Seafarer's Handbook
The Seafarer's Handbook, the third hardbound rulebook in Fantasy Flight Games' Legends & Lairs series, is a nautical rulebook for the d20 system. This is not a lonely position, as Mongoose Publishing has already released their Seas of Blood, and other companies have such products in the pipeline. So of course, the intrepid reader would like to know how it stacks up, right?
Read on.
A First Look
The Seafarer's Handbook is a 176-page hardcover book priced at $24.95. This is actually a fairly good price/page ratio for a product of this size.
The cover is mostly a deep green and has the "metal bound tome" look commonly used by FFG and modestly reminiscent of the D&D 3e core rulebooks. The front cover has a logo of a sea serpent coiled around a ship's helm wheel, against the backdrop of several sketches of ships and ocean maps on a yellow "parchment" color background.
The interior is black and white. As is usually the case with FFG d20 products, the layout is attractive and easy to read. The interior artwork is good, even better than prior Legends & Lairs books. The most eye catching talent seems to be Andy Brase, whose work was also featured prominently in FFG's Dragonstar Starfarer's Handbook.
The typeface is small and there is less promotional material than prior FFG Legends & Lairs books, but it has a visibly large column spacing, which will cut down on the word count in the book. Considering the book's price, however, you are receiving a fairly good quantitative value.
A Deeper Look
The Seafarer's Handbook is organized into six broad chapters.
Chapter One: Seafaring Adventurers
The first chapter is devoted to characters, including races, classes, feats, skills, and equipment. Basically, chapter one covers the type of material that you would find in the D&D 3e Player's Handbook.
The chapter begins by introducing three new races that make their home among the waves: merfolk, half-merrow, and aquatic elves. Merrow, you should recall, are the aquatic equivalent of ogres. Half-merrow are merrow/merfolk cross breeds. The race statistics look fairly balanced, but some GMs may take umbrage with the half-merrow's large Strength bonus. Further, the half-merrow has a special racial ability that allows it to use its Strength modifier for Intimidate checks. As the DMG already provides the impetus for using alternate ability scores for skills if the situation warrants, that did not seem like much of a racial ability to me.
Each of the races have some subraces mentioned, though there are few variations in the mechanics. One prestige class, however, is provided for the coral elf variety of the aquatic elf, the reef warrior. The reef warrior enters into a symbiotic relationship with life forms that exist in the coral reef and eventually learns to merge with them.
A short section describes adjustments of existing feats and skills when dealing with an underwater environment. This also introduces a variant version of an existing skill, Aquatic Alchemy. This is due to the fact that normal alchemical methods would not work underwater. Normally, I disdain the creation of new skills. In this case, though, the new skill seems justified - and easy enough to integrate with the existing classes: you merely allow it as an alternative to alchemy.
The book introduces a variety of new feats. Most of the feats fall into two categories: feats appropriate to seafarers (to include a few feats oriented toward a swashbuckling style of combat) and those appropriate to aquatic races. Examples of the former are Barroom Brawler (gives better unarmed damage and extra subdual hp), Great Lungs, Parry, and Port Savvy. Examples of the latter are Amphibious Endurance (lets aquatic races spend more time out of water), Tail Slam, and Tail Walking.
Most of these feats are mechanically suitable, but there are a few curiosities.
Create Manikin is an item creation feat that lets you create an effigy of a person for a cost of 2,000 gp times the target's level (plus attendant XP cost). For this cost, you can cast a spell on the effigy up to 10 times, and it affects the target. This seems a little too convenient to me; this would be the ultimate assassination tool. There needs to be some limit on the spells that you can cast.
Fool's Luck also seems a little too convenient. It allows the character to replace one failed roll with a success once per day, merely by offering up an explanation of how the character ended up beating the odds. If you consider it, though, this allows a character to beat any odds once per day, regardless of the fact that it may be well beyond their ability. This might work if you limit it to applying to rolls that fail by some margin (say 5 or less).
In the same vein as the half-merrow's Intimidation racial ability mentioned earlier, the feat Lookout seems like it gives you an ability that a character would already have. It allows characters in an elevated position to spot things at a greater distance. This should logically apply to all characters.
The equipment section contains new equipment for aquatic characters as well as for characters visiting an underwater realm, such as aquatic armor and waterproof scrolls.
As with the feats and skills, a brief section describes how to adjudicate the casting of spells underwater and provides a variety of new spells. A new clerical domain, undersea, is introduced, with spells predominantly from the new aquatic-themed spells introduced in the book. The spells include those that help deal with underwater conditions (such as sphere of air, improved water breathing, and underwater sense), assist aquatic creatures (such as air breathing), affect ships (like compass curse, sink, and nautomancy, which lets you imbue a ship with spells), and assist in underwater combat (like aquatic acid fog and ink cloud).
Again, there are a few curiosities. The aquatic form spell seems very convenient at first: it gives a character the aquatic template (described later in the book); however, it is permanent and cannot be dispelled. I thought that was a little excessive. The polymorph other spell (which is a level lower) may be a little more flexible in this regard.
In addition to the spells, a number of new magic items are introduced that are useful at or under the sea, or are themed after aquatic creatures.
Finally, the chapter covers combat and maneuvering in an underwater environment, including factors such as vision and modifiers for different types of weapons.
Chapter Two: Seafaring Campaigns
The second chapter includes resources and advice for running adventures involved with the sea.
The first section is entitled Adventure and the Sea. It contains advice for constructing seafaring campaigns, ideas for adventure locales such as islands and coasts, details of ships and the people who work on them, and rules guidelines for hazards such as weather and icebergs.
The second section is entitled Ports of Call. It leads off with some ideas and advice on detailing a port city, including the nature of trading and politics, and cultures. Finally, ideas and advice are given regarding life in a port city, alongside a sample port city, Kaaluntor. There are no maps of the city, but details are provided for such things as the city's markets, quarters, and so forth. At the end of the chapter, complete stats are provided for a number of sample NPCs from the city.
Chapter Three: Undersea Adventures
As chapter two is much concerned with seafaring adventures and environs, chapter three concerns itself with underwater adventures and environs. It includes some general advice for running such adventures, including playing up the alien aspect of such an environment. Rules related aspects of the environment are also addressed. You will find rules for kelp forests and coral reefs, and ideas for undersea site-based adventures such as shipwrecks.
After the general advice, a strange example of an undersea campaign environment is presented, the Underdeep. The Underdeep is an underwater setting that is placed in underground oceans. Many unique sites are presented, along with adventure seeds and a few special rules. For example, a new race is presented: the deep drow. The deep drow are essentially aquatic drow elves. As unusual as the Underdeep sounds, it just may be worth a try for those players jaded by classical forays into the Underdark.
Finally, the chapter introduces a few new underwater creatures. Of the most use is probably the aquatic creature template. The aquatic creature template is provided simply to adapt standard creatures for underwater use. Also provided are the abyssal shark (a gargantuan shark from the oceans in a plane of evil), the coral golem, the drowned dead, and the hippocampus (basically an aquatic horse).
Chapter Four: Ship Construction
Chapter four is actually one of the shorter chapters and provides a set of rules for creating ships. The ship construction is handled by purchasing various elements of the ship from a set of tables. Much like Mongoose's Seas of Blood (and strangely and unfortunately unlike the Dragonstar starhip system), the categories are used for sizes as for D&D creatures, but the scale is different and specific to ships.
In addition to the basic elements, all ships come with one special quality, but more may be purchased. Special qualities are likened to feats and provide the ship with some way in which it is exceptional. For example, the ship may be good at ramming, have more hit points, or be resistant to fire.
The last page of the chapter provides some basic material for hiring crew.
The ship system in the Seafarer's Handbook is more formal than that in Seas of Blood and does not invent new systems such as hull points to handle ship combat.
Chapter Five: Ship Designs
Chapter five presents a number of sample ships for use in the game. Each ship has statistics as outlined by chapter four, along with deck layouts and a detailed description. The deck plans are nicely illustrated and done from a perspective view. Contrasted with Mongoose's Seas of Blood, the additional detail provided in Seafarer's Handbook is rather nice; Seas of Blood only has deck plans for the weatherdecks and has less detail on each ship. Yet a disadvantage of the perspective view is that you cannot make enlarged photocopies of them for use with miniatures like you can with the top-down views in Seas of Blood.
In addition to classic ship designs such as longships, cogs, and traders, there are some rather exotic designs. For example, there is the submersible "Iron Whale," the mind-flayer designed "Deep Crawler," and the mobile arcane sanctuary of the "Wizard's Tower Ship." Some, though, were a little to strange for me, such as the "Sahuagin Corsair" (just why would sahuagin have their own ship design?) and the "Druid Lairship."
Chapter Six: Ship Combat
The last chapter covers the topic of ship combat. It utilizes the groundwork set in chapter four, and like it does not deviate from the existing rules for damaging objects. It has rules for maneuvering ships, taking into account the effects of crew manning and experience, fire, and swashbuckling combat.
Whether you prefer this version of the combat system over that in Seas of Blood is largely a matter of taste. Personally, I think I prefer the Seas of Blood ship combat. Though Seas of Blood does invent a new damage method, it is more manageable since it tries to abstract away some of the details that the Seafarer's Handbook sweats. Further, Seas of Blood contains a system for handling mass crew combat that integrates with their ship-to-ship combat system; the Seafarer's Handbook has no equivalent.
Conclusion
The question that is probably on everyone's mind is, "should I buy this book or the Seas of Blood book?"
The answer is, that depends. You can really buy both books and the only major overlap would be chapters four and six. The Seafarer's Handbook has greater details, especially where underwater adventures are concerned. If you wish to use the underwater environment, or like the more explicit method of ship construction, or need some GM advice and ideas on how to run a game, then the Seafarer's Handbook should be considered strongly.
As a mechanical book on seafaring, however, I really must say that I felt like Seas of Blood was somewhat better rounded and more practical.
-Alan D. Kohler
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