Airship encounters and complications

[GM1010011010]

Hey all, I'm running an e6 gestalt campaign and my 4 man party has reached level 6 and gained their first post-6 feat already. The game is mid-OP with 1 caster mostly support/buffer and 1 psion/scout who can nova and dish consistent damage.

I've given them last game an airship and they were aleady rulers of a small kingdom on the fringes of a collapsed empire where war has erupted (and they are definitely at war with some factions of the collapsed empire).

Now the game is partly skirmishes, war, politics, and plain old adventuring, but with an airship a lot of travel is definitely made easier. What I'm looking for is ideas for encounters that would happen when using the airship. What I have so far is:


Flying intelligent beasts (animals would probably not attack the ship). Chimeras
Dangerous weather: I have a simple skill based piloting system and it could prevent travel to some places or even make them stranded
An encounter with a druid capable of casting wood warp

[Krobar]

Unless theirs is the only airship in the world there will be others. And angry wizards are always good encounters

[Jack_McSnatch]

Enemy forces with their OWN airship. Naval battles in the sky!

Edit: lol someone beat me to it. Casters throwing fireballs from the ground would also be a nuisance.

[Canine]

Sabotage and stowaways are classics from naval tales, should work out ok for airships. Plus when they land and go adventuring, how do they secure the ship so that no one can steal it?

[GM1010011010]

I've done a space battle with the ship when they acquired in a planar expedition. There might be other airships in the world but I've never hinted at their existence before and I feel like it would be cheating that the opposition suddenly learns how to build them/has some.

Still flying wizards is a thing.

Also, one of the strongest leader of the collapsed empire does have a griffin cavalry unit that I plan on making them fight.

I guess I should have mentionned before that their airship is mostly unique, but it is definitely a strategic advantage and one I plan on letting them use, I'm just looking for fun challenges against the airship.

Thanks for the quick input :smallsmile:

[phlidwsn]

To steal a scene from an old fantasy novel, assuming the ship has landing wheels: Sabotage at night leads to the crew waking up to a pleasant breeze as the trees flash by, their ship hitting 15 knots on the ground having rolled its way into a cargo wagon road.

Cue player efforts to get the ship airborne in time(Give them a checklist or x rounds of effort to get airborne) before hitting either the town at the end of the line or a wagon & team headed the other direction while trying to slow the ship and avoid incidental obstacles.

Edit: "Human, Beware!" by Thorarinn Gunnarsson is the source, and has quite a few airship and other battle scenes to steal from, including the ever popular showdown in the heart of a volcano.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Do what sci-fi and fantasy have been doing since their incarnation: Look for similar concepts from other genres and tweak them until they fit the fantastic circumstances.

The most obvious places to look would be plots about spaceships and seaships, but I'm sure that you could get some Western tropes in there, too. Say, someone trying to hijack the airship, or some kind of flying race being a nuisance.

[Fouredged Sword]

Storms should be a major issue. Even a good rain should ground their ship as they wait for the winds to pass.

[Rothgar Ironmit]

At certain altitudes itll be colder and you could have your players take cold damage

[GM1010011010]

These are some great ideas, by all means please keep 'em coming!

On a tangential idea, assuming a standard kitchen sink setting using mid OP tactics, monsters and NPC's with level with access to pretty much all material (no dragon magazine though), and assuming you have to defend against said airship in a fantasy war, what kind of tactics would you use?

Main goal is to defend properly against it.
Secondary goal is to disable it, destroying it if needed.
Tertiary goal is to capture it.

[Fouredged Sword]

Giants may throw rocks at you as you are crossing a pass through some mountains.

[daremetoidareyo]

Steal the entire plotline from the first Speed movie.

Load ship with charismatic cargo. Like refugee tibbits.

Bad guy (i don't know, lich?) contacts you with the threat: If you go less than x nautical miles per hour the whole ship will explode. The controls for altitude are locked. So now you have to dodge mountains and wizard towers and the great coutl migration. The search for the planted bomb turns up the exact number of parachutes (drogue wings?) for the party to leave the ship and disable the bomb... in the bad guy's lair.

[Palanan]

How does your airship stay aloft? Does it use hydrogen, helium, or inert handwavium?

Depending on how the airship operates, sudden changes in altitude could be potentially disastrous. If an airship is losing altitude, ballast can be dropped--but if the airship flies into a hard updraft, then the vessel may be swept up thousands of feet higher than it was intended to operate.

That means in turn that in order to descend, the airship will need to valve off its lifting gas, to reduce lift and try to counteract the updraft. An airship is a tiny bubble in a vast, ever-churning ocean of air, at the mercy of forces that its crew can't control. Don't let the airship be taken for granted. Every day of every voyage is a brush with catastrophe.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Zr3nearvertical.jpg

This is the USS Los Angeles on August 25, 1927. The airship was secure at its mooring mast when a cold sea breeze caught the tail and lifted it to a nearly vertical attitude. All the crew could do was hang on to whatever they could grab.

After several minutes, the ship cooled enough that it began coming back down--hard. The crew dropped 2500 pounds of ballast to slow the descent. The ship only suffered minor internal damage, but it could have easily been a disaster.

(The incident is described in detail in Sky Ships: A History of the Airship in the United States Navy (https://www.amazon.com/Ships-History-Airship-United-States/dp/B001IH2QWO/).)

For a few creature ideas, there's a fairly obscure article in the 3.5 archive on Monsters of the Sky (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fw/20050211a), part of the "Far Corners of the World" series.

.

[Jack_McSnatch]

Ballista bolts with alchemist fire and oil flasks tied on. Catapults loaded with burning pitch. Hell, even alchemist fire arrows if the community has access to them. Set the underside of their flying boat on fire is what I'm getting at.

[trikkydik]

How does your airship stay aloft? Does it use hydrogen, helium, or inert handwavium?

Depending on how the airship operates, sudden changes in altitude could be potentially disastrous. If an airship is losing altitude, ballast can be dropped--but if the airship flies into a hard updraft, then the vessel may be swept up thousands of feet higher than it was intended to operate.

I'm a huge fan of this.
Other possible conflicts aboard this airship.
1.) Mechanical failure
2.) Mechanical sabotage.
3.) Enemy spies.
4.) Monsters in the engine room
5.) Mutiny or crew uprising.
6.) Colony of sky people/ dragons
7.) Airship Pirates
8.) Aliens
9.) Anti aircraft weapons
10.) There's a bomb on the ship that needs to be diffused or jettisoned.
11.) A murder mystery, which left the navigation system unattended, they're now who knows where.
12.) Volcano eruption
13.) Bermuda Triangle type interference.
14.) turbulence.

All I got.

[Fizban]

How to fight an airship depends heavily on how it works, what it's made of, and what's available. Also how fast it moves and how savvy the captain is. It sounds like you're not using any existing stats, so I can't give any specific advice.

Generally speaking, at this level I'd say Maximized Fireball (with seasoning to taste) is basically an answer to everything, including an airship if you throw enough of them. Objects take significantly reduced damage, even from fire, and it's surprisingly hard to do much with a single fireball. Otherwise you'll need ballista, or preferably cannons, that can fire upwards-which will require special mountings designed for this purpose. Hiring/calling the right monster is another plan, but with e6 your pool of fair monsters is much smaller and you need fiat to get Planar Bind/Ally.

Everything has range limitations, and unless the airship has a height limitation they will always be able to fly higher and drop rocks.

[Manyasone]

If I may suggest Jim Butcher's new series 'the cinder spires', the first book is called 'the aeronaut's windlass'. The book is amazingly good and it's a skyborne world, lots of ideas you can use