Building Bhakashal - Travel at Sea

Bhakashal never hands waves travel. Today I will discuss a recent session where the party went on an ocean trip (to get to Barrier Peaks). I will focus on the procedural aspects, rather than the justifications for various procedures.

Distance

Map hexes are 30 miles, a merchant ship travels on average 5 miles an hour, that means 6 hours to cross a hex, or 4 hexes per 24 hour day. This is the standard or baseline for sea travel in the campaign. You map the route and count out in 4 hex increments to determine total travel time. This usually gives you a fractional result of some kind, e.g. 4 and a half days, and either round up or round down (you can roll for it or just pick) to represent the variable impacts of wind speed. 

So the calculations in this case give us an 11 day journey from Highport to Monmurg.

Daily Encounters

Each day is divided into four sections of six hours each, morning, afternoon, evening and night, and each section of the day has different encounter odds:

Morning (6 am-noon) - 1 in 12 chance

Afternoon (noon-6 pm) - 1 in 10 chance

Evening (6 pm-midnight) - 1 in 8 chance

Night (midnight-6 am) - 1 in 6 chance*

The procedure for each travel day is as follows:

1. Ask the players if they want to role-play interactions with the crew or each other. If so, they pick the section  of the day they want to use (morning, afternoon, etc.)

2. Roll for potential encounters in each section of the day, if something happens (e.g. if a 1 comes up) then you:

1. Roll a d6 to determine the hour when the encounter happens (e.g. a roll of 2 would be during hour 2 of the 6 hour block)

2. Roll for weather. Bhakashal has weather effects that can impact combat, so this is important. If you don’t play with those sorts of effects then you can skip this.

3. Roll for the encounter on the deep sea encounter tables

4. Proceed with encounter per standard encounter rules (surprise, encounter distance, initiative, etc.)

Encounters are rolled from a weighted, curated table, and all encounters are subject to encounter reaction rolls, so many times even when an encounter comes up it will not necessarily lead to combat. So for example, if the PCs roll an encounter with a merchant ship, unless they decide to attack or communicate with them, chances are they will simply sail by.

Ditto for things like sharks, they can’t harm the ship, so unless the PCs want to engage with the sharks, they will simply sail by. 

The Journey

With these rules in mind, here is what has happened so far.

The PCs are on day 6 of their 11 day journey. 

Day 1 - an encounter with a giant whale in the afternoon, windy and sunny weather, in hour 4 (e.g. 4pm). There was no surprise indicated, I rolled for reaction and it just swam off, which was fine by the PCs, a giant whale can capsize a galleon. There were no other encounters for day 1, but the players asked to do some role play with the crew and gambled for a while in the evening. They asked some questions about Monmurg (they were looking to pick up some henchmen to replace slain henchmen when they got there) and got some gossip about the ship’s warlock. Information gathering is key in Bhakashal, as it can help to save time and avoid difficulties.

Day 2  - No encounters rolled, and the players did not want to do any role play for that day. However, I wanted a role play encounter with the captain in order to flesh her out a bit, so they were invited to the captain’s table for dinner and they discussed pirates in the Azure sea and how they were being handled by the navies of various nations. 

Day 3 - No encounters indicated, and no role-play requested.

Day 4 - Party seer (priest) decides he wants to try and convert crewmembers, so in the morning he spends a few hours preaching and heals a few sailors of minor injuries.  I roll for encounters in the morning and nothing comes up. In the afternoon an encounter is rolled. The d6 indicates it happens at 2 pm, and the weather comes up as light rain and wind (no significant effects). 

We roll giant sea snakes, number appearing is 7, no surprise is indicated, encounter distance is rolled, and the party engages in missile fire and spells until the snakes reach the ship. Thanks to some clever illusion use and the party bard’s successful charming of one of the snakes, they turn around the threat and the snakes disperse.

Day 5 - The party phantasmist (illusionist) decides to put on a show for the crew in the evening. No encounters are rolled for any section of the day, and when the evening comes around the phantasmist entertains the crew with a recreation of a recent fight with a giant slug and a group of saan (lizard folk) while the bard tells the tale with musical accompaniment on his lyre. Socializing like this, gambling, entertaining the crew, gains a small bonus on their loyalty rolls if things go south. Every bit counts.

Day 6 - The ship carries with it enough food and water for the trip, but the crew periodically fishes, and if they pass remote islands stop for fresh water. So in the morning they decide to drop nets and fish, and the party fighter wants to participate in that as he has a fishing secondary skill, so they role play that out. No encounters are indicated for the morning or afternoon. In the evening an encounter is rolled, the weather is windy but clear, the time is 11 pm, the table result is Kapoacinth, I roll 8 for number appearing. No surprise is indicated, encounter distance is rolled and the PCs spot the 8 beasts coming out of the water and up to the side of the ship. They get one round of spells and missile fire before the creatures beset them. We broke there last session.

A few observations.

There were 23 encounter rolls from the morning of day 1 to the evening of day 6, these rolls produced three encounters, one of which had the monster (a giant whale) leave the party alone. The advantage of this system is that it is unpredictable, you can get repeated encounters on the same day, repeated encounters on sequential days, or days of nothing at all. The “nothing at all days”, when the players don’t want to role-play and nothing is otherwise rolled, go by very fast. The beauty of this system is it only triggers an encounter in certain cases, there is no “narrative requirement” for an encounter to occur every X number of days, so everyone at the table, referee included, gets to be surprised. I cannot overstate how important it is to NOT MESS WITH THE DICE ROLLS. Rolling out in the open and not fudging the rolls makes the game world seem independent of the players and the ref, and this adds to immersion IMO.

Each encounter roll was tense, you can run into anything in the water, and you can’t really flee when you are on a ship, most marine creatures can outrun you, so there is real risk on the water. Rolling multiple times is one of the features of this system, it produces engagement and excitement with every roll. 

The combination of curated tables, surprise, encounter distance and reaction rolls means that there are options other than combat in many cases, and extended trips like this allow the players more room to role play. As they can’t really speed up the travel, this leaves space for the players to fill with role-play interactions. Information gathering, engendering loyalty through positive interactions with the crew, these sorts of things give depth to the game world and show the players that interacting with the game world has benefits.

My players LOVE long distance travel, they have fun filling up the time between encounters, and the possibility of encounters is exciting in itself, making rolling for encounters an event every time.