D&D and Pirating - Part 2 - Pirating in 5E

 

In our previous post on D&D and Pirating (What is a pirate adventure?), I decomposed the pirate narrative into it's core thematic elements, talked about what success looks like in a pirate campaign and walked through some of the obstacles that I needed to overcome to do achieve that success.

In this post I will discuss key world building elements that foster the emergent thematic properties I want, then make specific suggestions around 5E game mechanics, specifically managing the magic system and ship combat.  

Pirate Worldbuilding 

The goal of this section is to provide a generic world building recipe that, if applied, should result in a realistic and internally consistent fantasy world that supports the key pirate themes I identified in the previous article. As I have discussed before, this is by no means the only way to include Pirates in your game. It's also not the only to generate a detailed and internally consistent fantasy world. It is however a good and flexible way to do this, is one of the less work intense methods on the DM.

The technique I am going to recommend, is one that has been used over and over by fantasy and science fictions writers, so it's not a thing I invented, more one that I observed being successful, plagiarized and codified. 

Step 1: Start from History

Whenever I am designing a new campaign world I like to start with a basis in a real historical era, an era that contains the emergent traits and themes that I want to emphasize in my fantasy world and campaign. I call this time and place my primary source and I expect it to drive a lot of the main characteristics of the world; the look, feel, economics, politics, culture etc. This technique has several advantages over starting entirely from scratch

1. Real historical periods start from a position of strong internal consistency. They were the way they were because being that way made sense given all the other ways they were. Historical eras hold together
2. Real historical periods that manifest the themes you want in a campaign, possessed those themes for natural reasons. These themes, to go back to our earlier discussion, are emergent. They will hold up to a good deal of poking and prodding from the players because they exist inside a greater context that not only supports them but requires them.  
3. Real historical periods are extensively documented. You can almost always find books, maps, movies etc that provide far more detailed a source then any gaming sourcebook ever will
4. The players will have some familiarity with a real historical period. This makes the setting more accessible and easier to grab ahold of.

For our purpose, since we are shooting for Piracy, I picked the Caribbean in the late 17th century as the primary source for my Pirate campaign. This period was the birth of piracy. It hosted many of the most infamous pirates. It was fascinating historically and represents well all the major themes I wanted to portray. 

Step 2: Mix thoroughly while stirring

Starting with a basis in a real historical period is awesome but just playing in a "fantasy copy of the Caribbean" has some downsides as well. The very advantages, of that starting point; player familiarity, extensive documentation, can make the setting too familiar and predictable. The sense of mystery and wonder can be lacking.

One easy technique to overcome these obstacles is to combine theis primary source with one or more additional sources of major inspiration. These additional sources should still fit the theme but should be different enough to provide the flavor of something unexpected. I call these secondary sources.

You have quite a bit of flexibility in choosing secondary sources. You can, once again, steal from historical periods. Or from fantasy sources. Or make them up entirely yourself. Since they are intended primarily to differentiate the primary source from the real historical period, they don't have to be as tight on internal consistency. However, they do need to mesh well thematically.  

In my Thousand Isles setting I actually picked two other inspirational periods, colonial Hawaii and colonial Indonesia, both also from the 17tth century. These time periods have a lot of similarity with the 17th century Caribbean but also some major differences. Geographically, Indonesian islands are a lot larger, the interiors are more far more remote and inaccessible,and the geography is generally more interesting than Caribbean islands. The natives of both Hawaii and Indonesia were never completely exterminated / assimilated like those of the Caribbean islands were. Plus, both areas sported huge volcanoes and interesting mythologies. However, despite their differences, they reinficed a pirate theme nicely in many ways. 

I also added just a bit of inspiration from Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea, mostly in the naming and geography of the island chain. 

So now I have a fantasy - Caribbean that is noticeably different from the real world; considerably larger in area., composed of larger, less well explored volcanic islands and with multiple rich native cultures still intact (in the interior at least). It has an Inner Archipelago, which is center of population and civilization and Reaches radiating off, composed of less populated, less well explored more magical islands.

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If there are any Tolkien or George RR Martin scholars reading this, this is probably starting to feel a bit familiar. This technique is pretty similar to how things like Gondor and Rohan came from (Gondor takes primary inspiration from Byzantium, mixed with legends of Atlantis, Rohan is Anglo Saxon culture mixed with generic steppe horse cultures). Or Westeros. We all stand on the shoulders of the greats that came before us. 

Step 3: Season well

This step makes a final set of tweaks to your world that remove themes you think may be distractions and reinforce themes you may want to reinforce. 

In my case the main themes I removed were slavery and to a great extent native genocide. I removed slavery because slavery to the extent that it existed in the 17th century Caribbean would provide an irresistible moral pull, soon centering the campaign around an attempt to abolish it.  Or worse yet it would require the PC's to just tolerate and ignore it. The first campaign of slavery-abolishment actually sounds fun, and I did manage to weave some small elements of that into the Pirate theme, but it wasn't overall what I was looking for (this time). The second option would make me and probably everyone else feel dirty. Similarly since clashing cultures makes for good stories, in The Thousand Isles the European surrogates colonized and conquered but did not exterminate the native populations, who are now enjoying something of resurgence. 

Another aspect of the 17th century Caribbean I toned down was the technology level. Since I wanted a world where armor and melee weapons still co-existed with firearms, some elements of technology in the Isles are closer to mid 16th century then late 17th. Firearms and cannon for instance are more rare more expensive, and physically larger. 

The theme I magnified was a theme of remoteness and isolation. The Thousand Isles are much further away from their European-equivalents then the Caribbean is from Europe (as far away as Indonesia or Hawaii). And the European standins may not even exist anymore, at least no one has heard from them in a long long time. So rather then being pawns in the power games of Europe, the Isles more or less stand alone.

I reinforced remoteness for two main reasons. Firstly I wanted a universe where the freedom from central policing (essential to maintain piracy) can endure over time. In the real 17th century this period (called the First Age of Piracy) only lasted fifty years or so before the colonial powers got their acts together and crushed the pirates. Secondly I wanted the Isles to have to be remote enough from the Generic Fantasy World (In my case I used Stefan Porkony's excellent  City of Valoria / Mythras) that it could easily co exist on the same planet, even though the Isles are about 200 years ahead with regards to the level of technology the posses.

This remoteness has the added advantage that any DM can basically plug The Thousand Isles into any campaign world, just pick a spot of conveniently blank ocean near the edge of a map and say "the Isles lie 3000 leagues that way".

Step 4: Baking in the Details

Now that the general framework of the region is established, the next step is to develop the details of the archipelago, it's nations, cultures, languages cities, stresses and conflicts. I'll talk more about this in the third article which will delve into the details, however again the historical underpinning provides a lot of easy to access fodder here.

You can follow a similar technique to the steps above  at a smaller scale when it comes to "baking in the details" when creating cities or nations. While each city or nation should inherit most of the traits you have defined for the larger region. mixing in small flavors elements from still another historical or fantasy source will give a touch of uniqueness and character.

For instance in the Isles there are places that draw inspiration from Venice, from Hobbiton, from Switzerland, New Orleans, etc in addition to real places in the Caribbean. You need only a touch from each of these tertiary inspiration sources to give character and depth to your city or island or nation

Step 5: And on to the next dish

Bear in mind that you are cooking up a meal, a smorgasbord for your players, not a single dish. Each major region of your fantasy world, has neighboring regions. You can follow the exact same recipe above to detail out those adjacent regions. And the nice thing is, you can provide a fair amount of high level flavor for those adjacencies with only a little bit of work.

For instance the next continent to the west of the Isles, Mbo, takes influence from Egypt, prehistoric northern Africa,  and ancient Mexico, with some flavors from the fantasy novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant. I don't really need to know much about Mbo other then the tagline above in order to provide basic rumors and context while the party adventures in The Isles. 

Once your players prepare to leave the region you've detailed, or you need more details for some other reason, you can then apply the rest of the recipe to bake in the details.

What about the Magic?

As we talked about in the previous article, magic + piracy can be a problem. I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that a low magic setting was far more conducive to playing at pirate.  There are many reasons for this but the main ones are

• High level spells easily fry Tall Ships
• Even low level spells make sea travel trivial
• Any kind of flying would disrupt much of the economics of seaborne trade
• And finally and most importantly high level magic would quickly tear away all the internal consistency we inherit from our historical setting. Which didn't have real, working magic. 

So what does "low magic" mean exactly? In the context of D&D there are generally two possible meanings. In one meaning, magic is just rare and uncommon, especially high levels of magic but still works pretty much as the rules define it. So instead of every city having groups of magicians and markets where magic items can be bought, a city might have no workers of magic at all. Or maybe a handful of practitioners of under 3rd level. Magic items would be similar to rare works of art, only available when the current owner chose to sell them and demanding high prices at auction Magical creatures would also be similarly rare and sometimes unique

The other, more extreme mechanism involves changing the rules of 5e itself. Making it more difficult to recover spell slots, gain new spells, capping spell gain or even just removing all spells of 7th level +

If you are curious, Web DM has a pretty good over view of the various options and also the advantages of a low magic setting. here.

I opted for mostly the first option. Magic and people that can work magic in the Isles are incredibly rare. While magic practitioners of 3rd level and lower do exist in most larger cities, practitioners that are more powerful then 3rd are famous region wide, named characters whose stories most residents of the Isles could rattle off upon request. Monsters similarly are relatively rare, in the Inner Archipelago at least. 

For the most part I am not limiting the player characters however. They are one of those "named characters" after all. But I did start them on their journey at a relatively low level, I have been very slow to level them up (4 levels in almost a year of play) and I have been extremely stingy on magic items. 

In addition there are two places where I have explicitly limited magic even for the PC's.

Wind, Weather and Wave

Magic that effects the Wind, Wave, or Weather of the Sea is expressly forbidden by a very strict Goddess of the Sea know as The Lady

The Lady    

Also known as Queen of the Sea, Lady Luck, or the Lady of the Sea, she is a mysterious and enigmatic figure. She holds dominion over all the oceans of the world. She is fiercely protective of her authority and is draconian in enforcing her Lady’s Law, to the point where magic workers the world over fear to cast any spell that affects the wind, weather or wave of the sea. This is not just idle superstition either, copious documented cases exist of wizards or sorcerers who break this law quickly coming to a gruesome end, and clerical or druidical magic simply fails to function all together. Of all the gods in this book, this is the god you are most likely to personally piss off if you are a magic worker. My advice to you is, don’t. 

This prevents most of the extreme ship combat related exploits provided by magic. Note it does NOT prevent fireballing an enemy ship (which works rather well).  So magic users are still quite effective in naval combat, a 5th level mage is at least equivalent to a deck of cannon. However they don't utterly dominate naval engagements, especially given the relatively limited range of most D&D spells. So our operating principle of " Ships fight eachother with things that go "boom" is preserved. 

Magical Food and Water

Another place where Web DM has been very helpful, is how magic can ruin exploration. One of our pirating principles is that the sea is "Dangerous, in and of itself (not just based on creatures and npc's you encounter" . Sea Journeys are meant to be dangerous, it should be easy for things to go wrong and one of the things that should be able to go wrong is running out of supplies, especially water.

The one honest to god rule change I made in this campaign along these lines (and I may make others) is that any use of "Create water" while on the sea creates salt water, and that it is impossible to purify salt water with magic.

So where do I get my magic fix then?

Low magic games are fun but after being immersed in such for too long, groups often feel like they are missing out on some of the specialness that D&D has to offer. Also it's good to shake things up occasionally in a campaign. For that reason, I often like to have at least one "escape clause" from the low magic treadmill, a way to introduce fantastical creatures, demihumans, and a bit of that high magic sizzle into the campaign.

In the Thousand Isles I actually have two such alternates available.

The Shadowlands

Other planes tend to work well here because the ability for another plane of existing to influence the material world is extremely limited. My homebrew take on the Shadowfell (which I call "The Shadowlands) is heavily featured in the campaign. In many ways it's the exact opposite of the main campaign world. It is rooted in myth not real history. It is high magic, not low magic. It is fundamentally different thematically from Pirates.

It also meshes well some of the ideas I’ve had for world backstory and how I am going to portray voodoo in the Isles.

The Reaches

As they say in Earthsea, "All Rules Change in the Reaches". The Reaches is the place where I can experiment with relaxing the low magic constraints while still keeping most of the thematic Pirate elements present. Because it is somewhat isolated, lightly populated, and relatively unimportant to the dominate cultures in the Inner Archipelago, it's easy to have more of a free reign here without upsetting the consistency of the world.

Thematically, having magical islands and remote magical places just over the horizon fits in well with the 16tha nd 17th century Caribbean, such legends and rumors were endemic to that time anyway.

Naval Combat 

The second major tweak (after the magic related ones above) was how I decided to handle Naval Combat, especially ship-on-ship battles. I decided after much research to just jettison the D&D rules entirely when it came to large ships shooting cannons at each other. In the following section I will explain why I made that choice, how I juggle the two different game systems I am using (DnD and Blood and Plunder), and present house rules that stitch them together.

Understanding Naval Combat in the Age of Sail

The first thing I did was pretty extensive historically research on how such battles actually occurred. It's safe to say there are significant differences to real 17th century ship on ship action, vs how pirate battles are portrayed in movies.

Now, that in and of itself doesn't matter, it's ok to deviate from reality somewhat if it makes the story richer. However my conclusion was the way Hollywood generally (not always) dumbs things down makes your narrative toolkit as a DM less powerful and interferes with developing interesting stories rather then supporting richer ones.

Now I totally understand that most people don't want to read a half dozen dry history books on this subject to play D&D. The good news is you don't have to. There are really only three sources that, taken together, provide the basic education you need to understand naval battles enough to run a great campaign.

Sea Battles in Movies - Deprogramming yourself

This youtube video is a great source to beat the Hollywood stupid out of your brain. It's funny, it's short, it gets the job done.

Master and Commander - The movie that got it right

Now, to see Naval Warfare done well, go watch this movie.

The Blood and Plunder Miniatures Game

Even if you don't follow my recommendation to use this wonderful miniatures games as the backbone of your ship battle system, grab both the rulebooks anyway. They are truly excellent sources for all things Pirate, with lots of details around history, naval combat, sailing maneuvers, backstory, weapons etc.

Why making the D&D rules work for Naval Combat is more trouble than it's worth

To recap the issues we previously discussed with making Dungeons and Dragons work for ship combat, I identified two major problems in my previous blog post

Tall Ships in the Age of Sail, even relatively lowly frigates, usually had close to a hundred crewmen. If the ship was a warship it would have hundreds and would literally be packed to the gills with fighting men. This went double for pirate ships Two reasons for this

1. Cannon take a lot of people to operate effectively
2. Boarding actions meant having more crew meant winning the boarding action

HMS Surprise (the ship featured in Master and Commander) was among the smallest rated ship in the Royal Navy had a peacetime complement of 172 and a wartime complement of 220. HMS Revenge had nearly 1000. While the Surprise fits most players mental models of the general size and layout of a pirate ship, it was actually on the larger end of real historical ones. However, even the more common and smaller pirate sloops like Stede Bonnet's  Revenge had a crew of 70+.  

D&D as a system is not designed for combat involving even 20 combatants per side much less 200. And it gets even worse if there are, god help you, multiple ships. Clearly there is a problem.

Why not just downsize?

The way most D&D supplements handle this is downsizing the crew and number of cannons while keeping the ship more or less the same size. Alternatively they just assign a large number of crew without giving the DM any tools or advice on how to combat involving 40 soldiers, 25 sailors and misc others (i.,e the Large Sailing Ship statblock from the DM's guide).

At first this seems like an elegant solution, and for a more casual game it is. There are problems though.

This popular DnD ship model, for its size, should have a 20 cannon broadside
It has 6

Downsizing doesn't make logical sense

Downsizing can work. However the DM needs a reason why such a large ship didn't / can't carry more cannon or more crew given that it obviously advantageous to pack more guns and there is plenty of room for them? When the ship is an NPC ship, this might slip under the radar of player attention, but one of the primary themes of a pirate ship is that the Ship is Character.

Players will naturally want to make their ship more powerful, just as they make their own characters more powerful. Players that are fully operating in a sandbox, and have a lot of agency will not only ask awkward questions like "why can I only carry four cannons" but will do things like going out and hiring their own 50 pirates.

This gradually puts the DM into a more and more precarious state of deviating more and more not only from historical reality but from basic physics and math. He or she will have to create more and more arbitrary and far fetched reasons and house rules for how many cannon and crew ships can carry..

Large Crews provide more story potential

One of the really interesting things about pirate crews was the extreme egalitarianism they displayed. In a major departure from the norm of the times these crews functioned almost entirely democratically, electing and un-electing their captain and officers and putting serious limitations on their power. 

The players having to manage a large crew with even some of these egalitarian principles in play can be fascinating, however for that to happen it is necessary that the crew pose a credible threat to the party. If the crew is small it must be extraordinarily high level to pose such a threat, which again brings a whole host of new problems.

Larger crews also allow you to gradually fill out your warband of pirates with odd characters from odd backgrounds. Eventually, you can imagine a 70 person crew where each pirate or group of pirates has a story as to where they came from and how they came to be on the ship. Complex dynamics could exist between individuals and factions in the crew. 

So the tl;dr is, as is often the case, that an attempt to deviate from logic and common sense in order to support game mechanics is more trouble than it is worth. It's certainly worth examining the other alternative, changing game mechanics to support logic and common sense. 

Supporting large crew sizes

So the alternative is just to bite the bullet and accept the fact that you can have more then 20 people on a Tall Ship. Since vanilla D&D combat is going to slow to a crawl with even 20 on each side, you either need a way to abstract those numbers or an alternate combat system.

Abstraction can work. It's probably the second best alternative, and there are a fair amount of materials on the web already about running large scale combats in 5E. However there were good reasons why I didn't go that route.They mostly boiled down to the fact that there are a lot of things missing or wrong with ship on ship combat in 5E not just the the size of the crew.

1. The hit point system doesn't really capture the dynamic of  a “ship being shot to pieces around you". A ship that is alive and 100% functional up until it is suddenly sunk misses the mark. Rules patch needed
2. The mechanic of how a player would do damage to ship is weak. Hit it with your 2-handed sword and then shoot it with your bow and kill it? Rules patch needed
3. The 5E movement system also doesn't support the complex sailing maneuvers, importance of wind direction, etc that is a major theme of fighting on the sea.  More patching needed.
4. 5E has no direct support for specialized roles on a ship in combat. What does the captain actually do? what about the master gunner? sailing master? etc? more patching
5. How does the ship get repaired after combat? What effects can be removed on the fly vs requiring a port or a drydock?

You get the idea. By the time you are done doing all these house rules, you've really house ruled the hell out of yourself

 

A serious extension to the D&D core game system is needed, you either have to write it yourself or you buy it.

Why hitpoints for ships are a terrible mechanic

If you were running an adventure that involved a castle siege and one of your players stated that the castle wall must have a limited amount of hit-points so he was going to bash on the wall with his sword until it fell over, would you consider that a reasonable way to run a siege ?

Of course not. Walls are impervious to swords. No amount of hitting a castle wall with a sword is going to make it fall over. That’s because walls are structures and structures fundamentally are immune to most attacks and generally behave in ways that are not well represented by hitpoints . Even if you find a weapon to damage that wall (say a siege engine) it’s not going to transform from “completely ok” to “utterly destroyed” because you do that final point of damage to it. It needs to degrade gradually. 

Guess what else is a structure? A ship. It floats and it moves but it probably isn’t to going to die because you hit it with a mace. It also needs a way to gradually degrade as it takes damage. Also, wood floats. Sailing ships don’t just “sink” or rather the process of them sinking even if their hull integrity is compromised is slow. 

BnP&DnD

Since I am lazy and not a professional game designer I decided to buy not build. I looked at two options, systems that started with D&D and extended those rules, and systems that started from scratch, usually hailing from wargaming and miniature combat. I looked at the top five or so published pirate D&D expansions and they all came up lacking for me, mostly due to fundamental disagreement on the level of historical accuracy and the themes they seemed to be interested in supporting. It would be an entirely new series of blog posts to critique each of these, but mostly they were too high fantasy/medieval for my taste and also focused on "standard dnd adventures in a world that had pirates in it" rather then a pirate focus for the adventures themselves.

From a miniature war gaming perspective Blood and Plunder pulled me in almost immediately for a few reasons

• The ship models are gorgeous
• The level of historical accuracy is very high
• The game mechanics are smooth and easy
• The length of a ship engagement (around 45 minutes) fit well into a play session.
• The basic unit of abstraction (one model = one actual person, a dice rolled is an actual person making an attack) had the potential to mesh well with D&D as opposed to other systems that generally had a higher level of abstraction.
• Naval combat was designed with 1-3 ships on each side, but a higher level of abstraction game (Oak and Iron) was available that simulated fleet on fleet actions. Haven't used that yet but good to know it is there if needed
• The game was specifically built around pirates, and thus the thematic elements supported were very synergistic
• It was a living game, with constant new content and an engaged and growing community

There are other reasons as well. It's generally a great game.

It took only a little work to houserule a way to "import" the player characters into the B&P combat system, and we were off and running.

We've fought several ship on ship engagements since and one ship vs giants squid battle, and while I am continually tweaking the rules, it's generally holding up pretty well.

Oak and Iron, pic from Firelock site

Conclusion

Again, this post is meant to be a recipe to how to implement a pirate themed campaign. It's not meant to claim to be the ONLY way to do so, or even the BEST way to do. It is a recipe that optimizes for a certain play style. It produces a dish that tastes a particular way.

There are other recipes and other ways to cook dishes. There is nothing wrong with other play styles. I think this disk tastes good, and if you like things that taste like this you might want to borrow some or all of these ideas.

In the this post and the previous one, we've established a toolkit. In the next post I will publish the specific details of the Thousand Isles, in case anyone wants to directly steal some or all of that setting,. .