| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So, because I have an unwholesome fondness for all things Steampunk, I'm considering running Skulls and Shackles with a home brew setting - a realm flooded in ages long past, where with only a handful of islands left people turned to the skies for a place to live, creating artificial floating islands to live on. Of course, things have changed a lot since then, and not all the islands are as they once were...
I'm buys reading through the adventure path currently, but is there anything that would be an obvious problem? Other than the plummeting death of anyone who falls off the ship, obviously. I'll probably come up with some kind of gizmo to prevent that.
Any underwater battle. I'm doing pretty much the same as you are with converting it to be airships rather than seaborne vessels. I haven't quite figured out the underwater battles issue.
Dotting.
Also, have you considered replacing underwater dungeons with "cloud" dungeons? Say that these dungeons take place in a permanent heavy stormbank, allows you to create chambers of water or Heavy Fog effects, etc...
I have used a setting where the ground had been devastated by plague and mutations brought on by apocalypse. The ground is populated by undead and aberrations. This would make sense for bone wrack island and man catcher cove.
The real problem I see is having a floating Cheliax analogue. It might be difficult in such a setting to have a big empire.
One idea I had was possibly a minor item worn by crew members that allowed them to 'float' in any cloud bank. Any of the encounters that occur in the water, or require the players to be in the water, could instead be in a heavy cloud bank.
That, or just change these encounters to be something on a floating island or something.
Does it have to be an entirely airborne/cloud based setting?
What about a world where airship technology has replaced surface/sea transportation as the most efficient method of moving people and goods? That would still give you surface islands or empires to interact with (or be cast away on) and minimizes the amount of "tweaking" to the existing modules.
Honestly, I haven't thought about things too much yet. This was simply an idea I've been pondering a bit, and was curious as to the mechanical issues I'd run into.
It doesn't have to be entirely airbased, but I sort of like the idea. I also like the idea of a device that lets you swim in cloudbanks.
For the falling of ships problem, you could take two solutions:
1) Any ship comes with a permanent featherfall effect. Meaning people falling off (or bull rushed!) will still be out of the battle, but their mates could throw them a robe, or take the ships cutter and sail/fly down after them.
2) Use the ships from Spelljammer. They have inborn gravity toward the center of the ship, so people leaving the ship for whatever reason will be able to walk on the bottom.
Otherwise, I'd suggest Fitzwalrys' idea; islands exists, but for whatever reason, waterbased travel is a bad idea. Thus, people fly between the islands, but apart from that, the setting can exist as outlined in the AP.
You'll have to work on the ship-to-ship battle. For one thing, the rules in the AP doesn't make much sense, and frankly aren't fun. I use Fire as She Bears, much better! You'll have to invent some rules for height, and perhaps allow some tactics where people fly over their enemies, and drop heavy stuff on their heads. :)
An excellent set of rules for 3-dimensional combat can be found in Alluria Publishing's Cerulean Seas Campaign Setting. The pdf is quite expensive, but well worth it for those rules alone. It's what I planned on using.
I'll have to check out the Fire as She Bears rules for ship-to-ship combat. I wasn't too impressed with the rules in the AP myself.
Or modified Star Wars (WoTC D20) Starship Combat rules... They were written around the time 3.5 came about, and even the ship stats where based on the D20 rules. (Oh, man, so many memories coming back of my "homebrew" Barrier Peaks style campaign - D&D with LASERs...)
Might be worth finding a copy.
One of the biggest adjustments will be visability...
A pirate ship on the ocean would be able to see about 3^2pi square miles.
An air ship at about 10,000 feet would be able to see about 70^2 pi square miles.
It would be an interesting adjustment.
One of the biggest adjustments will be visability...
A pirate ship on the ocean would be able to see about 3^2pi square miles.
An air ship at about 10,000 feet would be able to see about 70^2 pi square miles.
It would be an interesting adjustment.
I'm curious. Where do you get that formula from?
After the human body reaches around 2,100 m (7,000 feet) above sea level, the saturation of oxyhemoglobin begins to plummet, which could be an interesting effect.
Distance to the horizon if Golarion is Earth sized
Instead of water and islands, maybe the ground is infested with something, like zombies. Civilization has moved to the peaks of mountains and grows food on terraces like the Mayans.
Cool!
Don't entirely get rid of the ocean and island elements. Have the ocean incredibly caustic because of (insert whatever ancient thing you want here). Now you can have ships but they are rare and don't last long unless made of very special materials. Most have taken to airships which ride the skies but don't need to be thousands of feet up. Maybe most air ships stay between 50 and 100 ft. up. Now if you fall it is not auto death. You could still have underwater elements with some special preparation like elemental protection spells. You can keep many locations intact with little change.
Alright, here's some ideas on the setting. |Forgive me if it doesn't entirely make sense - I'm taking more than my usual dose of painkillers today. And I'll take a look at Cerulean Seas and Fire as She Bears when I can.
No one knows now why we decided to kill the earth. Some say it was for war - that weapons and magic left the surface a scorched ruin. Other say it was greed, that we took too much from the ground and it rejected us, dying until we had nowhere else to go but up.
What we know now is the surface is death. A smog of black cloud hangs over it, and monsters reign within the smog. The land and the sea are nowhere for anyone with half a brain. We took the last of the safe land - good, clean land - and fled to the skies. Sometimes the land comes to us, too, rising through the dark clouds that suffocate the lands below.
Doesn't matter much to me, though. The skies are where I belong. Give me a descent ship, a crew and a prize to claim, and I know what matters - me and mine.
Chris Perkins has a DMing blog at the Wiz site that is a homebrew world that is both ocean going and airborne. It could be that you just freely mix the elements and sometimes your on the water, some times above it. As for falling just avoid it as in falling can kill.
I recently had an idea where for some odd reason, floating islands had a weird gravitational pull (or some ancient machine that made it so) that effected water, resulting in any floating landmass to have some water by the edges. This would be a good excuse to have airships still relatively look like normal sailing vessels, as anywhere they needed to dock was in water.
Not sure if I'll use this idea for my own, but it is a nonetheless interesting concept.