Welcome to the Caribbean, matey!

You’ve joined a gang of brave adventure and glory seekers in the Caribbean Sea in the year of our Lord, 1671, where the main nations of the European continent are hell-bent on carving out territories and trade routes for their fellow countrymen. You’re about to carve out some glory of your own, but you’ll need more than a fancy name and impressive clothes to succeed!

As part of the RTJ process, you decided on a name, a nationality, and a character concept, but now it’s time to flesh out your main character’s skills as a sailor.



Step 1 - Determine Your Character’s Skills

Your character has four main skills that will serve him in his adventures at port and on the seas:

Seamanship (S): represents how good your character is as a navigator. If you’re trying to out-maneuver your enemy, or trying to avoid dangers on the seas, this is the skill you need.

Scouting (Sc): represents how good you are at noticing things around you, whether you want to track a certain merchant ship, or are trying to stay well clear of a certain sea captain.

Combat (C): is of course how good you are leading men into battle.

Influence (I): is how well you can smooth talk your way in and out of trouble.


You start with 1 point in each skill and have 6 more points to assign across each of the above categories. Each score above 4 requires an extra point, so if you want to have 5 points in a given skill, you would need to spend 3 points to increase to 4, and an extra 2 points to push it to a 5, leaving you 1 point to spend on the other skills.

Note: should a calamity befall your character, your stats might take a hit, and if one of your stats reaches zero, your days on the high seas are over. Not all is lost however! You can also gain stat points! (More information on all that below).


Step 2 - Add Your Skill Set to Your Character Bio

Once you’re finished assigning points, please update the following and add it to your bio1 field so that your character stats are visible whenever you post:

1S | 1Sc | 1C | 1I



Step 3 - Choose Your Starting Vessel Type




Your character sheet will be found in your character details tab:


This message was last edited by the GM at 21:15, Sun 19 June 2022.

Characters will gain experience, suffer setbacks, and maybe get a really close brush with death, which means that you're not stuck with your starting stats. Your captain will get better with experience, as you progress and play.

Because of the above, I treat character progression as follows:

You will get 1 XP each time you do something that will set every tongue wagging in the Caribbean.

This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Selling 3 or more ‘in demand’ products in port.
• Defeating a Pirate or an NPC Captain
• Completing a Scenario Successfully
• Successfully plundering (12gp+) from a Merchant Trader
• Proving certain gossip/rumours to be true. ie: Sunken Ship near Tortuga might have plunder for whomever finds it.
• Other reasons at the GM’s discretion.

When you accumulate 10XP, you can use those points to boost your character’s stats by 1 point.

For example, it will cost you 10XP to boost your Scouting (Sc) skill from 3 to 4, but it would cost you 20 XP to boost your Seamanship from 4 to 5 (remember any skill above 4 costs an extra point).

As with the nature of risk when setting sail on the high seas, if ever your ship is sunk, your captain will suffer a wound that will affect one of his stats instead of drowning (or you could choose to roll up another character by having the character die).

In the eventuality that you do not wish to commit your captain to Davy Jones’ Locker, you will roll 1 dice.

A roll of 1 - 4 will determine where you lose the point (if any of your stats go down to zero, your career as a captain is over, and you will forever bore aspiring sailors with your stories at a local tavern -- congratulations, you are officially that drunk!). If however, you roll a 5 or a 6 (a success), then you still take the hit, but you get to decide from which stat you will deduct the point.

Dice Roll:

[1] -1 to Seamanship: your brain is addled, and you become forgetful/hesitant
[2] -1 to Scouting: you suffer damage to your eyes, and can no longer see as far as before
[3] -1 to Combat: you are crippled, and your combat skills suffer as a consequence
[4] -1 to Influence: you are disfigured and people no longer relate to you as they once did.
[5] -1 to any stat of your choice.
[6] -1 to any stat of your choice.

It goes without saying that I expect to see some RP from you then, and I want you to include some of those details in your character play from that moment forward. I tend to give bonus XP points simply for a good character playing, and an interesting read.

This is, after all, a role-playing game..!!
This message was last edited by the GM at 04:46, Sun 23 Jan 2022.

Your journey will start at your chosen home port in the year of our lord, 1671.

Port Actions:

• Sell Goods
• Purchase Goods
• Visit the Shipyard (ship upgrades, repair damage, buy a new ship)
• Recruit Crew Members and Specialists
• Spend the night carousing at the tavern (learning Gossip)
• Giving your crews a night on the town (to help with crew morale).
• Take a mission (if there is one available).
• Stash some gold (home port only).
• Set Sail

Once at sea, you can:

• Sail: move from one sea zone to the next or to port.
• Scout: used to find other ships (enemy or not) in the same sea zone as yourself, or notice a ship that has just left that same zone.
• Engage a ship you have scouted in combat.

Scouting is also used to find secret coves, hidden ships, or oddities that could point to something going amiss (ie: proving a rumour is true).

Yes, as with any other game, you might just stumble on one of the other players in the game.

At which point, you might try to avoid them, where they might still try to hunt you down. In either event, you will be pitting your skills against one another in a duel to see who will overwhelm the other and keep the other's plunder.

Rules for such engagements follow:

1. The Aggressor is the first to act and must choose their action between the following:
   
   
   •          Shoot their cannons at the enemy vessel
   •          Try to Board the other vessel
   
   
   
2. The defender then chooses his own action:
   
   
   •          Shoot their cannons at the enemy vessel
   •          Try to Board the other vessel, or;
   •          Attempt to Flee the Naval Engagement
   
   
   
3. A Seamanship Contest Follows, to see who gets to maneuver their ship to the other player's disadvantage.
   
   
4. The winner of the Seamanship Contest gets to perform their action, while the loser will technically be at a disadvantage that turn.

Shooting your cannons at the enemy often provides quicker results as it damages the ship regardless if you win the Seamanship contest (a cannon can be shot for each success you have, even if you didn't win the contest (so long as you have any cannons, of course)! If you win the Seamanship contest you get to fire ALL your cannons! You’ve managed to outmaneuver your opponent and have their ship dead to rights and can send a full broadside! If the other ship is disabled and you wish to flee, now is your chance! Alternatively, you might want to board the disabled ship, in which case you go to Crew vs Crew Combat. If the ship is sunk... well... their captain can go down with his/her ship, or get saved miraculously and start anew, though their stats will suffer, and a new rivalry will likely flourish from the event.

However, sometimes the enemy ship itself is the prize, and you might want to take her without causing too much damage. In this case, you might want to board the vessel and overwhelm her crew to cause less damage and take over the ship. Once you get into hand-to-hand combat, the combat changes to a Combat Leadership contest where the person with the most crew is likely to win, regardless of how good you are at leading your crewmates into battle.

Eliminate the crew, and you win the ship.

Winning a ship in this way lets you capture the ship, and you may transfer your cargo, gold, special weapons, etc, to the new ship. However, any ship modifications you made to your old vessel must stay with the old ship.


Finally, if your opponent manages to get NO SUCCESSES whatsoever during the Seamanship Contest, then you are allowed to flee. Combat Ends.



Naval Battle Damage & its Consequences

Hull: If your ship's hull is destroyed, the ship sinks, and you lose the battle.

Cargo: Each time your vessel takes a hit on its cargo holds, the amount of cargo you can carry goes down. If you have fewer holds than cargo on board, you will randomly lose some of your cargo.

Masts: If destroyed, your ability to maneuver in a Seamanship contest is reduced to 1 die.

Crew: If you have no more crew,  you can no longer board the other vessel, and will automatically lose if a boarding action is called.

Cannons: Each time a cannon is destroyed, you inflict one less point of damage, and if your cannons are completely destroyed, you can no longer shoot with them.



As with stat losses to your captain, each successful cannon shot requires you to roll 1 die to see where the shot lands.

Here is a Combat Round Tracking Sheet, the numbers in [-] indicate a dice roll. A result between 1 and 4 will hit based on the table below, while 5 & 6s (successes) are normally left to the other player where the shot will hit.

The exception to the other player deciding where your shots will land only applies when you use Ship Armaments (See below under ARMAMENTS), which allows you to decide where the success will target, instead of the other player attributing the shot.



On a 5 or a 6, your opponent gets to choose where the shot lands.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:23, Thu 24 Aug 2023.

Ship armaments provide an advantage in combat situations, and are ALWAYS available at port at a cost of 3gp per armament. They can be used to force damage resulting from successes (normally attributed to the other player) to a specific area of the other player’s ship (like targeting masts or crew); reducing the other player’s combat dice, firing more shots at the enemy, or exchanging them to provide extra successes during seamanship contests.


NOTE: you can only have 1 Armament of each type.




Ship modifications affect your ship proper, providing you with more crew, more cannons, etc. Normally these modifications stay with the vessel you modified, but affect the value of your ship if you plan on selling it.

Ship modifications are limited to 1 of each type, are limited (ie: if someone takes the mod, it will not be available from that port to other players) and are only available in certain ports, so choose carefully.



NOTE: Ship stats are maxed at 5.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:57, Sun 05 June 2022.