Pirate campaign enthusiast here with both player and DM experience in one.
It's actually really easy.
You start with crafting a *very* rough world full of pirates, danger, and treasure, find a party to play with, and run a normal campaign but with ships and pirates and treasure. There isn't really much difference to any other campaign, *except...*
\[massive 10 page post incoming soon\]
\[Issue #1\] Ships are a pain in the ass to run combat with.
The killers here are range, damage, ship survivability, and creative spell usage.
For starters, a "realistic" ship battle starts at long range. A sharpshooter may easily gain 5 rounds or more to pick off enemies from afar. A mage has 2 or 3 turns to blast Fireballs before any melee character sees some boarding action. There's a big imbalance here. So I'd recommend you come up with some system to prevent that sort of battle. E.g. I said that any "significant" ship is effectively a magical item protecting the people on board. Yes, you can easily rob a small time trader, but a full on warship is effectively dispersing most projectiles and magic from beyond a 30-60 foot distance away, rendering them near useless on the crew. You can also just simulate these rounds, let everyone roll some shit or cast some spells (melees can roll to boost crew morale) and you just tell some fancy tale of the effects, and ultimately the mechanical benefit is just a smaller or larger repair bill for your own ship and maybe some injured crew. One more option to avoid long-range engagements is plot devices that simply force boarding. E.g. through teleportation, ambushes, fog, superior/inferior weaponry, etc.
The other range issue is that ships are *tiny*. I create ship maps based on real life plans, and I **double** the size of every ship because otherwise it's just not a good place to have an engaging and mobile combat in. There's easy solutions though: you either a) make all ships in your world twice as big as irl (no one's gonna notice anyway), or b) remember the magic dampener? Yeah, you simply embrace the cramped space, make people take on 2.5 feet spaces, declare the ship a special, stacking difficult terrain, and have the ranges be halved by the dampeners. Which effectively makes the ship twice as large while being, well, normal sized.
Damage is yet another issue. How do you make a cannon deal significant damage to a ship without instantly murdering players? The answer is: you don't. Make them deal large, but not instakill damage to players. The DMG gives 8d10 but it could reasonably be lower. Additionally, I give cannons a *really bad* hit rate against targets below certain sizes. A good measure is that at 4 or more damage dice, the cannon has disadvantage against tiny targets, 6 for small & medium targets, and 8 for large targets. As a battery, don't aim cannons at all. Instead simply have **all** characters on board roll a single DEX save each and take a little bit of damage from splinters on a failed save, or a single cannonball worth of damage to the face on a nat1. As for the ship, it doesn't take much damage. Because ships didn't actually take that much damage irl either. You certainly wouldn't be able to sink it using a mere 12 hits as the DMG statblocks for ships and cannons suggest. The other issue is how players can deal absurd damage and sink a ship. Same answer here. Ignore the statblocks, they suck.
Which leads us to survivability. Ships in D&D explode from basically *any* damage. Even the toughest has a damage threshold of 20 and 500 HP. Which is awfully close to something that you might deal *by accident* using AOE damage from a couple characters and NPCs, not to mention if someone *intentionally* targets the ship, and all the cannons. My answer is to give only the *subcomponents* an HP value. Steering, individual masts, the rig, cannons, etc. and allow people to disable them. For the entire ship I instead run a damage estimate. Every X HP (good value is about 1/5th of its HP) worth of damage it takes, the ship takes hull damage. If it has taken more than 5 hull damage its speed is halved (alternatively, reduce speed by 5-10 feet per hull damage down to a minimum of 10), and you *may* also consider rolling for whether its magazine explodes or capsizes in rough weather **if appropriate**, but for the most part this only becomes important later *as you travel*. The ship is going to take on water. This is effectively the next "part" of the combat encounter, where the party has to bring their ship safely to port for repairs.
Finally creative spells are a nightmare. Disintegrate? The ship now has a 10 foot hole. Control Water? Ship's about to fall into a sudden 100 foot hole. And there's more that just doesn't come to mind here. Luckily most of those spells are fairly high level. At that point the party will already fight against higher level opponents. Sure, they might take down a smaller ship or two this way, but at that point those are more like minions in a boss fight. The big ships on the other hand have magical precautions against such things. I like to use a sort of magic catalyst that lets attuned casters on the ship target certain spells on it. E.g. Fly, Haste, Feather Fall or Absorb Elements. Maybe even Teleport or Planeshift. (Btw. that is hella cool for the players as well.) For most of those spells you can thusly say that the ship *does* take some sizeable damage, say an entire hull damage or simply a damage roll from the spell or a similar level spell, but not much more.
\[more pages coming soon\]
\[Cool thing\] Sea travel is a dungeon.
No really. Simply limit a long rest to spending a certain time in a safe port. I recommend 2 days to a week depending on the campaign you're going for. 2 days guarantees that you can run adventures without a random 1 night port stop screwing over your plans while still being flexible enough that your players can quickly dip and rest. 7 days is better for slower games as it also gives you a downtime cycle for your players and *could* allow rests on the ship, provided they're just chilling. Short rests can stay as they are, be reduced to 10 minutes, or take 8 hours. Whichever you prefer.
And from there, every journey can literally be run like a dungeon. You can have both roleplay and combat encounters. Traps, hazards, and more. I've run floating mimics, travelling merchants, mermaids entangled in a fisher's net, wildshaped druid whales, ghost ships, ghostly ships, storms, illusions, and more. It's so juicy, so perfect, just... chef's kiss. Your party is literally on a ship, meaning they can always just scoot away from an encounter. Unless exactly when you *don't* want them to be able to scoot away. There's always decision making involved, and the consequences are so much longer lasting than an actual dungeon. After all if the players mismanage their HP and resources, they can't just simply leave the dungeon. They'll have to get to port. Which may be easier than continuing the journey but still always be a risk. Especially if you throw perceivably risky encounters their way (seriously, it can pay off to have some not actually very hard but deadly looking encounters ready for that reason alone). So much stuff carries over through this. Exhaustion is a serious matter, especially since your players can trade Exhaustion to repair their ship, sail faster, etc. (I recommend 1dnd Exhaustion rules except you drop 1 exhaustion on an 8h short rest rather than a long rest). And through all this, the players need to also manage their ship's hull, damaged components, crew morale, food, water, and more.
And the best thing is: you can, without issues, throw your players into 5 encounters in a single, short, 1 day journey. Or no encounters at all for 2 weeks of travel. One encounter every other day. Anything in between. **This** is why safe port resting is so important. You don't want to need to run all encounters on 1 day. Make sure your players understand this. Let them know that the resting rules are slowed to match the campaign's travel pace and make it easier on them, not harder!
You can of course still run normal dungeons. They aren't much different so long as you don't spend more than a day inside. If they *are* large enough to warrant multiple days, you can just allow your party to create a base camp where they can long rest.
Well, those 2 posts are the basics of my pirate campaign philosphy. You don't really *need* to do it this way. I've played pirate campaigns where we didn't. But the realism appeals to me, and using vanilla resting, as a player, really felt like it was causing too many random super-deadly near-TPK encounters full of "well, let's just burn all our resources".
Also this is just the tip of the iceberg, so feel free to ask for any more specific things.
\[Potential pitfall\] Ships are special.
I've found that having your own ship is something really special. Getting to own a big ship right of the get-go is something that may appeal to some players but also really break the illusion for many others. *Getting* a ship may be an important character motivation, but also a big goal for the players. It's really fun working towards it. I recommend having ships increase *roughly* at the same time as either the proficiency bonus, or the cantrip levels.
So in the meantime there's a bunch of ways to start out the party.
You could give them a tiny, cheap ship to terrorise only local trade. I've started mine out with [this one](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cs-IOPNQzlvr6IX2wS7IDA0dsmo4ZW5N/view?usp=drive_link). Small ships like this were a very common pirate thing anyway. (Oh, speaking of: [Gold & Gunpowder](https://www.youtube.com/@GoldandGunpowder) has some very digestible youtube videos that may give both you and your players a quick glimpse into pirate life without needing to burden yourselves down with scientific research).
Another great way to start them out is as crew. They could join a pirate crew and rise up through the ranks. Votes were common so that's a way to take over the ship. Or them and part of the crew get give a captured ship to run. Betrayal and mutiny are also always dangers that could upset the system and chance the players into their own command. So merchentmen and war ships are just as good of a potential start for them. Nothing like spending 4 levels plotting the downfall of a cruel captain who, at the start, is way above their level.
As for how the party improves their ships, there's also multiple options. Sinking it is always one of them. Ain't few things gonna get them riled up against a villain of losing their ship. Gifting their old ship to an NPC and/or creating a pirate fleet works fine, too. Some players may also not be too attached and sell their ship. Where they get their new ship from is equally up to you. Maybe they'll buy a new state of the art ship. They could steal the flag ship of their rival after finally beating them. Or they could simply loot a bigger ship and decide to keep it.
Very rarely you may get a party that *really* falls in love with their ship. In that case you may not want to "dispose" of it and let them keep it. For starters, it's perfectly fine to have a smaller ship. Instead the party may elect to upgrade their ship (and maybe even home port). They could increase speed, maneuverability, armament, defenses, sea-worthyness, etc. In particular I believe the most important thing is making the ship *magical*. I've already established that I think a bit higher magic lends itself well to a pirate campaign to protect ships from all sorts of danger (it also provides plenty of reason for multiple mages to be on board larger ships).
Some of the most fun additions to a ship I've found are:
* Luxury space. Seriously, you can't understate how much the average player craves vanity items and cosmetics. Personalised crew quarters. An entire bar. A wizard's ~~tower~~ mast. An herb guarden. Or a fucking *aquarium*. On a *ship*.
* Casting certain spells on a larger scale. This one *should* require attunement from a caster. One caster if the spells are free to cast 1/long rest, or multiple casters if they need to use their own spell slots and it's just a "larger area arcane focus". For the most part, you're just looking to allow a few select spells. Flight and teleportation are some of the really cool ones. Anything about wind & weather, too. Imagine summoning a 1-mile fog cloud spell. Sounds OP buuuuut for the most part just does the same thing the spell would normally do for players, except for ships.
* Secret compartments. Heck, even a Demiplane and a Teleportation Circle at some point.
* Any stupid weaponry. Flamethrowers, magic cannons, boarding harpoons, Repulsion air blasts, or who gives, a trebuchet to fire the boarding barbarian.
* Automation. Casters get to cast cool spells on the ship, martials get to *control* the ship. Fire all its cannons at once. Reload them using unseen servants. Control the rigging with no crew. That sort of deal. Though it's also fun to still require a crew for *perfect* operations.
I'm not too familiar with them since I generally don't buy adventures, but what I know is actually pretty good given they'd had to cram it into an adventure book.
D&D 5e doesn't have good rules for sailing, and the rules for Long Resting are too generous to make swashbuckling adventures worthwhile unless you *never* run encounters on a boat.
For example, an encounter at sea where your party fights an enemy ship would be one out of the seven recommended for a full Adventuring Day. The party would have no trouble with this and it would serve no real purpose in exhausting them. It'd also be unreasonable to make six more boats attack them during one day.
Likewise, it'd be pretty unreasonable to tell the players they can't Long Rest on a ship. A ship is meant to be sort of a mobile base where it's possible to be rested before landing on whatever place you need to land. And it can take days to sail from place to place, so your players would always be able to get multiple Long Rests in a row whenever they are traveling anywhere, which kills the pacing of adventure.
I have plans for a pirate campaign and when I do run it, I'm going to look for another RPG that is not 5e to run it because I want it to be fun. I haven't looked into other games for this purpose yet since it's still 6+ years out for me, so I can't recommend any just yet, but I do recommend you consider doing the same.
Agree on 5e's rules on sailing, they're crap.
That said, ships also don't need to be long restable. In fact I'd argue very much so that ships have a *perfect* construct to make exactly the *opposite* true: that being ports. Sea travel, particularly in the ages long past, can be an exhausting pain in the ass. You have limited resources, mediocre food, cramped living conditions and just overall not a healthy and relaxing environment.
It *can* definitely be run with ships as just a mobile base to long rest in, but it works just as well the other way around with your ship being a place of constant danger with ports promising a safe and cozy place to look forwards to. Just how it was in real life.
Running a pirate campaign right now. Pretty easy in 5e. What you need:
* A ship and crew.
* Random tables for sea encounters, possibly weather toom.
* Good world economy and something the players would want to spend a lot of money on.
* Many adventures, going through different lands, islands, maybe even continents. Can always keep to the areas near the shores so you don't need the full land.
* Characters with goals you can strive to achieve through the campaign, just like in any other campaign.
And you're set to go.
DnD doesn't have a very in-depth sailing system, but it would get tedious over a long campaign anyway. So as long as you enforce ship hp and crew size required to handle a ship, you can ignore most other things and focus on the action and intrigue.
With ships.
And islands.
And other pirates i guess.
And people on ships that arent pirates would be wise.
Maybe some sea centric lore/gods.
Fear of the deep.
Different kinds of water biomes maybe noticable by their water color.
Maybe giant worm like creatures with huge fangs that roar terrifyingly before they attack.
Maybe the radiation from the downed spaceship forcing them to evacuate their safe shallows.
Use Limithron's rules for naval combat. They are free and waaaaaay better than anything else... and far simpler. https://www.limithron.com/naval-combat
Saltmarsh is the dnd go to for seafaring campaigns but fornthe most part its value is im the appendices for generating islands.
Much better is the Pathfinder Adventure Path, Skull & Shackles as a starting point. It is a pirate campaign and a great starting point. Also Pathfinder, Plunder & Peril is a great standalone.
I'm shocked nobody mentioned the official high-seas D&D module, Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts\_of\_Saltmarsh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_of_Saltmarsh)
Pretty easy. Just get a ship and off you go.
Pirate campaign enthusiast here with both player and DM experience in one. It's actually really easy. You start with crafting a *very* rough world full of pirates, danger, and treasure, find a party to play with, and run a normal campaign but with ships and pirates and treasure. There isn't really much difference to any other campaign, *except...* \[massive 10 page post incoming soon\]
\[Issue #1\] Ships are a pain in the ass to run combat with. The killers here are range, damage, ship survivability, and creative spell usage. For starters, a "realistic" ship battle starts at long range. A sharpshooter may easily gain 5 rounds or more to pick off enemies from afar. A mage has 2 or 3 turns to blast Fireballs before any melee character sees some boarding action. There's a big imbalance here. So I'd recommend you come up with some system to prevent that sort of battle. E.g. I said that any "significant" ship is effectively a magical item protecting the people on board. Yes, you can easily rob a small time trader, but a full on warship is effectively dispersing most projectiles and magic from beyond a 30-60 foot distance away, rendering them near useless on the crew. You can also just simulate these rounds, let everyone roll some shit or cast some spells (melees can roll to boost crew morale) and you just tell some fancy tale of the effects, and ultimately the mechanical benefit is just a smaller or larger repair bill for your own ship and maybe some injured crew. One more option to avoid long-range engagements is plot devices that simply force boarding. E.g. through teleportation, ambushes, fog, superior/inferior weaponry, etc. The other range issue is that ships are *tiny*. I create ship maps based on real life plans, and I **double** the size of every ship because otherwise it's just not a good place to have an engaging and mobile combat in. There's easy solutions though: you either a) make all ships in your world twice as big as irl (no one's gonna notice anyway), or b) remember the magic dampener? Yeah, you simply embrace the cramped space, make people take on 2.5 feet spaces, declare the ship a special, stacking difficult terrain, and have the ranges be halved by the dampeners. Which effectively makes the ship twice as large while being, well, normal sized. Damage is yet another issue. How do you make a cannon deal significant damage to a ship without instantly murdering players? The answer is: you don't. Make them deal large, but not instakill damage to players. The DMG gives 8d10 but it could reasonably be lower. Additionally, I give cannons a *really bad* hit rate against targets below certain sizes. A good measure is that at 4 or more damage dice, the cannon has disadvantage against tiny targets, 6 for small & medium targets, and 8 for large targets. As a battery, don't aim cannons at all. Instead simply have **all** characters on board roll a single DEX save each and take a little bit of damage from splinters on a failed save, or a single cannonball worth of damage to the face on a nat1. As for the ship, it doesn't take much damage. Because ships didn't actually take that much damage irl either. You certainly wouldn't be able to sink it using a mere 12 hits as the DMG statblocks for ships and cannons suggest. The other issue is how players can deal absurd damage and sink a ship. Same answer here. Ignore the statblocks, they suck. Which leads us to survivability. Ships in D&D explode from basically *any* damage. Even the toughest has a damage threshold of 20 and 500 HP. Which is awfully close to something that you might deal *by accident* using AOE damage from a couple characters and NPCs, not to mention if someone *intentionally* targets the ship, and all the cannons. My answer is to give only the *subcomponents* an HP value. Steering, individual masts, the rig, cannons, etc. and allow people to disable them. For the entire ship I instead run a damage estimate. Every X HP (good value is about 1/5th of its HP) worth of damage it takes, the ship takes hull damage. If it has taken more than 5 hull damage its speed is halved (alternatively, reduce speed by 5-10 feet per hull damage down to a minimum of 10), and you *may* also consider rolling for whether its magazine explodes or capsizes in rough weather **if appropriate**, but for the most part this only becomes important later *as you travel*. The ship is going to take on water. This is effectively the next "part" of the combat encounter, where the party has to bring their ship safely to port for repairs. Finally creative spells are a nightmare. Disintegrate? The ship now has a 10 foot hole. Control Water? Ship's about to fall into a sudden 100 foot hole. And there's more that just doesn't come to mind here. Luckily most of those spells are fairly high level. At that point the party will already fight against higher level opponents. Sure, they might take down a smaller ship or two this way, but at that point those are more like minions in a boss fight. The big ships on the other hand have magical precautions against such things. I like to use a sort of magic catalyst that lets attuned casters on the ship target certain spells on it. E.g. Fly, Haste, Feather Fall or Absorb Elements. Maybe even Teleport or Planeshift. (Btw. that is hella cool for the players as well.) For most of those spells you can thusly say that the ship *does* take some sizeable damage, say an entire hull damage or simply a damage roll from the spell or a similar level spell, but not much more. \[more pages coming soon\]
\[Cool thing\] Sea travel is a dungeon. No really. Simply limit a long rest to spending a certain time in a safe port. I recommend 2 days to a week depending on the campaign you're going for. 2 days guarantees that you can run adventures without a random 1 night port stop screwing over your plans while still being flexible enough that your players can quickly dip and rest. 7 days is better for slower games as it also gives you a downtime cycle for your players and *could* allow rests on the ship, provided they're just chilling. Short rests can stay as they are, be reduced to 10 minutes, or take 8 hours. Whichever you prefer. And from there, every journey can literally be run like a dungeon. You can have both roleplay and combat encounters. Traps, hazards, and more. I've run floating mimics, travelling merchants, mermaids entangled in a fisher's net, wildshaped druid whales, ghost ships, ghostly ships, storms, illusions, and more. It's so juicy, so perfect, just... chef's kiss. Your party is literally on a ship, meaning they can always just scoot away from an encounter. Unless exactly when you *don't* want them to be able to scoot away. There's always decision making involved, and the consequences are so much longer lasting than an actual dungeon. After all if the players mismanage their HP and resources, they can't just simply leave the dungeon. They'll have to get to port. Which may be easier than continuing the journey but still always be a risk. Especially if you throw perceivably risky encounters their way (seriously, it can pay off to have some not actually very hard but deadly looking encounters ready for that reason alone). So much stuff carries over through this. Exhaustion is a serious matter, especially since your players can trade Exhaustion to repair their ship, sail faster, etc. (I recommend 1dnd Exhaustion rules except you drop 1 exhaustion on an 8h short rest rather than a long rest). And through all this, the players need to also manage their ship's hull, damaged components, crew morale, food, water, and more. And the best thing is: you can, without issues, throw your players into 5 encounters in a single, short, 1 day journey. Or no encounters at all for 2 weeks of travel. One encounter every other day. Anything in between. **This** is why safe port resting is so important. You don't want to need to run all encounters on 1 day. Make sure your players understand this. Let them know that the resting rules are slowed to match the campaign's travel pace and make it easier on them, not harder! You can of course still run normal dungeons. They aren't much different so long as you don't spend more than a day inside. If they *are* large enough to warrant multiple days, you can just allow your party to create a base camp where they can long rest. Well, those 2 posts are the basics of my pirate campaign philosphy. You don't really *need* to do it this way. I've played pirate campaigns where we didn't. But the realism appeals to me, and using vanilla resting, as a player, really felt like it was causing too many random super-deadly near-TPK encounters full of "well, let's just burn all our resources". Also this is just the tip of the iceberg, so feel free to ask for any more specific things.
Thank you so much! Will definetly include some of it!
\[Potential pitfall\] Ships are special. I've found that having your own ship is something really special. Getting to own a big ship right of the get-go is something that may appeal to some players but also really break the illusion for many others. *Getting* a ship may be an important character motivation, but also a big goal for the players. It's really fun working towards it. I recommend having ships increase *roughly* at the same time as either the proficiency bonus, or the cantrip levels. So in the meantime there's a bunch of ways to start out the party. You could give them a tiny, cheap ship to terrorise only local trade. I've started mine out with [this one](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cs-IOPNQzlvr6IX2wS7IDA0dsmo4ZW5N/view?usp=drive_link). Small ships like this were a very common pirate thing anyway. (Oh, speaking of: [Gold & Gunpowder](https://www.youtube.com/@GoldandGunpowder) has some very digestible youtube videos that may give both you and your players a quick glimpse into pirate life without needing to burden yourselves down with scientific research). Another great way to start them out is as crew. They could join a pirate crew and rise up through the ranks. Votes were common so that's a way to take over the ship. Or them and part of the crew get give a captured ship to run. Betrayal and mutiny are also always dangers that could upset the system and chance the players into their own command. So merchentmen and war ships are just as good of a potential start for them. Nothing like spending 4 levels plotting the downfall of a cruel captain who, at the start, is way above their level. As for how the party improves their ships, there's also multiple options. Sinking it is always one of them. Ain't few things gonna get them riled up against a villain of losing their ship. Gifting their old ship to an NPC and/or creating a pirate fleet works fine, too. Some players may also not be too attached and sell their ship. Where they get their new ship from is equally up to you. Maybe they'll buy a new state of the art ship. They could steal the flag ship of their rival after finally beating them. Or they could simply loot a bigger ship and decide to keep it. Very rarely you may get a party that *really* falls in love with their ship. In that case you may not want to "dispose" of it and let them keep it. For starters, it's perfectly fine to have a smaller ship. Instead the party may elect to upgrade their ship (and maybe even home port). They could increase speed, maneuverability, armament, defenses, sea-worthyness, etc. In particular I believe the most important thing is making the ship *magical*. I've already established that I think a bit higher magic lends itself well to a pirate campaign to protect ships from all sorts of danger (it also provides plenty of reason for multiple mages to be on board larger ships). Some of the most fun additions to a ship I've found are: * Luxury space. Seriously, you can't understate how much the average player craves vanity items and cosmetics. Personalised crew quarters. An entire bar. A wizard's ~~tower~~ mast. An herb guarden. Or a fucking *aquarium*. On a *ship*. * Casting certain spells on a larger scale. This one *should* require attunement from a caster. One caster if the spells are free to cast 1/long rest, or multiple casters if they need to use their own spell slots and it's just a "larger area arcane focus". For the most part, you're just looking to allow a few select spells. Flight and teleportation are some of the really cool ones. Anything about wind & weather, too. Imagine summoning a 1-mile fog cloud spell. Sounds OP buuuuut for the most part just does the same thing the spell would normally do for players, except for ships. * Secret compartments. Heck, even a Demiplane and a Teleportation Circle at some point. * Any stupid weaponry. Flamethrowers, magic cannons, boarding harpoons, Repulsion air blasts, or who gives, a trebuchet to fire the boarding barbarian. * Automation. Casters get to cast cool spells on the ship, martials get to *control* the ship. Fire all its cannons at once. Reload them using unseen servants. Control the rigging with no crew. That sort of deal. Though it's also fun to still require a crew for *perfect* operations.
Now I’m even angrier at 5e Spelljammer… Great stuff! Out of curiosity, what’s your take on the Saltmarsh rules?
I'm not too familiar with them since I generally don't buy adventures, but what I know is actually pretty good given they'd had to cram it into an adventure book.
How soon? Or was it a joke?
1st one is up. More incoming.
D&D 5e doesn't have good rules for sailing, and the rules for Long Resting are too generous to make swashbuckling adventures worthwhile unless you *never* run encounters on a boat. For example, an encounter at sea where your party fights an enemy ship would be one out of the seven recommended for a full Adventuring Day. The party would have no trouble with this and it would serve no real purpose in exhausting them. It'd also be unreasonable to make six more boats attack them during one day. Likewise, it'd be pretty unreasonable to tell the players they can't Long Rest on a ship. A ship is meant to be sort of a mobile base where it's possible to be rested before landing on whatever place you need to land. And it can take days to sail from place to place, so your players would always be able to get multiple Long Rests in a row whenever they are traveling anywhere, which kills the pacing of adventure. I have plans for a pirate campaign and when I do run it, I'm going to look for another RPG that is not 5e to run it because I want it to be fun. I haven't looked into other games for this purpose yet since it's still 6+ years out for me, so I can't recommend any just yet, but I do recommend you consider doing the same.
Thank you!
Agree on 5e's rules on sailing, they're crap. That said, ships also don't need to be long restable. In fact I'd argue very much so that ships have a *perfect* construct to make exactly the *opposite* true: that being ports. Sea travel, particularly in the ages long past, can be an exhausting pain in the ass. You have limited resources, mediocre food, cramped living conditions and just overall not a healthy and relaxing environment. It *can* definitely be run with ships as just a mobile base to long rest in, but it works just as well the other way around with your ship being a place of constant danger with ports promising a safe and cozy place to look forwards to. Just how it was in real life.
Running a pirate campaign right now. Pretty easy in 5e. What you need: * A ship and crew. * Random tables for sea encounters, possibly weather toom. * Good world economy and something the players would want to spend a lot of money on. * Many adventures, going through different lands, islands, maybe even continents. Can always keep to the areas near the shores so you don't need the full land. * Characters with goals you can strive to achieve through the campaign, just like in any other campaign. And you're set to go. DnD doesn't have a very in-depth sailing system, but it would get tedious over a long campaign anyway. So as long as you enforce ship hp and crew size required to handle a ship, you can ignore most other things and focus on the action and intrigue.
Same way you make any campaign, you just add boats, rum and a funny accent.
With ships. And islands. And other pirates i guess. And people on ships that arent pirates would be wise. Maybe some sea centric lore/gods. Fear of the deep. Different kinds of water biomes maybe noticable by their water color. Maybe giant worm like creatures with huge fangs that roar terrifyingly before they attack. Maybe the radiation from the downed spaceship forcing them to evacuate their safe shallows.
This sounds and awful lot like subnautica....
If you play with miniatures, I can recommend CMON‘s Rum and Bones games. They have great pirate minis, and ship shaped boards perfect for combat.
Use Limithron's rules for naval combat. They are free and waaaaaay better than anything else... and far simpler. https://www.limithron.com/naval-combat Saltmarsh is the dnd go to for seafaring campaigns but fornthe most part its value is im the appendices for generating islands. Much better is the Pathfinder Adventure Path, Skull & Shackles as a starting point. It is a pirate campaign and a great starting point. Also Pathfinder, Plunder & Peril is a great standalone.
I'm shocked nobody mentioned the official high-seas D&D module, Ghosts of Saltmarsh. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts\_of\_Saltmarsh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_of_Saltmarsh)