The 4e minion with this exact adjustment you describe is precisely how our our table handles it.
My players love it when I throw swarms at them - an epic pile of miniatures on the table, carving a swathe through your enemies… it’s great power fantasy stuff, and a nice way of emphasising how powerful leveled characters are.
How do pirate captains manage the health of their crew, particularly in the areas of nutrition and disease?
On a more granular level:
What are the staple, easily-stored foods, and how are they supplemented with fresh foods?
[Are we talking ship’s biscuit and salt beef with regular landfalls to get fruit and vegetables? Is there magical cold storage so they can have frozen whatever? Do they take vitamin supplements? Do none of these things happen, so long voyages always result in nutritional deficiencies, including scurvy?]
What level of medical knowledge and expertise are available in your world in general, and on ships in particular?
[Are they even at the level where they know and acknowledge that scurvy is caused by poor diet? Is healing all magic and four-humors pseudo-medicine? Is it difficult to get a competent physician to join a pirate crew, leading to bullet wounds being treated by barbers or dentists?]
How do pirate captains deal with contagious diseases, and what are the most common shipboard epidemics?
[Is quarantine a thing? …in a confined space? Do they have the germ theory of disease at all, or is the focus on “bad air” and ventilation, or demons, or divine disfavor…? Are they looking at flu, plague, body lice, intestinal parasites, syphilis, all of the above…? Do crew members generally comply with the orders of the captain and/or surgeon, or are you likely to have half the crew sick, and the other half mutinying?]
How are battle wounds dealt with?
[Related to 2, but you’ll want specific protocols for different kinds of injuries, removal of bullets, shrapnel, or arrows as relevant, suturing techniques or lack thereof, bandage material, disinfectant or lack thereof, pain management—other than liquor—if any, ways of dealing with infection, if you want to go there, and, of course, prosthetics, because, IMO, you can’t have a pirate setting without the option of peg legs and hook hands, and anything else bad you think might happen to characters in battle].
How much value do captains place on keeping a crew alive, vs just replacing crew members when they die from injuries or disease?
[Fun fact: the British navy—and other Western navies—used to deliberately overcrowd ships at the start of the voyage because they knew a large portion of the crew would die, and they wanted to retain enough sailors to make it home. Quite possibly the death rate would have been lower without the initial overcrowding, and it definitely would have been lower if they had invested in medical care rather than extra recruits. I suspect pirates were, historically, as bad or worse in this respect. The extent to which captains in your world see crew members as replaceable vs repairable will be demonstrated by your answers to the preceding questions, or, if you’d rather go the other way, might help you decide on the answers].
…all of which probably makes it sound like I hate maritime dramas, which is totally false, lol, I love them, I just have a really morbid imagination.
We’re talking ship’s biscuit/hard tack and salted meat for the most part. If they want to up morale they might buy spices or other dried ingredients. And yes, savvy quartermaster would also buy fresh fruit/veg regularly to supplement this. You’ve made me realise that the party hasn’t done this yet, so unless they stock up on fruit at the next port, they’ll start getting scurvy amongst the crew. Magical refrigeration would be possible, but expensive and rare.
Yes it would be tricky to find a competent ship’s doctor who was willing to join a pirate crew. Magical healing may be more realistic, most would not help with scurvy. Experienced sailors would know about the need for regular fruit/veg.
Contagious disease is definitely a thing that could happen, and the cause could be natural infections or germs, or just as easily a curse, demons, divine intervention. I don’t think there would he much knowledge of germ theory per se, but even during the plague people know to quarantine the sick. It would be hard aboard a ship and the crew may resist it though, yes.
Battle wounds could be treated either wit mh magic or the use of surgery or regular medicine. Infections are a problem and they are most likely to simply lop off the offending limb, resulting in wooden legs and hooks for hands, etc. Because I agree those are absolutely necessary.
Interesting question. I’d say it largely depends on tge Captain. Generally conditions aboard a pirate ship are much better than sailing in a navy, or for the Southern Islands Company (and i think this is largely historically accurate). They are better paid and more highly valued. And they have a say in how the ship is run. There had to be some incentive to join tgenoirates rather than the navy). That said, there are some more ruthless pirate captains who treat their crews worse and see them as more expendable. Its up to the party how they run their ship, but if they mistreat the crew too badly, they may have to deal with a mutiny.
Very thorough! I like your framework of needing to provide an incentive to join the pirates rather than the navy. That’s exactly the kind of organizing principle I find useful with world building.
Fresh vegetables have vitamin C, too, so you could give them credit for that. If the actual party gets scurvy, and you want to make it a plot point, I recommend you make their most recent battle wounds reopen. That’s a real potential symptom of scurvy, and is likely to confuse them. Technically, it wouldn’t be the first symptom, iirc, but it’s easy to communicate in the context of a campaign, and scarier than bleeding gums, though I think the root cause is the same. (Something about connective tissue breaking down).
I mean, depending how vicious you want to be, lol, I am the kind of person who weaponizes realism in fiction or games. I think a little unexpected horror helps people focus on the story.
Haha, my table almost had a party wipe in a combat which started with the mage and the bard out front… And continued with the bard running further out front to use Thunderwave.
The dude who made this is a DM of mine. He almost wiped the party with an NPC casting thunderwave trying to support them. We sort forced him to make this :D
[Swords DCCXXXIX: CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON, by Matthew J Wills]
Panel 1
[A sword with a brightly glowing blade. The hilt is blue and scaly, while the guard forms the shape of two yellow-eyed, green-scaled dragons consuming one another’s tails to form a circle. The pommel features a ring hole from one side to the other. At the tip of the blade are two dots and a very thin line forming a slightly smiling face.]
A SWORD THAT GLOWS BRIGHTLY WHENEVER YOU’RE HUNGRY
Panel 2
[A sword on a wavy dark blue background. The blade is large, heavy, and only sharp on one side. There is a large spike like a dorsal fin bending backwards from the blunt edge, two divets like side fins on the flat, four divets along the sharp edge, and a large crack digging into the tip, reminiscent of a toothy maw. The hilt is dark brown, seemingly bound with leather straps.]
A SWORD THAT ONLY WORKS UNDER WATER
Panel 3
[A sword with a blade enclosed in pink-and-white striped wax, like a decorative candle. The hilt is blue, with a crossguard that curls up towards the blade. At the tip of the blade, the wax is melted away, revealing a dark, sharp interior like the wick of a candle, and more reminiscent of a wooden stake than of a blade. This tip is on fire, and the fire blazes forwards to form a more conventional sword-tip shape.]
A FIRE SWORD THAT ONLY LASTS FOR A SINGLE DAY
Panel 4
[A jagged, decrepit sword, curved in multiple places. The tip curves forwards then hooks back again like the tip of a khopesh, with two distinct, sudden corners to change angle instead of a gradual curve.
Beneath the tip, the blade is partially enclosed in a wooden guard of some sort. There is a spiral marking leading into a line on the upper part of this, and the wood is unenclosed at the front until the very bottom of the blade, where it closes over and curves to a very thin point before curving back to meet the hilt.
From the spot just above the hilt, grey hair like a beard emerges from the wood. The hilt is wrapped in white strapping of some sort, and the pommel has a ring hole from one side to the other, and three spikes, one on the bottom, two on the sides.]
A SWORD THAT STEALS THE VICTIMS AGE AND ADDS IT TO THE WIELDERS
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Jesus, I remember when they announced he wouldn’t be back for Talks at the start of C3, but I had no idea about any of the reasoning behind it.
Tough decision for sure, but definitely one that speaks to their integrity as creators and as a company. Best wishes to them moving forward, and hope Ashley is doing well of course.
While there is speculation that him leaving was related to this, there's no confirmation, and chances are it was a different reason. Personally I suspect it was related to his substance abuse issues and his frequency of lashing out at trolls online. The breakup and restraining order were both this year, and DV is VERY often hidden in plain sight. Most people who interact with DV victims are completely unaware, because most people who commit DV are very good at being charming when they want to be and the victims are usually too afraid to let the people around them know.
Yeah, I don’t think it was directly because of a restraining order either. That sounds more a symptom (along with his trolling) of his substance abuse problems. CR is very careful about how it engages it’s fanbase and he is a major liability to that.
I would suggest sketching your maps on paper and then copying the design at home. The time intensive part of making a map is figuring out how to populate it, at least for me. I.e. what civilization lives in which city, their culture, history, allies and enemies. Or in the case of dungeon maps, what monster lives in which room and how do they behave, loot, traps, story hooks etc.
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