Stormwrack is All Wet

[User3]

So I've just had a chance to look at Stormwrack. Here are the vitals:

--No classes that are worthwhile. While there is a Sea Witch class that gives the abiity to make maelstroms(which is pretty neat, but useless in most ways), but you ditch it after 2 or 3 levels.
--Enough sea combat rules to make your eyes glaze over. Real glazing.
--Sea-ish feats, with one or two new combat feats that you almost would take.....if none of the Complete books or setting books existed.
--New races! There is a human subtyped race that is all aquatic and skill bonusy. There is also a +2 Str/-2 Dex race with a natural bite attack which is +0 LA and the new melee race for everyone ever. Poor half-orc.
--Aquatic longbows? WTF?
--Some useful expansions on skills. Knowledge(Architecture and Engineering) is the boat building skill and Knowledge(Geography) is the navigation skill.
--More sea monsters, including an aquatic monster that you kill and juice, then smear the fresh monster juice on your body for a Stoneskin effect that washes off in water. How that is supposed to work is beyond me.

[Username17]

Every time someone writes nautical rules for anything, you end up with a bunch of special rules that don't make any sense in the greater context of the game. I don't know how many times I've had to tell people in a Shadowrun game that under no circumstances could they take "Sea Madness" as a flaw on their character.

In general, people shouldn't be allowed to write rules for nautical adventures. Regular adventuring rules should work when people are on the deck of a ship. It's just not that outlandish of a setting.

-Username17

[MrWaeseL]

Doesn't Savage Species have mouth weapons?

[Josh_Kablack]

Well the problems with the generic D&D rules for sea adventuring is that they don't handle ship to ship combat well. However, I am inclined to see this as a really minor problem, since parties of four adventures + a roughly equal number of cohorts really aren't capable of crewing anything that would regularily engage in ship to ship combat. On the PC party scale, ships should really just be terrain and special effects.

However I do have some issues with the listed ship speeds and how they interact with the speeds likely to be possessed by aquatic adventurers. There is a need for some ship speed-boosting magic sails and a clear need for naval powers' warships to function as fantasy aircraft carriers for some sort of aerial cavalry. Otherwise they will just get owned by the wildshaping, swan-boating, merfolk-allying PC pirates who can outrun them by 2 to 1 or more with better manuverability.

[User3]

How do the spells look in Stormwrack? Any great ones? Broken ones?

[MrWaeseL]

By the way, I resent how on the cover the monk looks all cool and collected, while the druid is getting hammered. That's not an accurate depiction of real D&D a all.

[Crissa]

Think fins-to-feet, Guest.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

Think fins-to-feet, Guest.

Thinks: Well I'm thinking of a gun!

... ok so you yanks aren't going to get a goon show reference but I can't help it.