Greetings!

Maritime explorers present a treasure trove of adventuring opportunities, new knowledge, the discovery of new lands, the development of entirely new trade routes, as well as encounters with entirely new peoples, tribes, and civilizations. The Player Characters can often become such kinds of characters themselves, or otherwise accompany such figures on fantastic journeys into the unknown! I have also found that diving into really developing such explorer characters--both Player Characters and NPC's--serves to enhance the depth of the campaign milieu as a whole, with a secondary effect of also creating new kinds of treasures, such as captain's logs, special navigation maps and charts, as well as many other things. I think developing maritime explorers in the campaign also enhances naval knowledge, the growth of ship-building, and opens the doors so to speak to new kinds of adventures, trade routes, and new experiences for the Player Characters, but also creating new experiences and dynamics for cultures and kingdoms within the campaign world.

Historically, I am often inspired by the age of exploration in the ancient and medieval worlds--not so much with the Renaissance and later ages of exploration as such later styles or ages of exploration bring along a host of other campaign dynamics that I do not want in an ancient and medieval flavoured campaign world. I am always blown away by the achievements, the knowledge, and the inspiring journeys of the great explorers and merchants of the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, and the ancient Chinese, as well as various maritime cultures of the Pacific region. Explorers and merchants from all of these diverse cultures, hundreds of years or more apart, and separated often by many thousands of miles, all yearned to explore and gain knowledge of the broader world beyond the horizon! All of these tales of daring explorers are wondrous, amazing, and inspiring!

Have you developed such characters and maritime traditions in your own campaign worlds?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

In D&D, I haven't found many of my players at all interested in such things.

In sci-fi games, they are very much interested in taking such approaches, and I remember our group really getting into the Star Vikings idea of T:NE a few decades back.

I haven't yet done so but it's my ambition to explore this in my Sundaland setting. After all there's an argument (not a mainstream one mind you) that the people that spread out in to the Pacific came from the sunken subcontinent and not Taiwan (see the book Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer).

Either way, Southeast Asia is a wonderful setting for maritime exploration and adventures. Like you I'm also inspired by mariners of the ancient world. Maps are probably rare and there will be a reliance on oral tradition, closely guarded secrets and local guides.

I haven't gone in much depth yet but I've gathered some relevant links here: https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/2020/04/seafaring-and-sea-gypsies.html

Quote from: TimothyWestwind on October 04, 2020, 07:44:05 PM
I haven't yet done so but it's my ambition to explore this in my Sundaland setting. After all there's an argument (not a mainstream one mind you) that the people that spread out in to the Pacific came from the sunken subcontinent and not Taiwan (see the book Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer).

Either way, Southeast Asia is a wonderful setting for maritime exploration and adventures. Like you I'm also inspired by mariners of the ancient world. Maps are probably rare and there will be a reliance on oral tradition, closely guarded secrets and local guides.

I haven't gone in much depth yet but I've gathered some relevant links here: https://sundaland-rpg-setting.blogspot.com/2020/04/seafaring-and-sea-gypsies.html

Greetings!

Outstanding, man! You know, it's amazing the vast *books* full of cool and interesting--and often significant and important--knowledge we *don't* usually get in school--even college. I know I have been fascinated by somewhat obscure knowledge. For example, the Romans had been trading with ancient India for many years during the empire--by ocean trading routes through the Red Sea, then into the Indian Ocean, and over to the western coast of India. Rome had huge trading embassies there, and gained riches from India, from fine cotton clothing, rich silks, the wondrous spices--like pepper, among others--as well as animals like the peacock. Likewise, Indian merchants had for centuries been sailing the Monsoon current all the way to the Persian Gulf, Egypt, and down the coastline of Eastern Africa. In ancient India, the Cholan Empire had come to dominate southern India--but also much of Indonesia, and many islands throughout the south-eastern Pacific in an extensive and prosperous empire founded significantly upon a large navy and merchant fleet which spread out through the Indian Ocean and into the southern Pacific. Amazing stuff! The ancient Chinese as well had been sailing throughout the southern Pacific and to India, conducting prosperous trade and exploration, as well as immigration. Further into the Pacific, yeah, wow. Various Pacific island groups related to China and the Maori, settled throughout the Pacific through sailing and rowing--thousands of miles. DNA testing has confirmed genetic links throughout all of these islands out to Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and everywhere in between. All done in large ocean-going canoes and such. Mind boggling!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I love age of sail and trading adventures, and these are always at least in the background in my campaigns.  In my longest running campaign, there were two major world powers competing with each other for colonies and resources.  As is my usual practice, I mixed several real world and fictional cultures to come up with each.  The Mnempens were a mix of the Aztecs and Eddings' Nyissans.  The Mishihari were a mix of Viking, Maori, and Andre Norton's Sul.  The Mnempens were bigger and richer, but the Mishihari were better fighters.  The conflict between these groups drove a lot of the politics and background events.  The PCs were from and mostly operated in a much smaller region based on European (or generic fantasy) culture where the nations had resisted colonization by the stronger powers. I've tried to run ship based campaigns - it seems like a no-brainer way to do things, but it's never gotten far.  I think that one of the issues is fragility of ships as compared to some D&D monsters.

Did you know the Romans sent an expedition up the Nile?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero%27s_exploration_of_the_Nile_river

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa

I assume you've come across the discussion around the Land of Punt (the place Egyptians would travel to for trading). The assumption is always that this referred to the horn of Africa, Yemen or the East coast of Africa. Again there are fringe theories about it being India, Java or Sumatra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Punt

And for something a bit more out there. Did an ancient Egyptian trading fleet get lost and end up stranded in Australia? Hieroglyphics found in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHbjWA6LbMY


As I said I don't have coherent ideas on this topic for my setting just yet, but here are some points I've thought about.

1. Boats: Crab sails, canoes, outriggers, double hulled canoes (See the blog post I linked to previously for my inspiration) . The river systems are extensive in my setting so I can imagine that as kingdoms become more powerful there will eventually be canoes the size of Triremes.

2. I don't know how common maps are. It depends on the culture. In real life the Greeks seemed more interested in accurate maps and the Romans were more interested in practicality (of course!). But even if the people in the ancient world had plenty of maps, we would never know since they've been lost over the millennia.

3. Itinerary 'maps'. Travellers and traders might be able to provide a list of places that lead to a final destination. There's a word for this type of travel guide but it escapes me right now. Travellers to Jerusalem for example had a list of places so they could ask the way at each point along the journey.

4. Big exploratory / merchant fleets. Probably because there's safety in numbers. If a culture has the resources they might be able to afford to put together such a fleet that has sufficient numbers of specialists and skilled people that can be self-sufficient for one or two years.

This is the equivalent of Star Trek in the ancient world. Go out on a voyage of discovery for several years, come back with tales and treasure.

5. The way I like to play my setting is as S&S, no/low magic. But I sometimes think about bringing in influences from an old cartoon called the Pirates of Darkwater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJB-6_XMfxg

There's a PofDW RPG and setting book floating around if you do a search.

BTW, there's a free Traveller hack called Mercator based on the Mediterranean in 1st and 2nd century AD. I haven't read through it yet but it looks interesting. It has tables of information about ship sizes with their cost, capacity etc. Also details about the price of trading goods, rules of trading, hiring crew etc. A lot of heavy work done for you that can easily be modified to suit a different setting.

You can get it here: https://www.paulelliottbooks.com/free-rpgs.html

Not really much of maritime exploration in my campaign -- effectively, the 1800 mile by 1500 mile mapped world is around a giant freaking inland sea -- but my campaigns have always been heavily maritime oriented.  For a few decades now, I've run out of large port cities.  Heck, the adventure in the main party now involves a long sea+river voyage: the princess running the show owns the ship, in which she and a previous party were buccaneers about 16 real years ago.  

Come to that, I have a blog post on the subject: https://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-to-do-your-own-age-of-sail.html

Maritime exploration is a great premise for an episodic game of exploration. Give the PCs a ship, and then come up with some excuse to get them to launch. The excuse could be a royal or even divine mandate, or something more mundane like a treasure map or bounty. Throw in some kind of Traveller-style star I mean port-hopping mercantile rules, track food and other supplies by the displacement ton, and let the players decide where and in which direction to go. Setting it up so it's a bunch of islands or an archipelago or inland sea instead of a bare coast gives the players more options. Drop rumors of more distant ports or landings. Make it clear that degree of distance from the start roughly equals level of challenge, and you have a campaign structure that has many of the advantages of a dungeon crawl, because the player can choose the degree of risk. Roll for ship-related complications like the doldrums or spoiled good, and for the small stops between major landings, roughly paralleling wandering encounters (which would also occur).

Although this is during the middle ages I like the idea of self-sufficient fleets like the Chinese had.


This is an example of an adventurer / mariner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

Here's an article about the possibility of Chinese mariners reaching Australia: https://www.theage.com.au/world/its-official-admiral-zheng-beat-cook-to-australia-20021125-gdutvo.html

"In Australia's case, Menzies claims Zheng's vice-admirals, Hong Bao and Zhou Man, beat Cook by almost 350 years. The two men, both eunuchs (as was the custom for captains), arrived in Australia in 1422 - Hong on the west coast, Zhou on the east - and spent several months exploring, landing in several places.

Their ships were massive - 122 metres long by 27 metres wide - not that much smaller than a modern aircraft carrier and absolute giants compared with those used by Columbus about 70 years later. The captains navigated by the stars.

Each ship had up to 1000 sailors, who were supplied with fresh vegetables, meat and rice grown on factory ships that accompanied the fleet."

The author also wrote a book about about a Chinese fleet that made it to Italy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies

Gaving Menzies is firmly an amateur/pseudo-historian but it's the kind of thing that sparks the imagination.

MAZES & MINOTAURS has some nice tables for generating random islands for the players to explore.
It can easily be transported to other games to prime the idea pump.

Farley Mowat's The Farfarers is a very cool theoretical dive into pre-viking maritime exploration that reached North America, in which he postulates (among other things) the use of largely light sealskin-hulled vessels which upon arrival at a winter stopover were then overturned and used as roofs for their dwellings.