Raiders of R’lyeh: From the Tideless Sea Outline
Here is the breakdown of the Raiders of R’lyeh expansion, From the Tideless Sea!
Chapter One includes rules for the creation of merchant steamships (“tramp steamers”) and their crews, and customization options based on in-game experience and rewards; also included are thorough rules for creating any vessel type of the era from a rough schematic, or even from a vessel’s gross tonnage — plus options for artillery and other customizations applicable to the players’ ship and to a wide variety of other ship types found in the setting.
Chapter Two provides new seafaring backgrounds, skills, and other options for players including an upgraded mariner background plus resources for creating over eighty new professional backgrounds including ship personnel, passengers, and other ship-based adventurers.
Chapter Three lists the various new game mechanics relevant to a seafaring campaign, in alphabetical order for easy reference, covering things such as: Communication and Sight at Sea; Damage & Repair (of ships experiencing things such as collisions, fouling, grounding, storms, etc.); Diving (and the creation and customization of diving equipment); Naval Combat (including artillery, torpedoes, mines, and even harpoons); Scaled Forces (including titanic monsters capable of threatening ships); and Survival (including new rules for survival horror at sea); to name only a few categories.
Chapter Four covers all the options for merchant campaigns, including voyaging, charters, and seafaring missions — plus an entire structure for running a tramp trade — moving cargo and passengers throughout the world — and leading a merchant vessel crew (or even a shipping company).
Chapter Five includes nearly 100 pages of toolkits for the gamemaster, including exhaustive setting information, character and faction generation tools and rules (including ship and character tables for creating on-the-fly stats and names of ships, crew members, and passengers from a multitude of countries), an encyclopedia of ship types — including warships, gunboats, submarines, merchant vessels, and a host of auxiliaries, among others — and other elements (e.g., custom houses, diplomatic missions, pirates, navies), plus an entire campaign creation section, to name only a few of the resources.
Chapter Six adds an entire chapter devoted to ports of call, including a system for statting up various types of ports and other seafaring regions — plus a quick reference for over 140 ports, hideaways, and lost worlds of the era.
Chapter Seven connects directly to the campaign creation resources in chapters five and six, providing step-by-step instructions for creating a wide variety of (mythos- or adventure-based) seafaring missions, mission nodes (for investigations, explorations, voyages, etc.), and plot hooks — and includes an example scenario outline (“Secrets of the Sargasso Sea”) illustrating the scenario creation process.
Chapter Eight focuses on a specific Ancient One and other enemies (the identities of which are to be kept secret from the players); it provides a complete resource for developing an epic, world-spanning campaign involving ancient evils, powerful conspirators, seafaring cults, mythos minions, and an assortment of interrelating factions — with a lonely, isolated cargo liner caught in the middle of the chaos. Also included are new spells, occult paths, and monster rules for hordes and titanic-sized, ship-threatening horrors, among other resources.
Other resources include a bibliography, characters sheets, a campaign map, and other gamemaster tools — including complete stats for the merchant vessel, Shantung, plus character sheets for her key crew members.
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Posted on December 1, 2020. Contains 568 words and is a 3 minute read.
