It's Maritime Month! Well, almost.

I realise things have been a little quite around here lately, but hopefully that's all about to change. I've been very busy with work and can't-blog-about-it-because-spoilers game stuff, but that's eased off for a bit. To motivate myself to write more, I have decided that it is going to be a themed month of posts here on the blog, although I'll also be posting about non-theme-related stuff, mostly more frugal gaming and a little bit of live game design. 

Specifically, it's gonna be Maritime Month!

Ahoy, me hearties!

Waaaaay back at the beginning of my D&D campaign, which was now over a year ago, I decided that I was going to start all the player characters in the same jail cell. That worked perfectly, because they were a mixture of scoundrels and ruffians ... except for Frances. Frances, the party healer, is a pretty decent and mild person, so I had to think of a reason for her to be in the slam. I settled on the ol' mistaken identity bit -- Frances looks just like a notorious criminal. I wanted something other than just some thief or murderer, though, so I decided she looked like the infamous Pirate Queen of the Thousand Isles. At this stage, that was just a name-drop, but I developed the idea as the game went on and pretty early on the PCs (or at least their chief impulsive-idea-haver) decided that they were going to go to sea and hunt down the pirate queen and find out just what the heck is going on.

Fair enough! Part of the problem is that in D&D 3.5 it's quite difficult to do that -- if you haven't built your character to be a sailor from the jump, you're probably going to be missing lots of important skills. But in the 5th edition rules we're using now, it's much easier to just go "hey for a life on the ocean wave," so that's what we're doing.

Anyway, game has been postponed while I'm out of the country, so I'm going to take this month to come up with nautical encounters and resources. Maritime Month is going to be mostly thinking out loud about fun stuff to incorporate into the game. If you have any thoughts on adding lots of sea stuff into your game, or ideas for good resources, please let me know!