1. Notes

Thousand Isle Quick Start Guide

Guide

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Dungeons and Dragons and Pirates! What could possibly go better together? It's like peanut butter and chocolate right? Well, as scores of failed supplements have shown, it's actually a trickier mashup then you would think. While the spirit and style of the pirating in the age of sail is a natural and additive match to Dungeons and Dragons genre, there are a number of complications that can easily wreck or divert such a campaign. Unless you as a dungeon master are aware and proactive in your world building and scenario generation, you are likely to miss the mark of your expectations.

The purpose of the The Thousand Isles campaign setting is to create an historically accurate and internally consistent sandbox campaign setting compatible with dnd 5e for low fantasy age-of-sail pirate adventures. 

This campaign setting does not require any rule changes to 5e though I do Suggest some.

In a previous blog post I’ve talked about some of the issues with creating a good age of sail pirate experience under the dnd 5e settings, especially if you care about enabling player agency via internal consistency.

I’ve also described how I intended to solve or work around the these issues. I discussed key world building elements that foster the emergent thematic properties I want, then made specific suggestions around 5E game mechanics, specifically managing the magic system and ship combat.  

It’s probably a good idea to read those two blog posts and get an idea if what I am going for is what you are interested in. I did have a very specific theme and set of goals in mind while building this world, if your goals or philosophy differ too far from where I started, well that is totally fine, but this supplement may not work for you.  

This campaign world reflects those solutions. It is intended to be a “drop in” early 17th century region that can be easily incorporated into any 5e fantasy campaign works that features a sizable and relatively unexplored ocean with a focus on Tall Ships and Piracy. In this document, the excellent (and free) Dwarven Forge campaign world of Valtentis is used as that starting point but it is relatively trivial to replace the few references to Valtentis and Valoria with whatever fantasy campaign setting you are currently using.

All you need to do is give your characters a reason to get out of their own particular dodge and a ship to take them away and you are off! The HMS Lady Jezebel was designed expressly for this purpose and the city of Haven Towne or Skull River Bay would make good initial destinations. If you want an example of making that transition, check out the Hightower Bay chapter on the blog.

Finally this setting is an amateur home-brew setting released under the Open Game License. I have no intention of making any sort of profit off this setting, it’s entirely for fun. However this also means it’s a bit bare bones at the moment. While it does have a fair amount of detail put into certain areas it has virtually none in others. While I do plan to keep contributing to this setting it’ll likely never reach the completeness or polish of a commercial product. C’est la vie. The upside of this is those blank spots are entirely up to you as a DM to fill in. If you come up with something especially clever ping me over on my blog (https://dndpirate.blogspot.com) and maybe we can incorporate your contributions here! 

Hope you enjoy and happy pirating!

Guy Bayes