Shot and Splinters, Useful Tables

 

I bought the ttrpg Shot and Splinters from Tom Mecredy’s itch page. I’ve had it for three weeks and I am preparing to run a game of it. It is wonderful. I’ll let Tom Mecredy describe his product himself. 

Shot and Splinters is a naval OSR hexcrawl set in the middle of the Napoleonic era, at about 1801.  Players will have the opportunity to raid the French coast of Brittany and engage in all sorts of nautical misadventures with the other nations warships and merchants plying their trade in the area. 

The main rules are very brief, in the OSR style and character creation only takes up a couple of pages. Tom Mecredy considers his creation to be a hack of the very well regarded OSR hexcrawl Wolves upon the Coast by Luke Gearing.  The DNA from Gearing’s epic Wolves upon the Coast shines through Shot and Splinters.  For example, in Wolves upon the Coast, each character rolls for three characteristics only: Strength, Agility and Constitution. In Shot and Splinters, each character rolls for four characteristics: Authority, Brawn, Dexterity and Intellect.  Since players will be associated with or on a ship for the majority of the adventures in Shot and Splinters, it makes sense for Authority to be added as a characteristic.  Authority measures respect and reputation among the crew. In a similar vein, since players may engage in intellectual activities like navigation, having Intellect as a characteristic allows the GM to abstract to dice rolls certain elements of ship maintenance. 

In preparation for running Shot and Splinters I did some research about the Napoleonic era. I am not a history buff, but I found the world of 1801 to be a rich and cosmopolitan place. Inspired by this I decided to make a d30 table with interesting travelers that players could encounter on Brittany or off its coast. I attempted to fill the table with an international motley of entries so that each encounter would be unique.  Also, since bandits abound in Shot and Splinters, I made a short 1d6 table to add some color to those encounters, giving some of the bandits an interesting background. I may expand on this latter table in the future. 

 In poking about the world of Shot and Splinters and 1801, I found the following sources to be helpful:

• Galvanism
• Brittany
• Jonathan North’s writings about Napoleonic history
• In addition, one of the characters on the interesting travelers table is a De la Poer. Read HP Lovecraft’s Rats in the Walls to get that reference. I just couldn’t help myself!

Movies:

• Master and Commander
• Napoleon
• Damn the Defiant!