Alright Veeky Forums. I'm running a low magic, renaissance era campaign focused on exploration...

In some aspects. I guess you could call it "halberdpunk". Renaissance era politics, as well as most technology being period appropriate, but with some things, such as the airships, existing as well.

Feel free to use but the non-magic airships I've used in my setting is captured/domesticated atmospheric beasts with armor plating bolted on carrying gondolas like some freaky biotech dirigibles

Wasn't there a RTS game that sort of had that aesthetic? Like one faction had designs all based around Da Vinci stuff like corkscrew helicopters and "power" armor made out of pulleys and ropes

Sounds familiar, it seems like a lot of "steampunk" gets confused about what the Victorian era was and veers into that area as well.

Sword-beaked birds that swoop down at people and spear them. They typically drop down like lawn-darts on mid-sized grazing animals, then all flock around and pick the corpse clean. A large swarm is currently migrating to match the migration patterns of their prey, and happens across the ship. They're in migration mode, so they've prioritized making good speed over hunting, but they've expended a lot of energy and are hungry as a result, and the ship is as if the ground's been brought up to them, kicking them back in to predator mode. With as much direct danger as they are, they pose at least as large of a threat to the sails of the ship, which they will rip right through.

While their dive attacks cause devastating damage (maybe twice the damage of an average sword blow - 2d8 in D&D terms), a miss has a good chance (50%) of embedding their beaks in the deck. Typically, they have to spend a round recovering from a dive attack, but if they are embedded, add another round to that (during which they are easy targets, as they can't dodge).

Their typical pattern is:
round 1 - dive attack
round 2 - recover
round 3, 4 - fly back up
round 5 - dive attack
etc.

If they are beset during the recovery phase, they may not be able to properly take to the air, in which case they will hop and flap around and make comparatively weak attacks (the equivalent of knife blows - 1d4 in D&D terms).

Once in the air, they have to fly up for 2 rounds to gain full advantage of their dive attacks (2d8 damage), but depending on the circumstances, they may cut this short by 1 round and make a lower-velocity dive attack for half normal damage (1d8).

The birds are sizable, and relatively tough, but a solid sword blow is normally enough to kill or at least incapacitate one. Hitting one in the air is tricky, however, and you get the worst of two rolls on ranged attack. When in a dive, they are virtually unhittable, and you must take the worst of three rolls vs. them.

Age of legends. They used alien artifacts for the magic tho.
And what OP wants is by no means low magic. Its high magic and quite hi tech too. You making some sort of campaign where a class of people has a lot of the technology. You almost making Eberron levels of magical technology there. But them, theres not wrong with that if you find it cool and the players are liking it.
A thing I did on my own spelljammer inspired campaign that was a VERY squizofrenic setting was that once my player were flying above a forest in a passenger class skyship, bugs that survived by eating small quantities of magic got baited to the ship's engine in a huge mass and started to suck it on in mid flight. You can adapt it a bit and do somethign similar.

They are therefore most vulnerable in their recovery phase, especially if they get embedded in the deck (in which case you'd get the better of two rolls to hit them, or an automatic hit if you don't have to worry about guarding yourself from other attacks).

If there is a significant wind on the airship (the airship is not going with the wind), the swordbeaks will not need a recovery phase, and can instantly take to the air just by spreading their wings and catching the wind. If characters are smart and quick to respond, of course, they can order that the ship be turned to move with the wind, negating this as a factor.

As an added the swordbeaks might be tailed by scavenger birds of one (or both) of two types, hoping to benefit from the swordbeaks' kills:

Small scavengers the size of pigeons don't pose that much of an immediate danger. They'll peck at wounds and cause minimal damage (1 hp in D&D terms), but they'll mainly fill the air with fluttering wings, obscuring sight and coincidentally making it hard to attack the swordbeaks. Striking at a particular one of these scavengers is difficult, but you can make melee attacks with swinging weapons against a swarm of them (normal chance to hit, with any hit killing one - it's harder to strike at the group with a stabbing weapon, so worse of two rolls to hit). The flock will fly off after they lose handful of birds.

Big scavenger birds are much fewer in number and aren't particularly fast, but are like lions of the air, chasing smaller animals (in this case the swordbeaks) away from their kills. They have fat beaks capable of snapping bones, and do about as much damage as a sword (1d8 damage in D&D terms). They're hardy as fuck and it can be a little hard to get past their beaks to hurt them, but they aren't very mobile, and there's no penalty to shooting them in the air (or on the deck).

>Age of legends
That was it, thanks user

The swordbeaks will make staggered dive attacks, with about 1/4 of their number attacking on any round. This should divide them evenly between stages, and on the fourth round (and thereafter), 1/4 should be making dive attacks, 1/4 should be recovering, 1/4 should be in their first round of flying back up, and 1/4 should be in their second round of flying back up. And they'll just run in a cycle like that until they take heavy casualties (1/4 to 1/2 their total number, depending on what you feel like). Depending on how vicious you're feeling, you may the birds out number the on-deck crew anywhere from 2 to 1 (which means half of the deck crew will be attacked in any given round) all the way up to 4 to 1 (which means 1 attack per person).

If there are scavenger birds following the swordbeaks, they probably won't enter the fray until after at least 4 rounds of combat have passed.

I like all the worldbuilding that you've packed into this one monster encounter. It makes the world feel more connected and alive.

Antimagic weaponry is being developed by a fanatical cult that doesn't want airships, or rival nation that wants to cripple another nation.

They have a device that can counteract/nullify the magic powering an airship. This tech could throw the balance of power completely off if it proves to be successful. An agent of the cult/nation has decided to test it out on a commercial craft to see if it works. Your party is the guinea pig attack

Bump

>low magic
>airship

>Low Magic
>but airships
You're a special kinda retard aren't you OP?

Wait maybe I could see it
>entrapped air elemental powers ship
Its not magical, more mechanical, except for the air elemental. Knobs and dials and shit stir up the elemental and control the valves, rudders, whatever bullshit. If there's ever an engine hit/malfunction, that pissed off elemental is going to kill everyone it can get it's windy hands on.

>Low Magic
>But we can reliably capture air elementals for our ship.
Do you not understand the concept of low magic setting?

I've admitted I misused the term "low magic". Perhaps "hard" or strictly scientific magic would be a better description. I would still very much appreciate any encounter ideas you have.

Original idea for a non-combat npc encounter-
Basically have an anchor plummet down narrowly missing the ship. Then more and more all around them until theyre in a forest of chains. Your players can choose to investigate - find its a gathering of merry globe-trotting skyrates - your players can interact with them as they see fit.
Maybe they want to sabotage the ehole fleet and send them into free fall, maybe they just want to drink and party and go on a few adventures with them.

If you're going to continue this farce, I need you to decide right now, what kind of setting is this going to be?

Because if it's a low magic setting, you're going to have to drop the airships all together and have the campaign become more grounded. If it's a "scientific magic" then you can keep the airships but you're going to have to accept that everyone in your setting is going to have access to magic in some way.

You can't have both, otherwise you end up with 3.PF where the people with magic are fighting godzilla while the non-magic people are stuck in the back trying not to get hit from the falling debris.

Idk why he cant have it the way he described. Make magic a more academic, technology based thing than an arcane thing. But still make it whimsical and magical. Dont listen OP i like your idea.

>Idk why he cant have it the way he described.
Because if magic is capable of being controlled the way that OP describes, it raises several implications about the setting that would not be possible if the setting were actually Low Magic.

Low Magic generally implies that magic is rare, dangerous, or unknown to most people within the setting, so encountering something like a troll or an orc is a big fucking deal because people generally won't have many effective means of defending themselves against beasts that can easily kill ordinary men with little effort (think Berserk when Guts and Zodd fought against one another for the first time).

So in order for this setting to be possible, magic would have to be plentiful enough to be witnessed and consistent enough to allow experiments to take place that would lead to prototypes that would later produce the first air elemental powered flying ship, which is fine but goes beyond the scope of a Low Magic setting.

It's not low magic mate, I've already jumped through all of the hoops you're demanding out of me. I've already admitted a couple of times that I was wrong to call it low magic, and that I should have used a better term. You're just getting bogged down in semantics now.

Okay then, so now that we've established that it's not Low Magic, what other bits of arcane technology is available to the average adventurer?

I'm imagining it like a pirate campaign.

Pirates are definitely a part of it, but I'd like to limit their role in encounters since airship pirates can get boring. However, stuff like sounds goddamn awesome, I'll probably use that at some point just for the visual, plus I like the idea of pirate societies that operate like political entities. As for magical technology, there really isn't much. Because of the equipment required to handle magic in any meaningful way a handheld item is somewhat impractical. Firearms are around but just standard ones, not inherently magical. I imagine an adventurer may choose, however, to modify their gun with some kind of elemental effect, since the magical device doesn't have to handle the actual propulsion of the bullet, just applying a very small, localized effect to the bullet as it exits the barrel.

What if there exists technology that allows one to capture an elemental for later use? Then you could have a system where people can capture elementals as a job and use their essence to power magical equipment which the players could choose to either use as an upgrade to their kits or sell for massive profit to offset how dangerous hunting wild elementals could be.

without giving away too much because I might publish it someday lel my setting just has a mineral which can be combined with another mineral through fairly basic metallurgy to create floating stones essentially. I dont explain how it works because nobody in the setting knows exactly how it works, as was the case with most observed phenomena before the "enlightenment". it's created in factories, no chanting or spellbooks required, and all it needs to work is sockets in the hull of the airship.

That's neither high magic nor high tech, is it?

Glad you liked it!

Naw I've read a low magic setting with air ships.

Magic doesn't necessarily mean that magic is rare, it could be common place but weak.

>Magic doesn't necessarily mean that magic is rare, it could be common place but weak.
If it were weak then you wouldn't have flying airships in the first place.
>Naw I've read a low magic setting with air ships.
Such as?

Parasites on the outer hull that need to be removed via rapelling down
Floating shipwreck/abandoned ship

Not him but Edge Chronicles?

So, Treasure Planet?