Draft notes on a ShipCrawl game (March 2025)

This was also posted on my blog for Antherwyck Games and I'm sharing it here, as well. The news content with this, and which isn't explicitly stated, but is implied here, is that I'm again actively working on a revision/update for Shipping Forecast.  This site has been the main repository for the project, so following here will bring you the updates as they come out.

These notes could be considered as a new introduction to the game and an explanation of what it's supposed to be for and how it could be used in a campaign setting.

Lonely Fun There’s a kind of gaming that my friend Thor refers to as “lonely fun.” He might not have coined the term, but he first used it when talking with me in reference to making Traveller characters. Even in those early days, going through the lifepath and the choices and options to create a character. You were using the game, you were probably telling a story as you went along, building up the character’s backstory, perhaps getting ideas about some elements in their career, but all on your own.

I had a couple sessions where I took a character (but the stats and anything about the character was entirely irrelevant) who headed out into unexplored wilderness to begin setting up a new barony. Using the charts and tables in the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Ref_Sheets) I went through a hex crawl kind of exercise, with an empty hex grid map, plotting out the locations of streams, noted ruins, woods, and a few hexes of apple trees, among other things. Once my character moved in and built their stronghold, they’d be able to go back out and explore the interesting parts and bring in some peasants to tend and harvest the natural resources in the land. Going through the tables, making exploration checks, finding what was in the next hex (or block of hexes) and charting it all out kept me engrossed and entertained for a good amount of time.

I think that solo RPGs offer a similar kind of guided activity that helps to generate enough feedback to lead to the development of an emergent story. (I haven’t played more than a couple solo RPGs, and I’m sure the field is much broader than just that, but that’s a core facet of many of them, I feel)

Sandbox/West Marches-style Games I’m more familiar with this particular style of game from reading articles and discussion, rather than from actually experiencing a game like this firsthand. I’ve long been intrigued by games that deal with engagement with the environment. Dungeons, as a setting, are places that have meaning and purpose, and exploring and understanding that has long been an interesting part of TTRPGs, for me.

Yochai Gal wrote a recent article about Pointcrawls & Emergent Play (https://newschoolrevolution.com/pointcrawls-emergent-play/) that spells out his approach to exploration-type games. This isn’t a design inspiration (especially since I’ve been flailing at this game concept for a couple years, and that article was only posted last month). But, if this gets re-worked and revised to be part of the content for a later version of The Shipping Forecast, it could be useful to come back and revisit that.

World-Building Games Another kind of game that buttresses another aspect of this is a story-building game like The Quiet Year (https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year) or Microscope (https://www.lamemage.com/microscope/) or the Lexicon Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon_(game)). All of these have a framework structure for advancing the action (for some fairly broad definitions of what “action” might be construed to be), but in all cases, much of the story comes from what the player(s) develop as they are working through those steps of the game.

The Shipping Forecast The original idea for the Shipping Forecast was to have some regular rules for an exploration game. Like the Ready Ref Sheets, the Shipping Forecast provides a set of tables and procedures to use for resolving the travels of a sailing ship. Weather events, shipboard incidents, and activities in port are the key elements the system should provide. The initial premise for the Shipping Forecast was to have a regular armature for this information that could be used in a campaign.

My formulating idea was that I wanted to have a trade-oriented (buying and selling spec cargoes as the ship travels from island to island) campaign for a ship in an archipelago, or a nautically-oriented setting where ships are the principal mode for travel and trade. There would be landfall adventures, intrigues and plots and dungeon crawls, at the various ports of call. But I also wanted a set of rules to regularize the time and travel going from one island to another.

So the initial idea was that this would used as a framework around which a campaign can be run, and the player characters in the game are the crew of the ship (presumably the officers). There might be some points where translation of character skill might come into play, but the sailing of the ship is largely its own thing.

But, the other thing that came to mind as I have been working on this, is that it could be very well suited to be a solo game. The idea of tracking the winds and weather, making for a captain’s log that records the progress of the ship from port to port, and a similar system for dealing with the markets in individual ports, and the commodities available for trade; all of this could make for a system that produces a set of data that is game content, worked out through tables and dice. But the story that is told around that could be larger and more fleshed out, as much as the player may like.

This is a rough first draft at this; maybe it will get re-worked and eventually incorporated in some fashion, into an eventual release version of the game. If you’ve read this and have feedback or thoughts about it, let me know.