Sunless Sea systems?

[golentan]

I don't know if anyone else here has played Sunless Sea. It's an early access game on steam that immediately gripped me. The sense of exploration, age of sail adventure, combined with there being terrible things waiting in the dark to devour you and constantly having to struggle against madness and mutiny and horror beyond your ken is REALLY FUN. To me.

The premise of the game is that around the time of Queen Victoria London was dragged underneath the earth to a vast cavern filled with an ocean, a realm that doesn't obey all the laws of reality as understood on the surface.

Sooo... what game system would you choose to run this in? My experience running is largely restricted to d20 variations, Mongoose Edition Traveller, and Exalted 2e. None of which really predispose themselves to a game like this, though traveller comes closest. I think that the system needs some form of horror mechanic, good ship based rules, and definitely should NOT abstract resources in any way (given that managing fuel and food are a major part of the game). It should be relatively gritty and easy to kill PCs, and needs good rules for disease and horror situations. A certain amount of steampunk and magitech would also not go amiss, but probably not much easy magic.

I was wondering specifically about 7th Sea and Call of Cthulhu, though I am open to all sorts of suggestions.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Hhm. Now I really want to see if I could hack Torchbearer to fit sea-venturing. The Grind is a mechanic that would work perfectly.

I think an older version of D&D might serve your needs fairly well. Sunless Sea doesn't actually rely much on the details of zailing; the important part is that you're able to successfully stay away from rocks, stay in the light, and not run out of supplies. Add in a random encounters table for zailing, and you should be good.

(Fallen London, on the other hand, would make for an excellent GUMSHOE game.)

[Silus]

I suppose if you wanted to run a D&D type game you could have it be an extremely expansive Underdark section...

Which come to think of it, I may do for my homebrew world....

[golentan]

I don't think D&D really fits. Way too much magic, not enough worrying about things that may be impossible to take down.

[Eldan]

A slightly specialized version of FATE, maybe? Though, these days, that's pretty much my go-to version for everything.

[Thrudd]

Basic/Expert D&D has rules for waterborne adventures. Magic is low-powered, especially at lower levels, some spells could be taken out or restricted. 1e AD&D sounds more like what you want, though. It has similar rules with a bit more complexity, the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneers Survival Guide are not widely used or liked (for reasons), but they might have some stuff you'd want to use or adapt for making just surviving the environment an important part of the game. Both games have extensive equipment lists (AD&D moreso) and can require tracking food and fuel for light sources, as well as rules for getting lost in the wilderness. AD&D has rules for diseases and mental illness.

It is certainly deadly enough, the level of deadliness of course being determined by what sort of creatures you want to include and how often. There is no "horror mechanic" per se, but both are based on a dungeoncrawling style of play that encourage players to maintain a steady state of paranoia about what might be around the next corner, where any encounter could potentially kill someone. At higher levels it becomes less so, but this can be mitigated by increasing XP requirements or adjusting the leveling rules or the gaining of hit dice. Perhaps the game caps at 3HD, and every level after they only gain 1 or 2 more HP. Or there is simply no gaining of HP ever, characters just increase in other areas. Remove certain spells from the game, or don't allow spellcasters at all. Magic items are rare or non-existent.

[Drakefall]

Re: 7th Sea. I don't think it would entirely work.

It does have lovely rules for swashbucklery, sailing and "not easy" magic, for sure. It's probably far and away the best ruleset I've seen for that high adventure genre. However, it is not gritty in the slightest and PC death does take quite a lot of fail to achieve. It also lacks anything resembling a horror or sanity mechanic, and I don't remember any resource management rules at all, though that could just be my faulty memory. It's very much Three Musketeers, and I don't think gritting it up, as it were, would be an easy task.

I have far less experience with Call of Cthulu (A whole two con games), but I'm led to believe its fairly modular so it might be something to look into.

Off the top of my head I think one of the Warhammer Fantasy rpgs might have what you're looking for. I've only played 3rd ed, but it certainly had grittiness and grimdarkness (though thankfully not as much as 40k), and I remember having to keep track of supplies though in a not-too-detailed manner. I think 2nd ed WFRPG might be the best suited to your needs, being less... "boardgamey" I suppose(?) than 3rd ed, but I have no personal experience with it, though would certainly like to try it. I don't know if it'll have sailing rules, but it should have everything else you need and those shouldn't be too difficult to make up or port in on your own.

Hope that helps.

[Airk]

Sunless Sea is not sailing in the literal sense and it is definitely NOT "Age of Sail". There's also no swashbuckling. I suspect 7th Sea is a bad fit.

The sanity mechanic seems to suggest that a Cthulu-type game might fit.

As usual though, this question isn't really being looked at right. The question is what do you want this game to be ABOUT? The personal horror of being on a ship in the dark ocean for day after day as stranger and stranger things happen and you start to lose your grip? The exploration of seeing what manner of eldritch creatures you can find and still live to tell the tale? The grittiness of managing your food and your fuel on an unknown ocean full of unknown dangers? All of these suggest different types of systems.

People have a tendency, IMHO, to look at things like this and go "Okay, we need a game with intricate rules for how to sail a steamship!" when in actuality, if the game is about personal horror and trying to keep from eating your crewmates as madness sets it, you have NO USE WHATSOEVER for complicated rules about sailing a steamship. It's just not relevant to the game. I'd even go so far as to say that in that scenario, rules for getting LOST aren't even useful, because all that will do is encourage the players to make characters who are good at not getting lost, and then...what kind of game do you have when you sail out, see a monstrous Cthulusquid, and go "F- this, we're going back to London, it's East by Northeast of us!"?

To me, the game cries out for a horror system - but since that's not my kettle of fish, I don't have any good recommendations. I kindof agree with CarpeGuitarrem that some sort of Torchbearer hack might suit well for other versions of this too - sortof a 'survival horror'. I think most of the other games suggested are off base and modelling the wrong things.

Also, in before someone says "Run it in GURPS"-

[golentan]

See, for me it IS about the ship. It's about managing the resources for your ship, arranging your crew, and going over the horizon to see what's there. And while it's not age of sail technology, it's very much an age of sail feel. The edge of the map is just marked "here be dragons," our ship will carry us on our attempt to catalogue them for the Empire, while we dodge pirates and monsters and fill in the map as we go. There's horror out there, yes, and that horror has to be dealt with. And there is sometimes personal struggle between characters or monsters, as when exploring an island or in the event of a mutiny, but the main thrust of the action is the crew and the ship working together to deal with situations while edging closer to hunger, absence of fuel, and complete psychotic breakdown in uncharted waters.

[Airk]

See, for me it IS about the ship. It's about managing the resources for your ship, arranging your crew, and going over the horizon to see what's there. And while it's not age of sail technology, it's very much an age of sail feel. The edge of the map is just marked "here be dragons," our ship will carry us on our attempt to catalogue them for the Empire, while we dodge pirates and monsters and fill in the map as we go. There's horror out there, yes, and that horror has to be dealt with. And there is sometimes personal struggle between characters or monsters, as when exploring an island or in the event of a mutiny, but the main thrust of the action is the crew and the ship working together to deal with situations while edging closer to hunger, absence of fuel, and complete psychotic breakdown in uncharted waters.

Which is it? The exploration the backdrop for the interpersonal strife, or is the interpersonal strife a seasoning for the exploration? Because I don't think you can do both, and your post doesn't make it at all clear which you want. Because you start by saying "It's all about exploration!" and then you finish with saying "It's actually all about the stress on the crew!" I think what you are TRYING to get at is that it is a game about scarcity and struggle against lack of resources (Food/Fuel/Light/Sanity) and to me, "how well do you sail your ship?" is irrelevant to that.

I still argue that it has anything like an 'Age of Sail' feel; Age of Sail is fundamentally optimistic. This is not.

Also, on a note that more directly addresses the source material, am I the only one who finds Pirates in Sunless Seas ridiculous? You can barely survive to find out what's a few miles off, but there are PIRATES just sailing around waiting to pounce on...what exactly? The nonexistent merchant trade? How are they not being eaten by giant Cthulusquid?

[golentan]

Which is it? The exploration the backdrop for the interpersonal strife, or is the interpersonal strife a seasoning for the exploration? Because I don't think you can do both, and your post doesn't make it at all clear which you want. Because you start by saying "It's all about exploration!" and then you finish with saying "It's actually all about the stress on the crew!" I think what you are TRYING to get at is that it is a game about scarcity and struggle against lack of resources (Food/Fuel/Light/Sanity) and to me, "how well do you sail your ship?" is irrelevant to that.

I still argue that it has anything like an 'Age of Sail' feel; Age of Sail is fundamentally optimistic. This is not.

Also, on a note that more directly addresses the source material, am I the only one who finds Pirates in Sunless Seas ridiculous? You can barely survive to find out what's a few miles off, but there are PIRATES just sailing around waiting to pounce on...what exactly? The nonexistent merchant trade? How are they not being eaten by giant Cthulusquid?

It's about the ship sailing into uncharted waters. The ship does not sail without the crew and fuel, and the crew does not survive or thrive without resources. How is this a hard concept?

Also, I'm not sure I'd describe sunless sea as pessimistic. Sure there are things that are too far beyond you in some way to fight, but that's a fact of life in most universes, there are disasters and all you can do is brace for impact and hope to rebuild. Sunless sea, you can still kick the world in the teeth and drag fame and fortune and knowledge from the Zee.

Also, yeah, there probably is merchant trade. Food harvested at the Iron and Misery company Funging station has to make it to london somehow, and most of the pirates seem to hang out on what would be shipping routes between london and her outposts (or potentially the Khanate and the Coral Republic when we get more stuff from them)

[Eldan]

I'm not sure Age of Sail is optimistic either. Tons of ships were just lost somewhere. Sailing around Africa was dangerous, crossing the Atlantic meant that sometimes, no one came back and crossing the Pacific without very good charts and navigators was near-suicidal for a long time.

[Thrudd]

It's about the ship sailing into uncharted waters. The ship does not sail without the crew and fuel, and the crew does not survive or thrive without resources. How is this a hard concept?

Also, I'm not sure I'd describe sunless sea as pessimistic. Sure there are things that are too far beyond you in some way to fight, but that's a fact of life in most universes, there are disasters and all you can do is brace for impact and hope to rebuild. Sunless sea, you can still kick the world in the teeth and drag fame and fortune and knowledge from the Zee.

Also, yeah, there probably is merchant trade. Food harvested at the Iron and Misery company Funging station has to make it to london somehow, and most of the pirates seem to hang out on what would be shipping routes between london and her outposts (or potentially the Khanate and the Coral Republic when we get more stuff from them)

SO, a seafaring hexcrawl, with:
rules for different types of vessels
rules for navigation/getting lost,
weather or its sunless sea equivalent,
keeping track of food, fuel, and other supplies, possibly rules for foraging and scavenging in the wild,
rules for exhaustion, thirst, starving, being exposed to the elements,
rules for the morale of hired crew and henchmen,
rules for disease and insanity
method for determining when encounters occur
high lethality for characters in general, or at least a sense of real danger

It really sounds like you would do well with a hack of ACKS or AD&D, maybe some of the crunchier stuff from AD&D hacked into the ACKS framework that is great for dealing with trade goods and merchant ventures, economy in general, and overall exploring, as well as late-game domain building.

[Airk]

It's about the ship sailing into uncharted waters. The ship does not sail without the crew and fuel, and the crew does not survive or thrive without resources. How is this a hard concept?


Because traditionally RPGs are about characters, and I think you'll have a hard time trying to find someone who wants to play a ship. ;)

[golentan]

Because traditionally RPGs are about characters, and I think you'll have a hard time trying to find someone who wants to play a ship. ;)

People wouldn't play "the ship" any more than the typical player in another game would play "the party," but a game usually isn't about one person to the exclusion of other players, either. Are you being willfully obstructionist on this topic?

[Eldan]

Hmm. I really can't think of a system that has both the resource-system, the exploration and the characters. Maybe you'll end up doing at least some of it yourself.

I'd suggest finding something with a good sanity system first, then adding the resource allocation yourself. And don't take call of Cthulhu. I sort of think that a system where sanity is a linear scale didn't realyl get the point.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I wonder...I wonder...could you use Don't Rest Your Head somehow as a basis for this? It's a game where Madness and Exhaustion are dice pools that ratchet up as you dip into your abilities. It'd be a bit of a stretch to hack, though.