Announcing Monday Night Pathfinder Pirates

I have been wanting to start a different sort of campaign for a while, something a little off the beaten path of traditional dungeon delves and overland adventuring.  Psionics Unleashed and the Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Magic books have been on my radar and my players' radars for a while.  With the release of Skull and Shackles and all of the related material, I finally found my new environment.

Pathfinder Pirates on Mondays is going to be a more advanced, open, and yet casual RPG session for me.  I've opened up the books to include Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Magic, Psionics Unleashed, all the pirates resources from Paizo, and player's test for Advanced Race Guide.  In addition, I found a resource over the weekend called "Armada: Expanded See Combat and Rules Sourcebook."

The game will be emerging guns, no lawful alignments, and is going to take place primarily aboard ship and seas. I chose the Sword Coast as a setting, since it is familiar, since I can cross-over material from my Friday and Monday games, and since it has relevant material, like the pirate city of Luskan.  The game will also include good possibilities for PKs, so I've warned the players to have a second character ready to go.  The players are really excited about the new character options.

My big excitement over this game is two-fold:

• Ship battles are going to be epic.  I've starting collecting ships and sea monsters from the Pirates Constructible Card Game, as well as from other sources, which I'll discuss later in another post.
  
• I am using a new streamlined GM kit.  I'm replacing my GM notebook and all hardback source books with a laptop.  I am using a pirate ship flip mat, a set of pirate ship card tiles, a set of general purpose card tiles, and a medium wet-erase map for all maps (no paper or auxillary maps).  I have 3 clear hard deck boxes to hold the ship and sea monster cards, that are stored flat as cards.  Minis will be light and fit in one small clear parts-style compartmented box and in a tube (more details in a later post).  Pens and dice fit in the minis box.  The few Skull and Shackles sourcebooks are small.  As a result, my whole GM kit fits in my normal-sized backpack!  This is a huge change over my Friday game which fits in a ginormous duffle bag so large that it has wheels!

So far I have 5 players for the Monday game after two initial weeks of building characters and running some test scenarios.  At last check we have a male Dwarven Druid stormcaster, a male Human Rogue with aspirations of captaining his own ship, a female Magus caster most likely to have an attitude problem, a male Half-giant fighter with a knack for siege weapons, and a female Ninja.

The ship battle test last week was a big eye opener.  The druid captained one ship with the half-giant assisting, and the ninja captained the second with the magus along.  The ninja and magus had a faster and more heavily armed ship, and thus were in pursuit.  Unfortunately, the ninja had almost no sailing skill, and the druid beat him soundly in almost every roll.  As a result, the druid's ship quickly positioned itself, took some potshots, and left the ninja's ship 'in irons' with some superior strategy.

The groups started boarding and we stopped there, since it probably isn't real constructive to let your PCs battle it out versus each other.  Already, the magus and druid don't seem to be getting along.

The big take-away I gave the players was that the sailing skill was important, since they likely will capture other ships, and someone has to sail them.  Clearly, the ninja, was not the man for that job.

Another cool thing I wanted to mention was the ability to combine third party product rules to get something better.  For example, Armada has a amphibious feat for certain races, and Psionics has the sea-faring Maenad race.  It seemed obvious to allow the Maenad race to take on the amphibious feat at first level.  This amphibious feat combined with the diving bell from Armada all gives the ability for PCs to engage in underwater adventures.  Awesome feature from Armada.  I can't wait to find other cool combinations when working these third party products in.  Armada was also a great resource for expanding ship types, which seem very limited from Skull and Shackles Player's Guide (which is free, so I am not complaining).

One disappointment to date: I haven't found a good source for cannons.  Ballistas and catapults are ok, but cannons seem like a must.