Skullduggery in Motion!- Salt Water Tears

I added a record of another Victoriana scenario played by my group to the Victoriana Campaigns page. This was a very experimental adventure with its own challenges.

When one of the first players in my gaming group was leaving to his first year of college I asked him what he wanted to play over the summer. He requested a naval campaign in Victoriana. Loads of research and several Aubrey/Maturin novels later I was ready.

I used several house rules for life on the open sea When the players encountered a new crewmember we rolled their stats together using the character generator. I cobbled together some broadside mass combat rules and combined them with the vehicle combat rules from “Marvels of Science and Steampunk” so the players could participate effectively in ship to ship combat. One of my players enjoys focusing on mundanity, so I built him a fishing minigame.

We transitioned the characters from the running Victoriana game by having them arrested for a minor disturbing of the peace and sentenced to naval service. The players enjoyed the constrained sandbox of life aboard ship, and they all quickly grasped the setting.

This was my least favorite and the most well loved by the players of our Victoriana adventures so far. I was over ambitious with this campaign, not realizing how few sessions we had left before the end of the summer, so a number of adventures and side plots were cut. However this is unnoticeable past the GM screen, and it’s my own fault for over researching and making rules and charts that were never used. I would like to try something similar again, but please don’t tell my players that.