Seas of Sand toolkit

I'm working on a setting that's called the Seas of Sand; it's a big desert that's filled with liquid-like sand. During the day, the sand is liquid, meaning you'll sink if you walk on it, but you can sail a ship across it. At night, the sand cools and hardens, so you can walk across it, but ships get "frozen" in place.

It's a naval campaign setting, basically, but it's in a desert, and thus other, unusual things happen.

I've now run about 4 sessions with some OSR types across two campaigns, plus a handful of test sessions, so I've got some mostly-workable rules and a map, which I figure I'll share.

This stuff is geared for GLOG, but is pretty easily hackable elsewhere.

The first are the rules for sandships:

Sandship Rules

These rules cover the basics of sandships, the big wooden ships that sail across the dunes. It's got their four stats, some ship conditions you can suffer from, and a list of ships. All pretty straightforward; a lot of these rules were cribbed from stuff like Skerples's pirate GLOG, and Clint & Cassie Krause's Driftwood Verses, which is still not out but I played one time at Gen Con and fell in love with.

Crew Rules

These cover the different kinds of crew you might have on a ship, and how you pay crews. Merchants pay crews by the day, but pirates pay by the share. At some point I'm going to draft up a loyalty & morale system for crews, where getting shares means more loyalty, but for now it's just payment. (It's also worth noting crew wages are in copper, not silver—this is a medieval-ish setting, and thus most people get paid abysmally.)

Goods & Costs

This doc covers some of the more common goods you might haul across the Seas, plus rules for taxes, sea laws, and ship repairs. This gets into the fiddlier aspect of the game, the more intense bookkeeping; some groups like that, some hate it. If yours is the latter, you can gloss over a lot of this stuff, and just give them a ship and cargo and then tell them to head out.

The Seven Sands

There are seven different kinds of sand in the Seas (and thus seven seas, har har), each of which functions a little bit differently (or a lot differently). The three common ones—silk, sugar, and salt sand—all are relatively normal, but the four weird ones get very strange. 

And here's the map we're using:

It's pretty hastily-drawn, but it works well enough. Each of those squares is 100 miles. I cover Qasira in this post, and might do the other five cities at some point. The different-colored sections are the different kinds of sand that appear in the Seas, covered in the doc above. Here's a brief summary of each city, plus what each city has and needs, in terms of trade. 

These rules are all written with a kind of naval-ish campaign in mind, with players taking the roles of merchants, pirates, or something in between. Lots of sailing around and managing cargo, with perhaps a less-intense focus on dungeons or classic "adventuring." Adventure still happens on the high (sandy) seas, of course, but it's more procedural, more incidental. 

I would make edits and tweaks to all of these, except that the hard drive that had these InDesign and Photoshop files has died, along with most of my work for the Seas, so they won't be getting changes anytime soon, tragically. 

As always, you're free to hack and tweak and modify all of this stuff, though I'd perhaps appreciate you not selling it. I'm hoping to, at some point in the distant future, turn this into a real-ass book and sell it. Hopefully.