Simple Naval Combat for Cairn

Naval Combat for Cairn

Ship rules for Cairn, partly based on my Space Ship Rules from Meteor. My Space Ship rules are about creating a ship occupied only by the players, where you're going to treat the ship as a sort of extra character and spend a lot of time upgrading bits and pieces and repairing things when they go wrong. For naval combat I wanted something snappier, where its more about the players directing a crew and hitting the notes of cinematic combat where actions are on a grander scale than you as an individual.

These rules assume the players are in control of a ship that has its own Crew beyond the PCs themselves.

If you’re in a ship by yourselves, use the normal Cairn rules to adjudicate the situation.

If you’re engaging with a ship significantly larger or smaller than yours, see Ship Scales.

Ship Attributes

• HP: As HP for a player. A ship’s ability to avoid or compensate for incoming damage.

• Hull: The ship’s durability and structural integrity.

• Sails: The ship’s speed and maneuverability. Includes masts, sails, rowers, rudders.

• Crew: The ship’s crew, and ability to support its crew. Includes food and water stores, as well as crew morale.

Ship Combat

On each round of combat, each Player Character may direct the crew in a single action. These will usually be Maneuver!, Fire!, Board!, or Repair! but could be anything else appropriate.

Actions are limited by the ship’s facilities. For example, if you only have a single set of cannon on board you can only Fire! once per round.

If an action is risky, make a Save as usual. If success depends on the ship’s capabilities use the ship’s attributes, if it depends more on personal skill use the character’s attributes.

Combat is simultaneous with both ships acting at once. If a ship is ambushed or taken by surprise in some other way, make a Crew Save to see if the Crew can prepare fast enough to act in the first round.

Maneuver!

Move the ship! Try to line up the optimal shot for you cannons, “cross the T” of the enemy ship, becalm them by blocking the wind with your own sails.

Fire!

Make an attack with one of the weapons on board the ship.

Attacks are done as usual for Cairn combat :

1. Roll damage die
2. Subtract armor
3. Reduce HP
4. Deal remainder to Attribute
5. If the Attribute is reduce, make a Critical Damage Save

Unlike normal Cairn combat, an attack can be directed at a ship’s Sails, Hull, or Crew depending on the weapon being used. Critical Damage Saves are made with the impacted attribute, and each have differing effects.

Board!

Applicable only when close enough to plausibly do so.

Treat this as normal Detachment combat, with damage being dealt to a ship’s Crew attribute.

Repair!

Restore 1d6 HP or fix a problem.

Attempt to patch a hole, put out fires, calm a panicked crew, or any other such thing.

Depending on context this might require a Save, promises made, bribes, or anything else that might be appropriate.

If a specific problem exists (such as those caused by taking Critical Damage) this fixes it. Otherwise this action will restore 1d6 HP (but not any Attribute loss).

Ship Harm

A ship at zero HP has its crew already stretched to the limit. Any further damage will start causing permanent harm to the ship.

Hull

Critical Damage to Hull means a significant breach. Lose 1 Hull per Round until repaired.

Hull at zero means the ship is taking on water and sinking fast.

Sails

Critical Damage to Sails means the ship is becalmed. Unable to maneuver until repaired.

Zero Sails means the ship is unable to maneuver under its own power, stuck drifting with ocean currents until repairs are made.

Crew

Critical Damage to Crew means the crew is panicked! Unable to command the crew to take actions until calmed.

Crew at zero means the ship’s company has been killed or disabled. There are no longer sufficient crew members to operate the ship.

Ship Scales

 

Under normal circumstances ship weapons are instantly lethal against individual targets, while personal weapons are completely ineffective against ships. If applied cleverly, powerful personal weapons or explosives could bypass this restriction.

The same is true for ships of dramatically different scales. A small ship’s weapons are ineffective or impaired against a massive ship, whereas the massive ship’s armaments are likely to be instantly lethal, or at least enhanced, in return.

Example Ship Weapons

This is where I’d list a bunch of different naval weaponry and example ships but unfortunately I am both not a naval buff and also too lazy to go look things up. I have, at best, a vague recollection of a single Horatio Hornblower book and I don’t think that’s enough to work with.

Instead have a Cannon with a few different kinds of shots.

Cannons

• Standard Cannonballs: d6 damage
• Chainshot: impaired against Hull, enhanced against Sails
• Grapeshot: imparied against Hull, enhanced against Crew
• Heated Shot: enhanced against Hull, risky to use on a wooden ship

Physical Media and Compositing Hybrid for Not a Place of Honor

One of the main visual goals for Not A Place of Honor (NAPOH) was to achieve a found footage aesthetic that made the spreads seem "real". The usual, and easiest way, to make a collection of documents as a spread would be to create each element individually and composit them together into a pile of papers.

This can work quite well, see this example (forwarded to me by Emanoel, the incredible artist I'm working with for this project). However, especially at my own skill level, I felt that the spreads still seemed composited. They didn't feel "real", more of a pastiche of realness.

My original thought to get around this was to cheat. That is, since I'm not skilled enough to replicate reality why not just do it all for real? Print out each document, assemble, and scan back in.

This sounded good but I ran into the problems that one, my printer is not nearly high quality enough to make that work, and more importantly it's a huge pain. Any small change, edit, or typo correction means redoing the entire spread from scratch.

The approach I've settled on is a hybrid one. I assemble and scan physical media for the "structure" of the spread, then digitally add the "content" after the fact.

Here's a walk through of my process to accomplish this. One large caveat is that I really don't know what I'm doing, so I'm sure there are better ways to make this happen. I settled on this after a lot of trial and error, including the two preview spreads shown during the Kickstarter campaign (seen here on the main page, and here on twitter). The spread shown here is still not final, the Pictogram is unfinished (you can see where I roughly removed the background) and the handwriting font will be replaced with actual scanned handwriting once everything else is finalized (including the text going through final edits).

Hybrid Physical Media and Digital NAPOH Process

Step 1 - Rough Layout + Size

 

I scanned a size reference in using identical settings to what I planned to use for the actual spread. Then with that reference, roughed in the various bits of text, art, and layout. I calculated the scale between actual and scanned size using the reference, then used that ratio to measure the size of the paper I needed.

Step 2 - Cut Physical Media

 

Another important step is to move your gremlin of a cat who's trying to "help".

Using the sizes from step 1 I cut the paper into the sizes I need. One important thing to do here is to cut every paper into the wrong size at least once because you flipped your scale ratio. The paper itself is a bunch of differently textured papers in various shades of brown I got from a local craft store. I was mostly looking for things with enough textural and color variation to give good contrast.

Step 3 - Scan

I arranged all the paper and other elements on the scanner, aiming to roughly replicate my original rough layout. I used paper clips to ensure a slight physical gap between overlapping pieces to get depth in the image. As a background, I used a printout scroll from an extremely old spectrometer dating from a time before digital readouts on research equipment. You can find some wonderful things if you by digging through drawers nobody's opened for years in research labs.

 

This step took a lot of tries between adjusting the positions, scanning, realizing I'd shifted something off the edge, and repeating.

Step 4 - Composite

With the spread scanned in I position the art, symbols, and text where needed (using Affinity Publisher). For each piece of paper, I traced a shape around the edges and use it as a mask for anything that needs to only appear on that paper. This also accounts for places where different pieces of paper overlap with one another. In this example, I'm primarily using it for the artwork, but this would also work for applying digital textures to the paper (necessary before I purchased actual textured paper).

 

The mask is a little loose around the edge of the notebook, because I added an extra layer to make it blend nicely afterwards.

In this unique case, because the artwork is mostly dark there was an obvious, sharp edge to the art that didn't blend nicely with the lighter colored paper I had scanned. I fixed this in a roundabout way that I'm sure is more complicated than necessary:

1. Make a copy of the "artwork" mask.
2. Apply a Gaussian Blur to the copy.
3. Extend the edges of the unblurred mask only in the places where I want the edges to be softened.
   
4. Apply the unblurred mask as a mask to the blurred mask.
5. Apply the masked, blurred mask as a mask to the actual artwork.

Step 5 - Finish

How gorgeous is that artwork by Emanoel?

At this point I just fiddle around with anything that doesn't look quite right. Futz with the masks where they don't line up, apply extra filters, blurs, effects or textures where necessary to improve the look. This often involves using different "blending modes" (usually multiply) on the text and artwork to preserve the texture and "depth" of the scanned image with the composited artwork. This is also where I'll add in the BANE stamps and watermarks.

Once I'm fully happy with this, I'll nicely ask my fiancée to transcribe the journal and card text and scan those in to replace the handwriting font.

This is all probably overkill for what I end up with, but I'm pretty pleased with the results so I plan on sticking with it.

Now onto the rest of the artifacts!

Macchiato Monsters - References, House Rules, Hacks

Collected resources for Macchiato Monsters

By no means is this intended to be comprehensive, just stuff I've come across and found useful (and a couple things of my own).

Play Aids and Advice

Spell Cost Reference Sheet (this one is mine!). I found that trying to create prices to spells on the fly was a bit taxing, so I wrote up a flowchart to get a rough cost as a starting point. Partly inspired by Blades in the Dark magnitude tables.

Combat Example by the author of Macchiato Monsters. Very helpful for getting an understanding how how it's supposed to play out.

Settings and Item Tables

UVG Equipment Tables and Rules by aincumis

Post Human Orbital Structures - really cool alternate setting, equipment tables thing by 

House Rules and Hacks

 Inverted Risk Dice (personal house rule)

Risk dice step down in size when the highest three values are rolled, not the lowest.

Rationale is that for consumables it makes more sense (I just ate a ton of these rabbits, that's why there are less of them), and it also spreads out the feel bads. Currently it's a double feel bad when you both roll low (and get very little benefit) and also now your thing is running out.

Downside, slightly more mental overhead since the numbers to watch for are different for each die size.

 Monster Dice (personal house rule/hack)

Replace monster's Morale Die with an all purpose Monster Die. If they try to do something in their nature, roll the skill die. 

1-3 are degrees of failure, and the die steps down until they get a chance to rest.

4+ are degrees of success.

If a monsters is particularly skilled at something, roll with advantage.

If they're bad at something or it's out of their nature, roll with disadvantage.

This can be used for everything from sneaking and ambushes, to resisting magical effects. It mostly felt weird to me that the advice for these things in the book was to just invent a stat for them on the fly, and roll under that. Risk Dice are used for everything else, why not also this?