Sunless sea thread?

what does Veeky Forums thinks of fallen london/sunless sea/ sunless skies? i really wanted to run a campaign for it but i don't know how it will work with 3-5 players.

An excellent cosmic horror story that retains its own identity even within the context of the genre. What kind of game are you thinking of running? Number of players shouldn't really be a concern I don't think.

Can I play as a rat post office worker?

>I don't know how it will work with 3-5 players.
It won't. Having two players with this setting is already problematic, anything above makes it close to umpossible, unless you want to just use the setting as a basic backdrop and do dungeon crawl.
Which I doubt is your goal.

i just don't know, the series have been designed for 1 player hence my question. i dont want to go murder hobo as well

no dungeon crawl too

All i need is a 10 page .pdf to explain the setting and then i could just homebrew some islands

Problem is, even after playing FL and Sunless Sea i don't know wth is going on

I could understand if you are trying to recreate the games exactly, but if you just want to borrow the setting then what's the concern? Sunless Sea already has a party system with your crew. You could have the captain of the ship be a NPC to avoid power discrepancies between players and the players have to survive his (literally) insane desires to explore the most dangerous places of the (unter)zee.

You'd also have to restrict the places you could go to tho

I could see how visiting some locations too early could be problematic, but then you could just have the NPC captain railroad the players to visit the islands in a certain order. Then you give the players full control over what they want to do on the island and then they hop back on the boat when they are ready to visit the next location. Also allows the GM to keep pace with the campaign as well since I assume it will take a lot of preparation to fully flesh out every island pre-game. The concern I would have with running a game in this setting is what system to use? The games are great don't get me wrong, but the gameplay is pretty one-dimensional across the series. I'm having a hard time picturing how the game would run outside of exploration and social interaction.

One would think this will give a nice idea how to run sunless seaesque campaign.

>no dungeon crawl
What? Not having players getting lost on an expedition in a Forgotten Quater? Not having them traverse Mirror Marshes? No Frostfound, Labyrinth of Tigers, that pirate sunken temple thingy?

I think CoC would work well

If you want to adapt sunless sea, the attributes for land combat are pretty much the same.

The only thing you'd have to homebrew is the ships stats and that should be easy. You could reskin a lot of monsters and i think they'd work fine.

Give the ship enough damage, hp and armor and it should convey how strong those monsters are with and without a ships cannon

>Frostfound
Oh Jesus playing that with a group would be intense

That's part of the appeal, to me anyway. Always something strange and new to discover

I agree, but as a GM you kinda need that info

Being in that position as a player sounds amazing though

i feel a sunless sea campign will be too railroady. sunless skies on the other hand might be promising

Hows Sunless Sea railroady?

Sailing games always are. Go to this island, now to this island, now to this port.

>Why don't you want to go full 180 in different direction than the setting is going: The Post
kys

Thats not really railroading as you have no forced direction

Theres multiple paths, not a single rail

>sunless skies
>less railroad-y
Oh the irony

I'm actually a player in a campaign like this right now. It's not a 1:1 rendition of Sunless Sea though, just very heavily inspired by it. Anyway, the way we've done it is that the players are the ship's officers, and while a sort of main plot is starting to take form, there's also a lot of wandering around doing odd jobs and encountering weird shit.

>know almost everything about sunless sea and fallen london
>stopped regularly playing Fallen London as the monthly stories are kinda shitty and they already revealed the Devil's goals which was a major mystery to me that kept me playing
>literally nothing left other than boring shit I already know the ending to and mindless goat/cider grind
>will play Sunless Skies but I already know what will happen there
I think it's time I ran a session of this. Only problem is I don't have a system. Was recommended Apocalypse World or Fate.
I'm also really looking forwad to the cultist simulator.

spoil me senpai

I wouldn't recommend fate, it gives the players far too much agency for a horror themed game. I probably say CoC rules would work well, but they may need some adapting.

It's a fantastic setting. I love the atmosphere, the lore (especially on a cosmic level), the locations, the storytelling. But it'll be a pain to GM for, considering the sheer amount of blanks you'll have to fill, even... no, ESPECIALLY about the basic shit.

The games all suck balls, though. Fallen London is boring (and I say this as a PoSI) while Sunless Sea is boring AND a mess of contradictory mechanics fighting each other. Get SS when it's on sale, and don't be afraid to cheat your way through the grinding nonsense every now and then.

As far as TTRPG systems go, maybe look into 7th Sea? Never played it, but from what I hear it could be a great fit.

Imagine dangling SMEN in front of your players and having them bite. Priceless.
Although, granted, it would take some god tier game-mastering to pull off.

I assume you want the devils. I'll just pluck it from the mantelpiece. Those who know will get it. Can't really give you the exact details on Sunless Skies, but everything major in it was already spoiled.

There is a wrought-brass gate. You can see it; you can see through it, too. And yet you do not know what is on the far side. Or why the devils smile so widely when you ask.

"Quickening"

'—the rest is a blur. When I emerged, it was as if I had passed through, yet back to where I'd entered. If there was anything between, it passed as swiftly as an eye-blink. Yet I acquired this suitcase containing an elaborate apparatus. But I do recall flashes of memory: a place not of tormenting, but fermenting? A place where experiments are made to appease the Law. Nothing more comes to me. But perhaps the instruments contained within may solve other riddles.'

In hindsight it makes sense. This was a huge reveal to me though.

what is his name? i spent so much resources and time . eventually i gave up

please senpai

Wait "to appease the Law"? You mean they were working with judgements all along?

So the devils are just the good guys? Whats about the whole soul taking thing then? A soul in that universe is the same as it is in christian mythology, right?

The Infernal Sommelier said that they "were never against them" and "what we are doing is just" or something along those lines. The Judgements still hate them just like everything from Parabola.

Souls are more akin to spores here. When you find a Judgement egg it basically says this. Also they are connected to emotions as when you lose your soul you dull yourself. Judgements are fucking hungry and consume you and every soul not bound in a bottle, "Some may call it ascension. I call it consumption. The fate awaits us all, unless Hell preserves us. Perhaps even then". You see this in Sunless Sea when you die via sunlight and Fallen London when you release brilliant souls. You also see this in Kingeater's Castle as that is the hunger Salt left behind (there are other theories, but this is the most likely one as it relies the least on some dumb autistic leaps of logic).

The setting is stranger than numenera lmao

That's why it's so great, although one has to wonder how it will work since it's very fucking hard to die there

Victorian-set CoC would probably work fairly well right off the bat.

Sorry bud, I kinda stopped midway through out of boredom. Too much grinding. But I can tell you this: it's very likely that Mr Eaten was once Mr Candles. Maybe you already knew though.

>Judgements
>The good guys
That's super questionable.

Setting is very interesting, lovecraftian but not as hopeless, so you may use CoC mayhaps...main problem for making it is the fact that in the fluff it's kinda hard to die in the Neath, sure you can die, but bullet to the head, being poisoned, getting stabbed aren't that deadly

Don't you go insane when you die too many times?

Also theres the tomb colonies so im sure theres something there

Ehhh, who knows how many times one has to die to go insane.

Also I'm pretty sure that tomb colonists are just people who got too old, because while people age they don't of old age

Sure is a bummer the stories are all hidden behind such an inane game. I know you're meant to die, but they could speed it up a bit.

Starving to death and running out of fuel still leaves you with 30 minutes to an hour wasted. And its not like getting those isn't a life or death battle either.

>Don't you go insane when you die too many times?
Not really. You get better at chess though. There are final deaths where you can't come back (like exploding or getting your head chopped off, but there are characters who can avert even this)
>Also theres the tomb colonies so im sure theres something there
If you get horribly disfigured or too old where you literally start decomposing you end up in the Tomb Colonies which are akin to Lepper Colonies. Most people end up either decomposing to nothing, or moths.

what's up with tomb colonist and moths anyways?

Some tomb colonists avoid death by lowering their position on the Great Chain to become moths. This is some form of the shapeling arts and is super forbidden. Some are disgusted by it, but those who do it say that it is super pleasurable better than sex tier.

But that would require access to the book, which far as I can tell doesn't exist yet in any public fashion.

Yes, but think of it this way. It's a couple of months head start on compiling stuff from sunless sea to fit it better when book comes out eventually.