The ruleset below is a work in progress, intended to complement the
naval combat rules I have already written for my On the Account campaign. They're still a work in progress, but once they're complete my intention is that they will fill out all the ship-side concerns around taking, fighting, and plundering ships introduced in the naval combat rules. They're also more up to date than those rules, so any contradictions should be resolved in favor of the concepts below.
1. Ships!
If you want to go a-plundering, you're going to need a ship (even if it's a canoe) and some crew (even if it's just the player characters)
It's easy to get caught up in and intimidated by the sheer volume of nautical terminology out there in the world. For the purposes of managing this onslaught, in these rules we drill down to really just one core statistic for setting up ships, which is
the number of masts they have. Mast number runs from ½ to 3, with ½ representing small oared ships with an optional mast. Everything else really derives off of that number, which is referred to below as
Scale.
Here's a partial list of common ships of the overall pirating period. The categories aren't rigid (fluyts can have 1, 2, or 2 masts, "galleon" and "frigate" are sometimes used as adjectives and sometimes as kinds of boat, etc.), and terminology changes over time as well), but it's something to get you going.
Scale ½
|
War canoe, bark, Barca Longa, Dhow, Ship's Boat
|
Scale 1
|
Sloop, Fluyt/Fly-boat, Pinnace, Junk
|
Scale 2
|
Brig/Brigantine, Schooner
|
Scale 3
|
Frigate, Galley/Galleon, Man-o-War
|
Small-Scale ships are cheap to operate, but lightweight in combat and incredibly fragile. Large-Scale ships hit hard and take damage well, but are expensive to run, repair, and crew. Most Crews settle in around one-mast ships (e.g., a Jamaica sloop, Scale 1); more ambitious Crews may choose a two-masted ship (e.g., a brig or fluyt, Scale 2). This leaves Scale ½ and Scale 3 ships for Market forces or special occasions.
All other things being equal, these rules are set up to grant an advantage to a ship that is configured for fighting versus one that isn't, and a ship with more masts versus one with fewer.
Once you have the Scale of your Crew's ship, go ahead and assign it the following stats:
- Hull: 10 points x Scale, for a range of 5 to 30. Locations 1, 4, 7 in ship-to-ship combat
- Sails: 10 points x Scale, for a range of 5 to 30. Locations 2, 5, 8
- Guns: 10 points x Scale, for a range of 5 to 30. Locations 3, 6
- Crew: varies, for a range of 5-250 - see below. Location 9
- Cargo: Twice Scale, for a range of 2 to 6. Location 10
Your ship also has a couple of stats that come up when it's involved in ship-to-ship actions: pursuit, fights, and so on. These are derived from the highest skill available among the player characters. Each character can contribute their skills to up to 2 ship stats. If you have skills that are not covered by any PCs, write a default value of 2 down there. If a character is contributing a skill, they're either officially in the position listed next to the skill, or doing that person's job for some intriguing reason:
- Awareness (contributed by the Lookout or Sailing Master)
- Close Quarters (Captain or Boatswain)
- Ranged Weapons (Captain or Master Gunner)
- Profession (Gunner) (Captain or Master Gunner)
- Navigation (Captain or Quartermaster)
- Seamanship (Captain or Sailing Master)
- Leadership (Captain or Boatswain)
- Naval Stores, derived from Adaptability (Boatswain or Quartermaster)
Each of these stats begins the session 1 point lower than its actual value, which represents the back-breaking effort or expense required to keep a ship operating at full effectiveness:
- Awareness - drilling and/or providing rewards to those who spot prizes
- Close Quarters - drilling and/or buying/maintaining weapons, keeping the crew well fed
- Ranged Weapons (Captain or Master Gunner) - drilling and/or buying/maintaining weapons
- Profession (Gunner) (Master Gunner) - drilling and/or buying/maintaining weapons
- Navigation (Captain or Navigator) - drilling and/or purchasing up-to-date charts
- Seamanship (Captain or Sailing Master) - careening the ship and/or replacing worn fittings
- Leadership (Captain or Boatswain) - building relationship with the crew, cultivating persona
- Naval Stores - conducting inventory, buying new stores
Historically, most buccaneers skated by on one or more of these indices; the player characters in your game, however, may be cut from different cloth. Small crews that want to take on big targets will certainly want to pursue these eight modifiers. This means bribing or bullying the ship's crew into compliance, which requires either:
- A roll of the skill/potential from the character in charge of that skill. If there is no character in charge of this particular ship skill, then the roll isn't possible as there's just no-one who is interested in leading the crew in their training. If the roll succeeds, the negative modifier is cleared; if it fails, it is not cleared but the company's Thirst score increases by 1 (see below), or
- Expenditure of 1 Booty x Scale, per skill. This can come from any combination of the Ship's Chest or the pockets of the Player Characters. This fee can be paid even after a character has tried and failed their roll, above.
Example: The Dagger is a 2-masted pirate brig (Scale 2). Getting all 8 ship skills up to maximum will take 8 Skill rolls and/or 2 Booty per ship skill (16 for all of them).
Different Uses for Cargo Space
Merchant ships, of course, use their cargo space for cargo. In fact, they tended to use whatever space is available, skimping on cannons and crew to fit more pallets and barrels below decks. To reflect this, the following equation applies:
10 crew = 4 cannons = 1 Cargo
A three-masted man-o-war configured for nothing other than war on the high seas, for example, might take the six cargo it is entitled to based on its Scale, and reallocate 5 of those to extra guns; this would give it 20 guns on top of its usual complement of 30, for a total of 50 guns. Conversely, a one-mast Bermuda sloop running cargo from island to island might give up 8 cannons and 30 crew for 2+3=5 extra Cargo, bringing its Cargo capacity to 7.
If a ship isn't using its Cargo for actual trade goods, extra passengers, or Plunder, it can allocate these slots to Naval Stores instead, each unit of which contributes a +1 to the ship's Naval Stores skill.
2. Crew!
Ships have three numbers when it comes to crew:
skeleton,
light, and
maximum. A skeleton crew is the minimum number required to sail the ship; a light crew is the minimum required for combat effectiveness; and the maximum is just that, the total number of souls that a ship can carry.
- Skeleton crew number = Scale x 10
- Light crew number = Scale x 10, plus 2 per Gun
- Maximum crew number = Scale x 40
Everyone in a Skeleton crew must have a Seafaring skill of at least 1 to count as crew. Between this number and the Light crew number, the additional crew can be landlubbers of one form or another, but everyone still has to work. Between Light and Maximum, the additional crew can be both non-sailors and non-workers (passengers, soldiers being transported, slaves chained below decks, etc.).
Remember that a ship can sacrifice cannons and cargo space to carry additional people. A three masted ship with only two cannons and no non-human cargo could thus carry a maximum of 120+70+60=250 people on board. However, each additional increment of crew taken as Cargo temporarily decreases the ship's max Thirst by 1, to a minimum of 1. If the welfare of these additional crew is not of concern, this increment size rises to 20 additional crew per Cargo slot, and in this case, whenever the ship would increment Thirst, it loses 1d10 of these additional crew, per slot, instead. If a ship is Gassed, this number rises to 2d10 per slot.
We can therefore see that cramming hundreds of people into a ship for a long period, a la slave ships or prison hulks, is a recipe for a mutiny at least and a colossal death toll at worst. But in point of fact, slave ships sometimes carried far more than 250 people. We can model this here by suggesting that these vessels were operating on minimum crew (let's say 30 individuals) and no cannons, which gives them an additional 9 Cargo slots for a total of 9+7+6 = 22 Cargo, or around 450 slaves. This doesn't get us all the way up to the 600 slaves that these ship sometimes carried, but it's close enough to give a sense of the extreme disregard for safety and human life that packing a slave ship entailed. It's also a good way to see why, if we replace slaves with looted gold plate, the enormous Spanish treasure ships were game-changing scores for the early buccaneers. In the system we have here, such a vessel would net each officer of the ship that captured it 32 Plunder or around 320 Booty - enough to retire five times over. Señor JOLS, one might say.
3. Plunder!
"Plunder" is On the Account's scale-sensitive abstraction to cut down on the amounts of bookkeeping associated with jumping back and forth between a human scale of operations, and a ship level. In general, the takings from seizing ships and the chores of ship repair and maintenance deal in Plunder; when Plunder is cashed out, it devolves to Booty (see below).
When a prize is encountered, the Market will have rolled a Black and Red die combo to determine cargo, ship type, and flag. After the battle is completed, the Plunder total is based off of these as follows:
- Base plunder = cargo value as rolled, i.e. 1-10
- ADD to this the number of cargo slots carrying lootable items. Although the usual way to do this would simply be to multiple Scale by 2, most cargo ships have given over some of their crew and gun contingent to cargo as shown above, so for a cargo ship multiply Scale by 3 or 4 to determine cargo size (3 for a somewhat cautious captain, 4 for a more careless one).
- In addition, not all ships will be fully laden at all times, and some valuables will have been hidden by the crew, so the player characters get to choose a representative to roll both Awareness and a CHA skill of their choice. Success or failure on each roll increases or decreses the Plunder total by 1; critical successes and failures increase or decrease it by 2.
- Every hit to the cargo hold during the fight drops Plunder value by 2.
- If the victorious ship does not have the capacity to carry its entire prize, 1 Plunder can be converted to a B/R roll's worth of Booty on the spot, and added to the Ship's Chest.
Example: The Fortune's Folly
takes a well-captained two-masted Portuguese galleon in a brisk surprizal. The Market's initial roll was B3R8 to generate cacao, galleon, Portuguese. So the base value of the Plunder is 3, for cacao, plus 6 for a moderately laden merchant ship. The boarding party rolls a success on Awareness and a critical success on Sensitivity to search; this increases the total haul to 12 Plunder. The officers of the Folly
can either try to put a prize crew on the galleon, risking mutiny or separation, and sail the full value of the Plunder back to a friendly port, or it can load its own 2 Cargo slots with 3 (base value)+2 (slots)=5 plunder's worth of cacao and head out on its own. Because this latter option leaves some plunder on the prize, the Folly's crew can also add 1 B/R roll's worth of Booty to the Ship's Chest.
What can Plunder be used to do?
Lots of stuff.
- Repair/replace up to 10 points of hull or sail damage
- Repair/replace up to 5 points of gun or crew damage, or add new guns and crew
- Replace 1 unit of Naval Stores, or purchase 1 Cargo's worth of additional Naval Stores
- Zero the crew's Thirst
- Cash out the crew (see below)
- Swell the Ship's Chest (see below)
Selling a prize ship gets 1 Plunder plus 1 per 5 points of remaining hulls, sails, and guns. Buying a new ship costs 5 Plunder plus 1 per 5 points of remaining hulls, sails, and guns. So, for example:
- To buy a brand new sloop (Scale 1) of 10 guns: 5 + 6 = 11 Plunder
- To sell a battle-damaged brig (Scale 2, 50% damage to hull, sails and guns): 1 + 6 = 7 Plunder
Translating Plunder to Booty, i.e., cashing out the Crew or swelling the Ship's Chest
The process of cashing in Plunder strongly invokes the Scale mechanics introduced above, with every unit of Plunder translating into individual Booty according to how large the characters' current crew contingent is.
At default, each unit of Plunder translates into a single, Black-and-Red roll's worth of Booty to be split among the characters. This measure, however, is calibrated to the 15 to 40-person crew typical of most small buccaneer outfits and should be adjusted as follows:
- Characters have less than 5 crew = each unit of Plunder translates to 3 Booty rolls
- Characters have less than 15 crew = each Plunder translates to 2 Booty rolls
- Characters have more than 40 crew = 2 Plunder for 1 Booty roll, or 1 Booty gives a halved roll
- Characters have more than 80 crew = 3 plunder for 1 Booty
- and so on, with each additional 40 crew adding 1 to the number of Plunder to give 1 Booty roll
Once the correct ratio has been determined, make any Booty rolls needed and split the result among the characters. For every character that spent their Prep action this session on finding buyers, +2 can be added to the Black die. If the Black die is higher than the Red, the transaction to convert the Plunder into Booty is more-or-less legitimate, i.e. handled by a competent fence who pays the right bribes; otherwise, each point of Plunder thus converted burns a point of Notoriety.
