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High Seas Update In Progress (Patreon)

Published:
2017-11-01 05:00:03
Edited:
2024-10-03 20:34:10
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

Here it is, a month late and a chapter short: the High Seas Update!

A lot of individual things hampered our productivity this month, but we've still managed to finish the core of the book, including the new ship combat rules. What we have here is a respectable 52 pages of swashbuckling fun, but we're still missing a proper chapter of monsters, a chapter of spells, and a short chapter of new diseases (which makes this book's sorcerer currently unplayable). The vast majority of everything to be added has already been written (though I'll probably expand our monster selection somewhat, since it leans rather heavily on NPCs), so I hope to get it all out by the end of next month; maybe a little earlier. (Don't worry -- this shouldn't mess with the schedule.)

On the bright side, I think this is one of the best looking books we've ever created, bar none. It's parchment and treasure-maps on every page, and I'm really happy with it. There's still more art on the way from the talented Martin Kirby, so you have plenty to look forward to when we wrap this up.

Changelog

11/1/17: Archetypes: Circle of the Deep: Ocean's Ally: 1/short

Archetypes: The Deep One: Dead Men Tell No Tales: 1/long, requires concentration, ends outside of range

Equipment: Weapons: Chained Anchor: No Special property

Equipment: Firearm Proficiencies: Rogue added

Ships: Ship Weapons: Broadsides: Makes note that a ship carries twice as many weapons as it has noted in a battery, and that it take 4 guns to make a broadside

Ships: Crew Roles: Gunner: Makes note that three men minimum are needed to fire a gun, and clarifies what the number of Gunners means

Comments

Claire Christenson

To be honest, I wasn't really that excited about the High Seas update. However I just finished reading the book and a pirate game is officially added to my list of things I definitely want to run/play. Keep up the fantastic work!

Cody Butler

Chained Anchor's special is not listed.

John Hoffman

Circle of the Deeps ability Ocean's friend does not have a restriction on how often you can summon these allies. Pact of the Deep One doesn't have a save or end condition or a number of uses or cool down. So you can literally fill everyone you meets lungs with water and kill them.

John Hoffman

The capstone ability for Pact of the Deep one that is.

Mage Hand Press

Ah, that one shouldn't have a Special property -- it's left over from a version before we made it Exotic. I'll remove it promptly.

Mage Hand Press

The Deep One's capstone should be 1/long rest, whereas Ocean's Ally is 1/short. That'll be fixed promptly.

John Hoffman

Nah brah. It's good as is. I always wanted an infinite supply of quipper. And to drown all who I look at. Is the Warlock ability supposed to have some way of not dying to it? Cause it's pretty powerful right now.

Mage Hand Press

Ah! That's something else I forgot: I intended to give this one of two end conditions: you focus on the ability as if it were a spell, and the effect ends if a target leaves the 60-foot range. I'll include /both/ of these limits for now, but I'm open to limiting it by only one condition instead.

Cody Butler

Noooo!!! I wanted a special sooooo badly!!

Cody Butler

Plague carrier typo 3 The white and iris of one or both of your eyes are entirely by blood red

Mage Hand Press

At this point, all of its specialness is contained within its crazy damage and reach. I think it holds up just fine without additional rules.

Mage Hand Press

Ah, good catch! I won't be updating it tonight with the fix, since it'll be a little more time-efficient if I tackle a handful of typos at a time, but it'll be fixed on the next update.

Cody Butler

You got it. I'm actually proofreading ATM to put them all on here.

Cody Butler

forgot the binder on the firearm prof.

Mage Hand Press

That's because, right now, our Binder isn't released under the OGL

Cody Butler

What class do you think it would share Prof. With?

Cody Butler

there is no wizard. is that intentional?

Mage Hand Press

Yeah, kind of. We couldn't really nail a good wizard or a good paladin for this update. Something about the general lawfulness of a paladin's oath conflicted somewhat with the idea of a swashbuckling adventure in a way that made it very hard to write; same with the wizard and its general bookishness. So rather than writing up archetypes that would be a stretch or that would have pretty unengaging ideas behind them, we just left them out.

Cody Butler

a Privateer would work so well for paladin! stealing for your crown. a wizard could be Spice wizard. it gets material componants cheap or something. just ideas.

Mage Hand Press

We entertained the idea of a privateer or pirate-hunter paladin, but we really had a hard time getting any mechanics to stick. After all, we'd done the Corsair first, and I didn't want the paladin to seem like redundant. Ultimately, we might have been able to make it work, but the deadline did us in.

Cody Butler

i would not mind it being like the corsair. If you get a spark of inspiration i would not mind it in your blogspot. More ideas would be a Legendary Captain that function like Purple Dragon Knight.

Alexander Garcia

The entire update wasn't completely done by 12:01am on the first of the month? REEEEEEEEEEE. In all seriousness, take your time. Better to do something right the first time than to rush and have to do it again.

Zhern

Really like the section on ships. Well done. Looking forward to reading through the rest of it and seeing what else you have in store in the final version.

John Hoffman

The lack of a Wizard of the Coast is disappointing.

Tyler Adkins

I really like the ship combat! Will you guys be revisiting Dark Matter ships with this kind of combat (section-based HP, fires and leaks) or are you leaving it as-is?

Big Goss

Question on ships. If a ship has a 6 cannon battery, does that mean 6 on each side?

Mage Hand Press

Correct. And you need three men to fire each gun -- the number of gunners only refers to the number of Gunner /players/, not the number of NPC hands needed. So a ship with an 8-gun battery is carrying 16 cannons and needs 24 men to fire a battery.

Big Goss

So for the carrack, it has 6 total guns on the main deck?

Mage Hand Press

Correct. Actually, that might be a bad example -- the carrack is intended to have three guns on each side, for a total of 6, but it doesn't have enough guns to make an actual battery... I'll have to add the word battery on that one and make an explicit note somewhere that 4 guns is the minimum for a battery. Like, if a ship has a swivel gun on the main deck, or a pain of long nines in the bow, you don't count it twice; you're only supposed to count the batteries twice, because they're arranged to be on either side.

Levi Andringa

I'm loving this, but the firearms proficiencies are missing for the rogue.

Kristopher R. Hunter

I'm really digging the archetypes with this, playing a Rum Cleric 'Morale Officer' sounds like it'd be a blast, even in a general campaign setting. I will echo what others have said about doing a Privateer Paladin though, that would have been spiffy. Ah well, can't have it all :)

Mage Hand Press

Thanks! I'm pretty happy with how that came out. My hope is that it's simple and playable enough for about anyone to pick up.

Mage Hand Press

Hm... /If/ we were going to revisit Dark Matter, I'd /hypothetically/ make a poll and ask everyone which chapter they'd most like to see updated and expanded. And "Improved Dark Matter Chapters" would be the only options for that month; it'd only be a choice about which one(s) we'd expand. Let's say that this /strictly hypothetical/ poll happens this month. In that case, I'd probably mention that we'd reorganize the chapter a little (the High Seas chapter is put together a little better than the one in Dark Matter), that we'd include more ships, including stats for things like space stations, research probes, orbiting satellites, ancient relics, etc, and that we'd include more ship weapons. I probably wouldn't want to expand those rules with sinking or fires, but I'd definitely take a magnifying glass to the current navigation rules, and I'd expand the customization a little more as well. But, frankly, in this /hypothetical/ poll, I expect that people are going to select expanded monsters, since that's the more pressing issue in Dark Matter. All this is of course, strictly a thought experiment.

Mage Hand Press

I've gone ahead and expanded the Batteries section to make this clearer.

Tyler Adkins

Well, I guess i'm very /hypothetically/ excited!

Cody Butler

This says it's in progress. Does that mean it is only half done like dark matter was?

Cody Butler

Also, I was just a little disappointed by the race selection, save for the nautalid out of space theme you did.

Mage Hand Press

I've got three more chapters planned for next month to basically complete the book: Monsters, Spells, and Diseases. We're not going to expand this into a full-on setting like Dark Matter, nor do intend to revisit and rewrite any of the other chapters.

Cody Butler

Real talk: are we getting a Captain Jim Finch or John Bunting? A definitely not Jack sparrow?

Mage Hand Press

Yeah, we had a lot of plans for different races, but it's hard to convey how down-to-the-wire this book was. I was still polishing up the ship combat rules like 5 days before release. We decided on those three races because they cover some important aquatic archetypes without being too overbearing with the whole "underwater race" thing. Those of you who follow us on Patreon have seen them all before (which I know is a little disappointing) but I think they improve the package here, and are a good inclusion for those that haven't seen Dark Matter and Men and Monsters.

Cody Butler

I understand. In the future would we ever get expansion packs to these books? Like a "Return to Dark Matter" or something?

Cody Butler

a Finch and Bunting are Sparrow like birds. I was just wondering if one of the NPC's would be a Jack Sparrow like person from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Mage Hand Press

I'm definitely not ruling it out (especially for Dark Matter -- I may or may not have grand schemes for that setting which require more expansions.) I'm definitely considering doing a Expansion poll with options like Lovecraft Handbook, Weird West Update, and High Seas to tack on a few dozen pages, but I can't say for sure when I'd do that. Right now, I've got the polls for the next few months basically planned, and I don't have time set aside for it yet.

Cody Butler

oh man my players were absolutely stoked for the Lovecraft Handbook. You all have your hands full all the time. Ever consider getting more digits?

Mage Hand Press

Oh, I getcha! The NPC stats we're including won't be named NPCs with backstories and personalities; they're more generic, so you can pull out a stat block for a Pirate, a Pirate Captain, a Marine, or a Colony Governor, when you need it.

Cody Butler

Haha sorry for the corny jokes. It was funnier in my head I guess.

Mage Hand Press

That's a super complicated question, actually. On one hand, yeah, every person we add on the team makes us a more powerful writing team, but on the other hand, every person I add in the long run might turn into a sort of financial obligation if we ever start making real money. At the same time, I'm a bit of a stubborn bottleneck. I act as the editor, the lead writer, the graphic designer, the information organizer, the Quality Control (QC) department, and the community manager. I think the QC aspect is the most important thing I do; I make sure we don't put anything out there unless it's good, and you can ask any one of the Digits: I'm a perfectionist. Bringing more people on board makes the editing job and the QC that much harder, even if I shovel off parts of the graphic design to other people that have time. Ultimately, that means there's a hard limit to how many pages we produce in a given month (right now, that seems like 50ish), and that number won't change much with new Digits.

Cody Butler

I feel like these should be in a Q&A somewhere. Like a "behind the curtains of Magehand press" Each person adds a small bit about them and stuff. Honestly, I've always wondered how many digits are running around. Do we have some horrid amygdala of multiple hands? Personally, I really like the quality of the stuff you post. It's worth paying into more so than what I've bought on DMguild. I'm honestly waiting for WOTC to understand the Monopoly it would have hiring you guys. Idealistic hope aside, when does seigeball win so I can finally get my spell handbook.

Mage Hand Press

I might do a Q&A this month. I like to keep things as transparent as possible, and that would be a great way of doing that. While we're on it: 5 Digits, me the Thumb, the Palm, the Knuckle, and the Nails. And yes, we all hope we're bought out or contracted by WoTC. Unlikely, I know, but we've all thought about it.

Cody Butler

Maybe if we all started posting in WOTC UA surveys to hire you all it would work LOL.

Ninja_Prawn

I should also say, things have been extra tough the last few months because I moved house and started a new job. That means I haven't been as productive as usual, for which I must apologise. Hopefully I'll be back in the game soon!

Cody Butler

Is the new job and change of scenery better than before at least?

Ninja_Prawn

Yeah, I'm loving it. And I just this minute got internet in my flat, which will make things much easier.

Cody Butler

That's great! I'm like an hour north of Seattle so all I have is rain, farmland, and rain.

Levi Andringa

Ok, had some questions. And I'm not sure if I've just completely missed the answers if they're in the book. 1)For the firearms, the loading property, does it work like the reload, meaning they can fire it only once as an action, but have to then spend an action reloading it? 2) With the ship sections and the general ship hit points, do the sections add up to it, or do you deal the damage to the sections until the ships general HP is down to 0? 3)For the warlocks Dead Men Tell No Tales feature, is there a duration on it, or can you keep concentrating on it until all the creatures targeted are either down, or have run away? Sorry for the long post. Just want to get it all figured out, got an itch to do a nautical campaign with a friend.

Mage Hand Press

The loading property is exactly as it's written; it doesn't take an action or bonus action to reload, but you can only fire it once per turn (unless you have the crossbow expert feat, of course.) The Ship Sections and the ship's general HP are different pools. If you make targeted attacks at a ship's bow and deal damage to it, you cause no damage to the ship, but you do impose the Wrecked penalty if you reduce that section to 0 HP. Right now, Dead Men Tell No Tales has no duration. Like, it'll probably take a while to kill something using it (suffocation rules in 5e are really slow), so the unlimited duration shouldn't be an issue.

Cody Butler

how does Dead Men Tell No Tales works against an amphibious creature? it cannot drown so no problem?

Mage Hand Press

Correct! They can breathe in water, so it's not a big deal.

Cody Butler

Alright thanks. I had a player get really heated after trying to drown another character (I know, I know. PvP is bad) and the other character was a nautilid. The players get all the murder hobo tendencies out with a PvP arena while I'm not dm'ing.

Levi Andringa

Question again, not sure if this is the place to ask it, since I missed the AMA, but would you guys ever consider doing a kinda live run through of the naval combat? To show how it all works, for people like me that have read it over and over, and some of it still confuses me.

Mage Hand Press

If we do a video on it, it probably won't be very soon -- we've got a very large YouTube backlog that we're itching to get at. That being said, I can try to answer any questions you may have.