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Foreword

"First there was the sky, high, pure and of a darker blue than he had ever seen. And then there was the sea, a lighter, immensely luminous blue that reflected blue into the air, the shadows and the sails; a sea that stretched away immeasurably when the surge raised the frigate high, showing an orderly array of great crests, each three furlongs from its predecessor, and all sweeping eastwards in an even, majestic procession."

First things first. Beat to quarters is a roleplaying games of ships and the sea. In particular, it is a roleplaying game where the players take the parts of officers and crew aboard a sailing vessel in the Royal Navy during her glory years (the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars). It takes its inspiration from authors such as Patrick O’Brian and C.S. Forrester.

The game comes in the form of an attractively covered 162 page soft-back book, approximately 19x25 cm in size. It can also be purchased in PDF form. The content is mostly text, but there is some excellent black and white art in the styles shown on the cover through-out – a mixture of original portraiture and old paintings of warships at sea. Copies of genuine naval dispatches of the era are also sprinkled through the text. I ordered my (hard) copy from the Omnihedron Games website at a cost of £15 (which included postage and packaging to New Zealand). It was despatched promptly and arrived in excellent condition.

I won’t try and summarise the order and structure of the book in too much detail. Suffice to say that it covers the usual things that roleplaying games manuals try to cover – how to create a character; lists of skills and abilities; rules for resolving challenges and so on – and that it does so in a simple, concise and well-written way.

The game system as presented is fairly simple and intuitive, but the simplicity belies some very elegant and evocative mechanics.

Getting ready for play

Before play begins, two very important NPC’s must be created – the ship and the captain. The rules allow these to be created either co-operatively between the gamemaster and players, or by GM fiat. In our game we created the captain co-operatively, while I decided that the boat would be a brig-sloop sailing out of the Royal Navy’s station in the East Indies – but the players were the ones to name the boat (the HMS Lancelot), and then decide her history (she had recently taken a larger French ship as a prize), her reputations (very popular with naval station inn-keepers, not so popular with naval station authorities), her strengths (the crew includes wily and experienced top men) and some traditions amongst her crew. The traditions are a nice touch that add little to the mechanics of the game, but contribute hugely to the flavour. In our game, my players decided that it was bad luck to step onto the deck of the ship with the right foot first.

Once we had decided on our ship and captain, the players created their characters.

The physical and mental attributes of a character in Beat to quarters are defined by Measures (namely Guts, Discipline, Influence and Charm), Skills and Traits (which other games might call feats, edges or benefits). Characters also have Reputations, which are discussed further below.

Before play each player needs to work out what role his or her character will play on the ship, what faith he or she follows and what sort of background he or she has.

In a system that reminded me slightly of old-school Traveller, character's Measures, Skills and Reputations are defined through the process of fleshing out this background. A character can have a background involving both pre-Navy and post-enlistment experiences. Unlike Traveller these experiences are never lethal, and the events and benefits are worked out by the player – with the system simply providing a structure and some jumping off points.

Each character must have a rank, and often also a role on the ship. It is expected that the captain of the ship will always be an NPC, so players can chose to be a commissioned officer (a lieutenant or midshipman), a warrant officer (a specialist, such as the Sailing Master or the Surgeon) or a rating.

I had three players in my group, so they created Tom Scorpio (a Protestant Welsh Gunner), Johann van Lerbeck (A Lutheran Dutch Purser) and Lt Giuseppe Carancala (a Catholic Italian officer).

Having decided who the players were controlling, we then went back and filled some gaps in the crew with randomly generated NPCs. Crew member generation was quick and fun. Notable crew mates included the amiable and competent Sailing Master (Mr Creedance), the unpleasant and inept Boatswain (Mr Mason) and two noteworthy able seamen (Jones, a useless sailor but popular amongst the crew following some heroics in an action against the French – and Smithy, capable but a drunkard).

Resolving challenges

. . and above all she rolled, a dead lurching drunken gunwale-roll that made the surgeon's work even more hazardous and delicate than usual.

Stephen was there, helping poor Mr Cotton, an elderly cripple who had scarcely recovered from a bout of dysentery and who had been overcome with work from the first few minutes of the action. Even now, after a shocking number of deaths below, sixty or seventy cases remained, lying all along the berth-deck: there was plenty of room, at least, since the French had killed forty-nine men outright and had taken fifty prisoners away.

The system Beat to quarters uses to resolve challenges involves normal playing cards rather than dice. The game-master and each player has his or her own pack of cards. When something needs to be resolved the game-master draws a card, called the Card of Fate. Each player involved in the challenge then draws a number of cards according to their character’s Skills, Traits and Reputations. Bonus cards can also be drawn if a character of higher rank is present and the PC is following orders (discussed further below). The game-master then draws extra cards from his pack to represent either the actions of an NPC or the elements and the vagaries of fate. All of the drawn cards are then compared to the Card of Fate. For each card of the same suit as the Card of Fate, a success is registered. For each card of the same face value, a critical success is registered. For each card of the same face value AND suit, a perfect success is registered. You will notice that because the game-master deals from the same pack that the Card of Fate came from he or she will never be able to gain a perfect success.

The outcome of the challenge is determined by comparing the numbers and type of successes. The person with the most perfect successes wins the contest, and where there is a draw (or nobody achieves that level of success) then the comparison drops to the next level. The results of the best card drawn by the losing player (or GM) can also have an effect in terms of positive and negative outcomes for the participants.

Here is an example. While ashore the burly Carpenter’s Mate Jake York has been goaded into fisticuffs by Preservation Biggs, a cocky Boatswain who hails from a rival ship. The game-master draws the five of spades as the Card of Fate. Jake’s player draws the two of diamonds, the queen of clubs, the five of spades and a three of hearts. The game-master (acting for Preservation Biggs) draws the five of diamonds, the three of spades, the king of spades and the ace of spades. Jake has one perfect success and three failures. That perfect success means he beats Biggs, who has one critical success and three normal successes. Applying some narrative to the results, the Boatswain rained blows on poor ol’ Jake, breaking his jaw with one crunching hit (although it came in a losing hand, that critical success still means that Jake’s Health is Maimed) – but Biggs was knocked unconscious and lost the fight as soon as the Carpenter’s Mate finally managed to land one of his powerful hay-makers.

The elegance of this system really makes itself felt when players start working together.

Turning gamers into Jack Tars

"Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison."

To expand on my last comment, Beat to quarters is a wonderful demonstration of how good design can encourage certain styles of roleplaying. From roleplaying’s earliest days game designers have struggled to find ways to get players into the mindset of their characters. Some have added punishments to deter inappropriate behaviour (paladins who commit an evil act lose their powers), others provide meters and effects that are meant to guide behaviour (for example, the way Call of Cthulhu rates a character’s sanity). But my favourite method of encouraging a certain style of play has always been to recognise key aspects of morality and attitude, and to reward those who play to them. Pendragon’s system of traits and passions has long been a fine example of this.

Beat to quarters has its work cut out for it when it comes to encouraging a specific style of play – because that style of play is one where team-work is paramount. Most games I have played have been better examples of Brownian motion than of good planning. Generally my fellow players and I take the form of a group of individuals who mostly ignore each other (except to make jokes at each other’s expense) and haphazardly stagger our way towards an objective – getting in each other’s way more often than we help each other. This style of play is not exactly consistent with the world of the King’s Navy, where discipline, following orders and hierarchy is everything.

Beat to quarters handles this issue beautifully. One of the author’s solutions is to introduce the concept of Discipline. Discipline is one of the defining Measures that all characters have. Just as fighters and wizards in Dungeons and Dragons can, in part, be defined by their strength (or lack thereof), so characters in Beat to quarters are partly defined by their Discipline. And having a high Discipline is rewarded. During a challenge a highly Disciplined officer is able to give extra cards to characters under his command, and highly Disciplined crew will be able to take greater advantage of those cards than their more independent minded colleagues.

The resolution system – where an entire combat or challenge is handled through a single draw of cards (rather than through multiple rounds of dice rolls) – also encourages a more co-operative approach. That is because a plan must be mapped out before the challenge begins. Prior to playing Beat to quarters my group could never sustain a plan beyond a single combat round – at which point someone would invariably go rogue and the plan would fall to pieces. But because all the action happens at once in Beat to quarters, overcoming a challenge is a very different beast.

Here is an example of how a challenge might work, taken from our gaming session: enroute to the Indies, the HMS Lancelot was caught in a storm while trying to round the Cape of Good Hope. Lt Carancala was the officer on watch, so held ultimate responsibility for the outcome. He decided to use his Discipline to help Mr Creedance (the NPC Sailing Master) at the wheel. Lt Carancala’s player drew cards on Mr Creedance’s behalf while I drew for the storm. The result was a close win to the player, so we decided that Mr Mason (the NPC Boatswain) was slow in ordering men to reef the topsails. The Lancelot’s mast creaked and bent menacingly in the wind and only swift action from Mr Creedance at the wheel kept the ship from broaching. Meanwhile, Mr Scorpio’s player decided that his priority during the storm should be to secure the cannons on the gun-deck to prevent them from smashing about. Mr van Lerbeck decided to spend the storm attending to the nervous disposition of the Viceroy of Bengal’s charming daughter. Both succeeded their challenges. Here I got things slightly wrong, but what should have happened next was that Lt Carancala’s player participated in a Command challenge to determine the overall outcome - with three bonus cards because of the three successful challenges.

Beat to quarters also goes to some lengths to encourage immersion in the setting without introducing specific mechanical devices. It suggests that players running officers be seated on the opposite side of the table to those playing ratings, and that sessions begin with the national anthem. Not being English, I instead put the Master and Commander soundtrack on in the background and at once point asked the players to give three cheers for the King – which did help set the tone for the session.

If we play again, I might play them The Unthanks’ “Here’s the Tender Coming”. The loveliest old folk song about press-gangs you will ever hear.

Missions

‘The coffee has a damned odd taste.'

'This I attribute to the excrement of rats. Rats have eaten our entire stock; and I take the present brew to be a mixture of the scrapings at the bottom of the sack.'

'I thought it had a familiar tang,' said Jack. 'Killick, you may tell Mr Seymour, with my compliments, that you are to have a boat. And if you don't find at least a stone of beans among the squadron, you need not come back.'

Adventures in Beat to quarters are expressed as Missions. Each mission involves a series of challenges that the group (as a whole) are expected to co-operatively overcome. The storm described above was one of the challenges that my players faced in trying to achieve their mission, which was to deliver the new Viceroy of Bengal to the Indies. Each player also has individual missions, which might sometimes play into the group mission. For example, a character might use the opportunity to chase down some Barbary pirates (part of a group mission) to impress the captain with his fine sailing skills (an individual mission), or to impress Miss Lily, the Viceroy of Bengal’s daughter, with his bravery (as part of a much longer – but ultimately more rewarding - individual mission which has as its eventual aim marrying the lovely lass).

The game encourages co-operative play. The game-master is told to ask the players to brainstorm before each session to come up with story ideas – although the GM is not necessarily bound to follow their suggestions. My group is usually fairly traditional in its play style, and I was a little dubious about how well this would work – but the fact that we had spent some time thinking about the ship, her crew and the player's individual missions meant that ideas flowed very easily. I had deliberately avoided planning any sort of structure for the session, and was very surprised to find how naturally they came up with their own storylines and how easy it was for me to put some bones on these and turn them into missions.

Love, fear and admiration upon the ocean deep

There had been much talk among the men working just out of sight forward of the quarter-deck rail, cross contentious talk; but the Néréide was always a surprisingly chatty ship, and apart from putting this outburst down to vexation at their late arrival, he had not attended to it.

Games of Beat to quarters are expected to have a social aspect. This is encouraged through competitions to win the captain’s favour, or the gun-deck’s ear. Participating in these social contests gives players the chance to earn extra cards to use in later challenges.

Characters also start with, and can gain more, Reputations. These can be with either individuals (Loved by Miss Lily, Despised by Preservation Biggs), or with ships and other institutions (Admired by the Ward Room, Distrusted by HMS Hercules). These can be used to gain extra cards when situations involving those individuals or institutions arise. Reputations also have hit points and can be damaged. Spray Miss Lily with your own blood while trying to impress her with your bravery and that Loved by Miss Lily might be injured – requiring no small amount of wooing on your part to heal the wound to your Reputation.

Another of the social aspects to play can be particularly important. While a character with the captain’s favour, or the gun-deck’s ear, gains extra cards during a single contest – if the morale of the ship’s crew is low then any action aboard the ship results in all players getting less cards in everything they do.

Running out the long 9s

"As it usually happened after an engagement, a heavy sadness was coming down over his spirits. To some degree it was the prodigious contrast between two modes of life: in violent hand-to-hand fighting there was no room for time, reflection, enmity or even pain unless it was disabling; everything moved with extreme speed, cut and parry with a reflex as fast as a sword-thrust, eyes automatically keeping watch on three or four men within reach, arm lunging at the first hint of a lowered guard, a cry to warn a friend, a roar to put an enemy off his stroke; and all this in an extraordinarily vivid state of mind, a kind of fierce exaltation, an intense living in the most immediate present."

Naval battles are treated slightly differently from other challenges in Beat to Quarters. Here a challenge occurs in several stages as each ship tries to manoeuvre its way into the most advantageous positions. Positions are tracked on a simple chart, with sailing challenges deciding which vessel gets the weather gage and control over movement. Once in the Broadside! position (or Long Range for frigates and larger vessels) ships can fire their guns in an attempt to damage the enemy’s hull, crew, guns and rigging. Different ammunition can be used to try and damage different parts of the enemy vessel (or her crew). Ships can also close to Boarding range where the crews will engage in hand-to-hand combat. Once per round each ship gets a chance to allocate resources to Repair some part of the ship which has sustained an injury. Injuries to a ship effect its performance (for example, “injured” or “maimed” guns mean less cards are drawn in the bombardment phase – while a ship with no hit points left in the guns column cannot discharge her cannons at all). When a fire breaks out, failure to repair the damage means that the fire will spread next turn.

Naval combat involves some build-up as the ships manoeuvre for position, but once they are in range things become deadly very quickly. In our session the players spent some time chasing down and then gaining the weather gage against a Dutch schooner, but once they finally had her where they wanted her a single Broadside! was enough to shatter her rigging and damage her hull beyond repair. Although the Dutch ship was at a positional disadvantage, she was still able to Maim the Lancelot’s gundeck in reply.

Conclusion

'Eleven knots and six fathoms, sir, if you please,' reported Braithwaite to Pullings, official gravity fighting a losing battle with delight. All hands were listening nakedly, a murmur of intense satisfaction ran through the ship.

'Give it her,' said Pullings, and stepped closer to Jack's path.

'How do we come along, Mr. Pullings?' said he.

'Eleven knots and six fathoms, sir, if you please,' said Pullings with a grin.

‘Hey, hey,’ cried Jack. ‘I scarcely believed it could be so much.’ He looked lovingly along her deck and up to where her pendant flew out in a curving flame fifty foot long, almost straight ahead. She was indeed a noble ship; she always had been, but she had never run eleven knots six fathoms off the reel when he was a boy. . . .

Stephen was sitting on the capstan, eating a mangosteen and staring at the mongoose as it played with his handkerchief, tossing it up, catching it, worrying it to death.

'We are running eleven knots six,' said Jack.

'Oh,' said Stephen, 'I am sorry to hear it - most concerned. Is there no remedy?'

Beat to quarters was recommended to me by a friend in another city. I do love Patrick O’Brian’s books, but that is almost as much for the quality of his writing than for the nautical setting. And I have to say that I could not see my group ever successfully playing a game in such a regimented environment. But a read through the rules changed my mind dramatically. Neil Gow has clearly spent a good deal of time working out how to encourage gamers to play in a certain style, and that effort really has paid off.

I don’t quite feel able to give Beat to quarters a five for style. The book is well-written and well-presented, but here it is competing with the likes of Dungeons and Dragons and its full-colour, big business brethren. But the simple elegance of the layout and tidy prose is certainly enough to earn a four.

Where Beat to quarters really shines though is in the substance. The system encourages, and admirably compliments, a certain style of play. I haven’t mentioned much about the background information presented, but it is certainly there and provides enough flesh for even the most lubberly of gamers to successfully run a game with such a specialised theme. The background information is also often inspiring, and incorporated well into the system (the outcome of a shipboard fire, for example, is appropriately terrifying). The system itself is uncomplicated, but graceful, and is tailored beautifully to the setting. Even my wayward group of individuals surprised themselves with the way they ended up working together as a team. The social aspects also encourage engagement and also provide inspirations for story-lines. By the end of our first session, the Lancelot felt like a living ship and her crew a family. You cannot ask more of a nautically themed game than that. Here Beat to quarters easily earns her five.

I had intended that our session with Beat to quarters be a one-off, but life aboard the HMS Lancelot was rousing and full – and I fully intend that she shall set to sea again. I highly recommend that you join us.

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