# Stigna's Guide to Ships & Vehicles Hello! Something that comes up in D&D campaigns a lot is vessels of some kind. Ships, collosal siege-beasts, ancient devices, whatever. It can be hard to translate these scenarios, as cinematic and epic as they may be, into an involved game experience. The rules of D&D are largely meant to have players operating a single character in hand-to-hand combat (or spell-to-spell or novelty-frying-pan-weapon-to-appropriately-serious-BBEG-cursed-runeblade or whatever). The following rules are meant to bridge that gap, and allow players to feel engaged in conflicts of the ship/vehicle scale without having to learn a whole seperate game. The rules focus on simplicity and modularity, so they should be easy to teach to players and easy to tweak to the needs and wants of you and your playgroup. If you have any questions or requests, feel free to reach me via whatever medium you first encountered me - or shoot an email to Stignawastaken@gmail.com. ### Index [**Page 1 - Introduction for DMs**](#p1)
You are here. This section contains the index and a behind-the-scenes explaination of the ruleset.

[**Page 2 - Fundamental Concepts and Actually Using Them**](#p2)

This section continues the behind-the-scenes explaination and discusses the philosophy of usage.

[**Page 3 - The Rules of Ships and Vehicles, a player handout**](#p3)

This section contains the actual codified ruleset of this Ships & Vehicles system, and can be used as a player handout. It contains the entirety of the rule-set, but is best considered alongside the statblock of a ship, for context.
[**Page 4 - An Example Ship, For Context**](#p4)
This section contains an example statblock and battlemap for a ship called the F.S.S Krylock. A copy of the rules and a stat-block such as this one are all that is needed for players to utilize the system.

[**Page 5 - Example Scenarios**](#p5)
Example scenarios and some discussion about encounter design.

[**Page 6 - Logistical Implimentation & 10 Ship Design Ideas**](#p6)
This section contains tips on how to actually impliment this system into your game, and some ideas to spark your creativity.



### Fundamentally How This Works, DM-to-DM The core premise of Ships & Vehicles is the transformation of a ship into a highly interative D&D battlefield. I'll go over the specifics of the rules down at [the rules handout](#p3) but I want to take a second to familarize you with the underlying philosophies behind the system (because some things serve best as DM's-eyes-only stuff), so you can better use it as your own. I didn't want to break up the player-ready-ness of the handout proper to add this commentary, but if you feel like you'd do best with the additional context as you read through this go ahead and skip down to the [rules page](#p3) and hop back up when you've given it a once-over. Okay, here we go!

When engaged in ship (or vehicle) combat, a player controls their own character just as they normally would in combat, with initiative order and class skills and any other goodies that your players like to pull off mid-combat. It's still fundamentally D&D combat, and we get to keep using all the sweet rules and characters we've become accustom to. However, this combat takes place on the ship. The ship doesn't have a turn or anything, it's just *there* under the players like a mobile little section of battlemap. However, the ship is littered with **Components** that do something when you spend your action to **crew** them. Thus, in addition to their regular suite of things they can do, players can also run over to parts of their ship and interact with them to make something happen. Something cool. The ship isn't just *any* battlefield, after all. It's a seat of power for your party, and that's the real draw of bringing your ship to a battle; you get to pack the big guns. The example ship that you'll see later on down on this document is a very basic starter ship that I gave to a level 3 party and it has a weapon that does 4d12 + 8 damage *per shot*. It's not as unbalanced as it sounds but it *feels* awesome, and that's important. Running around crewing components should be attractive and dynamic and fun, a reward for securing a ship and bringing it to bear in combat and an interesting and compelling tactical choice.

Crewing components is resonsible for everything that the ship actually does, from attacking to moving to whatever fancy stuff you or your players dream up for your ships. To move the ship, you run over to the helm and spend your action crewing it which lets you move the ship according to its built-in speed and mobility. To fire a cannon, you run over to the cannon and spend your action crewing it, which lets you make an attack on behalf of that cannon according to its built-in statistics. Of course, there happens to be a bunch of pirate boarders standing between you and the cannon so it's important that your party work together to push through and fire a shot to scuttle the enemy ship. And the enemy set a lit barrel of gunpowder bobbing in the waves ahead of you like a mine so it's probably important that you send someone to the helm. And there are cannonballs pounding into your hull so you'd better move fast. Oh dear. How dramatic! \page ### Fundamental Concepts, Continued
Beyond components and crewing them, there are two other buzzwords in play here. **Durability** is a measure of how much punishment a ship or vehicle can take before it becomes too damaged to function (at which point its wrecked and starts sinking or collapsing or whatever is appropriate). Ships/vehicles are treated like discrete entities for the purposes of targetting attacks against them. "I attack the goblin chieftan" or "I attack the ship" work out the same way, with one distinction; you can't ever miss an attack against a ship if you're in range to make it. It's like the broad side of a barn; any attack against a ship automatically hits, no need to even roll for it.

I tried having component-specific damage (y'know, slash the sails, silence the cannons, attack particular parts of a ship) but I found that the rules complexity just wasn't worth the benifit. If your players want to make targetted attacks, I'd advise treating those as you would any other targetted attack (i.e I wanna smash his knee with my greataxe) and ruling on a case-by-case basis. Rolling against an appropraite DC to hit a specific component and disabling it on a success is a good system, but I reccomend that you let the players work up to investigating that themselves; "hit the vehicle to reduce its health pool" is *much* easier to pick up than worrying about seperate durabilities or destructible subsystems or what have you. Trying to codify stuff like ship saving throws/immunities is also more trouble than it's worth; those sorts of questions are usually trivial to answer ("the ship is made of wood, it doesn't get put to sleep") and trying to bake it directly into the rules system just makes it a headache to learn. And we're trying to pitch an easy-breasy system to our players; you can leave the corner cases of D&D to DM discretion, as we do.

Similarily, I experimented with various defensive mechanics to make ship durability feel more distinct from normal damage but this also got distractingly complicated. Here's the solution I ended up with; ships have a lot of health. You can hit it with an axe (smash bulkheads, cut lines, chop at a mast or whatever; all flavours of "attack the ship") but that won't necessarily be a hugely impactful force all on it's own, because one person's damage output is usually relatively minimal compared to the pool of HP they're chopping at. *However*, siege weapons (like the weapons that are mounted on ships, hint hint) deal crazy huge amounts of damage. *However* siege weapons tend to have pretty severe accuracy penalties baked into their stats which means that hitting on-foot targets with them is tricky. *However*, if you recall, attacks against ships automatically succeed. This way, ship-vs-ship combat is incentivized to be about blowing holes in the other person's hull, but it integrates it into traditional combat very nicely with ship offenses and defenses being compatable with on-foot combat. Most crucially, this system hides the complexity and depth within the system itself; your players don't have to learn anything or memorize rules or be compelled to play a different combat game. They can just learn a relatively simple system overlayed on top of traditional D&D combat, and then feel clever for learning how to harness its power on their own terms.
**Traits** are the last buzzword, and they're pretty much a catch-all for anything that modifies something. If you ever feel the need to add something specific to a component (it renegerates on it's own over time, it automatically fires for you, everyone near it gets hit with *fairy fire* or whatever) just slap it on as a **Trait** and your players will be like "hey, yeah, that's part of the rules, I get it."

So basically, ships are made of parts and you use the parts to do stuff. Great, that's the rules. Now how do you actually use it? I'm glad you asked! ### How to actually use those concepts! As I'm sure you've noticed by now, a lot of the depth to this system comes from the objects they are applied to. Firstly, anything that you want the ship to be able to do needs to have a **Component** associated with it. If you want the ship to move 50 feet in a round with a 45 degree turn, make that the function provided by the helm (steering wheel) component; when the time comes move the ship, someone runs over to the help and spends their action crewing it and they get that function. You have a lot of room to get fancy with components, but the core thing to keep in mind is that they should be attractive. Your players are crewing the thing instead of casting a spell or attacking someone, and you want that to be an interesting and rewarding choice, not a chore. So if you want to make steering the ship a big thing, maybe give it a ram (deal big damage on running into things) or provide a dangerous environment to heroically steer through. A classic take on this concept is the broadside, in which the ship has a boatload of guns but it can only shoot them in one direction (usually the broad side, hence the name) and so the person at the helm is playing a game of manouvering the whole ship at an enemy that's avoiding it, while the battle threatens the helm. But, and this is important, the payoff for playing this game needs to be juicy. Bust out the D20s for damage on the broadside, reward the players for winning that game. Ship health bars can take it, and if a few pirates go poof so much the better.

So, take whatever you want the ship to do (I reccomend "move somewhere between 30 and 60 feet with a 45-90 degree turn in there somewhere" and "shoot in any direction for a bunch of damage with an accuracy penalty" as basics and you can get fancy from there) and slap it onto a hull with durability, some stats like size, storage space or some you-relivant metric and you're good to go. The end result you're looking to create is that your crew is running around the deck of the ship doing something akin to normal D&D combat, but with the extra (and tempting) option of activating components to turn the tide of battle. Then it evolves naturally into rallying around particular components, using and mitigating the extra mechanics available and then full ship-to-ship combat. It gets especially cool when the players start customizing their ship, thereby changing the terrain of their ship battles and what components are available to them. There's a tonne of room for creativity here, both mechanically and in how the players express themselves. \page ## Ships and Vehicles: From airships to caravans, ships and vehicles are a common part of many an adventure. *This* vehicle, however, is different. *This* vehicle is in your service. For you, this vessel will be a weapon, an ally, perhaps a home. It's important, then, that you have the tools to make the most of it - and so I present the following rules for ships and vehicles. #### **Object Properties**: However complicated or beloved they become, ships are fundamentally objects and are treated as inanimate for the purposes of classification. Ships do not function autonomously. Instead, their functionality arises as their components are crewed. #### **Crewing & Components:** A ship’s various capabilities are provided by particular parts of the ship. The helm moves the ship, the arbalest shoots and so forth. To access these functions, a crewmember can crew the corresponding part of the ship by spending an action crewing whilst adjacent to their component of choice. When they do, they perform the function of that component, including making all relevant decisions and rolls. For example *River* decides to fire the ship’s arbalest at a passing beast in search of a new hunting trophy. On his turn, he drops his broom, spends his movement to move to the ship’s *arbalest* component - located somewhere upon the deck - and uses his action to *crew* it. The arbalest’s function is to make ranged attacks, and so River chooses the target, rolls to hit and then rolls damage. A single component can only be crewed once per round.
*It takes a large crew to operate all those cannons - but
  signing on new hands is easy with a hold full of plunder!*
#### **Durability**: Ships are complicated mechanisms with many intersecting parts. However, like many complicated mechanisms, they stop working properly when you hit them enough. Thus, a ship has a single health pool (called “durability”) that is reduced by any form of damage damage it incurs. When that durability is exhausted the ship is wrecked and becomes nonfunctional. All attacks against ships automatically hit but cannot crit; no to-hit rolls are needed. Note that the DM may manage more specific forms of damage or non-functionality, but this is not a systemic feature – much like how losing health points doesn’t implicitly correlate to crippling or loss of limbs, but can under specific circumstances. #### **Traits** Traits are details, quirks or aspects that change or add functionality in some way. They may be attached to the ship in general, or to specific components.








































             *Ship design can be quite complicated and expert
      shipwrights charge a pretty penny, but a superior vessel
                            is well worth it on the cruel sea.* \page # The FSS Krylock >### Ship Statistics
>**Durability**: 225

>**Travel Speed**:11 km/h (132 km/day)

**Personnel Capacity**: 4

**Size**: 90 feet x 30 feet x 60 feet

**Cargo Capacity**: 40, 000 kg, 10x10x35 feet

**Components**: Helm, Refurbished Arbalest, Jetstream Array

**Traits:**
        **Living-Wood Timber**: 25 extra durability.      
As long as durability is over 60, regenerates 5 durability per day. Sprouts cedar boughs.

        **Fore-and-Aft-Rigged Sails:** The ship cannot move directly into the wind, but moves at doubled speed when moving directly with the wind.





>### Components: > #### Helm: >**Function**: Moves and steers the ship. 30 feet of movement with one 45-degree angle per turn. > #### Reclaimed Seafire Arbalest
> **Function**: Make a ranged attack on a single target within 150 feet with a -6 penalty to hit. Does 4d12+8 piercing damage on hit. Uses arbalest bolts, stores 10.
> #### Weathered Jetstream Array **Function**: Sets the winds within a 2 km radius to blow strongly in the chosen direction for 1d4 + 1 rounds once a day. Can be cancelled early by crewing again.

























































                  *A bird's-eye view of the deck of the F.S.S Krylock.* \page ## Example Scenarios A ruleset is all well and good, but let's take a look at a couple scenarios you can use it for! They may not perfectly match the goings on in your campaign but that's alright; the general concepts should serve you well, and give you some ideas about designing encounters. ### Loot-Balloon Tutorial This is a good introductory scenario to teach players about the workings of their new ship, and slots in well as a random encounter or a "random" encounter. The ship is sailing through open water on its way to wherever, when someone on board spots somethrough drifting through the fog. What exactly this is depends on your setting. For me it was a piece of skywrack, the top half of a wooden tower that had been ripped free from a floating sky-city in a recent storm that had gone drifting loose under a large hot-air-balloon-style mount.

The important thing is that it's drifting with the wind, seems likely to contain something worth having, is held airborn by something large and tempting to shoot and is composed of something that would happily float on the surface of the ocean if shot down. When it's first spotted, it's a great distance off to the port or starboard of the ship and wind patterns are theatening to lift it back up into the mist in a few turns. To get to it, the players are going to have to turn the ship toward it to close distance and then hit that deliciously shootable lift mechanism with their shipboard weapons so they can sail over and loot it. I reccomend that this loot be some sort of new component that they can install on their ship, to clue them into the idea of customizing and upgrading their vessel (and plus it's sweet when you're using tools that you've claimed yourself). This is how the example ship earned the jetstream array (which they delight in using like a nitrous button). But the idea here is to present a clear opportunity to achieve something tempting and use this as motivation to walk through the basics of using components in a low-pressure environment.

There isn't enough going on in this as an encounter to give everyone something to do which in a very important part of an actual encounter (or else you just have some people sitting around passing whilst whomever is on the helm just says "I steer toward the thing" repeatedly) so you want to place the loot-balloon in a very precise location; it's got to be far enough away that the crew needs to turn the ship to reach it with whatever your party's long-range shenanigans are, but close enough that they can get to it pretty much immediately once they make the effort, to avoid sitting around.










### Lair of the Reef-Walker This is a good meaty encounter to throw at the players that utilizes many aspects of the system. A collosal sea-beast makes its home in a distant reef, and it's up to the players to best it. The creature is armoured by coral plates so thick that they look like they could endure hits from siege weaponry. Fortunately the players came equipped.

The Reef Walker itself keeps its distance, magically creating coral footing for itself just under the water's surface so that it may scuttle away from potential ramming from the player's ship. This is important, because we're emphaizing the ship's firepower with this one and ramming a ship into the enemy totally defeats the purpose of trading fire. Speaking of fire, though, the Reef Walker is capable of launching cannonade-level blasts of water at the player's ship and will happily do so each turn until the hero's vessel has been pounded to matchsticks (although an occational devestating shot does go to the heroes to keep tension up. Remember, shots on the ship (or the reef walker itself, given its scale) automatically hit but shots on players have an aim penalty.) It's aim isn't perfect and it fires slower if it has to compensate for the ship moving (two shots a turn if the ship is still, just one if it's not). Meanwhile, it causes jagged spurrs of coral to come erupting up from the depths in the path of the ship, necessitating clever steering lest the ship collide with a shoal and take heavy damage.

Each turn, the Reef Walker also calls minions up from the depths, with shambling coral poly-spawn scuttling up the sides of the ship and onto the deck to do battle. They'll prioritize swarming distracted targets (i.e whomever is operating the ship's various components, like weapons or the helm) and come up in daunting numbers, demanding that someone repel boarders. Boarders in general are a really great tool for naval combat, as they nicely mix traditional D&D combat with the mechanics of the ship. This is especially true at lower levels/with simpler ships when your party has less components to keep busy with. Ideally you want to end up with players saying things like "take the helm, I can clear out this group" or "cover Neth while he works the guns!" As an additional fun detail I added when I ran this fight was that you could strike the giant enemy reef walker in its weak point, and let the player operating the ship's weapon roll to to crit (they always hit, but nat 20s quadroupled the damage, for massive damage).

When I ran this encounter it was for three lvl 4 players, used the sample ship above, had about 150 hp (but kept far enough away that only the arbalest could hit it, so it took 4/5 rounds to take down), 45 movement, did 3d12+4 bludgeoning with it's cannonade attack (each shot having a 25% chance to target a player with a -2 modifier to hit), reef jags did 3d8 damage to the hull on collision, 2 polyps spawned each turn (4 if the ship was still), each with 13 AC, 15 HP and a 1d6 damage/+1 to hit melee attack, 15 movement, if you want to run it "out of the box" - but bear in mind that different numbers may work better for different parties. It's meant to be a tense damage race, incentivizing maximizing both ship-based damage output and ship-based damage mitigation. \page ### Logistical Implimentation A lot of this revolves around having ships - which are themselves battlemaps - running around on a larger oceanic battlemap. It's easier than it sounds to make happen. Here's how I do it. On digital formats like Roll20, the easiest way is to simply import a bird's-eye .png of the ship in question as a token and do the fight on top of that. When you need to move the ship, you can box-select it and everything on board and move or rotate it as needed. If you're comfortable, it's surprisingly easy to draw one of your own; it's largely symbolic anyway and making a big bottle shape with a few stand-ins for cannons or steering wheels is a nice personal touch. [Here's an image link to the example ship I made with a transparent background, ready and welcoming for use as a token.](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/445680ee-87a6-4e9e-836b-3a05c874b0c4/ddzbam6-6877b2c0-7371-4455-aece-d45fded1a12d.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOiIsImlzcyI6InVybjphcHA6Iiwib2JqIjpbW3sicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNDQ1NjgwZWUtODdhNi00ZTllLTgzNmItM2EwNWM4NzRiMGM0XC9kZHpiYW02LTY4NzdiMmMwLTczNzEtNDQ1NS1hZWNlLWQ0NWZkZWQxYTEyZC5wbmcifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6ZmlsZS5kb3dubG9hZCJdfQ.4A2EamSO54bWrra6PVDVyoYo2ze7mDFTzkV6k6emLzs) Otherwise, any bird's-eye shot of a ship (especially ship battlemaps) works, and you can either photo-edit components in yourself or drop them in as tokens of their own.
If you wish to go belowdecks, I'd use another .png token that's just the layout of the interior walls. Overlay that on top of the ship to give a top-down x-ray/blueprint view. You could also have a seperate portion of the battlemap that's a static map of the ship's interior and just move minis over to that map when they go belowdecks on the main map, which works very well.

That seperate battlemap section for the interior will serve you well for tabletop play as well. As for the ship, a simple cardboard or paper silhoutte cutout with a to-scale battlemap grid/components marked onto it works great; you can just slide it around as the ship moves. If you want to get really fancy, you can throw together some glue and popsicle sticks around a piece of cardboard with the battlemap grid on it. Start with the cardboard and frame it in popsicle sticks to get the "deck" and then build any details you want around that. Easy, and impressive as a setpiece.

Here's a picture of a very simple vehicle encounter, in which my party raced a bomb-toting villain down a mountainside to the town below on ramshackle sledges. This uses the cardboard/popsicle/glue method. It took maybe half an hour, and was my first attempt that making these sorts of things. It worked out great, and was quite easy; you can totally do it!




#### 10 possible ship component ideas **Abyssal Prow-Maw**: The ship makes a bite attack on one target within 20 feet of the prow, -4 to hit, 6d12+12 damage. Crewed from helm. **Bound Painwraith**: Adds 1d6 damage to every instance of damage an enemy aboard the party's vessel suffers for 1d4+3 turns. **Warding Crystal**: The players start each battle aboard their ship with 10 temporary hit points, works passively. **Well-Calibrated**: The party's gunnery officier treats this weapon component as a ranged weapon when using it (get to use their attack modifier for rolls, can cast ranged-weapon-related ranged spells through it ect) **Feycannon**: Fires directly forward from mount (no swivel), -6 to hit, 3d10+2 damage on hit, 200 foot range, casts entangle on hit (affecting the whole deck, if it hits a ship). **Firebelchers**: Vents fire 20 feet in all directions around the ship's hull, 3d6 fire damage, DC14 reflex save for half. **Naval Ram**: The ship takes no damage from head-on collisions, and inflicts twice it's movement speed to ship-sized targets if it collides after moving at least 30 feet this round. Works passively **Runebomb Matrix**: Deploys three runebombs anywhere on the ship's deck that detonate for 4d6 damage in a 10-foot area (DC 16 reflex for half) when a hostile boarder comes within 10 feet of them. No friendly fire. **Boarding-Harpoon Launcher**: 360 degree swivel, -4 to hit, 1d6+1 damage, create a 5 foot x 40 foot pathway of rope netting between itself and the target that can be walked on like terrain. **Riftgate**: Teleports the crewing individual up to 400 feet in any direction (usually used for boarding).
Regardless of how you and your party ends up constructing your ships, I reccomend that you give them a little bit of further description and fluff beyond the statblock. It works great on the fly, but sometimes a question comes up that needs a deeper explaination. Plus, a little bit of flavour text is cool; ship upgrades are a great type of loot and the description of a ship starts to become a recounting of the party's trials and triumphs. How you impliment this is largely up to the tastes of you and yours, but [here is how I did the expanded descriptors for the example ship.](http://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/WlMSjFyWw)


>#### Artist Credits By order of appearance: John Bentham Dinsdale - "English King Charles II receiving the fleet after the Battle of Solebay 1672"
James Murray Watts - "37 foot Auxillary Schooner or Yacht"



     And a heartfelt thanks to you, dear reader. Happy sailing!