The Golden Sea One Shots

 I have used the Golden Sea (by Grant Howitt) about six times now.

I had downloaded it at some point and thought it was cool, but one year at Dragonmeet I saw an A2 sized high quality map which included all the rules (it's a one page RPG!) and I grabbed it.

Even then it was a while before I actually ran it. My usual group had gone on hiatus during lockdown and I wasn't feeling up to playing online either. When people started talking about meeting in person to play again I started to look at the Golden Sea again, and it was the first RPG I ran after a break of about a year.

So, as a one page RPG it doesn't require much reading, but as some have commmented it leaves a lot for the GM to do. The first time I ran it was with just two players, and there was a lot of enthusiasm after the previous year. I don't think any of us had played in that time. I had made a few plans beforehand, mostly about how to present the setting and the way trade and society worked.

The game uses a pretty cool system to get the players to help create the setting. The blank map included on the RPG shows the main city, the Maiden's Hand. The players take turns drawing and naming places on the map, three places for each player. They each add the place they come from, a place they have visited, and a place they have only heard of. I then presented them with a mission for the Crown, the main trading power in the setting, and said that their ship captain would decide on their course. That left it to me to decide on encounters along the route, but it left it to the players to flesh out each place they stopped at.

While the resolution system is also very simple it wasn't until a battle started that I realized I didn't quite know how to use it. I muddled through anyway and I think it's something that different GMs could interpret differently. I'm happy winging it anyway...

After that I made the Golden Sea my go-to RPG when our group had new members. In the next five or so sessions where I used it I think I had two players that had played previously. I let them try to remember their previous characters or just make new ones. It was a blast each time, and I started, as I always do, to think about using it for a campaign.

 

 

One thing that I realized was that I could combine the maps from each session of the game. No direction is specified on the map, so I could have each map show a route away from the Maiden's Hand, but in a different direction for each one. I had made a random table to determine the type of missions offered by the Crown, and I expanded it a little over time. Once regular sessions get underway, plot threads will naturally arise through play and the campaign will sustain itself.

Over the course of a few months I also looked for media that could help visualize the setting, and I found a game on Steam, Sands of Aura, and a movie, Monster Hunter, that featured ships sailing across sand. While the sand sailing in the videos for Sands of Aura did look cool, I ended up not mentioning it since the Dark Souls-like combat there didn't really resemble the game I wanted to run and I didn't want to create false expectations. I could edit my own video, but no ETA for that.