Hi All,

My apologies for the 4S DV inflicting pun in the title. This is just a plea for suggestions / resources for a run I've got lined up. I wanted something a little different so I thought about having a run targetting a ship. I'm thinking probably kill the corrupt captain of a cargo ship. Perhaps he knows that he has enemies in Seattle and is simply avoiding coming to shore there. Or it might suit my players better if the captain wasn't corrupt and had simply caused too much trouble to the local Syndicates in the past and one of them wanted a little payback. Could be a good chance to introduce the Vory. I'm running a butchered Ghost Cartels campaign so I reckon I can tie it in to that, also.

So help I need at present is as follows:

First and foremost: plans for a ship. I've done a data search and not come up with anything that helpful yet. They don't need to be RPG maps - I can re-draw anything if need be. I just need realistic layouts. Ideally I'm looking for a medium to large-sized cargo vessel (not oil tanker), but if someone has an especially good yacht or something, I suppose I could always swap my plot around a bit.

Second up, if anyone has any useful nautical material of any kind to share, I'd be interested. Whether that is patrol boats, ocean drones, sea monsters or whatever. Or even just experiences with similar adventures.

Third, can anyone say where international waters would begin? One of the possibly plot outlines I have is someone who remains outside of UCAS territory, but provides a smuggling point that the Seattle government would like to dispose of. The Seattle map from Runner Havens seems to draw a border about five miles out (approx. 7km). But that also appears to put the area beyond into Salish-Sidhe waters which can't be right - people have to sail through Salish-Sidhe to get to Seattle?

Fourth and last, can anyone give me sensible suggestions as to a possible cargo and where it might be shipped from? I dislike answering players questions for detail with "the boxes contain stuff". And inevitably one of my players will try to steal the ship.

Ship plans are my most urgent need. If I can get this sorted this evening then I can print out anything I do on A3 at work tomorrow. But aside from that I am completely open to any ideas for a water-bourne / ship-bound adventure.

Any replies are appreciated.

Peace,

Khadim.

EDIT: Also has there ever been any cannon information on the waters around Seattle? It would be a shame to run this adventure and later find that it's well known that Seattle waters are supposed to be haunted by pink kraken, or something.

You could have the ship's cargo be NERPS!.

Territorial waters, or a territorial sea, as defined by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is a belt of coastal waters extending at most twelve nautical miles from the baseline (usually the mean low-water mark) of a coastal state.

"Cargo Ship Deckplans" google image search:

http://www.ssjeremiahobrien.org/deckplanssimple1.jpg

http://oakgrovedesigns.net/homepage/libships/topview.gif

http://www.ssmaritime.com/angelinaplan1.jpg

etc.

I have not been aable to find any ship plans yet, but I will keep looking. You could always make it a container ship. Shipping 40'0 containers from the Japan, Hong Kong and other East countries to Seattle. They hold a lot of contianers so you don't have to get to specfic, just tell the players the they see thousands of containers carring various companies products. You could then have the captain who is using the massive amount of containers as a cover to smuggle stuff. Who is going to look through 5000 containers for 1-2 contsiners of contraband.

I believe the international community recognizes 15 miles from shore as sovereign terrotory. after that international waters.

Trevor

What kind of cargo? Incredibly run of the mill boring stuff or something potentially exciting to runners? Is the ship leaving Seattle or coming into it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship

Each container can carry totally different things. Inside a container there probably are additional protections for the cargo, such as padded boxes for electronics, vacuum containers for expensive perishables (in SR most natural foods are expensive, so they get better treatment than today, when after a few days of a harbor strike, ships can stink to high hell from rotting foodstuffs.) or maybe more lethal stuff for more expensive/rare cargo.
Opening a cargo container before it's final destination (not just the ship destination) is a HUGE taboo. Not even the shipping line may open one, so unless the captain decides it's a life or death matter, he will not allow opening a container or otherwise tampering with it. Each is sealed in such a way that opening it must destroy the seal, so tampering with a container cannot noramlly be disguised. In shadowrun they may be electronically locked, and loaded with RFID tags, and so on. If your players ask you what's inside the containers, answer "what isn't", and send them to the ship's manifest.
By the way, some containers may include very bizzare and exotic cargo. While a ship's manifest may write it down as something else, sometimes someone in the shipping company knows the real cargo (perhaps he's a contact with organized crime moving their stuff, perhaps just a wageslave editing a manifest as ordered by his bosses).

As you can see from the photos, it's very hard to handle containers during a shipping voyage. So a run against a ship in mid-voyage will probably have other objectives (hijacking the ship, killing/ransoming the crew, raiding the ship's computers (or crew) for important information, and more. A huge shipping line represents an investment by a lot of people. Should it be known that the runners caused an entire ship to be lost, the will probably be hunted down relentlessly by the corporate court. Ransoming a ship and it's crew to their shipping line is the saner choice here. If the run objective is opening a specific cargo container, better do it while it awaits shipping in the harbot storage area, or at some other point along it's route while it's being moved on land.
However, I've seen several movies in which ships were attacked and containers breached in mid-voyage.

Movies : The only one I can think of right now is War of the Worlds. The hero is a harbor crane operator.

Knasser: have ship maps. On iPhone. Will post when I get home. Alright....

Khadim: I developed these MAPS for my PbP game. Its meant to be a kind of all-purpose medium sized craft, so it has things like a moon pool and work shops, as well as a cargo hold. Based it on the schematic drawing included. The photo images are an actual ship of the same model. The later images are recent updates with some newer techniques I've been using (including a scale/grid). All are formated for printing on a standard 8.5 x 11. If you have questions about what's what, let me know. Also I can edit them fairly easily (add or remove chase boats, mini-sub in bay, magic circle in forward hold, etc).

I recently used these maps for an adventure where the runners are hired to recover a specific crate from a ship that had been hi-jacked by pirates. The third party shipping company decided to write off the loss and collect the insurance (which actually happens in some case). Johnson needs to recover McGuffin. [Optional Twist: Johnson is not the one who shipped said McGuffin- he's an opportunist who is trying to steal it]

Seems like every time you see cargo containers on a ship, it invariably leads to human cargo. Off the coast of Seattle, this would likely be refugees from Asia, SE Asia (specifically the Phillipines, if that area is still all f'd up with Japanese occupation) or maybe the east coast of Africa. All of whom will have paid their life savings in order to come to Seattle (even if they were told they were going somewhere else), to be slave labor in underground sweatshops, bunraku parlors, Seoulpa rings, and so on.

Or, you could go seriously old school and have a vampire in one of the containers. I mean, it seems like smart vamps would fly, but if they don't have passports and they want to travel under the radar (or they think they're Dracula), sleeping in a dirt filled cargo container would work. They can even Mist Form out of it when they get bored, and go eat some of the human cargo in other containers. The smugglers could think they're dropping off a bunch of slave laborers, and find out that some HMHVV'er on a Bram Stoker trip has drained half the cargo and turned the other half in vamps and vamp pawns. Make it a Nosferatu (if you have PAoE, or wherever they were updated), and it gets even creepier. (Since some human cargo is bound to die on the trip anyway, that makes the vamp even less noticeable.) Or, make it the Filipino vamp variant that eats the internal organs. The runners break open a few containers that contain bodies whose chest cavities have been treated like a brunch buffet, and they'll wish they'd stayed on sweet, sweet asphalt.

The container bays should only be partially full, that way you have a lot of long corridors between containers in sort of a grid, but uneven 3D terrain for the running gunbattles. (Against people with Mist Form, this becomes even more problematic, since they can pop up anywhere.)

These maps are great, Method!

Thanks for sharing

No problem. Be sure to check the various sub-galleries on my photobucket for more. Use them well.

Everybody - thank you for all replies. I didn't reply before because I have a tendency to try and finish what I'm working on before I share it.

If anyone wants to see the final target of the last mission I ran, the maps and stats are here:

http://knasser.me.uk/content/shadowrun/cargoship.pdf

Everyone's comments were a big help. I ultimately based my design on noonesshowmonkey's Liberty Ship links. The comments about Containerisation and International Waters were all very useful to the actual adventure. The PCs had to assassinate the captain of the ship who had moored it off in international waters some way out from Everett. It was fun.

Thanks again to all - this was an area I knew very little about,

Khadim.

Funny you should mention this I'm just finishing up a module for a convention next month to run a ship based run.

1) Here is the one I'm working on making into a vector right now its a battleship though hope it helps out.

2) Use aerial drones along with some few small craft boats patrolling a few hundred meters from the boat if its a smugglers ship. If its a warship you could use smaller craft protecting it along with all sorts of mil-spec goodies. Both of these would have hardened systems for navigation because getting lost and being run aground by some hacker would be about the worst thing that could happen.

3) Truly international waters start at 200 nautical miles (~375 kilometers) the laws of a nation start at 12 nautical miles (21.6 kilometers) off the coast

4) Anything from drugs to toys stuffed with drugs to drugs stuffed with toys to anything in between. Ships carry almost everything just decide what in general the ship specializes in. If its a pirate ship just say its carrying contraband, if its a shipping vessel just make a list and roll a 6 sided die and pick off that list each time, if its a military vessel its guns or military hardware.

Hope all this helps out.

It does. Thanks. I similarly made a vector drawing of my ship (linked in the post above yours) which took long enough. Your battleship is substantially more sophisticated than that though. I think I cocked up a number of things in actually running this mission - I'll write it up for my campaign log when I have time. But basically, I think I allowed a plan for getting on board to succeed which really shouldn't have.

Peace,

Khadim.

I actually just ran a ship-bound wetwork two nights ago. The target was on a Classique III, had 5 "Red Samurai" with slightly changed gear and a wagemage with 2 bound water elementals on his craft with him, and 2 Seacops trailing him, each with 2 "Red Samurai" and a GE Vigilant Light Autocannon.

The world-class sniper waited till the target was abovedeck and shot him from 1.65 kilometers away, putting the guy at 16 overflow. Just to spice things up a bit, I had the guy burn Edge to survive, and they saw him reach for the bulletwound in his head, just before he went behind a wall. The sniper then Called Shot/Long Shot'd the guy. He doesn't have a confirmed kill.

That's not dissimilar to how things played out with mine. They were forced to board the ship but two of them bluffed their way in to see the captain (their target) and managed to kill him. Of course two were on the ship and two on the helicopter. There was some fighting which the PCs managed with little damage taken and now they're on their way back. The captain spent a couple of Edge points to survive at first, but the way Burning Edge works in my game, actually burning a point would let him survive the entire encounter which didn't seem fair as their mission was to kill him. Besides, the group had come a long way from charging in blindly to having plans. Still they're not home yet...

Knasser, where did you get your blueprint? I've been looking for things like this, specifically for a corvette or similar class ship but can't find much. Certainly nothing for modern warships.

Not sure about cannon info, though I know there was something in Rigger 3 about warships and such. As for canon info, however, I'm sure I read something in New Seattle about some hints as to what's on the high-ish seas

As I based my plans around the Liberty Ships that another poster mentioned, it was actually quite easy to find deck plans just from a web search, because these ships are historical and famous. That might be a lot less easy with modern ships. And whatever you do don't search for "corvette deckplans" all you'll just be swamped with results from Star Wars RPG.

You could try here

or do a search on Naval Ship Schematics. It wasn't easy though. There's probably some magic word or phrase that will unleash thousands of handy designs, but I don't know enough about ships to guess what it is. At any rate, I advise you to keep drowning and swimming rules nearby.

Good luck,

K.

LINK

There is a menu at the top right of each page that says "Plans / Schematics", "Pictures" or what have you. What you get can be hit or miss, but whatever.

BTW its also a great resource for a myriad of other military, paramilitary and security related junk.

Thanks guys. I already found out about corvettes and star wars Also corvettes and the Corvette. I really hate that car. I wonder if the lack of readily available schematics for modern warships has something to do with national security or something.

Nope, people just look in the wrong place. Try for example this site:
http://www.briese.de/typo3/index.php?id=13...p;L=1&No=81

Most of the workhorses/vessels for this operator have General Arrangement Plans available for download in pdf forms which should fullfill your needs.

Note these vessels are really workhorses in relation to seaborne cargoes, but should fulfill your needs.