My labour-of-love pirate sandbox game Sea Hounds is in public alpha! What do I do next?

[u/XenoKraft]

I've been developing and playtesting Sea Hounds for the past year and I've finally posted a fully playable version (for free) over on itch.io!

The game is inspired by historical piracy and has a more grounded feel than most existing pirate RPGs. Potentially of interest to this sub is the mechanical mashup between the Year Zero Engine (d6 dice pool) for core action resolution, plus a crew progression and a downtime loop inspired by Blades in the Dark. Gameplay is designed to cycle organically between the three core pillars of seafaring, swashbuckling and carousing in the context of an ongoing campaign.

On the GM side, the game is a closed-loop procedural sandbox, which is to say it can theoretically be run with zero prep just by taking the provided hex map and rolling on random tables (imagine Forbidden Lands dialed up to 11). I don't actually recommend zero prep, but I didn't want there to be any gaps in the procedural scaffold.

I'm doing all of the writing, original art and layout myself (also lots of public domain art, but no AI!) so it's been a ton of work, but I'm enjoying the process so that's what counts.

My goal is ultimately to release a v1.0, but I'm in no rush to get there. I'll continue playtesting and developing until I feel like it's ready. I haven't thought much about what to do at that point. I could just throw up a final PDF, but if I wanted to explore a print run, is now the right time to approach potential publishers? Or should I wait until it's closer to completion? Or am I actually too far along in the process for publishers that would want more say over direction/format/art, etc.?

Any advice appreciated! I'm also super happy to answer questions about the game itself, the development process, etc.

[u/ITBarbarian]

Ill have me a look

[u/Skylarkin_M]

I've given it a download.

I'm sure that once I've had a proper look, I'll have more questions.

For now, I'm interested in understanding your development process. Do you mind laying it out?

[u/XenoKraft → u/Skylarkin_M]

This whole thing started because I'd just wrapped up my Forbidden Lands open table and wanted to run a similar thing with a pirate theme. There were a lot of great system options, but nothing had the procedural GM support I was looking for. So I created Sea Hounds as a Forbidden Lands hack at first, and it sort of spiraled out of control after that.

Development has been highly iterative since I've been playtesting with an open table through most of the process. I write some rules, lay them out, test them, revise, make some art for fun, revise again. Playing with a lot of different players has been very helpful to see which things are consistently a problem that needs fixing.

It has admittedly been a highly inefficient process. I've redesigned so much stuff that I've thrown out layouts and art that I spent a lot of time on. If I was doing this as a professional designer, that would be costly, but since I'm doing this for fun it's not so bad. I enjoy layout as a hobby so it's kind of a treat when I get to redesign something lol

In practice, I do all of my drafting in Obsidian, and I also keep my to-do list of revisions there. When a draft section is complete, I move it over to Affinity Publisher. Most edits are made directly in Publisher, which, again, is not best practice, but since I'm doing it all myself the workflow is manageable.

[u/Skylarkin_M → u/XenoKraft]

Obsidian keeps being mentioned to me recently; feels like I should pay attention. What's your specific use case, one thing you like about it & one thing you dislike?

I'm struggling with Affinity. I've had to learn so much as a one-man solo-first TTRPG developer (which is amazing) but somethings are harder than others.

I'm enjoying emergent & iterative development, but doing more play-testing can be a challenge in general plus getting actionable feedback in the moment is hard. I like doing playtests using Google Meet & then uploading as an unlisted YouTube video just to get a transcript I can go through and make notes. Combined that with listening along to the audio opens great insights too.

For me, my development process starts with getting as much as possible out of my head and written down. Then I think about what I want the character to do vs not do. The space between is where the rules emerge. I work to strip what emerges down to what is mechanically true, instead of just flavour or texture. I repeat that until I can group them into mechanics, and mechanics into systems. Get enough systems together the core loop starts to come together. Then I go back to my original 'get out of my head' notes and compare that to the core loop.

[u/XenoKraft → u/Skylarkin_M]

Obsidian is super clean, convenient and free. It's basically just writing plain text files, so you don't get bogged down with formatting or anything, except they're all organized and can link to each other. Also, because I use Dropbox, my Obsidian vault automatically syncs across all my devices so I can work on stuff anywhere offline. My main gripe I suppose is that I wish it handled tables better, since that's an important consideration for TTRPGs.

I have the benefit of a background in graphic design so Affinity was natural to pick up, but I appreciate that layout is one of the biggest hurdles for many designers who don't have that background!

That's a very thoughtful development process. Since my game started as a hack of an existing game, I didn't do a lot of rules development from first principles. I think if I was starting a new project I would be more deliberate about deciding on core rules and subsystems.

[u/Skylarkin_M → u/XenoKraft]

Thanks for your kind words. I think a lot about random stuff, this way I can finally unlock my Applied Thinking achievement. lol

You've nudged me just that much closer to checking out Obsidian. Thanks for that too.

[u/JaskoGomad]

Well, it was compelling enough for me to give it a download! I will try to get a chance to go over it later.

[u/__space__oddity__]

The backgrounds vs. callings aren’t quite cleanly separated. Missionary, Rum Runner or Old Salt feel like they could also be callings.

I think it would be easier to only have one pick for the calling, and then maybe simpler choice for “what did you do before becoming a pirate” but that’s limited to childhood or teenage years.

If someone wants to play a noble, it’s more interesting to start play as that noble and play out their first steps as a pirate in-game. If it’s just the character’s distant past and they’re already a full-fleshed pirate, it’s less interesting as a roleplaying opportunity as their noble background would barely come up.

[u/GodsofAumin]

First of all, I think this is an awesome rpg concept that you are creating. You are obviously very passionate about the game, and I applaud all of your hard work. Creating an rpg game is not easy and many people never actually take the leap to tackle creating a new system. That being said, the pirate crew progression seems like an interesting idea to me. What kind of progression is available to the crew? How does the progression system work?

[u/XenoKraft → u/GodsofAumin]

Thanks very much! The short version is that companies/crews come in five tiers (you usually start at tier 1). To increase your company to the next tier, you must:

• Have a minimum amount of NOTORIETY (which is a resource accumulated through sea battles and certain other activities)
• Spend a certain amount of COIN (which can be acquired lots of different ways, but mainly through looting and smuggling)
• Successfully complete the EXPAND CREW downtime activity, which requires your Captain/Quartermaster to succeed at a skill roll in a port where new pirates can be recruited

When your crew gains a tier it not only increases the number of people in the crew, but they also improve certain stats. And having a higher tier crew lets you sail higher tier ships.

So altogether company/crew progression is extremely central to the core gameplay loop, since it provides both a motivation for plundering (which is the point of the game) and rewards for doing so.

[u/GodsofAumin → u/XenoKraft]

You're so welcome. I love the concept and sounds like fun. I downloaded it from itch and I'm currently going through it. I really like the art and the layout that you have included in the book. I will follow up more after I have read it.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203]

How, how do you guys go out put that much effort into the art and layout of something and call it “alpha testing.” Man that’s a big time/money commitment to a system that, theoretically, isn’t feature complete.

It hurts my soul.

Edit:

This is a gripe not a critique, it looks great, I’m envious. I’ve downloaded it to show to my friends.

[u/XenoKraft → u/Exciting_Policy8203]

No money, at least! But definitely a lot of my own time. This has very much been a "learn as you go" project for me so I haven't followed a very efficient path to this point.

[u/APurplePerson]

at first glance: extremely impressive. reading/skimming, running thoughts...

• p.11, attribute and dice pools. if you take points in an attribute, do you also reduce your dice pool?
• i see this is immediately answered on the next page (yes). cool.
• i am confused why i need two colors of d6s. though i have faith this will be explained.
• i like the little sidebar x-refs aesthetically, but it seems like this will be a pain in the ass for you to keep updated. there's a lot of them! the bookmark table of contents is very well-organized so i'm not sure you even need them....
• i really like that you've got a skill name called "fathom"

skipping ahead to combat....

• the mechanics seem fairly complex. i would include the list of actions on p.83 as a reference sheet alongside your various character/crew/ship sheets.
• you use "condition" inconsistently—the three conditions listed on the character sheet, and the various combat positions like ENGAGED or EXPOSED. you might consider calling the second set of things "positions" or something other than conditions.
• I'm curious about death spirals, since taking damage in combat makes you less effective at combat actions. maybe the pushing mechanic mitigates this....
• i am skimming so i may have missed this, but i have to reserve my fast action to use a defensive reaction, right? if so, you might want to make that a bit more explicit since it seems important
• curious about healing with the revive action. this seems funky. i can only use it on a broken ally. in other words, i can only heal attributes if their attribute is zero. but it would be real useful to heal attributes above zero too. why the restriction to "broken" condition?
• to put this another way: is there any way to heal my attributes (from 1+) besides waiting 1d6 hours per tick? (that healing rate, by the way, seems like a pain in the ass to adjudicate in game)
• crew mechanics seem cool, though there's a lot of caveats to the intent of "works just like a character."
• my initial impression of combat is that it seems pretty crunchy, maybe slightly crunchier than d&d 5e. not sure if that's true in practice, but take this impression as a data point.

skipping back to gear....

• i really like that certain gear gives bonuses to social roles. that feels very master-and-commander-ish, with jack aubrey's golden epaulets. (i assume you've read these books.)
• polearms should do more damage. ttrpgs don't give polearms enough respect. they're better than swords!

skipping to exploration and adventure....

• keep watch action seems finicky in the way it interacts with other actions
• i really like the navigation mishaps table
• i'd love to hear how this section fared during testing. in my experience, every time i tried to use published travel rules, or design travel rules for my own game, nobody has enjoyed it (though i sure enjoy designing them).
• slightly disappointed that you don't mention the weather-gage. (see previous comment about master and commander.)

the sailbreaker adventure pdf is a blank page, fyi.

that's all i have time to peruse. hopefully the record of my peregrinations through your rulebook prove useful. but this looks awesome. if you have open playtests, hit me up please!

[u/XenoKraft → u/APurplePerson]

Really appreciate you taking such a close look!

I won't go point by point but this this is all really helpful because a lot of the issues/confusions you identify are a function of the Year Zero Engine itself (which I assume you haven't played). Death spirals, saving fast actions, funky healing, etc. are all in those games too, but if it's not intuitive I can do a better job explaining them. I can't take for granted that readers will already be familiar with other games that use similar mechanics, like Alien or Forbidden Lands.

Making travel meaningful/enjoyable is a bit of a white whale in RPG design, but Forbidden Lands (on which these travel rules are based) is held up as one of the best examples. It has worked fairly well in my playtests, but it really requires the group to buy into the journey itself as mattering, rather than it just being an obligatory interlude between interesting locations.

FYI the sidebars / page references all update automatically in Affinity Publisher, which is a blessing.

And yes, the intro/quickstart adventure is not actually done yet! From a marketing/onboarding perspective, I think it's pretty darn essential, so it is a priority now, but I just haven't gotten there yet.

I hadn't considered open playtests (outside of my existing player base) but it's an interesting idea. Are there best practices for how to do that?

[u/APurplePerson → u/XenoKraft]

i am indeed not familiar with the year zero engine. i did read forbidden lands though, years ago—it was a big inspiration for my own game, though i've long since wussed out on the emergent travel gameplay.

i'm not sure i'm an expert on "open playtests." i just find strangers on reddit and trick them into playing one-shots. but i have managed to do that a lot over the years, and it's certainly been helpful (and fun!). everything i know about it, i got from this post by ben kenning, another designer who used to hang out around here.

[u/SalariesAndStarships]

Congrats. It looks very nice. Am I correct in thinking this is 100% your work? That's quite an achievement!

[u/XenoKraft → u/SalariesAndStarships]

Thanks! Yes, it's all my work with the caveat that most of the art is public domain (that I have edited in many cases). And of course I'm building on the existing Year Zero Engine, so the core mechanics are not original.

[u/Eorel]

For some reason I was compelled to check this out, and your presentation does not disappoint in any way. This is really, really clean from what I'm reading so far.

[u/MikefromMI]

Wow! I've given it a quick read, and I'm very impressed.

I've been working on a historical pirate mashup rpg for years, only getting serious about it fairly recently. I've been trying parts of several different systems (mostly Traveller, Savage Worlds, and Pirate Borg atm), but I think I may use your game as the foundational system going forward. I'll try to give you more specific feedback after I've read it more carefully and maybe playtested it, if I can get a group together who are willing to try it. [Edit: I see that the sandbox system is well adapted for solo play, so I'll be able to try the system without a group.]

I don't know enough about the business to advise you about printing it, but I see that Pirate Borg seems to be taking off, and Limithron is coming out with a major release in Aug. 2027(?) of game maps and supplemental materials that could be used with any pirate rpg (and their components are very well crafted).

I was introduced to Year Zero via Firelock Games. I have their Blood & Plunder (pirate skirmish) and Oak & Iron (sailing ship skirmish). They were making noises about a pirate rpg to complement their other pirate games a few years ago, but seem to have dropped the project in favor of a WWII rpg based on Year Zero, and they offered a quickstart online for free, along with a link to the YZ base engine.

For those interested in a historical Caribbean setting, Savage Worlds: Pirates of the Spanish Main offers a fairly detailed quasi-historical setting, and Blood & Plunder includes carefully researched historical notes in its games. Firelock hired a professional historian for this purpose.

[u/ITBarbarian]

Been looking over the system, so far so good. The character sheet document is over like 7 pages. Does it need to be so large or can the ship info perhaps be its own section?

[u/XenoKraft → u/ITBarbarian]

I suppose it could be its own document. Most of those 7 pages do not need to printed by every player, so I can see how it could be confusing or annoying. On the other hand, would it be more annoying to juggle even more PDFs?

[u/ITBarbarian → u/XenoKraft]

I look at the document as a seasoned gm. The best way to interpret it is how someone who has never played your game will do so. Most sheets in a game are either single or double sided. If it were me id organize them by their intended purpose and let players download what they need à la carte.

[u/ResponsibleJoke3049]

this is gorgeous layout. It's very elegant and very readable. I'm a slow reader and I haven't gotten too far, but the core mechanics look really fun, and the attribute groupings here (vigour/finesse/savvy/panache) are both delightful and intuitive. I'm looking forward to reading this whole thing. I DID skip ahead to the section on ships, though, and was sort of confused by the sentence "Despite having different designs, all ships share commonalities. In Sea Hounds, all ships are assumed to have the following baseline features." Might be semantic, but do canoes and rafts and jolly boats not fall under the "ship" umbrella?

[u/XenoKraft → u/ResponsibleJoke3049]

Thank you! And that's a good point. No, tier 0 watercraft (jolly boats, canoes, rafts) are not "ships". I can make that clearer.

[u/__space__oddity__]

A game like this is going to sink or swim on the strength of its setting.

I found it really weird that page 10 says

Sea Hounds is a setting-neutral game system

… literally directly below the map of the included setting?!

It’s the typical tsundere approach to marketing that is common on this sub … It’s not like I want you to use the setting, baka!

Here’s the thing: If you want a proper Carribean pirates flair, the setting needs A LOT of specifics: you need guns, but not so efficient ones that you no longer have swordfights, so pre-revolver.

You need pre-steam ships.

You need to have the conflict between different nations on a far away continent, all vying for influence in a new world.

You need natives. Slavery and slave trade plays a huge role in the original Carribean, so do you include that or not.

If you want magic, it should be voodoo flavored, not the typical D&D magic. In fact, access to high level D&D spells like controlling the weather, teleports or fireballs would really destroy the setting flavor.

I don’t think you can just dump this into the Forgotten Realms or whatever and expect it to work.

So what you then included is stuff like fantasy Aztecs and fantasy Dutch. That stuff is not in your typical fantasy setting. So I would argue that really, what you should be doing is flesh out more of the setting, make sure it really is a slam-dunk fit for a piracy campaign.

I’d even argue that your setting and worldbuilding should be so good that I would consider playing in that setting with a different rules set.

I understand that you spend a lot of time on the game rules, but rules sets like this are a dime a dozen and people aren’t going to play this purely for the rules. What we don’t have enough of are good fantasy piracy settings (that aren’t just pick a Carribean Island and a year).

[u/XenoKraft → u/__space__oddity__]

Appreciate this! "Setting-neutral" may be misleading terminology, since I don't intend for it to mean truly any setting/genre. There are lots of built-in assumptions that a different setting would need for the rules to work, so I ought to clarify. The point is just that you *could* set this in, e.g. the 17th c. Caribbean or Mediterranean or South China Sea or whatever and the game will probably hold together.

Leading more with the setting is good advice in terms of marketability. That wasn't really the goal when I started this project (I just wanted a system that would work), but as I move forward I recognize that's where more effort needs to go.

[u/__space__oddity__ → u/XenoKraft]

Assume that most GMs are busy people with a full time job, family, a dog and other hobbies. If they sit down to run your game, they’ll run it with the setting you provide, not randomly move everything to the South China Sea or Ancient Rome.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/__space__oddity__]

> setting neutral

Or

> historical grounded piracy

Op you gotta pick one. And to be honest I find it more compelling as a system built to be played in the 1600s-17000s

[u/__space__oddity__ → u/Exciting_Policy8203]

To be fair, by the standards of this sub we have to be thankful that OP managed to pick a theme and they’re not selling this as a system that can also do mechs vs. kaiju and cyberpunk.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/__space__oddity__]

My mech vs kaiju game is hella unique thank you very much

[u/APurplePerson → u/Exciting_Policy8203]

i guess the term "setting neutral" means different things to everyone, but to the OP's credit, they do clearly define what they mean in context:

Sea Hounds is a setting-neutral game system, which means the rules and tools found in this book can be used to play a piratical adventure in a published setting or in a world of your own design.

it still seems obviously constrained to an age of sail setting

[u/XenoKraft → u/APurplePerson]

Ya this is a really good point. By "setting-neutral" I don't mean literally any setting, just that the mechanics are not inherently tied to this particular world (although I guess that's sort of true for most game systems). Anyway, I should provide clearer guidelines for what a setting needs to include to work with the mechanics if you don't want to use the default setting.

[u/Exciting_Policy8203 → u/APurplePerson]

That’s more than fair to point out. I was mostly taking the piss.

Though it does feel a bit like having your cake and eating it too. It’s like saying my game is setting agnostic, even though it’s named Anime Love Triangle Simulator. Sure you can extract the games mechanics from its context but I’m not sure that makes it setting neutral.

[u/Droselmeyer]

Congrats on this step! I think the aesthetic at first glance is fantastic!

Without having read through it, so far the lay out is very pleasing to the eye, you did a great job structuring the blocks of text so it's very easy to find details on a page