| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Where do you want it to happen? There are loads of places this can work/happen.
A busy market street with moving caravans, the speed at which the carrts must move, horses and other dangers can make falling off a deadly danger.
A fast flowing river with a bunch of boats or prams that get cut loose and speed down the river.
Dinosaur stampede in a narrov cliff valley.
Massive caravan thats in the throes of entering the main gate alongside a bunch of other carts and caravans.
The game mechanics would be simple.
Every round at initiative 0 the "map" moves. You would need appropriately sized tiles for the cart if youre usign a map, cut pieces of paper will of coirse be sufficient.
Each row of tiles has its own speed, so if you have several carts in a row they all move at the same speed, they then pass and overtake each other with their difference in speed, one cart group might move 1 square forward per round, representing its movement speed of 80ft/round vs another cart group´s speed of 75ft/round, a difference of 5ft. Exactly how and why this is happening is up to you to figure out.
Jumping between carts at the same speed ought to be a DC 10 acrobatics test, or DC 5 for players that spend a full round to make the jump safely. Different speed carts would require DC 15 checks (DC 10 safely).
Good luck with your idea.
The Zeitgeist 3rd party module "always on time" has a segment that's like that, though my GM has it and not me, i assume it includes a rules segment on fighting atop the train.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Man, talk about railroading the party. :-)
How about rafts tied in a line polling through a swamp that has occasional currents. Movement from raft to raft requires jumping (dex) or pulling them together (str), or polling them alongside (int/wis?).
Some have lots of cargo, some lots of people. If there are factions that must stay separate, that could require diplomacy (chr). If a raft is cut loose, it needs to be rescued (swim). If several are loose and get caught in a current, that can lead to a shipwreck event if the party is caught.
/cevah
If you really want to get challenging and shamelessly ripoff from The Hobbit, use floating barrels instead of barges in a river (you have to use Acrobatics just to stay on top).
I see no reason you couldn't use a train.
What's a train doing in this setting? A Wizard Did It, of course... I'm reminded of "Blain the Mono" from the Stephen King low-magic fantasy "Gunslinger" series, for example, which seems to have been an artificially intelligent technological relic from an earlier age. "Dungeon-Punk" was all the rage at least until recently, and magic-powered trains would have fit right into that aesthetic. Run your train on Golem power, or pull it with magical monsters... the possibilities for trains alone are limited only by your imagination.
If a literal train isn't your thing, then have the chase take place on the backs of giant monsters... for example, a sort of city where the buildings are built on the backs of a stampede of giant crabs. I bet you could use some of Paizo's Map Pack buildings (Marketplace or Shops for example) for this purpose quite nicely... perhaps set the tiles on top of a blank flip-mat, and move the tiles closest to the characters a couple squares closer or further apart each turn (D8 for the direction the tile moves in); if the tiles are within one square of each other (~5 feet), the characters can jump across... if the tiles touch each other, the monsters they sit on top of collide and characters on top of them risk losing their footing....
And, the caravan wagons, barges, and barrel-chases mentioned by other posters sound like fine ideas to me as well.
I've never seen them in person, but I can't help thinking that Paizo's Chase Cards deck could help out running a train-car fight/chase scene fun and interesting (though I suspect you might have to pick-and-choose which cards are in the deck).