Silhouettes LXVII

More silhouettes for your maps, handouts, and rulebooks.  These are all in the public domain, use them as you wish.  Have some more ships.
A brig:

Another dhow:

A felucca:

A frigate:

A galleon:

another junk:

A square-rigger:

Another square-rigger:

A sloop:

A hermaphrodite brig:

A schooner

Sea Trade from Dragon #6

This is the sea trade system from Dragon #6 Ωmega mentioned in my previous post.  I've read it before, but, looking back, I have to say I'm impressed. The whole thing fit on one page, was clean, and easy to understand. Kudos to Ronald C. Spencer, Jr.  It feels very DIY OSR to me.  

I've reformatted the data here for scholarly purposes. I changed "Ports Skipped" to "Port Distance" (it just makes more sense to me, unless there's some kind of race for time related to profiting).  I've also tabulated the returns and odds in a second chart. As you can see the sting of failure is ameliorated by including the brutal chance of ship loss with just getting poor returns on your cargo.  The biggest risk giving a 35% for the former, 25% for the latter. But if you take that risk, you have a 5% chance of getting one of those dreamed of 500% returns on your investment.

I don't think I would use this as is.  The minimalist in me wants to at least cut it down to short, medium, and long hauls.  But it's cool to see what they thought the probabilities should be.  If you can get a hold of a copy, the system also includes simple rules for pilot fees, time spent, and import taxes.  Cool stuff.

About Trade

What's the simplest system we could come up with for trading goods by sea that would still have some of the flavor of the real deal?  I figure some of you are very knowledgeable about this stuff (looking at you richard).

I'm thinking 3-4 tiers of.  More risk = more return. More risk will mostly = ports farther away.  Maybe have the player roll each session we play to check on the trade voyage's fate.

1. What should the probabilities of succeeding be for low, medium, high risk? If you stick with a single d6 and have the roll be 4-5-6, 5-6, or 6, that would be a fifty-fifty chance of losing a cargo even at the lowest risk.

2. What returns should I be looking at? I'd like no chart necessary, so numbers like +10%, +25%, +50% are more attractive, because I can do them in my head.  I have no idea if those are way too much or too little.

If we stick to general rates of return based on distance, we can decide later what ports have what goods and just plug them in and you could always layer shortages and rarity on top of the basic system bones.

Yeah, I realize this could ruin everything and let people make their fortune without needing to enter dungeons.  But investigating the loss of a vessel, or even traveling on your own trade vessel à la Sinbad, is right down my campaign's alley.

Boats

Have some boats. If I understand correctly these would be smaller craft more suitable for rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. Some of them may be more modern then you would like, but dhow, junk and sampan have been around for a long time. Also some, like the junk and dhow had larger versions for the open ocean. Of course that's just what I've gleaned from some online reading, more knowledgable folks please feel free to chime in.

A public domain image.

More Ships

Here's an Arab dhow:

A Chinese pirate junk:

A smuggling junk:

And a nice pic of an old lighthouse:

All public domain.

Pictures of Ships

I found a couple good books with pictures of different ship types in them: Ships of the Seven Seas and Old seas wings, ways, and words, in the days of oak and hemp.
Here are a few highlights:

Now the trick is to get stats for all these in game terms.  I'll post more about that later.

These are all public domain.