Sea of Dead Men
A downloadable game
The Game
Sea of Dead Men is a tabletop role-playing game about a crew of pirates making their fortune in the lawless Carrascan Sea. You'll start out as a novice crew, with a ragged ship and a motley gang of sailors, and slowly grow in skill and influence as you navigate a web of rival pirates, occult powers, merchant companies, and military armadas.
Sea of Dead Men is built on the Forged in the Dark engine, bringing the flexibility and excitement of the Blades in the Dark ruleset to the genre of high seas piracy. The game alternates between the characters' daring scores, where they set out to seize plunder and strike against their enemies, and the downtime in between, where they rest, recover, and pursue their own individual goals.
The Rulebook
Sea of Dead Men is now a fully stand-alone ruleset. The 387-page PDF includes all the rules you'll need to create and play a crew of daring pirates, plus advice for playing and running the game, a primer on nautical terminology and concepts, and a wealth of description for the regions, factions, and nations of the Carrascan Sea.
If you want to give the game a try without spending any money, you can download a demo version for free. The demo version requires you to already be familiar with Blades in the Dark (or willing to peruse the Blades SRD), but is otherwise completely playable. It includes all the content from the previous (non-standalone) releases.
Resources
Both the paid and free downloads contain copies of the playbook sheets, as well as a set of reference sheets. These sheets include rules summaries for easy reference, trackers for heat/faction status and PC harm, a map of the Carrascan Sea, and a set of random tables.
For online play, a set of Google Sheets playbooks can be found at this link. You won't be able to edit those sheets directly - you'll need to copy the file into your own account before you can start filling in details.
You can also find playbook sheets for Roll20 at this link, along with instructions for their use. Note that you'll need a paid Pro account with Roll20 to use them, at least for now.
The full rulebook contains diagrams of various types of ships, which are available to download here as a separate file. They're based on images from Wikipedia (some are unmodified downloads from Wikimedia Commons, some are my own adaptations), and as such they're licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
- Rulebook PDF is now compressedJan 22, 2024
- Sea of Dead Men - Full ReleaseJan 21, 2024
Comments
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Hey ensifer!
I'm wondering, have you changed anything important in the core mechanic of fitd? I'm not sure I have to read all the rules if i player already Blades in the Dark, Hack The Planet or so.
Most of the core mechanics are pretty much the same as Blades, but there are a few changes. Both the full rulebook and the free demo have a section towards the beginning that lists out all the notable differences, including page number links to those those specific sections.
I'm wondering is there any chance to get from You an editable reference/players sheets, to translate it? I started to play with my group. I can translate it to Polish language. It would help me a lot just to change the text because I'm not master of ps/canva/whatever u used xD
Howdy, I was looking for inspiration for a Skies of Arcadia BitD hack I've been wanting to make and came across your game. I wanted to ask if it was ok for me to use this as a base for my hack?
Go for it! A lot of of the ruleset comes directly from Blades anyway, and the new/adjusted mechanics I added for Sea of Dead Men are totally fine to use in other games.
Big congrats for the full release, ensifer!
Just had our Session 0. All three players said this was the most fun character and crew creation they had. Can't wait for the first mission!
There is typo in the book in the Sallician factions. House Camillieri is spelled as Carrascos, so House Carrascos is mentioned two times. It is easy to make a mistake between them.
Glad you're enjoying it!
I've updated the PDF to fix that typo; if you download it again, the faction heading and table of contents should have the correct name.
just wanted to say that this is by far my favorite Forged in the Dark game, such an evocative setting even from the original demo. It’s been a big creative inspiration for 3 years and so excited to see such a developed version. Incredible job!
Are there any plans on getting sheets in Foundry VTT? I know it is not a small endeavour... Great game though! Hopefully we will see more expanded version soon.
I ran Sea of Dead Men yesterday for three players - two of whom hadn’t played a TTRPG ever before. Great fun! Everyone enjoyed the experience.
I’m looking forward to the standalone game.
Sea of Dead Men is incredible!
I love the Crews and the Character playbooks, they are distinct and evocative.
A cool improvement and hack of Blades In The Dark, i can't wait for the standalone version so we don't have to refer to BITD SRD.
Thank you so much for making this available to all of us, ensifer!
Great work. It's the game I used to introduce the Blade In the Dark system to new players and my one shoots.
I got a notice that something was updated recently, but I can't figure out what was changed. Anyone have any insight?
It was a really minor update - I just added blank character/crew playbook templates to the sheets file. Sorry for the lack of clarity there; I didn't realize itch would send out notifications, otherwise I would have included a proper devlog.
Had fun playing a couple sessions of this game. Would be cool to have a Leech style playbook maybe centered around the Blast action and cannons and other weapons and tools.
I have been running a campaign using this hack for Blades in the Dark for around 20 sessions now. So far everyone seems to be really enjoying it. We have definitely had to drop some rules from Blades to fit the narrative from time to time, and I definitely have been now adding my own flavoring more and more to cultures, mythologies, etc. of the world to add onto the Occult side more, but otherwise we have been playing and loving this! Great job!
I've been having some trouble with the Roll20 character sheets recently. My old campaign works, but whenever I try to create a new sheet, it comes out looking like this:
It could be like a roll20 update that's messing with it or something I'm doing wrong, but let me know if it's not just me.
Thanks for the heads up! It looks like Roll20 recently added new input sanitization checks to the custom sheets, which seems to have broken a lot of the internal logic.
For a quick fix, you can go into the game settings and check the "Legacy Sanitization" box, just above the text boxes where the code is entered; that should keep the new Roll20 updates from interfering with the sheet. I'll take a closer look later this week and see if I can update the sheets to match Roll20's new standards.
Thanks so much!! That's a big help!
I've been playing a pirates game using these rules for months and it's been working out great! One of the longer campaigns we've ever had. Added a custom crew playbook and player playbook, and have fleshed out my own setting as well, but these rules are solid. Do a good job of translating Blades into the pirate genre. Thanks for all the work you've put in!
This looks really good!
Great game!
I would change only one thing, I would name it Blades on the waves. ;)
This looks cool!
is this compatible with the world of Blades? also, how much has this been playtested?
It is absolutely insane that you aren't charging anything for this (please consider adding PWYW so I can give you money?). I am a rusty GM with a table of mostly new players, and already have managed to start several interesting storylines and have a lot of fun on scores.
The places these rules depart from the SRD can be a bit subtle (I especially messed up when assigning Heat the first time), but going with the flow and using ocean magic liberally seem like a golden ticket.
This looks incredible. I'm extremely excited to play this and love the little differences between this game and blades. You have to visit your stash to take out money from it? Every ship has a Crew by default (because of course it does)? You can play on a Ghost Ship? All amazing and cool things! Really loving the work that went into this!