Aquatic Campaign

[Kami2awa]

There are lots of hints in the core books about running an aquatic campaign. The recent amphibious paladin thread in OOTS has inspired me to run a world which is entirely made up of small islands, floating atolls and underwater cities, rather like Earthsea or Waterworld.

The PC races will be expanded to include half-aquatic elves, water-breathing humans called Saltblooded ones and locathah (for the purposes of the campaign locathah will be completely amphibious).

Has anyone on the boards done something similar?

[AslanCross]

Haven't done anything of the sort myself, but the book Stormwrack is all about aquatic/naval campaigns and settings. You might want to check that out.

[Kaelaroth]

I have done a campaign of this nature. The PCs (only two on this occasion) were aquatic elves, a monk and a rogue. Unfortunately, this kind of campaign has a drawback. As underwater fighting is slightly more complicated, characters tend to stay away from watery events, and favour land-based encounters. In answer to this I introduced a world threatening plot hook, involving gods, buffy, divine blood, ninja clans, flying tigers, and trans-dimensional rifts.

On the other hand, if you are willing to do a serious aquatic campaign, GET STORMWRACK! Now! It is essential. Good luck!

[cupkeyk]

We had one and it was slow paced, due to the fact that the water slowed us down. None of us had races with swim speeds so we were going at half our speeds and doing partial actions. And there was always the threat of drowning so we were mostly afraid of the water and just blasted opponents out the water if the option was available, or summoned giant fiendish octopi or giant crabs, both of which usually were like pressing the win button. Our game wasn't planned out well, I am just naming things where an aquatic campaign may go awry.

[BardicDuelist]

A campaign set underwater can be rather boring, unless your characters are playing acquatic races, but I've run a couple seafaring campaigns. What is fun about those is you can do what my friend calls a "scooby doo" dungeon. Basically every crazy person has their own island and such. If you have an idea, it is easy to throw in a storm to throw the PCs off track and have them crash on an island.

On a side note, storms are difficult to run unless you have combat in them as well. They tend to bore players because they are a series of skill checks.

Annother problem with this is you have to decide who the captain is. At low levels, it makes sense for it to be a NPC, but if your PCs are more than a little chaotic you could have to run a premature mutany. What I tend to do is make one PC a captain, one the master, etc so that they are all about equal rank and have cool titles.

Underwater battles are like flying battles in many respects and have many of the same mechanical problems. One thing I did was to have a double miniature on the battle map and mark what height the characters were at. Still, calculating range is a little more difficult.

[qube]

I'm currently running an island based campaign...

the party consists out of
- swashbuckler
- ogre barbarian
- scout
- rogue (flying race)
- sorcerer

(1) make sure everyone can do something
a battle between ships is nice, until 2 of the players have nothing to do ...
- sorcerer has rod of extend, so his spells can reach the other boat
- the rogue and scout use bows
- the swashbucker is captain
but what about the ogre barbarian?
I gave him a cannon only large creatures can operate :D

(2) in a ship battle, the parties ship will probably be almosts broken (compare them as 2 archers who keep fiering arrows at each other ...)

[BardicDuelist]

(2) in a ship battle, the parties ship will probably be almosts broken (compare them as 2 archers who keep fiering arrows at each other ...)

Not necessairly true. If fighting pirates or somthing of that nature, they are likely to board as soon as possibly if they cannot intimidate you. They tend to want your ship (which costs a lot of money) to either use or sell, and it makes it easier to transport all of the loot they take (they don't have to move it). Also, they tend to avoid killing you if you are at all known or influentual since ransom pays very well.