OUR LAST GAME went excellent. I ended up the last session feeling a little let down about the scenes that took place aboard the ship, and I had wanted to fix that. Ships present lots of problems, for one, you’ve got tons of NPCs running around, and 2. I’ve never been on a big old fashion ship. I’ve read lots of stories! I have a deep love for Maritime Adventure, and I didn’t want just short fights to dominate the adventure. THAT IS BORING!!! It got to be too much, and I didn’t feel that I was capturing ship life as well as what I wanted to.

You know that the game is suffering when the only thing that you roleplay is fight scenes, it gives the PC’s to much information, for one; but it also quickly turns into a dice session which isn’t good either.

My biggest challange was figuring out what to put on the ship. We needed something that could blend in, it would be stupid to have a monster lair on a ship with so many men on board, and I remember stewing about this for several days, when it dawned on me, ISOLATION!!! These folks are totally isolated from everything, what if The Thing From Outerspace was on board? Well, I down-graded it to some dopplegangers, but of the Ravenloft variety which are much tougher to detect as they possess powers of ESP.

I had three of them, one boss and two underlings, but as it turned out the PC’s couldn’t tell how many were on board, they were hoping that it was just one, but after finding and killing one, they discovered that their problem wasn’t yet over. These monsters were ambushing men and tying them to barrels, which served as markers for a Si Fan ship that was tailing them. This also let the PC’s know that the Si Fan was not just a human enemy, but was a much darker entity.

We didn’t get as far as I wanted too, but that is cool because I let the PC’s pick the pace that they wanted to go, which worked really well. If they wanted to spend more time investigating certain aspects of the game then I just let them have at it. The whole time they are trying to figure out what was on board, who the monsters were parading as, as well as dealing with every day hazards of an ocean voyage. We just took it one day at a time, and eventually got to Horta and they got the Info that I promised them.

Again, I prerolled weather conditions and build my story around it, the monsters used the weather to their advantage, as did the PCs. A no wind day turned into their favor when, off in the distance, they were able to capture a marker which the monsters had set.

I also prerolled all fight sequences between the monsters and their victims, they were attacking stronger men now, and one of them was injured in the ambush, this lead to it’s undoing, as it should had. The characters caught on and were able to kill that one.

I still wanted to keep some things random, so I generated a cool little list. Twice a day, and once at night I’d roll a d20, if it resulted in a 1 or a 2 then the dopplegangers sabotaged the ship.

Random Sabotage Generator (1d12)

1. Poison Food
2. Broken rigging
3. Fire in kitchen
4. Robbed Lockbox
5. Key to arms room stolen
6. Cannon strap breaks, cannon lose on deck
7. Powder keg explodes
8. Diseased rat
9. Fight, mutiny
10. Man over board
11. Lifeboat hull broken
12. Engine breaks down