Ship ownership for profit

Gilladian · May 10, 2024

My 2nd level PCs “own” a ship (stole it from pirates). One of them is a priest of the god of merchants. He has dreams of setting up a mercantile trade network and reaping tons of profit. As DM, I want them to be able to travel place to place and have fun adventures. How would you balance the two extremes? What can I offer them that will be just prrofitable enough (if all goes well) to keep them solvent? Maybe passenger shipping?

aco175 · May 10, 2024

Cargo is usually the bread and butter of ships and passengers are secondary. There should always be a need for bring food and ale from place to place with the occasional rarity such as coffee or chocolate. Depending on the size of the ship, they should bring in 200-500gp per trip with crew and ship expenses being half of the gain.

Passengers are great for quest hooks. Anyone from anywhere can be looking to book passage going someplace or fleeing someplace (or someone). It would be easier for the DM and players to have only a handful of NPC passengers on ship at one time. This would allow for more memorable ones and interaction with the crew as well.

Another idea is for the crew to be the main ship people and operate in the background and the PCs being more like passengers and drop off at places to adventure and meet the ship on their return voyage.

GMMichael · May 10, 2024

Gilladian said:
My 2nd level PCs “own” a ship (stole it from pirates). One of them is a priest of the god of merchants. He has dreams of setting up a mercantile trade network and reaping tons of profit.

That sounds incredibly boring. I hope he can hire a manager.

Gilladian said:
As DM, I want them to be able to travel place to place and have fun adventures. How would you balance the two extremes? What can I offer them that will be just prrofitable enough (if all goes well) to keep them solvent? Maybe passenger shipping?

Negotiating contracts could be interesting if terms other than gold are involved. And there's the problem of suppliers 1) not fully meeting orders, and 2) causing problems with what they actually deliver. Of course, there's always the problem of a rival merchant being extremely attractive...

kigmatzomat · May 10, 2024

Tome of Heroes has a two or three page "trading company" rule set for down time. It assumes the players can find a trustworthy captain/manager and are involved just a few days a month.

An older, but more complex system is in the Expedtious Retreat product "The Silk Road". It was for 3e but that really doesn't matter much.

As for making it a ship-based game, you have options. Privateer is a fancy word for "sanctioned piracy", or they could be knighted or whatever and told to hunt pirates.

Alternately, places in distress often need food. Have them carry a shipment of grain to an area suffering a poor harvest, except the players hear rumors in the dock bars that the harvest is actually cursed by a witch and boom, adventure.

They leave there with a hold of Whatsits ( whatever the town might have to sell) that they got at a low price being heroes and all. They can sell it at BigTown for a modest, reliable profit or go to Backwoods, which is always trying to get a merchant to bring them more Whatsits but they are out of the way and too small for a big ship.

Either way, boom, adventure!

bloodtide · May 10, 2024

It's not too extreme.

A great adventure is to have them get into the rare and exotic trade. Travel to far off lands and fight folks there and monsters. You have the whole list of real world rare items....teak, oil, salt, gold and more. Then add in the fantasy stuff....void stone, upsadasisum, admantinum, dragon eggs.

Tonguez · May 10, 2024

I once had a pair of PCs sent to a distant city to set up a trading house sponsored by The 500 Lords of the Vaniyaga a network of 'Heroic Traders' Merchant-Devotees operating across the coastal ports of the Mahasegara (Indian Ocean) from Africa to Mahapajit (Indonesia) and beyond. The Vaniyaga was dedicated to the gods Varuna and Kubera, have a central charter the Vira Balanja Dharma(Law of the Heroic Traders) and agree to be subject to the Council of Auditors

Anyway the PCs were given a ship, a first cargo and letters of introduction and got to travel from what was essentially Goa in India down the Malabar Coast to Ceylon, across the Bay of Bengal to Takola (a Vanara Kingdom approximately where Burma sits), then South through the Dvaravati Kingdoms (Siam), then into the Straits of Melaka and the Mahapajit Empire (including the pirate enclave of Temasek.) The PCs starter cargo was textiles and gemstones to trade or gift and were looking to secure access to spices, tea and hardwoods as well as establishing their own Trading Post

First league of the adventure was RP interacting with the crew and Captain (Captains Dinner), checking the cargoes etc. Then they got hit by a storm as a sailing skill challenge.
Other encounters were

fighting of Pirates
sighting a Sea Serpent
Unruly sailors getting drunk, Bosun wants to throw them to the sea serpent.
Stop-over in Ceylon, replenish supplies, social encounters
the arrival in Takola was a big event, as the local Gokhong Apemen were under attack by raiders, the Merchants helped to defend Takola and in return the Tuhaan of the Gokhong gave them the friendship of the Gokhong people and favoured trader privileges (later in the campaign the Traders invest in rebuilding the port of Takola including a Temple to Hanuman Vayuputra)
After Takola the Ship has various small exploration encounters as they head south before reaching the Mahapajit Empire and the Straits of Melaka.
Hunting/Foraging for Supplies
Exploring sites of interest
encountering a ghostly flotilla of misty canoes
negotiating with Smugglers (as allies)
negotiating with Smugglers (as rivals)
on reaching the Mahapajit Empire the PCs go through the process of gaining favour with the local authorities including mandatory visits to local Datu (Chiefs) and Raja, negotiating docking fees with the harbour master and taxes and duties with the Customs Office, buying Warehouse space, hiring stevedores and staff, finding willing buyers, finding a place in the market, overcoming local rivals, combating the threats of theft, defending the rights of Khokong Apemen (a different tribe to the Gokhong) against prejudice and violence, saving allies from slave raids - they were also suppose to go and get involved in more shenanigans in Temasek (the Pirate enclave of Singapura) but we never got there...

The advice

Make sure the Captain of the Ship is an NPC
let the Ship be its own character too (with a monster stat block if need be)
PCs can be crew, even officers interacting with the crew
Treat Trade Routes as a Seasonal Resource (I used a 1d6 yield on investment and based success on skill checks)

Dannyalcatraz · May 10, 2024

Any adventures- be they modules, movies, TV shows, or short stories & novels- that center on travel can be mined, adapted & used for adventures & plot hooks for a ship-centric mercantile/exploration campaign. Consider:

Any caravan
Firefly tv show
Kung Fu tv show
The Odyssey
Stories about the Pony Express
Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
Master of the World by Jules Verne
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
The Gumball Rally movie
The Sinbad movies
Stories about explorers like Lewis & Clark or Marco Polo

Gilladian · May 10, 2024

kigmatzomat said:
Tome of Heroes has a two or three page "trading company" rule set for down time. It assumes the players can find a trustworthy captain/manager and are involved just a few days a month.

An older, but more complex system is in the Expedtious Retreat product "The Silk Road". It was for 3e but that really doesn't matter much.

As for making it a ship-based game, you have options. Privateer is a fancy word for "sanctioned piracy", or they could be knighted or whatever and told to hunt pirates.

Alternately, places in distress often need food. Have them carry a shipment of grain to an area suffering a poor harvest, except the players hear rumors in the dock bars that the harvest is actually cursed by a witch and boom, adventure.

They leave there with a hold of Whatsits ( whatever the town might have to sell) that they got at a low price being heroes and all. They can sell it at BigTown for a modest, reliable profit or go to Backwoods, which is always trying to get a merchant to bring them more Whatsits but they are out of the way and too small for a big ship.

Either way, boom, adventure!

I am actually running 3.5 and own Silk Road! And the grain/witch idea is perfect! I will be stealing this one hook,line and sinker. The perfect village for this is already “in play” with just a few minor tweaks.

haakon1 · May 11, 2024

Harn has a book about trading ships, and various D&D editions have ships & the sea books you could use.

Celebrim · May 11, 2024

Gilladian said:
My 2nd level PCs “own” a ship (stole it from pirates). One of them is a priest of the god of merchants. He has dreams of setting up a mercantile trade network and reaping tons of profit. As DM, I want them to be able to travel place to place and have fun adventures. How would you balance the two extremes? What can I offer them that will be just prrofitable enough (if all goes well) to keep them solvent? Maybe passenger shipping?

Traveller has this style of game as part of its core gameplay loop, with the expectation that PC's will struggle to make real profits on legitimate mail, passenger, and cargo carrying and so take side quests to help pay off the bills. So you might look at Mongoose Traveller 2e for some economics rules and ideas.

I will say that a D&D ship based campaign was one of the best if not the best campaigns I was ever in as a player, and by all means go with that just don't use D&D economics as the basis of making it work.

Let them set up businesses, and then have those businesses trend in the long run to making about 4% return on investment per year once the market settles down. Use the businesses as hooks to get them into adventures. Everyone will have fun.

Ship ownership for profit

Gilladian

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aco175

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GMMichael

Guide of Modos

kigmatzomat

Hero

bloodtide

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Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow

Dannyalcatraz

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Gilladian

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haakon1

Hero

Celebrim

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