Sea Crawlin'

A few months ago, Cadillac Monteau saved enough coin to purchase his very own galley. He wrangled up some orphan children and found a strange foreign merchant with a few sailors to come on board. I then got to work designing the South Seas, where the goal of his voyage lies in wait.

Procedures in use for sea travel are from Wolves Upon The Coast. They are very easy to use: if you can run a normal hexcrawl this is not much different. Things get easier if you make sure the players are the ones handling ship logistics. They are responsible for repairing it, tracking supplies, etc. 

The start of the session was about 40 minutes of accounting. This side of the campaign hadn't been played in a while, so logistics needed to be worked out. Supplies were tallied up. The main difficulty is food. Using the standard ration cost (From Knave) things get pretty pricey. I am considering offering discounts for bulk purchases. I don't mind the upkeep costs, I just think it seems reasonable to offer discounts in this case.

The slots on the Wolves ship make things a bit wonky. I don't mind slots for player characters, but it's a bit weird that the Galley can hold 160 "things." Food becomes by far the biggest burden. In this case, weight may be a little easier. I realize many prefer slots, but using weights will produce more clear results. Similarly, I think that having a precise speed rating for boats could come in useful. For this, I may look to Rules Cyclopedia.

Currently the players have no navigator, and can't travel through waters without sight of a shore line safely. Thus, they are forced to island hop. They hope to find one soon. This kind of dynamic is interesting to me. 

Probably the most interesting dynamic of the sea campaign thus far, as they've only done a small amount of travel, is managing a crew. The party has about 30 people, including children. One kid was killed by a Tiger and, at one point, a random encounter that occurred back at the ship while the party explored a ruined village threatened to kill many more. Cadillac, the captain of the ship, feels very responsible for the NPC crew members. Most of them are not salaried, but are a group of children escaping war torn homes.

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Despite using the same rules as the main branch of the campaign, the tone feels very different. Content and structure both contribute to the tone. Content in this case is stuff like encounters, items, etc. It makes a big difference, and I'll be prepping more tables to emphasize those difference.

Structurally, the main campaign branch has largely been dealing with a large scale war (Next time I do this, I will resolve it much faster), in which the players have become enmeshed within a military bureaucracy. The South Seas branch, contrarily, has the players totally in charge. This is the main structural difference, along with commanding a large group. I will do a campaign retrospective when we wrap up sometime this year (I want to run Wolves) but this second branch is immediately more engaging for me because of the increased player freedom. The other campaign branch has some structural issues (Some of which stem from the particular play culture of the group that plays that side, and some issues which stem from the fact that the game started as a 5e game before moving over to an OSR system) that have made me tire of it more than I would like.

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