Re: Sea scenarios (was e23, beginning supplements)

From: bethexton_at_...
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:09:31 -0000

As Manual said, he had various adventures as part of the 1001 Arabian Nghts stories.

> NOt much ship to ship fun there though.
> Getting on a boat in Sinbad movies seemed more like getting a
train -
> you get on -you sail- you get off, then have adventure.
>

Well....yes. Even in the stories. The thing about ancient sea- faring was that mostly if something happened at sea you died, or if you got lucky clung to floating wreckage and drifted onto some island eventually. Remember that most ships didn't sail far from sight of land and most put into land for sleeping. There were exceptions, but not that many--Vikings being a notable one. The result is that even pirates were mostly about lurking in bays and rushing out when a ship was sighted.

For more major ship to ship combat it seems to usually have been some variant of galleys ramming each other (greek style), or else people roping ships together to make a fighting platform so that they could fight much like they did on land (what the vikings normally did).

If you look back at the classics, the Odyssey or Jason and the Argonauts, almost all of their adventures, like those of Sinbad, were on land. In fiction I've seen a few books with long stretches on ships of that sort of technology, but for at sea adventures it pretty much comes down to:
- dealing with a storm
- daring a long stretch out of land and hoping your reckoning is right to get you to land before you run out of water.

- navigating past deadly reefs (sirens optional)
- trying to out sail a force that you cannot hope to defeat
- trying to fend off a swarming by canoe/small boat using pirates 
(when near land)
- being overtaken by a faster ship of pirates/enemies and fighting a vicous bording action as they try to conquer your ship. - coming to something mystical and magical and either just being impressed by it (background color), or having the heroes placate powers of the sea (being taken down to the palace of the lord of the sea, etc).

I'm not saying there are not other possible adventures--in fact in Rosemary Kirstein's "The Lost Steersman" there is an interesting bit where a type of snail is thick in the water at one point and boars into anything it can, so is starting to put holes into the ship....

But there is generally not a lot of variety in the at sea adventures I've seen set in that level of sailing sophistication.

--Bryan

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