In my fantasy campaign, the players recently acquired a flying airship. This gave me the chance to reflect on the advantages and possible concerns with a mobile base of operations. While many of my examples will be based in a fantasy setting, the same principles should apply to any mobile base, be it a starship, sailing ship, or catbus.
ADVANTAGES
Travel time – If your group likes to get right to the “good part,” a mobile base of operations eliminates much of the issue of travel time. There may be an even bigger benefit if your group can only meet sporadically. In that kind of arrangement, you probably won’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with travel preparations or wandering monsters.
Varied locations – Any type of vessel will greatly increase the variety of locations you can provide to your players. Much like in “Star Trek” you can do a jungle adventure one week, and then jump right into an arctic adventure next week. In the real medieval world, almost any kind of travel was quite limited.
Airborne adventures – A flying ship (or something similar) can allow players to repel air pirates, visit floating castles,, encounter ghost ships, or fight flying octopi. If you wish to take your adventures to other worlds or planes, include floating planar portals or sky storms that hurl you into a different sphere.
CONCERNS
There are, however, some concerns that come along with a mobile base of operations. Let’s look at a few, and also see if there are ways to perhaps mitigate these concerns.
Lack of familiar NPC’s – When a campaign is based out of a small town or keep (perhaps on the Borderlands), players get to know various NPC’s. These NPC’s can provide information, supplies, adventure hooks, healing, and even friendship. With a mobile base of operations, these roleplaying opportunities may be more difficult to provide. When players range all over the globe, they may not put down roots.
To help provide recurring minor characters, you can just bring them aboard. If the vessel is large enough, they can be the PC’s fellow crew members or traveling companions. Also, if you do not wish to bring the NPC’s aboard, provide a home port where the ship must dock from time to time for refueling and resupplying. Then they can get to know all the locals. Also, if your game is structured such that the PC’s get their orders from a king or wizard, provide a way for them to contact the ship at the beginning of each session. Perhaps they call the party through a crystal ball or magic mirror. Have the same person make the call all the time, and be sure that communication is instantaneous so players can interact with them.
Lack of familiar surroundings – Some players enjoy tromping over familiar territory. They like studying an area map and exploring all of the ruins and interesting sites. A mobile base can make it more difficult for players to get to know a particular area, or to build up a reputation as a local hero.
Along with a home port, a limited patrol area can help players focus on a smaller area. They don’t need to cover the entire globe all of the time. For example, where a land-based campaign might focus on an area the size of a county, a ship-based campaign might cover an area about half the size of a state.
A patchwork feel – When characters adventure in a particular area, it is easy to indicate the change of seasons and provide a sense of the passage of time. This can help make the game feel “real.” However, a mobile campaign may feel a bit more disjointed as you travel from desert to jungle to arctic and back. If your group prefers a more seasonal feel to the campaign, this may be a particular problem.
Along with a home base and recurring NPC’s, you can structure your adventures to provide some more continuity. If you’ve just sent them on a wild venture to Pluto, bring them back home to deal with some local trouble. After a particularly wild setting, try for something more traditional or Tolkienesque to bring them back to a fantasy grounding. Make note of the passing of the seasons and have NPC’s fill them in on what has happened in town while they were away.
CONCLUSION
Have you used a mobile base for any long-term campaigns? What successes and challenges did you face? Let us know below.
A FLYING airship? As opposed to the much-less-desirable ground-based airships? 😉
Why yes. I’d imagine that these airships are rather like sailboats, but on land. Needless to say, most players tend to sell these airships to the first traveling merchant that offers them the odd coin for it.
If you think that’s ungrateful of them, you should see what happens if you give your players an airship of the sinking variety. The murderous looks that were shot across the table that night…
PCs gaining access to modes of travel that are better, faster, safer, or more comfortable than what’s available to the common person is one of the rights of passage (pardon the pun) of rising in level and power.
GMs should be careful, though, about giving the PCs a mode of travel that is orders of magnitude faster than what’s common in the setting. The reason is many of the aspects of the setting itself are functions of speed: the speed at which information, people, and resources can be moved from one location to another. The way the government works, the norms of society, and the way events unfold all depend on these. Give the PCs access to unusually fast travel and you’ll break all these aspects of your setting.
This isn’t to say that airships are bad. You, as the GM, just need to make sure they aren’t too unbalancing in your game. For example, even with an airship, it still takes time to travel. It’s not like the party’s hopscotching around the world at light speed while everyone else is still on horseback. (THAT would be unbalancing!)
Consider also the reasonable limits you can put on its use. Does it require wind or solar power? Maybe the wind and sun aren’t cooperating. If it takes fuel, is it expensive or rare? Maintenance is probably a pain; how many qualified mechanics are there? Oh, and every high level thief in the Seven Realms just targeted that airship as the next big score!
Yeah, I agree; The PCs probably shouldn’t get the ONLY airship, or if they do, it should still be a relatively incremental improvement over the rest of the setting (Maybe the only way to fly before was on Wyvernback or something.)
It’s perfectly fine if the PCs end up with the BEST airship in the world; It just shouldn’t be the ONLY way to fly. Though to be fair, even if it is initially, I don’t think anyone in power who finds out about it will waste any time getting to work developing an equivalent. So it can be fun for the PCs to think they’re all invulnerable up in the sky until The Mage Emperor of Khext surprises them with his newly trained air-elemental-powered glider corps or something.
Good thoughts Blackjack. Limitations aren’t a bad thing, and I’ve had the party attacked for their flying ship too.
Thanks to other folks for their thoughts. Keep ’em coming!
(I’m th author of the article, just so you don’t think I’m hijacking things).
I built my homebrew campaign ‘Infinite Isles’ setting on this premise – specifically a world-spanning archipelago connected by shipping trade-routes.
You hit most of the points that mad this attractive to me. In addition, it helps explain how points of civilisation can exist in relatively close proximity to monsters, dungeons or other weird entities without one or the other being wiped out (monsters don’t generally cross salt-water and sailors generally refuse to land on “haunted” islands”).
I won’t let the PCs have their own ship until fairly high level but they can join a crew or hire passage easily – they can’t say exactly where it will go but it will take them close enough to row the rest of the way. And they will get to know the regular captains and crews that go their way as well as their reliable contacts in each port.
There are bigger islands if the players want to stay in one place for a period of time and get more immersed in political intrigue or a megadungeon, or any other style play.
So I have not found the problems you list to be too much of an issue. The one little thing that keeps niggling me is how to handle heavy armour – hardly fitting or practical on the ocean waves!
Inspired chiefly by a mash of Le’Guin’s Earthsea novels, the Voyages of Sinbad and Celtic folklore, I’m really happy with the result and I built up a whole history, comsology and set of cultures based on the implications of the premise.
I once GMed a short adventure in which airships were the primary means of travel.
You have some good options: need refueling at a not freindly city, attacks by aerial creatures, skypirates (or skypolice, if your players ARE the pirates), storms and other natural phenomena.
A nice tip is using one of these to move the plot, or give the players the illusion of multiple paths. How? Throw them in a ravaging storm. Or attack them with a flock of bloodthirst Pegasus’ 😀
If they brush off the problems, fine. They keep going wherever they were already going. If they fail, send the airship crashlanding to the ground. While the players try to fix the airship, they can conveniently stumble on some McGuffin, or hidden temple, or whatever you need them to find.
Nice thoughts guys, I like the skypolice idea too. May steal that one REALLY soon.
The NPC issue isn’t necessarily a problem. There’s always the need for a crew. Create a few interesting personalities and run with it.