Shot and Splinters, Useful Tables 2

 

Image from chess set here

I’ve mentioned Shot and Splinters, Tom Mecredy’s naval Napoleonic hexcrawl before and I still find myself hearing the siren’s call of the Age of Sail.  In short, I have designed two additional tables for use in naval adventures around the time of 1800, inspired by history and my own flights of fancy. The trinkets and treasures d30 table describes things of value of the era or that are adorned with things of obvious value. For some of the entries I researched for museum pieces of the time and used those as inspiration. An example is the “traveling calendar timepiece from a Swiss watchmaker,” that I discovered in one of the references down below. 

Sailors have always had superstitions, so I mined those ideas and an article on ship leisure to generate the d20 table for incidents aboard ship.  Without much trouble, one could adapt the entries to apply to the crew of a spaceship as well.   

More sources for naval and Napoleonic history:

• Society in Napoleonic France

• Exploration and Discovery in the Napoleonic Era

• Breguet timepieces Napoleon owned

• One of the entries in the trinkets and treasure table is a direct reference to HP Lovecraft’s The Temple. 

• Some sailing superstitions 

• Leisure during the Age of Sail