Armada campaign setting?

[Sayetsu]

It's a floating city from China Mieville's novel The Scar, made from hundreds of ships chained together or something similar. (I read it many years ago.) It's the coolest setting for a fantasy novel I've ever experienced, and I'd love to run a campaign set in it. If anyone has converted it, or done something similar, I'm having trouble finding it. Does anyone know of something like this?

[Sparky McDibben]

Afraid I haven't. There are a few things that spring to mind (quarian flotilla from Mass Effect, Drifthall from Raiders on the Serpent Sea, etc), but I don't know if those examples are helpful. Let me know if you want help brainstorming or worldbuilding; always down to chip in two cents.

[Jack of Spades]

The actual-play show Dimension 20 has a season set on a flotilla-city, titled Pirates of Leviathan. Pretty sure they are playing 5e in that campaign. Behind a paywall, but free trial might make it possible to binge it in a weekend.

[Mechalich]

There was, at one point, a Dragon magazine article that stated out at least some races and feats for Mieville's Bas-Lag setting for 3.5e (which encompasses Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council), though I have no recollection as to which issue it was.

Truthfully, Mieville's world-building isn't all that good - which isn't meant to be a dig, setting consistency is simply not anything even close to what the novels are trying to achieve - and the floating pirate armada frankly doesn't hold together all that well (it literally would get smashed by storms almost immediately, which is why floating flotillas of this kind don't actually exist).

[Sparky McDibben]

There was, at one point, a Dragon magazine article that stated out at least some races and feats for Mieville's Bas-Lag setting for 3.5e (which encompasses Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council), though I have no recollection as to which issue it was.

Truthfully, Mieville's world-building isn't all that good - which isn't meant to be a dig, setting consistency is simply not anything even close to what the novels are trying to achieve - and the floating pirate armada frankly doesn't hold together all that well (it literally would get smashed by storms almost immediately, which is why floating flotillas of this kind don't actually exist).

Those are all good points. However, I think we can still use standard fantasy RPG stuff to help OP build it.

My first instinct is to just make the weather witches (druids?) a powerful faction within the flotilla. Perhaps older hulls are bound up with magically-strengthened sargasso?

[Pauly]

Without knowing the setting my thoughts immediately went to Flashing Blades or 7th Sea as being the standouts in the swashbuckling/age of piracy genre.

[Saintheart]

Tangential, but - maybe the solution is to look for inspiration for similar premises rather than similar settings. Battlestar Galactica would have all the tropes from which you can build missions: resource shortage, enemy pursuers, moles within the fleet, etc etc.

[Quertus]

I’m drawing a blank on the name, but iirc the 3e D&D epic handbook has a city made from the concatenation of lots of space rocks. I suspect 2e Spelljammer probably had a somewhat similar concept. I doubt either of these will have had the thought out into them to be terribly useful, however.

[Bavarian itP]

There was, at one point, a Dragon magazine article that stated out at least some races and feats for Mieville's Bas-Lag setting for 3.5e (which encompasses Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council), though I have no recollection as to which issue it was.

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