Why are underwater adventures so boring?

[Lago PARANOIA]

the Tome treatment of sahuagin are all pretty cool (and not for reasons that have anything to do with stats).

I take exception with this right here. I'm starting to think that the Tome treatment of sahuagin is actually a lame handwave.

Part of their writeup assumes a large, conquering, united empire. This is despite the fact that there is no hint of an economy of scale underwater (not even a bullshit Bronze age one) despite the fact that they're supposed to live fairly deep underwater, visibility is severely limited for them, and there's no way for them to keep a bureaucracy.

It makes a lot more sense for them to be isolated, xenophobic clans of ignorant Warrior Fish without even a unified culture--let alone government. But if you go the more sensible route sahuagin aren't any different from Monster Clan of the Week #3. Hence the handwave.

[Crissa]

Well, just because fishmen won or win all their battles doesn't mean they do or don't have a fishmen empire.

I'm sure to deer the Roman empire was no more an empire (perhaps less so) than the middle age kingdoms that came after.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

Empires need bureaucracy in order to not fracture, which is why Alexander the Great had an empire that almost immediately collapsed after his death, Rome had an empire that lasted for several centuries, and why Europe's empire was small and weak.

But the Sahuagin can't support a bureaucracy because they fucking live underwater. Unless they have some sort of crazy hivemind/racial memory thing going on like the Aboleth and were conservative to the point where the Catholic church would tell them to tone it down a little and could project force on a level that would have to exceed what people could do until the middle of the 20th century, empires would break apart almost as soon as they were formed.

They'd probably break apart anyway because bureaucracies NEED the written word to even have a prayer of functioning and you can't have writing underwater.

[Crissa]

Lago. Read my post. Reply.

To a deer, is there any difference between the Roman Empire and the Christian Kingdoms? They're both an oppressive monolith.

-Crissa

...Also, why can't you have writing underwater? Knotted string, shells, stone or coral all can be used as means of conveying a writ. Sure, the process of printing might be a bit tough to comprehend - them not having liquids in an air environment - and some places they don't even have light naturally, but that doesn't mean they can't have a written language.

And under water you have lots of other things you can take advantage of to create images which are just difficult to do or retain above water, such as growing images.

[Maxus]

They'd probably break apart anyway because bureaucracies NEED the written word to even have a prayer of functioning and you can't have writing underwater.

I beg to differ.

Not on paper, but god know what they can do. Carve it? Make something out of seaweed (hey, if mushrooms get a free pass underground...)

Point is, there isn't any reason they can't. Nor any reason they can. It's done to 'Because I said so"

[angelfromanotherpin]

They'd probably break apart anyway because bureaucracies NEED the written word to even have a prayer of functioning and you can't have writing underwater.

Why not? Writing can be carved into stone or coral, or facilitated by any of a number of techniques that can be developed when you have a racial +4 Int mod.

[Lago PARANOIA]

To a deer, is there any difference between the Roman Empire and the Christian Kingdoms? They're both an oppressive monolith.

I don't know what this means and neither do you.

At the bare minimum you can't have any large, successive government without a bureaucracy. The Roman Empire had a very successful one, which is why they got large, while the Christian Kingdom had abject failures, which is why they were tiny and fractured.

I don't really give a care about how oppressive any particular Sahuagin government is or how it ranks in comparison to other democracies/autocracies/etc., I'm objecting to the idea of the Sahuagin empire being unified and world-spanning.

Not on paper, but god know what they can do. Carve it? Make something out of seaweed (hey, if mushrooms get a free pass underground...)

Point is, there isn't any reason they can't. Nor any reason they can. It's done to 'Because I said so"

Why not? Writing can be carved into stone or coral, or facilitated by any of a number of techniques that can be developed when you have a racial +4 Int mod.

1) Just because you have a written word doesn't mean that a bureaucracy can automatically form. It's like a car. There's no way you can have a modern automobile without an engine, but even if you do have that you need more than that to have a car. Government bureaucracies need to be able to project force and also have reliable communications between everything it encompasses. This situation becomes absurd beyond all reasoning when you say that you have a world-spanning empire that owns the briny depths during the medieval Europe time periods.

2) That sounds suspiciously like a bullshit handwave I was talking about earlier. We want a sahuagin worldwide empire real real bad despite the fact that one of the biggest stumbling blocks towards them actually forming a bureaucracy (having a written record) is just not possible.

So what's the solution? Blah de blah SEAWEED. Coral. Rocks. Let's forget the fact that actually having a book on one of these fuckers is absurd beyond all reasoning, let's just say that they have them anyway. Fucken brilliant writing!!!

[mean_liar]

EDIT. Oops. I missed Page 3, so here's the context from the end of p2 I'm responding to with this post:

Why is switching up backdrops deemed not worthwhile?

Yes, that's exactly the question. In theory, underwater adventures should be worthwhile.

Do you have any fond memories of underwater adventures to share?

I ran one recently. It was fun. They beat the hell out of some aquatic-race smuggler/pirates. Crabs, jellyfish swarms, and electrical and ice effects/spells with their bizarre underwater enhancements... and the HalfOgre Entomanthrope WereMonstrousCrab Monk/Fighter/Barbarian. Great fun. Next session was to Not-Sigil.

Not much more to say than that. Players had fun, I had fun, and the enemy Aquatic Elf Sea Witch was of course more effective than CRABMAN, but CRABMAN was cooler.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Whatever, Lago. The Aztecs ran an empire with only a crappy pictographic writing system and crappy communications. The Maya ran a large bureaucracy on stone records, and the Mesopotamians did it on clay tablets; no books required. This really seems like a failure of your imagination.

[hogarth]

I ran one recently. It was fun. They beat the hell out of some aquatic-race smuggler/pirates. Crabs, jellyfish swarms, and electrical and ice effects/spells with their bizarre underwater enhancements... and the HalfOgre Entomanthrope WereMonstrousCrab Monk/Fighter/Barbarian. Great fun. Next session was to Not-Sigil.

Not much more to say than that. Players had fun, I had fun, and the enemy Aquatic Elf Sea Witch was of course more effective than CRABMAN, but CRABMAN was cooler.

Sounds kind of neat! I suspect your game is probably more high-power than I'm used to. So my experience is more along the lines of "try not to drown" or "you failed your Swim check, so you can't do anything this turn".

[mean_liar]

Ah. I hate tracking the fiddly bits after level 3 or 4 and generally hook up PCs with good patrons - they had an ample supply of water breathing potions (2 per character I think?) and some other gear from Stormwrack that gave them a Swim speed. The fighting types all use piercing weapons, so that wasn't even an issue.

It was more, "fight the coral golem in a tight corridor while the aquatic sea witch dimension doors while invisibly blasting the shit out of you!" Good stuff. Some kind of ice spell to make a tiny iceberg to clog up the tunnel to split the party, then d-dooring behind the party and continuing to cast indirect spells at them while they attempt to hack through the ice to get to their pal.

I run on Nightmare mode, where the characters are all optimized and I assign feats individually to each monster rather than using their Monster Manual load-outs, put armor on top of natural armor, that sort of thing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Whatever, Lago. The Aztecs ran an empire with only a crappy pictographic writing system and crappy communications. The Maya ran a large bureaucracy on stone records, and the Mesopotamians did it on clay tablets; no books required. This really seems like a failure of your imagination.

WTF?

The Aztecs and Mayan totally had paper records. The conquistadors fucking burned them all. On purpose.

Also, Mesopotamians? Do you mean Sumerians? Because their successors (Assyrians and Akkadians--who penned Epic of Gilgamesh) totally had paper. They're the only ones who didn't write on papyrus, what with cuneiform tablets. But they didn't have much of an empire. Their civilization didn't have a radius of a hundred miles from the center. And they were ruled by several city-states rather than one government. That is a far ways off from having a world-spanning monoculture, guy.

[virgil]

I don't recall the sahuagin write-up saying they were a single, unified civilization. I'd still call fractured medieval Europe human dominated, and they managed to still have great cities and all that.

As for how they could spread information out fast enough to maintain a bureaucracy for a large empire, is magic advanced enough? Hell, the basic stat-block explicitly gives psychic communication powers, so any kind of extrapolation is possible; whether it be trained 'messenger' telepaths, or even psychically reactive memory stones. Also, I could imagine sounding structures taking advantage of water to make sound travel way farther.

While insufficient for portability, carving remains a viable option for writing. Portable, simple information for messengers could use something akin to beads & knots on string with an established code (or carvings on bone).

[Crissa]

Actually, the Maya had real books. But the Inca didn't have books, and instead used knotted colored string for their records.

Nearly any type of paper is of course superior to clay tablets, but the clay tablets still worked.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't recall the sahuagin write-up saying they were a single, unified civilization.

This is implied by omission. There aren't sahuagin subraces (D&D's comical but typical way of creating civilizations), there aren't a pantheon of sahuagin gods, there's no cultural diffusion, etc. This implies a monoculture, which is absurd, or more likely that this ties back into my original assertion that no one gives a shit about what's going on underwater. Because people accept these kinds of handwaves at face value.

As for how they could spread information out fast enough to maintain a bureaucracy for a large empire, is magic advanced enough?

I guess, but it seems like such a cheap, lazy, hack way of doing things. I'm tired of using the excuse of 'magic' for plothole spackle, especially when it requires creating shit from scratch to force the kinds of plot points you want when a much more reasonable interpretation is just around the corner.

While insufficient for portability, carving remains a viable option for writing.

Goddammit TGD, stop saying 'carving'. You can't have stone tablets without clay, a way to write in the clay without the characters deforming while you're transcribing (good luck doing that while you're underwater), a way to DRY the clay, and a way to keep them dry once you warm them.

If you mean 'carving' as in finding a rock and digging into it with tools I'm going to fucking laugh at you.

Portable, simple information for messengers could use something akin to beads & knots on string with an established code (or carvings on bone).

This is significantly more reasonable. They're not going to be made of bones, because they deform too easily and it's underwater, but teeth seems likely, assuming that they pull it from each other and have some way of shaping them.

[Danchild]

Soft metal is superior to clay with regards durability. It also provides a decent template for papyus or paper rubbings. Unfortunately the value of the metal is probably worth more to a conquerer than the information on it.

[Crissa]

And yet, people had been doing it for years before paper.

-Crissa

[erik]

A level 9 wizard can just fabricate whole walls of writing out of stone or whatthefuckever. Hell, it might be interesting to wander through the Halls of Record where the halls are seriously the written history and records.

Could have walls several hundred feet high and long. Just hope you have a librarian who knows the system!


There's diving slates that can be written on for short temporary messages... and I stumbled upon this on the internets:

http://www.infohub.com/forums/showthread.php?t=370

So maybe there are papers that work underwater?

[A Man In Black]

This is significantly more reasonable. They're not going to be made of bones, because they deform too easily and it's underwater, but teeth seems likely, assuming that they pull it from each other and have some way of shaping them.

Why from each other? Sahuagin have domesticated sharks.

[Crissa]

Oil pencils and plastic film are often used as waterproof writing surfaces. But that sorta requires plastics.

-Crissa

[Prak]

What about alchemically/magically preserved hides with engraving? sure, not as fast as scraping a lead pencil on paper, but it'd work.

Alchemy could theoretically be possible for an aquatic race if they stole the necessary equipment from a merchant vessel, and found some way to work in an air-filled environment, like a cave or such.

And saying "A wizard did it" is only a cop out when that's all you say. Saying "A wizard did it by..." is not.

[RandomCasualty2]

And saying "A wizard did it" is only a cop out when that's all you say. Saying "A wizard did it by..." is not.

Well if you can't have writing without wizards, you pretty much can't have wizards, because you need writing to even have wizards.

Basically all you're allowed to use is divine magic basically, since it doens't require that you have writing to do that.

[ubernoob]

And saying "A wizard did it" is only a cop out when that's all you say. Saying "A wizard did it by..." is not.

Well if you can't have writing without wizards, you pretty much can't have wizards, because you need writing to even have wizards.

Basically all you're allowed to use is divine magic basically, since it doens't require that you have writing to do that.

Clerics, Druids, and Sorcerers work fine without writing.

[Prak]

wizards don't require paper.
Complete Arcane 139: Alternate Spellbooks
Sahuagin could easily make use of Structures, Tattoos (or scarification, for aquatic), or Tokens.

None of these require paper or pigments.

[IGTN]

If getting effective underwater writing tools is impossible for the Sahuagin (since they've also got to solve their lighting problem with magic, which is, admittedly, already done), then there is another solution: they set up their bureaucratic posts in air bubbles, or even deliberately build air bubbles for their writing rooms and libraries. They already need air bubbles if they're going to keep anyone they kidnap from a coastal town alive long enough to enslave/sacrifice alive, so it's not entirely new.

Also, I could easily see a system of scarring of animals being used to convey messages. Slash the message onto the side of a fish, "leash" it to your messenger, and then you can deliver messages from town to town. Probably let it heal first so you don't get eaten by sharks, although that takes time (or magic), or you can skip the live animal and just carve skins. Knots, as virgileso suggested, is probably a better way if they can make string (something underwater has to have tendons, at least, even if they can't make it out of kelp or something).

There might also be a creature with a shell suitable to writing on; shells are complex layered materials, so any large flat shell (abalone is too curved) with a thin outer layer that looks notably different from the inner layer is suitable for scraping writing onto as long as something hard enough to scratch it is common enough. It's slow, but it lasts well enough for record keeping.