How does the crew get bellowdecks without going through the officers' or captain's quarters? Are they only locked/trapped at night? Are there rope/ladders going into the cargo holds? If there isn't an official answer, how have other you other gm's been handling it?
I'm going to add a trap door and stairs right above the stairs that go from the 2nd to the 3rd deck of the ship.
Added a stair (lengthwise) from middle deck to the ship's waist under the gratings. Going through the forecastleor even worse the captain's cabin is not really recommended
The ships.... well.... 'nuff said.*deep silence*
Once off the "Wormwood", we will go for less landlubberly designed vessels^^
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This isn't the first time this has happened...
The original ship flip-map suffered from a similar lack of transitions between decks.
Do the artist think it through?
These need to be less artsy and more mappy.
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The decks on this Flip-Mat do connect. The problem is that the adventure blocks those connections for story purposes. This is one of those annoying little things that pop up when you tie-ins between multiple products.
The best way to solve it is to add a stairway under one of the hatches on the main deck down to area A6. That way the crew can get belowdecks without having to go through the officers' or captain's quarters.
The (other) problem is that, in a real structure (ship, house, whatever), stairwells will be one-above-another. Anything else wastes space.
On a battle map, however, this can lead to confusion regarding which flight of stairs a mini is standing on (up vs. down from the pictured deck/floor/whatever). The vast majority of gaming maps that I've seen choose to NOT properly position stairs one-above-another to avoid this sort of confusion. This actually drives me completely nuts, but it's an understandable design decision for making the game run more smoothly, so I've learned to accept it...sort of. :)
The easiest fix for these deck plans is to place a stairwell above the bilges-to-middle-deck stairs so it comes out on the deck just outside the doors; and wall it in (above, on the open deck) and give it a door of its own, the cabin doors will still be accessible to either side and the door to the stairs will keep water from flooding in during storms. Remove the stairs inside the cabin (two squares away) down to the middle deck, giving more room for the - um, officer's cabin, I think - I don't have the maps with me right now.
A "better" fix for the architecturally-inclined OCD personality type would be to replace BOTH those stairwells with ones that run fore-to-aft, rather than port-to-starboard, as such stairs would be much safer to traverse during rough seas, when the ship can be expected to list from port to starboard and back. Think about almost any movie with a ship in this size range, and that's how the stairs are usually depicted. But that's a much harder change to make with the printed maps. And it will almost certainly end with the stairs emerging in the off-limits cabin area.
I choose a similar solution:
I "placed" a stair above the stair leading down to the sleeping quarters with the exit being a door next to the door to the officer cabin. As the PCs will never get the chance to enter the officer cabin they won't see that there isn't really a stair coming up at this place.
I choose a similar solution:
I "placed" a stair above the stair leading down to the sleeping quarters with the exit being a door next to the door to the officer cabin. As the PCs will never get the chance to enter the officer cabin they won't see that there isn't really a stair coming up at this place.
I'm doing something similar. The stair I'm adding is more of a ladder-stair, if that makes sense. It's a narrow, very steep stair that only takes up a single 5-foot square.