I know that the Grump has touted the Mongoose ship book among others, but I need a quick, trimmed down set of rules for something along the lines of epic scale ship-to-ship combat. Anybody have any suggestions that won't require me to rob a bank? We intend to use the Pirates of the Spanish Main/Crimson Coast ships as representation, we just need a down-and-dirty set of rules to go with them. Hopefully something that can cover actions of individual characters on the ship at the same time (otherwise we would use the PotSM rules to begin with) since this is occuring in a d20 Swashbuckling Adventures game.

Thanks in advance...

Corsair by Adamant Entertainment is just the ship rules, and is aimed at 17th & 18th century ships. The rules are similar to those in Book of the Sea, and are based on the eariler version in Seas of Blood.

Seas of Blood is also widely available, even though out of print, and while Book of the Sea and Corsair both use these rules as the basis the version in Seas of Blood is the simplist. I wore out a copy, and it is not a poorly made book. My one complaint is that the ship designs are sometimes silly, mostly to accommodate the use of catapults, there is a reason they were not used in the real world. I handled this by ignoring the images, and replacing the catapults, trebuchet(!) and ballista with culverin, demicannon, and cannon. (Things what go *BOOM!*)

Both BoS and SoB have rules for trading, all three books have rules for magic in a D&D game, though those in Corsair are largely duplicates of those in SoB.

Ships & Sea Battles also has rules for ship battles, but by the time I bought it the rules from SoB had become entrenched, so I never more than looked at it.

For an entire setting that uses sea battles as a theme:

Swashbuckling Adventures by Alerac Entertainment. The classes are balanced among themselves, not so much with the standard D20 classes, but it is a great game for, well, swashbuckling adventures! I have run a campaign using both this D20 version and the original 7th Sea. My problem with the settin is entirely the map, otherwise very cool. One of the factions is the Brotherhood of the Coast, or as they were called in our world, the buccaneers. Of the two I prefer 7th Sea, but I like both. The ship combat rules in 7th Sea are fast, with a ship treated identically to a character. And beware of both the 7th Sea, from which few return, and the Black Freighter.

Swashbuckling Adventures does in fact have ship combat rules in the main book, based on SoB (again, it seems to be the preffered rules set among a bunch of companies). You do not need Ships & Sea Battles to have such in your games. The rules in Ships & Sea Battles is neither based on the R&K system from 7th Sea, nor from SA, and in my estimation fails at both, we never even tried them out. In one of the 7th Sea books (I think the GM book) there are rules for fleet actions.

Nittier and grittier is Skull & Bones, while there is some swashbuckilng it is mostly a game about pirates, stinking, murderous, and rapacious pirates! It takes place in the Spanish Main and the South Seas. I ran a three part scenario for it, combined with D20 Call of Cthulhu... there are treasures you don't want to find, and captains that you don't want to cross. (Did you ever read Lovecraft's The Terrible Old Man[i]? Well, he was younger once, a [i]long time ago... but still terrible.)You could play a campaign based on Pirates of the Carribean, or something closer to a salt caked hell. Good game, with an occassional magazine for material.

The Auld Grump, yeah, I like ship based games...

*EDIT* Added a bit more about Swashbuckling Adventures and 7th Sea. I can recommend both, and had a lot of fun with each of them.

But I think that for D20 either Swashbuckling Adventures or Skull & Bones is the way to go. Even though I preffered the R&K system in 7th Sea - strangely enough because it was less realistic. 7th Sea is a game where you can leap away from explosions and dust yourself off, continuing unimpaired. One of the rules is that only the Villain, never the henchmen or brutes can kill PCs, it is all about drama, and has the best rules for representing drama I have seen in a game.

The Auld Grump

Strange that my DM didn't mention the ones onthe Swashbuckling Adventures book. That is what we are playing.... Maybe he doesn't know they are there...

Gods I hated Man O' War!

The models made me go, 'Who are they trying to kid?!!!'

Ships with rollers.

Ships with mortars that take up a third of the deck.

Ships with giant claws.

Viking longships that get a bonus to boarding?

No sale.

If they do a new edition with sane ships I might be interested, but the first edition just looked too silly to bother with.

And if dwarfs have ironclads they would win every engagement, if they don't win then there is a serious problem with realism in regards to the rules.

The Auld Grump, grump, grump, grump...

hheh, i stumbled in here with the same idea Knightseer had, Ships is so generic a term... Still trying to find a decent set of rules, and mdels, while i don't mind, i don't love them either, the d20 rules they can't do big battles worth crap, and i wanted to do somethign big at one point, and they just don't have the scale i want...

I've looked at some of the Stuff the Grump mentiones but eh still looking for something for my big battles.

This summer, Wizkids is making a new CSG along the lines of Pirates of the Spanish Main, called .

Very beer & pretzles, like PotSM.

Hmmm, now that I think about it there are a few Mass Sailing Ship Rules... let me dig, though the one that leaps to mind is Wooden Ships & Iron Men, which I played back in the early '80s. Limeys & Slimys was for fewer ships.

A free one or two can be found , , and .

The Auld Grump