Naval Combat in 5e

A few years ago I ran a wave-crawling, island hopping, colonial power-smashing piratical campaign in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. At the time I was very concerned with making ship combat and exploration VERY crunchy and cooperative. I home-brewed a Frankenstein of a system together to these ends and it worked well enough to be fun for our table.

However, the whole system stole WAY too liberally to be publishable. OD&D could say “Use Chainmail” for mass combat without feeling bad about it because Gary Gygax wrote Chainmail. I, however, had nothing to do with the X-wing game that I used for ship movement or a number of the other sources I stole liberally from.

Still though, people ask me from time to time to see what I came up with, and rather than post those resources over and over in the forums where they ask, I can compile everything here.

Let me know if you use, hack, or read these rules. I would love to know if anyone gets real use out of them! Happy sailing!

Here are the rules:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M-Kd-9uvdlmZmajTwbQVX-YfdveBlx5H/view?usp=sharing

And here are some 'helpful' record sheets

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LO2suvpB3c89mQwF_IvqVqxhJsxcJE2t/view?usp=sharing

A lot of this requires you to have the components from the X-wing tabletop game, and know a little bit about how that works.

• https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/x-wing/

I also cribbed from the following...

• NAVAL COMBAT (5E) - Running Sea Encounters for Ships & Monsters

• Coins and Scrolls - Wave-crawl

• Unearthed Arcana, Of Ships and the Sea

I hope you can cobble together something you think is useful from this mess! Have fun!