[Savage Worlds] Looking for interesting sea faring ships and crews!

[Kol Korran]

Hey all! While the title specified the Savage Worlds system, I am mostly interested in the conceptual ideas, and less for system specific mechanics. I can create/ derive those from the ideas.

Our group started playing the 50 Fathoms campaign. For those of you who don't know about it, the campaign draws it's main inspiration from the Pirates of The Carribbean movies. The jist of the history is that on a fantastical world, a king sentenced a trio of dark witches to death by drowning. The witches cursed the world to drown in their last breath, and as their curse took effect, most of the world indeed drowned.

The survivors escaped and established new settlement on the mountains-now-turned-islands, and sea faring is now both common and essential. Various nautical species emerged, but there is also another interesting complication- A strange magical portal connects semi-randomly to Earth, between circa 1400-1850, and draws sailors and ship to thus fantastical world.

The result is a world where traders, pirates, privateers, explorers, entrepreneurs and more roam the seas. There are the Masquanni (The fantastical world's humans), Earth humans of varying ethnicities (English, French, Americans, Chinese, Portuguese, and more).

The campaign is VERY sandboxy, (That is one of it's selling points), and has tables and more to generate various plots and encounters.

BUT... (And here comes the question) The tables, while good for producing the bare bones of ships and encounters, provide little (if any) beyond that. After a session of randomly creating not-so-satisfying encounters, and understanding that there is some more work to make it more memorable, I came to the decision to put more content, more "meat on the bones" and creat better fleshed out encounters.

If it matters, the world does have magic, mostly around the 4 basic elements. The other races include various fish- people, mystic squid people, walrus people, graceful bat like people and crabby crab people.

My main problems is with interesting ship and their crews. They don't all have to be super-special, but some names, goals, motives, other details, and perhaps a twist or a secret for each would be great!

So, does any of you have any interesting ideas? I would love to hear them out.

I thank you in Advance,
Kol.

[Cikomyr2]

I can offer you Hans Pechman, "Ill-Luck Puch". A character i played in a Deadlands game.

Ill-Luck Puch is a man who knows he was unwanted by his rich family. Everyone else loved Puch's brother, who inherited aristocratic features, charisma and was not born a little person.

So rather than staying and always try to suck on the family's tit, Hans ran away to find his place by himself in the world. American immigration agents nicknamed him "Puch" after his name Pechman, and the fact he wasnt taller than 3 feet tall.

Nevertheless, Puch found his way all the way through to the Maze of California. Where his luck finally turned around as he was offered to captain the ship The Lady Luck by.. something. A self avowed liar and a cheat, Puch believed his soul wouldn't be worth much in the trade, and accepted the bargain. The entity accepting the deal became the First Mate, and now Puch happily sails the Maze (or anywhere without laws) seeking fortune and adventure, hoping that he always go one step beyond his family's or the law's reach.

Ill-Luck Puch is a "me me me" selfish individual who is aggressively greedy, but cant help himself from bragging and talking about everything he knows. He wont kick a man when he's down, appreciate generosity and reciprocates it when it happens. He will usually try to hold a bargain, even if he will try to twist the letter of the agreement to get one over his counterparty.

The Lady Luck is a decrepit, falling-appart looking chinese junk that have had a lot of strange contraption worked on it. Pechman is a genuinely smart and resourceful man, and has figured a few ways to add some magitek to make the ship go faster than it should, even having an emergency hot hair balloon that can lift the ship airborne for small periods to go short treks overland or avoid reefs.

Pechman has the attitude that hes a wasted ****-up that can never amount to much, but his mind has allowed him to devise plots and tricks to get out of bad situation. He is a remarkable marksman but whether it is genuine talent or the runes he engraved on his ivory-handled 6-shooter as well as the Lady Luck's canons, he will never tell.

(Tl:dr Ill-Luck Puch is a Deadland Huckster who sold his soul to a Manitou in exchange for the ability to gamble for magic. He also is a Hexslinger and magically empowered his firearms. From there have fun, he's not a good guy but he's hardly a villain either.)

(Edit: the Lady Luck is basically a spirit-trapping ship. The First Mate recruits any of Puch's or the Lady Luck's victims that have the right moral makeup, and have them join the ghostly crew.

The ship itself needs an actual crew to function in the material world. But you are never truly alone when you sleep in the bay of the Lady Luck)

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

This is a very cool topic.

Since it's based on Pirates of the Caribbean, albeit loosely, let's steal from what Pirates of the Caribbean itself is based on: Tim Powers's novel On Stranger Tides. A duel between two voodoo sorcerers -- Ulysses Segundo and Edmund Morcilla -- brings to the surface two fighting ships from a hundred years before. They sank battling each other, and now roam the seas continuing their battle.

Let's put the real-life Spanish plate fleet in there too. A convoy of big ships, armed to the teeth, carrying spices, pearls, silks, gems and gold and silver across the sea -- a captain who could cut a ship out and take it would be set for life and so would his children's children. A variation on this could be the Black Ship or the Red Seal Ship, a single large treasure vessel so superior to those around it as to be nigh-invincible. And while we're thinking of real humans -- if some of them came through a portal to this world, surely some would be searching for the portal that could take them back. Maybe it's like The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and they're searching for the edge of the world.

[Lord Torath]

How about Night Druid's Tall Ships and a Star to Steer By.

That pdf contains a dozen or so ships and crews, if I recall. It's for Spelljammer/Hackjammer, but all you really need to do is swap the ship for a more traditional one and you should be good to go. There may be some characters in there of races that don't appear on your world, but again, should be easy to swap out.

There may be more useful resources on The Definitive Index of Night Druid's Work - scroll down to the Ships & Crews section.

Lost Ships and Skull and Crossbows might also be good resources. Again, made for Spelljammer, but the personalities can easily be swapped to ocean-bound ships.

[Rynjin]

Go for broke, make the Voltron/Megazord ship. A pirate captain with a fleet of fast and nimble schooners that can all glom together to form a supermassive warship.

A group of mer- or fishfolk that migrate around on a floating city. They lure in crews who are desperate for supplies and shore leave, and rob them blind when they take the bait. Maybe have the group come across a few legitimate examples of this concept before springing the trap.

A seemingly empty "ghost ship" or hulk that is actually an animated, malevolent object. Not haunted or anything, the ship itself is just like a genius loci equivalent. Could potentially be "tamed" by a daring enough crew.

A group of warmages who set ships ablaze...but offer to put it out in exchange for a tithe of goods.

A recently stolen vessel masquerading as a legitimate Navy vessel from some nearby country.

Druids who protect their ships with groups of aquatic animals, and even have a pair of massive whales or sea turtles to pull them along when becalmed.

A strange, saucer-shaped vessel made of an unidentifiable material that floats mysteriously above the water.

[Telok]

https://www.mindstormpress.com/the-pirate-crew

Easy rules to give personality and events to a ship's crew. Basically you assign some tags to various crew, some are nemesis while others are loyalists. Every so often you roll a number of dice equal to the counts of nemesis, loyalists, and some events since last time. Sometimes nothing happens, or seems to happen, and other times you need to generate an encounter or event (there's a chance for a crew bit of a buff too). Any time you assign something for the crew to do "offscreen" you get a randomly assigned nemesis or loyalist, so you're either relying on a disgruntled employee or risking an valuable crew member.

I'm using it, modded to my current rules & using a randon npc generator (because I'm not tracking 200+ crew), and it's provided some drama and interesting & useful crew about every third session.

[Maat Mons]

Here are some memorable historical seafarers for inspiration:
https://youtu.be/yzGqp3R4Mx4?si=XAj0g5LEYS1USSnx
https://youtu.be/rLgoivl2v9o?si=PZgMCzZo4Xa-LSVt

[Kol Korran]

Hey all.

I want to thank you all for all the suggestions and advice. (Including some thing I never thought about, like the crew rules). I have read only part of the suggested links (I have little time as it is, real life and all), but I have allready gotten some ideas, and I'm sure I'll get even more.

So thanks a lot!

[Vogie]

I find this amusing, because one of the most recent episodes of the Storyteller Conclave podcast talked about this (the "our future games" episode). IIRC, they were using a mix of 7th Sea and Pirate Borg to pull this off.

Also, noting your portal years, you can check out 1899 on Netflix which is all about a transatlantic steamer finding it's sister ship abandoned in the middle of nowhere. It's by the same creator/director of Dark, the spooky German thriller.

While names can be lifted whole-cloth from historical ship manifests, what I would encourage is to make the portal transport somewhat traumatic - that way, you have these transported crews reacting to being thrown across space & time, and enter into the world in some sort of distress. This way you can also have wildly different crews that are also differentiated by their response to that trauma.

• A formerly straight-laced military crew tries to rebuild a hierarchy, and you see their efforts start as kinda silly, but they start collecting stragglers and it grows to something respectable (for better or worse)
• A pirate crew is actually delightful and compassionate when they aren't actively being hunted and forced to a life of crime
• A pair of crews band together and work things out, Star Trek: Voyager-style
• One crew goes deep into their religion and believes this is some sort of divine event - a 2nd coming, a Ragnarok-analog, an afterlife, etc.
• One crew goes absolutely insane, turning into something like the Reavers from Firefly, or another evil psychotic/cannibal direction.
• There's a completely absurdist crew of little creatures that are equal parts terrifying and adorable, like the little coconut pirates from Disney's Moana.
• A remote island that has turned into a Lord of the Flies/Yellowjackets analog.

[Cikomyr2]

So this idea of multiversal sea where all currents come and conflicts, some Astral Elemental Plane of Water is awesome. Mind if i steal it?

[Maat Mons]

Hmm, interesting. What if we play with the pre-Newtonian understanding of gravity as an innate tendency for things to be pulled “down,” rather than a property all mass has? But instead of things being pulled in one consistent direction, there’s a plane (in the geometric sense) that everything is pulled towards. So the world winds up being a laminar sheet. This sheet consists mostly of water. Stone gets pulled to wards the middle, but large enough masses of stone are so wide that, even when they’re at there in the middle, bits of them stick out above the water on either side, giving land masses. But, being just big rocks in water, the land masses keep getting pushed around by currents. So neighboring land masses are only neighboring on a temporary basis.