magic flying ships

[awa]

so I'm working on a home brew campaign world and most of the stuff is working fine but I'm hitting a snag on how to run the flying ships. since exploration with the flying ships is the premise of the game that's somewhat of a problem.
The specific snag I'm caught on right now is that the ships have a lot of different upgrades and one of those is speed this is two related problems actually.

1 I have no idea how fast the ships should go i want them to be faster than sailing but i cant decide on how fast that should be.

2 there are 10 potential levels of speed a ship could have based on upgrades and at certain speeds you should not be able to just stand and fight normally you should have to hang on to stuff but i have no idea at what speeds that would be.

[Jarrick]

Stormwrack, The Eberron Campaign Setting, and the Eberron Explorer's Handbook have some information in them that you might find relavent as far as handling ships, airships, and other large vehicles, such as trains. As far as being blown off a fast-moving airship, you'd have to figure out how many MPH the ship is travelling and consult the Wind strength table in the DMG.

[Fizban]

Well, Eberron has flying ships and trains that go around 20-40 mph, so you could go with that. The Arms and Equpiment Guide has Zeppelins and Dirigibles which move around the same speed as a sailing ship if you don't want the setting as magic heavy as Eberron. If you want to use the lower-magic Zeppelins and have them go faster than sailing ships, you can justify it easily by using some of the speed increasing enhancements in the various books. They're very expensive compared to a boat, but not so much compared to a Zeppelin, so it makes sense to use them on the flying ship.

For fighting on deck at high speeds, it's just wind. Weather it's you or the air moving, the effect is the same, so all you have to do is use the wind effects table in the DMG.

I would note that if you want these to change the setting, they're gonna have to either be really cheap, or really fast. The smaller Zeppelin in AaEG isn't too bad compared to sailing ships, so it would make sense for them to be fairly common in places where that kind of travel would be needed. The catch is for them to be needed: horses are much, much cheaper, so anywhere the land is actually passable, there aren't going to be airships. Alternatively, you could make them fast, like in Eberron. Eberron Airships are much faster than horses, so they make sense anywhere in the world with enough money to build them.

[Gamer Girl]

Well....we do have 'flying ships' in the real world called airplanes. You could base your flying ships off them.

Air travel still takes time...

You might not want to base your ships on 2010 planes...maybe use 1940's planes? or such...

[awa]

the flying ships are a big deal because people live on floating cities above the ocean and they have no access to wood. also the monsters in many parts of the ocean are to powerful to fight.

i had forgotten the wind table specified how many mph the wind was moving thanks that neatly solves that dilemma.

[umbrapolaris]

find some conversion of Spelljammer setting on the net; u will be satisfied i think.

[Tvtyrant]

Make them all magic blimps? Those are just a ship suspended from a balloon anyway. Since they have less drag then a ship they go as fast as the wind takes them for sailing purposes, or however fast their prop goes if they aren't sail based. I would shoot for 35-50 mph, which is actually faster then it sounds if you can go straight without having to go around things.

[Debihuman]

You can try to pick up a copy of Airships originally by Bastion Press.

See here: http://dragonwing.net/Airships.htm there is a link at the bottom for the nifty FREE preview. I think it was pretty good.

Debby

[awa]

I ended up basing it on dragon speeds and then converting it into mph then after i was done adjusting came out to about 27 mph for a ship with no speed upgrades.

I would like to thank again for the mention of the wind table that was particularly helpful

[Fizban]

You're welcome . I wonder if it's an often missed thing, my DM didn't seem to know anything about it when I mentioned it.