Hey all!
So I ran a one and a half shot recently with heavy Innsmouth vibes and ended up with the party summoning a Spelljammer from the waves and hurtling into the writhing tentacles of a Nautiloid which had also risen from the depths.
We didn’t play out the combat, but it got us thinking and after the session (as often happens) we chatted about what we might do next.
We stumbled into the idea of playing the crew of a fantasy version of a submarine, a spelljammer in deep space or a vessel in the deep sea (pretty interchangable I think) tasked with hunting down and killing gigantic horrors of the dark.
This idea has grabbed our imagination and now I’m trying to see if we can whip together some kind of simple mechanics or gameloop to simulate the tense “silent running mode” cat and mouse feeling of sub hunters with the big scale enemies of like Shadow of the Colossus.
Any thoughts?
Any old school mechanics that might help or systems that might be fertile ground for rules pilfering?
Wow! It sounds awesome! I would probably start with some simple naval rules (as in Expert) or elsewhere and then bolt on mechanics or procedures for anything that comes up, using Spelljammer for inspiration. I find Spelljammer itself gets way too caught up in a bunch of crunch that kill the fun of it. I think I’d rather work from something simple and add crunch as needed than try to distill simplicity from Spelljammer’s messiness.
I found an article or two summarizing naval combats through the editions, but the more I researched the creatures living in the depths of the ocean and listened to some good ol nautical horror stories on youtube I think I want a game experience that doesn’t put the players in the role of adventurers, but more in the tense role of pushing their luck exploring the briny deep.
Marking off AIR and FUEL each round, and having their SANITY challenged.
Can you capture something worth the risk and haul it back to shore? If you can you might be able to upgrade the ship enough to go deeper next time.
And so I’ve gone off the deep end and started trying to get some mechanics together that let the players operate parts of the sub to operate different features of a weirdo water vessel with ocean monster parts grafted on.
Here’s some battlemaps I used for our dockside oneshot as well because WHY NOT?!
One nice thing about a sub, and ships to lesser degrees, is that there are more rigid roles that players can take on. You can’t both be at the listening station and at the con or at the con and at the helm, etc. There isn’t the sort of overlap that you find in overland travel.
That said, adventuring is all about going into dangerous places and surviving to bring something back, whether from dungeons, caves, and castles or the deep shelves of bottomless depths. The added currency with submarine adventures is air which, having played through a Traveller dungeoncrawl, is no small consideration and it can add a lot of tension!
The sanity piece comes from how much horror you want to inject wherever you are. It sounds like the deep sea gets those horror juices flowing for you so you should absolutely embrace them!
EDIT:
I REALLY love that last map. What tools did you use? Those textures are awesome!
I did those maps in Procreate on my iPad.
The last one was just using some of the built in texture brushes and the organic shape selection tool to kind of block in the coastline.
