Russell Gadoury's page

Guidelines for selling captured ships are presented on page 9 of the adventure, in the Development section of Event 7. Basically, PCs can sell captured ships for half their value in plunder (usually about 5 points of plunder), provided they have enough people to form a prize crew and sail it to a friendly port.

Oh... There's a lot of info to take in so must've completely missed that. Cheers. :)

Maybe just not pull any punches with the ship to ship combat so between looted ships and ships they've lost in encounters they break even.... I dunno.

I'm not sure how my players are going to handle it I'll probably let them do it once and if they try over and over I'll make it a dangerous proposition. They have to split the crew, and one ship will just mutiny sail off, get attacked when the crew on the other one is out of reach, etc.

That's probably what I'm going to do too but I just know that reselling the ships they encounter is going to come up. Preventing them from reaching the port with their loot isn't really the problem(angry GM smash!), my problem is that while losing your treasure once or twice is just bad luck, the third or fourth time it becomes obvious that I'm trying to thwart their efforts. Having been on the other side of that, I know that's no fun. Especially if they don't know they're not doing something they're not supposed to or wasn't accounted for. Probably have to mix it up, sometimes they get away with it, sometimes a pack of aquatic tarrasques uses their stolen ship as a tooth pick, LOL.

I think I may just house-rule it that any captured ships be worth 3-5 points of plunder tops (which includes repair, crew and squibbing costs)and then just throw enough obstacles and random encounters on their way to sell it that it pretty much translates into the same as an act of piracy in terms of exp. and money.

I've got a question, what will you do if the pcs decide to take for themsefl the ships they encounter?

This is a good question.

I'm hoping that being on board the Man's Promise isn't crucial to the story later on but I'd just use the standard stat blocks for a ship of the appropriate size from the Skull and Shackles Player's Guide should they decide to use a ship other than the Man's Promise.

The problem I'm having right now is that, according to the regional gold piece limits (outlined on pg. 62 of Part 1 or pg. 207 of the Gamemastery Guide), it's entirely possible to tow or sail a stolen vessel back to Rickety's Squibs for squibbing and resold for a sizable take (10,000 gp or 10 points of plunder -in addition to any cargo in it's hold- and quite possibly a new infamy threshold) in any of the more populated ports. Nearest I can tell that's not what was intended with the plunder system they've outlined.

From there, assuming I haven't overlooked something, the problem becomes 'why bother getting the Free Captains' blessing if you WANT to pick a fight with every vessel that comes along due to how profitable it is?' Short of killing the PCs outright when they inevitably pick a fight they can't win, I don't see a feasible, in-game reason to prevent them from doing so... especially when the reason they have a ship in first place is because their former captain was trying to accomplish this very same thing.

Any advice here would be welcome. I haven't encountered this problem just yet but I anticipate it as my gaming group would pull the teeth from a dead man's head if it earned them an extra copper piece. XD