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Notes on a ShipCrawl Game
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This article adapted and expanded from the previously posted "Draft 
notes on a ShipCrawl game" from the RThorm blog on antherwyck.com 
[https://www.antherwyck.com/2025/03/04/draft-notes-on-a-shipcrawl-game/]
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The idea of a Ship Crawl (like a hex crawl, but for a sailing ship) has 
been something I've been slowly working at for a number of years.  The 
hex crawl is the more well known example of exploration and adventure, 
but trying to directly map that onto ocean adventure is generally 
unsatisfying.  This attempts to address that, and to provide a set of 
rules as an independent framework of rules for those specific elements.
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The premise that I have been working towards with this is to have a 
system that provides the backbone to deal with the procedures for 
sailing, trading, exploring, and so forth in a ship-based game.  The 
model of the free trader starship in Traveller is the point I have 
started from, but with sailing ships (or maybe oared galleys, if that's 
your preference) going from port to port across the seas.
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Lonely Fun
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There’s a kind of gaming that my friend Thor refers to as “lonely fun.” 
He might not have coined the term, but he first used it when talking 
with me in reference to making Traveller characters. Even in those early 
days, going through the lifepath and the choices and options to create a 
character. You were using the game, you were probably telling a story as 
you went along, building up the character’s backstory, perhaps getting 
ideas about some elements in their career, but all on your own.
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I had a couple sessions where I took a character (but the stats and 
anything about the character was entirely irrelevant) who headed out 
into unexplored wilderness to begin setting up a new barony. Using the 
charts and tables in the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Ref_Sheets) I went through a hex 
crawl kind of exercise, with an empty hex grid map, plotting out the 
locations of streams, noted ruins, woods, and a few hexes of apple 
trees, among other things. Once my character moved in and built their 
stronghold, they’d be able to go back out and explore the interesting 
parts and bring in some peasants to tend and harvest the natural 
resources in the land. Going through the tables, making exploration 
checks, finding what was in the next hex (or block of hexes) and 
charting it all out kept me engrossed and entertained for a good amount 
of time.
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I think that solo RPGs offer a similar kind of guided activity that 
helps to generate enough feedback to lead to the development of an 
emergent story. (I haven’t played more than a couple solo RPGs, and I’m 
sure the field is much broader than just that, but that’s a core facet 
of many of them, I feel)
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Merchant Ship as a Small Domain
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Fundamentally, ship travel is boring in most ttrpgs because there is 
very little to do if you are just a passenger.  If you treat it like 
getting on a bus or a plane, there's not much to do until you reach your 
destination, unless something rare and fairly catastrophic occurs (but 
that's not especially good for games).  The pointcrawl model is perhaps 
better for that kind of setting, where the ports and islands are 
interesting, but the time in between is not interesting, but that tends 
to gloss over any of the sailing and ship operation, and focus more just 
on activities in port or on land.
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However, if you are the free trader captain, or a group of shareholders 
together operating the ship, then there are active questions about what 
you do during the travel that can become more engaging.
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The ship itself is a complex system that must be operated by a team.  It 
is a small domain unto itself, not unlike a castle or stronghold or even 
like a village.  There are many functions that need to be attended to, 
and there is also guiding leadership in making strategic decisions about 
operations, as well as the more immediate responses to obstacles and 
crisis situations.  The numerous points of engagement and complexity of 
the system should provide for a dynamic setting that serves as a 
framework for interesting games.
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Deciding what cargo to buy in Port X to take to Port Y (or considering 
heading to Port Z instead) can be ship-level activities.  There can be 
choices about sailing in storms, and whether to try to make good time 
getting to the next destination, or trying to be more careful and 
avoiding damage to the ship.  Even matters of how to manage crew and how 
to work with the stress of sea travel on the ship are relevant matters. 
What tasks of operation or repair the crew takes on (and whether the 
crew are fundamentally cooperative or not, let alone whether they are 
competent or not) all sets up a lot of material to engage with.
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The Shipping Forecast
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The working title for this set of rules, "The Shipping Forecast" 
references the BBC's long running maritime program of weather 
forecasting information for ship travel.  Up to this point, I have been 
working towards a set of weather rules that are dynamic enough to be 
interesting to track and log, and where the course of weather depends to 
some extent on previous information, rather than being solely the next 
random result from the same table.  This sets the basis for the turn 
(currently each turn is a 3 day period) and the map (hexes are 100 miles 
across, which is a reasonable scale for ocean-scale distances and 
travel, and corresponds with an average day's travel rate for sea-going 
ships).
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The original idea for the Shipping Forecast was to have some regular 
rules for an exploration game. Like the Ready Ref Sheets, the Shipping 
Forecast provides a set of tables and procedures to use for resolving 
the travels of a sailing ship. Weather events, shipboard incidents, and 
activities in port are the key elements the system should provide. The 
initial premise for the Shipping Forecast was to have a regular armature 
for this information that could be used in a campaign.
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The intent with the weather system is not to build a meteorological 
model, but rather to have enough complexity to be interesting, to have a 
feeling of different systems interacting to create the weather effects, 
and to have a system where there is not a simulation of captaining a 
sailing ship, but where some sense of verisimilitude is created by 
maintaining a ship's log to track the weather and the events that occur 
with the ship.  Sailing ships in history kept logs with hour-by-hour 
entries about the conditions and their speed and direction.  This was 
vital for navigation, and for understanding where you were, where you 
were going (if it was a known destination), and how to get back.
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Likewise, the trading system is not intended to be a functional model of 
a world economy, but presents a system where trade and commerce present 
opportunities and challenges that make the process interesting and help 
drive a story forward.  Maintaining the ship's log can allow the 
information to be built up in the narrative over time.  If Port X has 
paid a premium for commodity A when the ship has tried to sell it there 
in the past, then perhaps there is a regular demand for that commodity 
there, and that becomes part of the story of that ship's world.
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(The game is unconcerned with tactical sailing; but if that's what you 
are looking for, there is a set of rules for that [Salt'n'Tar] in 
Grenzland #3)
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So the intent was to have a framework around which a campaign can be 
run, and the player characters in the game are the crew of the ship 
(presumably the officers). There might be some points where translation 
of character skill might come into play, but the sailing of the ship is 
largely its own thing.
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The ship itself is also a means to other adventures.  The trope of the 
travel adventure is as old as Odysseus, at least.  Encounters ashore can 
punctuate the journey, much like thousands of Traveller campaigns have done.
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The Pilot's Logbook
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My formulating idea was that I wanted to have a trade-oriented (buying 
and selling spec cargoes as the ship travels from island to island) 
campaign for a ship in an archipelago, or a nautically-oriented setting 
where ships are the principal mode for travel and trade. There would be 
landfall adventures, intrigues and plots and dungeon crawls, at the 
various ports of call. But I also wanted a set of rules to regularize 
the time and travel going from one island to another.  Travel between 
ports should be meaningful, rather than featureless interstitial space 
between ports.  Having things to do, and thinking about the operation of 
the ship as an ongoing process that requires constant attention, makes 
it more meaningful and an actual set of systems to be played, rather 
than just the time spent between destinations.
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But, the other thing that came to mind as I have been working on this, 
is that it could be very well suited to be a solo game. The idea of 
tracking the winds and weather, making for a captain’s log that records 
the progress of the ship from port to port, and a similar system for 
dealing with the markets in individual ports, and the commodities 
available for trade; all of this could make for a system that produces a 
set of data that is game content, worked out through tables and dice. 
But the story that is told around that could be larger and more fleshed 
out, as much as the player may like.
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Keeping the journal builds a narrative over time.  The random 
information in the weather tracking, and the course of the ship lays out 
the prompts to build a story around.  Events that have to be responded 
to make the travel something more engaging and interesting than just 
being a passenger. It also provides an activity that is reminiscent of 
the tracking done by sailors, but at a more manageable scale (one entry 
every 3 days, rather than an hourly log). The log also tracks the ship's 
accounts, and the cargoes bought at one location, and the markets and 
prices paid for those goods at another place.  Even as a solo journaling 
game, the operation of a ship, tracked with a logbook to record weather, 
conditions, activities, and cargoes and accounts can be played. That 
ongoing sequence is a story that can be interesting on its own.
.Au RThorm
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