how to prevent sinking a ship in harbor

[Kol Korran]

hey all. i've got a bit of an odd question: i'll soon be running a pirate campaign, and i've run into a little snag: the Stormwrack rules list most ships' hulls as having a hardness of 5. since most fantastic settings have means of breathing underwater (be it race, magical items or even the spell), i'm coming to a bit of a problem:

what stops a water breathing character to swim into a harbor of an enemy fleet, and hole many ships underwater, sinking them? i assume above water patrols will have difficulties observing such a character, and due to economics and demographics i can't have all harbors have underwater patrols.

any ideas? my thought was to have the hulls treated with some alchemical substance that may nauseate creatures getting close to the hull, but then i want water monsters to affect the ships as well...

help?:smallfrown:

(search word: piratewitch)

[avr]

Depending on the tech level - ancient galleys were sometimes drawn up on beaches to land them. Once they're on land or mostly so you can defend them like you would anything else.

Trained animals or monsters might patrol the harbour. Nets could make moving through the water without being noticed a pain, though they couldn't really stop a determined rogue with gills.

[killianh]

Simple alarm spells would cover the issue of detecting them.

Also there are rules in the arms and equipment guide for adding protective layers to a ship.

[gallagher]

1) the captain of the fleet probably has a few detection tricks up his sleeves, to have been around long enough to be an otherwise fearsome captain.

2) ships are thickly built, and working with tools underwater is clumsy work. what are you using to get through the wood?

3) anything that would work quickly enough to destroy the fleet within a reasonable amount of time would alert people above water that something is going down

4) innocent people could be kept on the ship, or things that the characters desire enough to not sink the ship.

5) the enemy should be an appropriate leveled endeavor. have the ships have wizards with divine spells out the wazoo to give them early detection

6) if one side can use water breathing, why cant the other? wouldnt the smart thing be to have underwater patrols if you have a 7th level dedicated caster somewhere on this fleets crew

[gallagher]

thought of another, which i think would make for an awesome idea

false bottom boats with patrols on the inside. someone who can afford a fleet is among the richest men in the regions, no? If you are gonna buy a ship, you might as well pay for the permanencied invis bottom.

[whibla]

what stops a water breathing character to swim into a harbor of an enemy fleet, and hole many ships underwater, sinking them? i assume above water patrols will have difficulties observing such a character, and due to economics and demographics i can't have all harbors have underwater patrols.

Sharks (lasers optional). Great scent gets around invisibility. Possibly trained to ring a bell on the surface, as soon as any intruder is detected.

Any trained marine animal would probably suffice, as long as they're there more for guard duty than attack duty. Alert the 'proper' guards, and your saboteur can be quickly outnumbered / outgunned, and out of luck.

One thing to bear in mind about ships is they're damned big. While their hull hardness is only 5 each section of hull then has 30 or so hitpoints. Any chopping sound will almost certainly be heard on deck, giving the attacker not much time to be done with his sabotage, and a small hole can be patched pretty quickly (especially with magic). Fully manned pumps will keep the ship afloat in the interim.

I'm sure there's probably a host of magic protections that can be applied, but once you get passed alarm, or magic mouth, or maybe the Rod of Warning I suspect we're no longer in the realms of 'cheap' or commonly available. Animal training on the other hand is readily available, fairly cheap, and they have a useful lifespan.

[Canarr]

Underwater guard animals have already been mentioned; otherwise, simply place a guard in the lowest deck on the ship. One crewmember to sound the alarm should be enough to deal with any single saboteur the enemy might send in - and larger groups would have difficulties getting past the guard animals.

[Cruiser1]

what stops a water breathing character to swim into a harbor of an enemy fleet, and hole many ships underwater, sinking them?The same reason PC's usually don't resolve encounters by casting Mage's Disjunction: It's destroys the loot. A ship is very valuable, where PC's (and enemies of the PC's if they own a boat) shouldn't try to sink it as much as defeat its crew and take it over for themselves. :smallwink:

[JeminiZero]

I'll quote myself from here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7510417&postcount=31):

My 2 cp: If I were a surface dwelling kingdom who is constantly getting attacked by merfolk over centuries, I would at some point, start investing seriously in stuff that can fight them off, and even take them on in their home underwater.

Idea 1: (Not copied from Avatar despite what it might seem). Breed an army of sea creature lycanthropes. All you need is a good-ish sea animal strain to infect a bunch of voluntary peasants, with the promise that they, their children and so on and so forth, will have a secure future as the kingdom's defenders.

Of course the first generation will have a hell of a time since their transformations are uncontrolled. But their children will have full control over their transformation, and will become dedicated to your cause when merfolk attack their seaside village/guardpost and massacre their parents (who incidentally also find that being unable to transform when you actually want to sucks tremendously).

After that subsequent generations will have full control over their form. They can shift to hybrid form letting them wield weapons/armor, breath underwater, swim around and basically remind merfolk why burning down villages tends to make angry high level PCs.

Idea 2: Warforged. And considering that Merfolks are acting like jerks all over the world, there will be a considerable market for water-proof fighting machines. If that isn't enough, you could make a sentient-construct X-prize: 100,000 gp (on top of the large garunteed market) for the first company to invent a way to cheaply mass produce Warforged.

[Acanous]

A few things, really.

1: Submarine gates. Think iron bars that create a fence underwater. These are real things, invented to keep animals out. Alarm the top. medium-sized things or bigger that go over, trigger the alarm. This has the added benefit of working against sharks and other marine predators.
2: Fishing boats with nets. The Alarm goes off! Now what? Nets. Small boats combing the area will make sneaking around down there a pain, and slow them down as well.
3: Visibility. Docks are DIRTY. Especially medieval docks. We're talking dumped garbage, fish guts, sewage, you name it. Seeing things down there is not going to be easy, the closer you get to the actual dock.
4: The difference between civillian and military ships? Size. That's all they have to go on without coming up. Large trade ships are at just as much risk as a warship, because your saboteur has no clue which is which.
5: Divers. Sailors trained for underwater operations existed since roman times. It'd be a risk for the divers, but they'd oerate in teams. Any sailor is going to have enough ranks in swim to move around quickly. They won't be able to beat a merman's swim speed, but there's more of them, and they're the ones defending an objective, so they don't have to move.

These are all in addition to any special measures the admiral takes, like spellcasters, trained animals, magic items, etc.

[Kaeso]

what stops a water breathing character to swim into a harbor of an enemy fleet, and hole many ships underwater, sinking them? i assume above water patrols will have difficulties observing such a character, and due to economics and demographics i can't have all harbors have underwater patrols.

What about the currents? There's a large difference between not drowning and being able to properly swim at open sea. If you're close enough for a relatively safe swim to the enemy harbor, you've already penetrated their defenses.

Ah, but "there's a spell for that" you say? That only proves the overpoweredness of the average spellcaster.

[Togo]

A hole in a large boat doesn't sink it very quickly, even with a large hole. Assuming the boat has a crew, they can detect water rushing in, and plug the hole. Even if the boat does sink, you're in a harbour. It's easy to fix. Just find the leak, get some people into the water with some heavy sailcloth to plug the hole, and then start pumping out the water. Pumping out the water again is a chore, but you can make even a badly holed boat combat-worthy again in a few minutes. It's not like it's deep enough in most docks for the boat to sink more than 10' at the very most. If it's deeper, then just use a crane, lift it off the bottom (it's not that heavy underwater, since wood floats, and many wooden boats don't sink much below the surface at all), patch the hole, and then pump it out. It will take a while to fix if you want it to face rough water, but for a quicky combat in the harbour, we're talking minutes.

In real life, people had access to drills, and swimmers, and they didn't bother to try and sink boats, because it's too easy to unsink them if you're in harbour. They just tried to set fire to the whole dock, ships and all.

[Invader]

I feel like a more obvious choice for destroying a ship is a simple fireball. Given the mechanics of the spell, 1 fireball will catch enough of the ship on fire at once to make it pretty unlikely that you'd be able to put it out.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if there's a simple solution, PC's will try that before the hard one.

[Togo]

I didn't think fireball set things on fire at all - too brief for that.

[Kerilstrasz]

At ancient Greece, major harbors had crew-men that by using a relativelly small boat they "closed" the harbor entrance (lightbeacon to lightbeacon) with a massive chain that had the strength to stop or at least damage any ship trying to enter or leave. The point that interests you is that in many high value or millitary harbors they had and iron, fully collapsible net hanging form that chain preventing any underwater intrusions.
The above method however, cant be used on a high traffic harbor except at night hours.. ofcourse even this problem can be solved by having crews of harbor men with sole duty of opening the "chain gate" whenever it is needed.
So... assume a fully organized capital city may use the chain gate 24/7 as well as any military harbor. Lower value harbor may use chain at days and net at nights and even lower only chain or nothing.