Players buy a ship

How involved were they?
Because the best two options are either they were to involved with the events that either it follows them to wherever they may go or they are forced to return to deal with it.
No. 2 is start a new adventure.

There is a third option, just keep throwing curve balls at them like a passive-aggressive cunt, from pirates to sea monsters to months of no wind and dwindling supplies.
But you don't want to be a cuntnot actually all that cuntish now, do ya?

>Taking the chance to enjoy nautical horror is being a cunt
Look, my players had BETTER know how I feel about the ocean if they want to go to sea.

There has literally never been a campaign in the history of the role-playing hobby wherein a DM wasn't putting in the lion's share of the pre-game work.

Have them sail off the edge of the world and end up in the mirror world. If the stuff they were involved in was important enough you can make the mirror world show the bad end that results from them shirking their duty. Then (if they want) let them return to the real world and prevent that from happening. Or they can stay in the mirror world and fix it.

I dunno, shadowrun sort of behooves the players to come up with all the supporting characters, leaving the DM free to have the barest of storylines.

I mean, if they want they can go all floorplans on you, but it is not required by the game.

A obstacle or three is not. But an entire hurdle course is being a cunt.
A Kraken is fine, Krakens after Krakens is being an arse.

No, just a series of four to 20 islands of various horrible gimmicks, along with occasional incursions on the ship of skin walkers, sentient hiveminds of detritous eaters, and occasional crew falling to the madness of the deep.

"putting in more work" is not the same as "putting in a shit ton more work".

If you're wasting your time making up locations and NPCs that your players might never encounter, you're overplanning. There's a whole world out there, and some GMs expect their players to remain within 10 miles of the starting tavern through the whole campaign.

Events behind keep rolling, maybe someone there sends for them, and players find new dangers in the open sea and finally find The Land of Randomly Rolled Shit

>gay wedding Lich
sauce me my guy

Move the important parts of your plot to the new continent, just with the role of King Chester replaced by Chief Wumpum

rapozacomics.carbonmade.com/projects/5313679
It's in the free sample, somewhere.
It's a neat comic, altogether.

Dinosaur. Island.

Players don't speak the local language. They'll leave eventually.

I think he meant this one

You know what's amazing?
That someone can say "Lich gay marriage story" and there is not just one, but two viable answers.

That sounds like a fun adventure.
When my group goes sailing the dm has a one-off pirate fight before a storm wrecks the boat and strands us at the destination.

Twice now.

Oh well, sucks that I found out only now that the campaign I'm running apparently isn't part of the history of role-playing. Weird.

Either try to improvise a story that suits the group better or end it with them sailing off into the sunset. They're clearly not into the story you've given them so far.

Actually, there's three viable answers. Somebody else greentexted about some gay paladin who wanted to legalize gay marriage too, and then they get overrun by oecs, because apparently gay marriage was more important.

*overrun by orcs, sorry. Misspelled orcs.

>the ship is torn apart by a storm
>they wake up in some sort of tent
>turns out they washed up on a nearby tribal island
>the tribe there was going to use them as sacrifice to appease their gods, but the shaman of the island thinks they were sent by the gods
>they think that because they've never seen humans, elves, and other mainland races before.
>they believe your duty on the island is to defeat a great evil there, conveniently located atop the mountain of the island.

>Players decide to leave the port town hub they've been in and sail away to another country entirely, leaving behind important events they've been involved in.
>What do you do?
The game ends with an short epilogue about how the characters become pirates/privateers/shipping merchants.

Roll up new characters, boys and girls.

Have they also hired a skilled crew and navigator? You can't just "sail to another country". Sailing across even narrow bodies of water is nearly impossible for unskilled sailors if the weather is bad. Sailing intercontinentally in even calm seas would be a shit-show.

>what do I do if the players do something I haven't planned for?

what do you think?

Just have them stumbled across the lines of drug and slave smuggling that your local antagonist group uses to fund their evildoing. Tracking the crimes to their source brings the party back to roost.

Plus, now you can have wacky island one-shots like the Isle of the Ape Kings or the tower that bridges the seafloor and the sky

have another grop of NPC adventurers solve their quests and reap all their glry, while they are stuck doing unimportant quests.
Then they'll have to fight them.

Let the players figure it out themselves, they'll find something to do.

Also, the world goes on without them. By the time they come back (assuming they DO come back), things will not stay the same from when they left.

Roll up a new adventure but play the old area out in the background as if the heroes have left and it goes unsolved. Let them find out what's happening when they get a chance. Either it follows them to their new location or it becomes a part of the game lore

Just adapt that elsewhere, be creative. I have like 8 dungeons pending and 5 of those have had to move locations

If they run away from supposed module content then tell players that either they find reasons for their characters to get involved in shit happening or make new ones that are. Because when I make a game that has some theme, I warn players beforehand and expect them to roll with it or GTFO.

If it's sandbox then open my "sea and distant lands shit" folder for marine adventures.

I let them, and adapt the campaign to them playing in the new country. Every now and then they'll hear news of how fucked things are getting in the land they left, not that those assholes will care.

Correct, your delusions aren't real.

>locations and NPCs that your players might never encounter, you're overplanning.
So, in this case any amount of pre-planning is overplanning, since they decided to tell the DM to fuck off and just leave the campaign.
Even if the players are putting in as much work as the DM, it's still a dick move for them to drop everything the DM has prepared in order to pursue some random never-before-mentioned idea.

Storm Dragon.

>Not world building

How pedant

Just have there be no other continent. They set out, circle the globe, and land back home, just on the other side of the world

In their absence things either resolve themselves or get much worse.
The results of their absence should be waiting if they ever come back.
Consequences that CAN feasibly follow them should impact them wherever they wind up.

or let them see THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN