A Pirate's Life II: Naval Combat

Last time we went through a game structure for ship movement during naval combat. It wasn’t super simple, but the result was (hopefully) something intuitive with strategic depth. Let’s do the same for the combat itself. The limitation of the ruleset is that it only keeps one player occupied at the table unless each player is commanding a different ship. So we need things for the other players to do that are also intuitive and have strategic depth, while not creating anything already covered in the rules.

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Serial Saturdays III: Getting By

Isda put her arm around Jacque’s shoulders and put the weight of her left side on him. “How bad is your ankle?” Jacque said.

“I don’t think it’s anything a little ice and rest can’t take care of. How bad is whatever you’re storming away from? The look on your face when walked into each other...it was a little intimidating.”

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A Pirate’s Life: Naval Movement & Travel

My PCs are planning to leave Haven after just one quest. It’s not because they didn’t like it, but the party’s Captain is playing a cleric of Tali. As such he doesn’t like staying in one place for too long. After putting a lot of work into Haven, I’m having strong urges to railroad them back there but I’m going to channel this into expanding the sandbox to the high seas. Let’s go sailing.

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City Squares II: Stocking Haven

Today we’ll fill Haven with contacts from each layer, information for those contacts to dole out to the players, and the encounters the information leads to. In addition mechanics will be discussed, specifically the City Turn and how it is played in the urbancrawl.

From the Alexandrian: “Unlike a dungeoncrawl, the goal of an urbancrawl doesn’t default to treasure hunting. It defaults to finding something interesting.” The idea is that the information is the treasure, and the contacts are npc versions of treasure chests. Agency here is created in multiple ways: whether to look for a contact, where to find them, how to convince them to part with information, and what to do with that information. This part is even more interesting since the players can decide act on the information immediately, usually leading to an encounter. Or they could sit on it, prioritizing other goals first. It’s even possible they may just take the information to a different contact and sell it. Anything goes.

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