D&D and Pirating Part 3: A sample campaign world

-



Dungeons and Dragons and Pirates! What could possibly go better together? It's like peanut butter and chocolate right? Well, as scores of failed supplements have shown, it's actually a trickier mashup then you would think. While the spirit and style of the pirating in the age of sail is a natural and additive match to Dungeons and Dragons genre, there are a number of complications that can easily wreck or divert such a campaign. Unless you as a dungeon master are aware and proactive in your world building and scenario generation, you are likely to miss the mark of your expectations.

The purpose of this series of three posts is to share some of the learning from running such a campaign (now entering it's second year of continuous play) and provide a basic storytelling framework and toolkit for navigating the choices and trade offs presented. 

In the first post I decomposed what a pirate adventure IS into its core themes, what kind of gaming style and campaign world best suits it, and why it's not a slam dunk to just bolt pirating onto a run of the mill D&D campaign

In the second post I dug into solutions, both for the world building and game mechanics shortfalls identified.

In this final post I will put all the pieces together and present the Thousand Isles campaign setting, a drop-in pirating sandbox designed to easily bolt on to whatever fantasy campaign world you are currently using. 

In this setting, the excellent (and free) Dwarven Forge campaign world of Mythras is used as that starting point but it is relatively trivial to replace the few references to Mythras and Valoria with whatever fantasy campaign setting you are currently using.

All you need to do is give your characters a reason to get out of their own particular dodge and a ship to take them away and you are off! The HMS Lady Jezebel was designed expressly for this purpose and the city of Haven Towne or Skull River Bay would make good initial destinations. If you want an example of making that transition, check out the Hightower Bay chapter on the blog.

The campaign setting is hosted by kanko.io, the main entry portal is here 

Finally this setting is an amateur home-brew setting released under the Open Game License. I have no intention of making any sort of profit off this setting, it’s entirely for fun. However this also means it’s a bit bare bones at the moment. While it does have a fair amount of detail put into certain areas it has virtually none in others. While I do plan to keep contributing to this setting it’ll likely never reach the completeness or polish of a commercial product. C’est la vie. The upside of this is those blank spots are entirely up to you as a DM to fill in. If you come up with something especially clever ping me on this blog and maybe we can incorporate your contributions here! 

Hope you enjoy and happy pirating!

Guy Bayes



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Into the Hells

-
Image
  As Whisperleaf stared down the huge, steam belching, red metal monstrosity that was barreling toward him at an impossible speed across the dusty red plain, his panicked brain momentarily took a step back and reflected on his situation, in that strange, calm way that panicked brains sometimes have. "How did it come to this exactly?" he thought. For a moment he locked eyes with the poor unfortunate that was chained and bound to the front of the infernal machine. They shared in the momentary communion of the utterly fucked. He thought he saw sympathy in those eyes. And then the Infernal Machine was on him. Whisperleaf tried to dodge out of the way at the last possible instant, but got the timing wrong. He didn't exactly even feel the metal beast strike him, just a momentary shock, and a transient feeling of flying through the air at great speed. And then there was darkness. Just before the darkness set in one final thought lazily crossed his dying mind "I probably sho
Read more

The Mountain That Eats Men

-
Image
      So my name is Benny Barlow, pleased to meet ya. Reckon I am a good person for you to talk to, since I worked that mine for over two years. Which means I stayed alive a lot longer then most, longer then anyone else at this camp anyway. And that was mostly, luck I gotta say. My momma always said I weren't smart nor pretty but  The Gentleman  favored me. Staying alive for two years ain't no mean feat here either, they don't call Cerro Rico "The Mountain That Eats Men" fer nothing. Many don't make it three months, between the cave-ins, bad air, cholera, dead-lung and the crazies, or just plain being worked to death. There are a lot of ways to die here.      The Vetrini don't give two shits who dies neither, they just keep new bodies rolling in to replace the old ones, and as long as the silver and mithril keep rolling out, they are happy as clams. Old, book learned fella I knew once said he did the math and based on how much fresh meat rolls in every yea
Read more

The Horde

-
Image
  Ricmo pulled the goggles firmly down over his eyes and gunned the engine of the massive infernal machine on which he rode. From up here in the drivers cupola he had a great view, as his massive red-iron monstrosity tore over the hellish wasteland. The beast belched black smoke and hot steam, huge treads crushing anything unfortunate enough to get in its way, bushes, spindly trees, even solid rock giving way before it. The thing ROARED. Ricmo smiled and gunned the engine some more.  "This is awesome!" he thought to himself.  Ricmo had figured out the yoke and throttle, with some help, but had zero idea what most of the gauges, buttons and levers in front of him did. He was totally making this up as he went along. From somewhere below him, through the hatch that led to the secondary driving compartment, their new ally, Max Zombie was desperately yelling instructions at him, but between the creature's thick accent and the roar of the wind and engine, Ricmo could only make
Read more