Wednesday Knights Blog

I am working on the next installment of my Pirates! campaign and I am always on the lookout for good ideas. To that end, I recently picked up Ships and Sea Battles from AEG.

Like all of their 7th Sea Products, this books contains well presented background material for that system. Although I do not use the 7th Sea world, this material is still useful in that the countries in the 7th Sea world are stand-ins for real countries (for example Avalon is England, Castille is Spain, etc.) Therefore it is easy to extrapolate from the information provided.

There were four key aspects to this book that I was looking for when I picked it up: (1) ship information; (2) cargo information; (3) locations/ports of call; and (4) fleet combat.

Of these four items I was really pleased with the cargo information. The text contains good information and descriptions about the cargo. Also, the book contains handy charts to allow you to easily and randomly determine the cargo on a particular ship. In my eyes, this was the best part of the book.

I was disappointed in the ship information provided. I must caution you that I am comparing the ship information in this book to that found in Broadsides! Broadsides! contains an unbelievable amount of ship descriptions. The disappointment that I had with Ships and Sea Battles was that there was nothing in there that I did not already have with Broadsides!

If you currently have no other ship resource, Ships and Sea Battles will work fine for you. It contains information for 12 different ships. If, however, you already have Broadsides, don’t buy this book for the ship information.

With respect to the towns/ports of call information, that is quite good here as well. AEG typically does an excellant job providing background information. They do so here again with respect to the ports of call. This section includes several pages of descriptions of different drinking, gambling, and other establishments with names and a textual description. These would be useful in almost any pirate setting.

The book also includes detailed information on two cities. The information includes maps, descriptions of important buildings in the city, and the important people who can be found in the city. Although these were written for a 7th Sea background, as I noted above, they can be easily modified for other settings.
The fleet combat information  provides a handy  system for resolving a mass combat. The system looks like it will work well. However, it is a little too abstract for my tastes. I can’t really fault AEG for this, however, because for mass combat to be effective at all, it must be mostly abstract. After reviewing the fleet combat rules, I think I will stick to having my players deal with specific aspects of a large battle and use the fleet combat rules as a gauge to determine how the rest of the battle is going.

If you are thinking about a pirate adventure and do not already have good source material for ships or cargo, then I would recommend this book. The information on the cargo is excellant and the port of call information is very good. Also, the ship information will provide you with everything that you need to outfit your players and create suitable opponents.