The Soulless Seas pt. 4

Last weekend, I ran A Storm on the Soulless Seas, the climax of Game Day Season 5.  We had a lot of fun and learned a few things about my homebrew naval battle rules.

I've always tried to make the season finales big climactic affairs, but this was the first one where I really focused on making it a spectacle.  I think the spectacle is more important than the story climax, because your player will have come up with their own narratives that might run separately or counter to the declared narrative of the event.

I actually scheduled this event several months in advance so that players could have plenty of time to make ships and playtest the rules and whatnot.  I think that helped a lot, because most of the regular players did end up making at least one ship.  We also managed to iron out a fair bit by having time in advance to playtest the rules.  That said, there were still some issues with them that I think could have been avoided.

I defined ships crew capacity as simply whatever they could carry.  While that worked fine for the event, I could see it creaking and groaning under the weight of the single ship armies (where their entire army was on one warship).  I think that any sort of prolonged play in this format would quickly gravitate towards enormous warships.  So, I have changed the crew rules to limit a crew to 1 Hero, 1 War Machine, and 1 other unit, all of which must physically fit on the warship.  I hope that these limitations will be sufficient to cut down on the power level there and get more dynamic fleet on fleet battles going.

I'm actually planning on using this one page version of the Soulless Seas naval battle rules to create a naval campaign book!  I've already got an expanded version of the Flagships rules, and have started working on weather, and of course as usual it will include a two player narrative campaign!  I've got to wait on it a bit though because I want to get some nice photos of naval battles in progress for it.

I also tried a slightly different battleplan formulation for this event.  Instead of having two different locations, I had a Round 1 objective and a Round 2 objective (my Game Day events are only two rounds so as to be inconclusive and brief).  Having the event flow like that made it feel like more of a narrative took place.  I think I'll likely do more of that in the future, although it all kind of depends on the event and the story, so it's really just one more tool in the bag.

Lastly, since this was the end of Season 5, the campaign book is now available in the AoS Downloads section.