Recently there have been a number of really fun threads on reality intruding into gaming, places, books, history, etc.
I am a big fan of SCUBA diving (though I hopelessly spoiled having done most of my diving in the Red Sea and the Galapagos Islands). I have also done a fair amount of travel through various coastal regions, and even spent some of my college days rowing. However I have not seen much in terms of Aquatic Adventures. I know Stormwrack was meant to address this however I have never played or run a predominantly underwater campaign.
Just thought it would be fun to see how really underwater adventure made it into the game, as well as see how much time people spent undewater in game.
For myself, I think some of the the wreck diving I've done has been about as close to real adventure as I have come - being face to face with sharks and barracuda, is about as close as I need to get to fighting sea monsters - though (Curse the luck) I have yet to find any pirate gold, though I was able to find the hidden objects in my under water navigation course.
In game most of my contact with sea creatures has been them coming on land.
The problem with an aquatic campaign is that the players can usually pass most obsticals, so every old standby for making the players stop (There is a big pit in front of you, what do you do?) becomes irrelivant. Er... I've never run a maritime campaign, so the longest they've been underwater would be...
Er...
when they take baths I suppose.
I really want to run a seafaring campaign one of these days--I was in the Navy for 8 years, and have been working my way through Robin Hobb's Liveship trilogy, along with C.S. Forester's "Horatio Hornblower" series, both of which make one think of the romance of the sea. Poul Anderson wrote an interesting novel about aquatic elves that I remember reading in high school, and I'm sure Patrick O'Brian (whom I haven't read) also has lots to offer the DM's imagination. Not to mention Melville, Dana, the historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, Peter Buck's classic Vikings of the Pacific, and modern accounts of seaborne adventure, like Brendan Voyage (forgot author--about an attempt to sail across the Atlantic in a coracle like the Irish priests) or Shackleton's story in Antarctica, or Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki.
I bought the Legends and Lairs "Seafarer's Handbook" some time back and found a little useful material in it, but didn't find it on the whole too inspiring. I've been thinking about buying Stormwrack (I really liked Frostburn), but have been wavering--I had hoped it might offer some more detailed and realistic, but workable rules for handling, for example, ship-to-ship combat and underwater combat, as well as the interesting environmental challenges in an aquatic environment. A couple of quick browses through it in the store haven't convinced me that it has what I'm looking for. Seems like most of what WotC puts out these days is just 80 bazillion prestige classes and new races. Maybe I have too many preconceived ideas about how I want to incorporate an aquatic campaign into my own homebrew campaign world already--it seems to me that aquatic adventures are played so little that it makes more sense to develop the existing races than to add a bunch of new ones. What I want to know is, how do storms of varying magnitudes affect ships, swimming creatures, subsurface creatures, etc. in game terms? What is the effect of walking on or touching coral with unprotected skin? Give me some realistic rules for ship-to-ship combat that take wind (the key factor in sailing warship battles) into account. Explain how skills are used in a shipboard environment. How about some realistic rules for the effects of pressure--what's the limit beyond which your body can't adapt without some sort of protection, what are the parameters for getting the bends when you come back up from a long dive. What are the rules for determining whether you got lost at sea? What are some pragmatic ways to track underwater combat in three dimensions. Etc.
Anyway, meanwhile, I've been thinking about ideas and jotting them down, and trying to develop an order of sea paladins and some deities with interesting water-connected domains, but haven't gotten very far along yet. A couple of Dungeon adventures have touched on the maritime realm recently, and they did publish one higher-level adventure that was completely underwater--but a series would be nice (not necessarily an AP, but an arc spread out over six or eight issues--something at a lower level that could be the start of a longer campaign and encourage development of specialized maritime characters.
I think there are two basic ways you can go here--you can start the campaign underwater and use merfolk, aquatic elves, locathah, etc. as PC races, or you can run a "pirates and sea monsters" campaign where the PCs are normal air-breathing races, who mostly adventure on the surface and go island-hopping or transoceanic exploring until they're fairly high level, then occasionally they visit the realm of Poseidon or Procan with the aid of magic, to recover the gold from the lost treasure ship, or make a diplomatic mission to the king of the merfolk to stop him from raiding the kingdom's merchant shipping, or to recover people captured by an evil storm giant and held as slaves in his undersea castle, etc. One could even run a campaign that combined the two--either by allowing PCs to have feats or magic items that make them effectively amphibious, or by having two "cooperative" parties--one air breathing and one water breathing--and allowing the players to maintain one character in each party and switch off depending on the adventure.
Anyway, I'm interested to hear different people's ideas for adventures here--especially those of you who are divers (I've never tried it), and I'll be happy to post a couple of my ideas in return.
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I'll do a little self-promo here and recommend Seekers of the Silver Sword from Dungeon 125 for what I would do for an all underwater adventure.
In my own campaigns I feature a lot of underwater stuff, both in my homebrew worlds and published settings (and look, my icon even has gills and bubbles!!!)
If you're familiar with Oathbound (from Bastion Press) they have a lot of cool underwater stuff, including a race of intelligent jellyfish, as well as alternate ideas for travelling and breathing underwater, and all sorts of weird things like air spores and living underwater cities made from giant mollusks. Some of the rules are a little dated (3.0), but nothing a good DM can't customize.
My favorite aspects of running underwater games are 1. movement in every direction, 2.limited sound and vision, and 3. pressure increase and temperature and light decrease with depth.
I try to keep things simple with regard to rules, and vivid with details. Like all games, its the detail of your description that will make it or break it, but really- its not too much different that running a land-based (or air-based) game.
I just thought of something. What if you used the animated ship stats from dragon... er... the number escapes me... but what if you took away the special qualities and gave it attacks with balistas...
Ok. That just sounds like a bad Idea for some reason.
The problem with an aquatic campaign is that the players can usually pass most obsticals, so every old standby for making the players stop (There is a big pit in front of you, what do you do?) becomes irrelivant. Er... I've never run a maritime campaign, so the longest they've been underwater would be...
Er...
when they take baths I suppose.
Your players bathe?
I would love to see a few more "aquatic adventures" in the pages of Dungeon.
I ran Salvage Operation from Dungeon #123 last year when my players were 3rd level and they still talk about it. I really enjoyed it too.
I read and was interested in Tim's "Seekers of the Silver Forge" but it's too high a level for my group right now, maybe later.
The idea of having the players do a little island hopping appeals to the swashbuckling slice of me. Using the new stats for the Isle of Dread (Dungeon #114) and forming a seaquest to find it would be my first "adventure path" idea off the top of my head.
I ain't much of an Underwater Adventure fan. I DMed a Star Wars module once where the PCs met the Mon Calamari and fought with the Quarren. Everything seemed dark, everything seemed slow. I thought it was pretty claustrophobic.
Although Underwater scenarios aren't my 'forte', I still try (at least once per campaign) to have an adventure at sea. Encounters are often pirates, bad weather, sahuagin, or some other sea creature. I also agree that there is a lack of material that pertains to ocean adventures. Sea trekking is a long and dull trip.
A bit like arctic-condition adventures. Snow, snow and more snow. Oh, a rhemoraz! Big surprise. I also try (at least once per campaign) to have a cold-based adventure.
Where the hell am I going with this?
Ultradan
Where the hell am I going with this?
Ultradan
Uhhh....you prefer the icy breath of cold northern winds to the pressure of cold watery depths?
Uhhh....you prefer the icy breath of cold northern winds to the pressure of cold watery depths?Where the hell am I going with this?
Ultradan
Nope. More like I think adventuring at sea and adventuring in cold places are pretty much alike. Lots of nothing to see.
Ultradan
The characters? No. The players? Maybe.
Your players bathe?The problem with an aquatic campaign is that the players can usually pass most obsticals, so every old standby for making the players stop (There is a big pit in front of you, what do you do?) becomes irrelivant. Er... I've never run a maritime campaign, so the longest they've been underwater would be...
Er...
when they take baths I suppose.
Sea trekking is a long and dull trip.
Having made five trans-Pacific transits, plus four trips across the Indian Ocean and a couple more between California and Hawaii, I would have to agree that real world sea travel can be quite tedius. But probably no more so than trekking on horseback across the plains of X. Anything that is "wilderness" of any sort can be that way if you insist on role-playing every day, making random encounter checks, survival checks, etc. for each increment. There was another thread several weeks ago that talked about how to provide the right flavor, hinting at the tedium of the journey without spending large chunks of precious game time on it.
I think the key to making it interesting is to coming up with some interesting and challenging encounters for the open spaces--not random--but keyed to time and not to reaching a specific spot on the map. In a certain sense, there is no "place" on the open ocean unless you have GPS or something comparable. Otherwise, you are always estimating your position with greater or lesser accuracy, and aiming for a landfall that you hope will appear when you expect it.
Reading some of the "literature of the sea" will give a DM some ideas of the sorts of mundane (but potentially interesting) challenges a party can face. What do you do when the winds don't cooperate with you? What do you do when your crew thinks you're fixing to sail off the edge of the earth and is about to mutiny? What do you do when you've missed your landfall and are running short of food and water? What do you do when your ship springs a leak? I think the way to craft aquatic adventures is to put together a flow chart--as suggested in WotC's recent Heroes of Battle book, but with a wider variety of challenges. This may be much more important for structuring the adventure than the traditional map, even if you want to run a Columbus-style transoceanic explorer type adventure. (Since it's "terra incognita" to both the party and the DM, unless it's in an established campaign world, you can just draw up an island or coastline and plop it down in the middle of the ocean when you're ready for it--whether because the party is bored of seeing nothing but flying fish or because their ship just broke in half and they need a convenient shore to be washed up on.)
If finding a specific place at sea is part of the adventure, you can still avoid tedium by having the ship's pilot roll a survival or profession (sailor) check to see if he can find it--if he misses it, flowchart the consequences and describe briefly the tedious and worrisome days of waiting for the landfall, followed by the "well you're running short on food and water, and the first mate informs you that you'd better turn back soon or risk the entire crew dying of thirst and starvation."
So, now that I've rambled for too long--yes sea travel is boring, but it doesn't mean seaborne adventures are. Guess I'll have to try writing one for Dungeon just to prove the point.
P of B
P.S. For those who have suggested specific literature and gaming aids in this thread, thanks. If anyone can think of any others, please share!
A bit like arctic-condition adventures. Snow, snow and more snow. Oh, a rhemoraz! Big surprise. I also try (at least once per campaign) to have a cold-based adventure.
I actually think Frostburn has lots of material to fill out a great arctic campaign--but perhaps that's because I've been contemplating one for quite some time, and have some ideas that I think would be quite interesting. Some day, my players will have to cross the tundra, braving the smilodons and the wild Torming tribes to reach the Straits of Grinding Ice, get past the ever-watchful minions of the Frost Giant King on his island in the middle of the straits, and make their way across the frigid boreal continent to the Ice Castle of Zansarbole, where they'll have to negotiate with the enchantress queen of the ice elves and convince her to give her most precious possession, the Ermine Cloak of Balestreien, to them for safekeeping. There will be battles on skis, strange encounters with ice feys, not to mention blood-snow, faerie frost, and black ice; dungeons built from crevasses in huge glaciers; eerie encampments in which earlier foolhardy adventurers to this frozen clime perished, now empty except for their frozen corpses (and their ghosts); strange lumps of enchanted meteoric iron (and other objects marvelous and dangerous that the gods dropped from the skies in ancient times), half-buried in the ice; isolated valleys where volcanic hotsprings make life possible for people of more temperate climes; glassy frozen lakes where one can peer through the ice to glimpse the ice-sprites frolicking below.
Hey, I'll have to save these ideas for another thread--and for when I have time to put them into effect.
My favorite aspects of running underwater games are 1. movement in every direction, 2.limited sound and vision, and 3. pressure increase and temperature and light decrease with depth.
Tim--thanks for your suggestions. Do you like the way the DMG handles these three aspects of underwater action, or Stormwrack? Or do you use another source that provides a simple and elegant method to provide a degree of realism without burdening the game too much? Also, do you have a good way to track 3-D combat, besides using counters or markers to note how far above or below the baseline depth each individual is?