Month prep, what to do?


Skull & Shackles


So, I'm moving away next month, and going to be starting Skull & Shackles with some old friends of mine. This gives me a lot of time to prepare. I'm currently borrowing one of my players' S&S books, and reading through all of them when I've got the time, as well as pouring through each chapter's official thread.

Seeing as I've got so much time to prepare, I wanted to ask you guys if there's anything you wish you'd have done in your games. If there's anything I need to foreshadow, or any rule systems that need tweaking (I'm reading that the rum rations can kill off characters, if used RAW). Also, I'm going to look through the forums for suggestions of good supplements and tools, such as NPC spreadsheets, so if you guys know of any off hand that might have fallen off the first couple pages, let me know.

I'm sure a lot of the foreshadowing plot lines will become more obvious when I've finished reading through the books, but I wanted to ask beforehand so I can keep an eye out for specific things.

Thanks in advance!


IcedMik wrote:

So, I'm moving away next month, and going to be starting Skull & Shackles with some old friends of mine. This gives me a lot of time to prepare. I'm currently borrowing one of my players' S&S books, and reading through all of them when I've got the time, as well as pouring through each chapter's official thread.

Seeing as I've got so much time to prepare, I wanted to ask you guys if there's anything you wish you'd have done in your games. If there's anything I need to foreshadow, or any rule systems that need tweaking (I'm reading that the rum rations can kill off characters, if used RAW). Also, I'm going to look through the forums for suggestions of good supplements and tools, such as NPC spreadsheets, so if you guys know of any off hand that might have fallen off the first couple pages, let me know.

I'm sure a lot of the foreshadowing plot lines will become more obvious when I've finished reading through the books, but I wanted to ask beforehand so I can keep an eye out for specific things.

Thanks in advance!

Best advice I can give:

Spoiler:
1) Absolutely bone up on underwater combat rules.

2) Consider having Arron Ivey be alive rather than... what he is.

3) Consider flipping some of the major events in book 6 with book 5... i.e. take out Bonefist before rallying the pirates against the Chelliax fleet.

We absolutely loved this AP and I'd be happy to work with you on your prep - drop me a line any time. :)


Story Archer wrote:


Best advice I can give:

** spoiler omitted **

We absolutely loved this AP and I'd be happy to work with you on your prep - drop me a line any time. :)

Thanks a ton! I'll definitely drop you a line when I get more time! And those are good points. I've only read through book 3 so far, so I don't know what happens in 5/6 yet, but I agree about Ivey. Although, I liked his original fate, so I might have

I'm currently reading through book 3, and I've got some notes.

To save the whole thread from being in spoiler tags, I'ma mention right now this is spoiler town.

In Book 1, I want to namedrop Caulky Tarroon earlier, so she's more recognizable in book 3. Or at least emphasize that she exists more in the players' minds. Maybe flirts with the cook's mate and gets him flogged by Harrigan "for lookin' at what aint yours." (But Harrigan, we're pirates, that's our job)

Similarly, I'm going to be looking out for the officers in later books to see what their written personalities are like, so I can ham it up when GMing them.

I'm going to be running the AP in a rather small space, so to keep it small, I'm running it on Maptool and projecting it onto the TV. I've used this system in my kingmaker game and it worked great. I'm going to download the S&S PDFs and import all the maps into Maptool; then get the paper minis page and use the photoshop slice tool to make tokens. This means that, hopefully, with a week's worth of work, I can have the entirety of the campaign all set up and ready for play. Of course, I'll probably need to find a couple special maps for areas, but luckily a lot of the random events happen on a blank ocean map.

Shadow Lodge

Quote:
I'm running it on Maptool and projecting it onto the TV.

This intrigues me. How do you keep your players engaged, if you're the one moving all the miniatures around? How do they accurately relay what they want to do on the screen?


I would come up with a substitute for the Naval Combat Rules - much like the Caravan rules of Jade Regent, ship battles tend to turn into "solo combats" where the one player with the ship sheet makes all the rolls while others get bored.

Caveat: Maybe it gets better once you can afford to outfit a fleet, but I have a lot of players that barely know their own characters capabilities, so only one person aside from the GM really knew how ships worked.

Shadow Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Frog God Games' Fire As She Bears 3rd party supplement innately lets everyone be involved in ship combat. Modifications are required to fit the S&S ships into FaSB rules, though.


+1 to Fire as She Bears. There's some work to do, but it's pretty easy to convert FaSB's cannons into S&S' ballistas.

With FaSB the naval combat offers other options than simply boarding, and there's some actual manouvering and broadside-firing going on. Ships will be battered and damaged after a fight, which will also help prevent the easily abused possibility of capturing and reselling every ship you meet.


Ah, I'll look into Fire as She Bears right now. I understand completely about the solo mechanics and how they can be tedious for the party. My Kingmaker game has the same issue with kingdom building.

Serum wrote:
Quote:
I'm running it on Maptool and projecting it onto the TV.
This intrigues me. How do you keep your players engaged, if you're the one moving all the miniatures around? How do they accurately relay what they want to do on the screen?

It actually works pretty well. We LANned our laptops so each player could control their own token (or the person beside them could, if they didn't have a laptop). Alternatively, I had success just moving the tokens myself. Usually they just say "I move twenty feet up and five to the left" and it works well. The lack of tactile miniature feel on a table is unfortunately missing, but the ability to put the vivid, professionally drawn maps up on screen is worth it. It works especially well when you have a dungeon with lots of line of sight things, because using vision blocking layers, you can accurately determine what each token can see. Plus you can add fog of war over the unseen portions. It speeds up play a lot to have the map there beforehand, instead of drawing it out each time the players enter a new room.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

Watch the three main Pirates of the Caribbean movies (Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, and At World's End). Seriously.

This is to help get you in the "pirate mindset." Many of the elements and characters can be heavily borrowed from for a S&S campaign. Especially useful is paying attention to all of the maneuvering for advantage, often mutual betrayals, and (sometimes literal) backstabbing among the characters.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Go back through the history here it is invaluable.

We are between book 1 and 2. I have them running around on some side adventures.

My biggest tip: There are a lot of NPCs. I got a pic of all of them. Even if they did not have a pic in the book. When interacting with them I would show them a pic and really play up some aspect of their personality. It totally helped. It prevented the crew from becoming a faceless commodity some of them are in relationships, some of the NPCs have real status in the crew. It really keeps the world breathing for them.

There is an excel sheet that one of the forumites did that tracks attitude, populated their foot locker, and so on. http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2o0pc?Skull-Shackles-NPC-Attitude-Helper#1

sabedoriaclark developed a system for the whole party for ship to ship combat that is based on the default system. http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2p54b?Naval-Combat-For-a-Whole-Party#8

Consider making some of the standard sailor or pirate weapons marshal or simple so people do not need to spend a feat.

Figure out what type of game you want to run alignment wise 1- Happy go lucky pirates of the Carribean (Jack Sparrow, Han Solo, all of the cast of Firefly). 2- Rape and pillage torturing pricks (real villans). This is really important if the pirates are mostly good Han Solo, Robin Hood types you need to really sell Cheliax as the evil imperialist empire and Kerdak Bonefist is Jabba the Hut. If they are really evil d-bags themselves you will want to send the law after them.

Figure out the system of "how the politics of a pirate ship works." There are several systems. The AP assumes similar to Wormwood; Captain- First Mate-Bosun and then had other officers that were incharge of things. Your players may be familiar with the show "Black Sails" where the position of Quartermaster is essentially the First Mate. The captain is elected by the crew and only really in charge in fights. While the Quartermaster is the voice of the crew. If they research pirate ships they will find this system or variants of it on a number of websites. I suggest you make it clear before you start. Movie pirate captains (and Harrigan for that matter) are tyrannical/beloved leaders of the ship that everyone will obey). The Black Sails or quasi-historical bunch feel more like a brutal democratic meritocracy.

Come up with multiple pirate underworld personalities. It is way to easy for everyone you deal with feel similar. Its a pirate campaign after all you don't want the Captain Barbosa parade of NPCs
1-Brutal sadist
2-Tyrant
3-Pragmatic Dealer
4-Cynic figuring its his turn to earn a buck
5-Slighted former good guy making those who spurned them pay
6-Charming Opportunist
7-Dandy
8-Swashbuckler thrill hunting brazen thief

I am really enjoying this flavor of game so I added a lot of additional and side content. There is a list of pirate adventures that are pure gold. http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2oho7?Dungeon-Issues-Module-Recommendations#1
These are incredibly handy especially breaking up the time on the Wormwood which for some can feel railroady drawn out.


Thanks a lot!

I'm currently playing a bunch of Assassin's Creed 4, so I'm getting into the mindset a bit. Going to have a Pirates of the Caribbean showing before my first game, I think.

It's a good idea to make up some pirate personalities. I'm fairly confident I can make them seem pretty unique, but that's a great list to start with!

Plus, that excel sheet is excellent!

I'm not sure what my party exactly wants to do in terms of how evil they're going to be, but I'll definitely make sure to play up Cheliax and Bonefist to whatever fits best.

Scarab Sages

With a month to prep, I'd suggest building a copy of the Maiden. If you don't have much room, you could build it to half-scale. There are plenty of good pirate ship maps out there that you could digitize and project, but a 3-D model on the table provides a really strong "you are there" feeling.

Brush up on the lingo with The Pirate Primer. It covers threats, retorts, oaths, and other common phrases, the piratical mangling of English grammar, and a really cool (though short) appendix contains the Articles of nine historical pirate companies.

I agree with the previous commenters who suggested using Fire as She Bears! The players in our group are still one or two sessions away from having their own ship, but I definitely plan to use it.

Check out this thread on making the AP run more like a sandbox and less like a railroad.

Come to think of it, I suggest starting with the GM Reference threads, then spending the next couple of weeks mining this whole section of the messageboard for ideas.

I used the paper minis to make a deck of cardstock Wormwood crew cards. Printing the info from the spreadsheet Gnomezrule mentioned above onto the backs of the cards would have made them even more useful.

Last, and possibly most important, make sure your players understand their options and agree on the kind of campaign they want before they make their characters. Tailoring the AP to fit the party becomes much harder if half of the characters are brutal thugs in search of plunder, and the other half are valiant outlaws who would rather defeat the Shackles pirates than cooperate with any of them.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Adventure Path / Skull & Shackles / Month prep, what to do? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Skull & Shackles