Recources for the Age of Sail?

[Gezahs]

Hello there,

I am gamemastering a campaign set in the age of sail. I am very fond of GURPS, which offers lots of concepts - from combat to shipbuilding. Unfortunately I can´t find much "ready to use" material.

For example: I can not find a good set of data-sheets for the dozens of different types of ships, which colored the age of sail. What i could find, was little information in Gurps 4th Low-Tech and GURPS 4th Low Tech Companion 2. Also the GURPS 3rd Swashbuckling gives only a general idea and GURPS 3rd
Voodo reders mostly to Swashbuckling about this.

My problem is, that i do not want to invest hours and hours to create a fancy set of data-sheets with deck-plans and images of ships. I simply do not have the time if not paid for. Gurps material offers good concepts to create such on your own. But right now I realy would prefer some sort of time-saving "out of the box" solution.

Beside starting an interesting discussion, following things would realy help me:

- do you know any other GURPS supplements which offer further information which could be used for a fancy Caribbean-Pirate setting?

- are there any fan-recources covering this gap?

- are other forum threads deeper into this?


Thanks in advance, i am very looking forward to any replys!

Gezahs

[Blind Mapmaker]

Did you have a look at GURPS Supporting Cast - Age of Sail Pirate Crew (link). I don't have it and the preview doesn't indicate the presence of actual ship stats, but it certainly looks like something you could use.

[ClayDowling]

How much do you actually need? Unless tactical naval battles are going to be a major portion of your game, full ship stats for every conceivable ship probably aren't necessary. Likewise, deck plans aren't going to be necessary unless you expect to have a lot of boarding actions.

If you will be doing tactical naval battles, I would create ship stats as needed. You're more likely to be involved in single-ship actions than the battle of Trafalgar.

While there are plenty of variations on deck plans, they all hew to a basic pattern with relatively minor variations. If detailed historical simulation is your goal, then you'll need to grab naval designs and convert them to deck plans (which is actually pretty easy with tools like Inkscape or Gimp that let you overlay grids and images). Otherwise, declare it a spherical cow and just use a few basic deck plans for your boarding actions.

[pyratejohn]

There are a ton of discussions about pirates here. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page and click the tag links you'll open a veritable treasure chest of information.

(And now, back to reorganizing my library, were I have approximately 11 linear feet worth of books on piracy, the Age of Sail, and 17th/18thC history.) 8^)

[Phaelen Bleux]

Do a Tag search for Age of Sail. . .I have designed a few ships for my Pyrates campaign and posted them here.

Osprey Books is a good source for general historical info, as well.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Books:

Howard Chapelle's stuff --

American Fishing Schooners 1825 -- 1935
American Sailing Craft
American Small Sailing Craft
The History of American Sailing Ships
The National Watercraft Collection

http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/shipplan.htm has information on how to access the Smithsonian's collection of ship plans -- more from the late eighteenth century, as most ships built previously weren't built from plans.

For the British side see the National Maritime Museum:
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/exp...category/90352

"Seamanship in the Age of Sail" -- John Harland. Gives details on how sailing vessels actually worked -- how the dutiful GM can avoid "keelhauling the yardarm" and other errors.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Gezahs

Hello there,

I am gamemastering a campaign set in the age of sail. I am very fond of GURPS, which offers lots of concepts - from combat to shipbuilding. Unfortunately I can´t find much "ready to use" material.

For example: I can not find a good set of data-sheets for the dozens of different types of ships, which colored the age of sail. What i could find, was little information in Gurps 4th Low-Tech and GURPS 4th Low Tech Companion 2. Also the GURPS 3rd Swashbuckling gives only a general idea and GURPS 3rd
Voodo reders mostly to Swashbuckling about this.

Thanks in advance, i am very looking forward to any replys!

Gezahs

I don't know first hand whether this product is a good one or not, but take a peek at it and see if it whets your appetite...


http://ki-ryn.com/Zero_Hour/Sailing_Ships_Demo.pdf

[whswhs]

I found a fair bit of useful material at http://www.thepirateking.com/ .

Bill Stoddard

[roguebfl]

If I wanted to do a lot of boarding actions is the a good source of Deckplans to go with the aforementioned datashetes?

[doulos05]

The map from the Pirates computer game was reasonable to give to the players. You should use one of the historicals to precisely locate shoals and such.