I’ve got all (or almost all) IKRPG resources. Looking through everything there are a ton of cool skills, classes, weapons, and adventuring companies based upon naval fighting And adventure. I was hoping to run a naval based adventure. However when looking for ships I could only find two types (found in bitter medicine).
Am I missing something that has different ship types? If not, does anyone have homebrew for this? Thanks!
I know there used to be a link to a homebrew Guide to Naval Warfare in the old forum, but I didn’t save it (or read it, I’ve got to admit, since I was firmly determined at the time to not be our group’s IK GM because I wanted to get to play so much), and I don’t know if it was ever compiled into an easily referenced form.
That being said, I did once freelance for PP to contribute to an article on naval equipment and ship types (and have since kept mulling some issues over; some of my contributions - incoming shameless vanity warning - even made it into the DnD5 Cryx books though). As far as I know the ship designs and further ideas I wrote up were never published (and probably still need some work in terms of balancing), but I could put some here. I’d prefer getting the permission of somebody at PP first, though, since I did give them the material and they paid me for it, so it is theirs and their decision what to do with it.
Honestly, that’d be great. I don’t mind rebalancing, I just don’t know where to start even lol.
There was a free set of PDFs on the old site for doing naval adventures that had at least one type of ship in it and some naval-specific gear, I think I have the PDFs somewhere
Here are some more recent ideas for resolving ship combat, though, that were not part of the original freelance material:
Ships gain +5 DEF against other ships that aren’t within 1" on the tabletop, as cannons normally fire at extreme ranges unless ships are adjacent on the tabletop. All cannons’ RNG is still used as normal to determine whether another ship is within this (extreme) range. Ships can be attacked at up to twice their cannons’ RNG, but they then gain +10 DEF (This isn’t really such a big deal most of the time, as ships only have DEF 7, and a Hero-level artillerist can reach POI+Artillery 7).
Unless the sea is extremely calm (which would render non-steam powered ships slow to stationary), firing cannons should suffer a penalty for the ship bobbing in the waves (probably at least +2 DEF to the target; this could be offset by the captain trying to steer a steady course, which could also trade the attacking ship’s DEF and the potential of evasive maneuvres for better attack rolls).
Ship cannons should normally be resolved as battery fire, with a full battery of 6 cannons inflicting 1d3 (1d3+1?) attacks for 6 shots fired (potentially, this could be improved by capable artillerists and/or steersmen). This is necessary since ships can have dozens of cannons per broadside, and rolling them all separately would be unnecessarily tedious.
The old Iron Kingdoms forums have been made available again till 31st May, so you could access Fatebreaker’s Guide to Naval Warfare there for a much-appreciated set of ship rules. No PDFs, I’m afraid, but the thread is not too long, so it shouldn’t take too long to compile the data into a PDF yourself.