How to Run Naval Combat, Part 1

London, British Library, Royal MS 10 E. IV, fol. 19r

The general public's knowledge of Medieval naval combat probably derives from pirate movies and swashbuckling adventures, things centuries removed in setting and technology from the Middle Ages.  So how did people fight at sea in the Middle Ages, and how can we use that knowledge to make naval combat in D&D more interesting?  Well, not to brag, but I've recently written an award-winning Master's thesis on medieval naval warfare, and I'm obviously an expert on D&D because I run this blog, so allow me to drop some knowledge on you.

First, let me say that I know historical accuracy is not what a lot of people are looking for in their D&D game.  I would never recommend sacrificing fun on the altar of scholarly pedantry.  But when you look into it, adding a dash of accuracy can actually make things more interesting - as it turns out, people in the past really knew what they were doing.  Today, I'll talk about how naval combat worked in the Middle Ages, dispelling a few myths and anachronisms.  In a later post, I'll talk about how to mesh that information into a world where magic and monsters are very real things.


Ballistae Are Not Cannons - Naval Combat Before Gunpowder
People are pretty familiar with the tropes of the Golden Age of Piracy or the Age of Sail, where massive ships with multiple gun decks pulled up alongside each other and let loose broadsides, firing dozens or hundreds of cannons simultaneously to blow the other ship to flinders.  Because of this, you sometimes see fantasy settings that use ballistae as stand-ins for cannons, with ballistae firing out of gun ports in particularly pointy and relatively quiet broadside barrages.  That sort of thing does a disservice to naval combat, and it's pretty boring compared to how things actually went down.

First of all, gun-ports built into the side of the ship (as we are familiar with them from pirate movies) were not widely used until the time of Henry VIII, and did not even exist until the tail end of the Middle Ages.  Secondly, ballistae were probably not widely used in medieval naval combat.*  Thirdly, and most importantly, the goal of naval combat was not to destroy the enemy ship, as a broadside was intended to do, but to capture it.  This meant boarding the enemy ship and fighting the crew into submission.

If you do incorporate early gunpowder weapons into your campaign setting, as I encourage you to do, hand cannons and arquebuses are entirely appropriate.  From the fourteenth century onwards, many ships carried guns and cannons on board.  Usually, these were small and few in number, maybe 3-6 small iron cannons to be fired from deck or from swivel-mounts on the rails or in the castles.  In the last 50 years or so of the Middle Ages, you got some ships that had several dozen cannon on board.  These were mostly in large sailing ships decked out for war; smaller oared galleys were not stable enough to support more than one cannon, mounted in the bow of the ship facing forward (like the cannon galleons from Age of Empires II).  These guns would be used in much the same way as all the crossbows and longbows were - to soften up the enemy ranks before boarding.

*It's a bit difficult to tell, since chroniclers often used the same name for ballistae and regular ol' crossbows, but in any case, they certainly would not have been present in large numbers.  They may have been a bit more common in the Mediterranean, where Roman naval traditions held more sway.  

The Grapple
When two ships met in battle, they would maneuver with sail or oar against each other as the crews of each ship rained missiles down on the crews of the other vessel.  Once the defending vessel was sufficiently softened up, the attacking ship would grapple with it using chains and ladders and the crew would board the enemy ship.

Naval combat got pretty brutal.  Even chroniclers of land battles in the Hundred Years' War singled out naval battles as particularly bloody.  Writing about the 1340 Battle of Sluys, the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker says:

A horrid battle-cry rose to the heavens above the wooden steeds, like the prophecy of Merlin; the shower of iron quarrels from crossbows and of arrows from bows dragged thousands of people to death; those who wished, or rather, who dared fought in close combat with spears, axes, and swords; stones thrown down from the topcastles bashed the brains out of many; in short, the fleet engaged in a great and terrible naval battle, of the sort of fury that one would not dare to watch from a distance.

One of the reasons it was so bloody was that so many men were packed together on such small decks.  Add in arrows, bolts, darts, and stones raining down on them, and naval combat became a meat grinder.  With nowhere to retreat except the briny depths, the defenders were fighting for their lives like cornered animals.

Obviously, this style of combat is more conducive to D&D combat.  The party can board the enemy ship or repel the boarders, climbing up ladders or swinging across on ropes.  It lends itself well to swashbuckling adventure.

Castles on the Sea
Medieval ships were notable for having castles built into them.  In later centuries, these evolved into upper decks like the fo'csle (a shortening of forecastle) and the poop deck (heh), but at the height of the Middle Ages they very much looked the part of the imposing fortification.  Ships typically had castles fore and aft with high wooden walls - often crenellated, like the walls of a castle.  The castles gave the crew cover, and a height advantage, allowing them to fire arrows down on the enemy ship, and made it harder for enemies to board.  The largest warships in the last century of the Middle Ages sometimes added a second or even a third fighting deck on the castles, allowing more archers and men-at-arms to pack in there.  Ships geared for war often had mobile wooden walls that could be assembled in the waist of the ship for added defense there as well.

The crow's nest, a classic piece of nautical architecture, evolved from the topcastle, a high-walled platform built at the top of the mast.  Topcastles were more than just a lookout platform - they were built to hold several men and a buttload of weapons, because topcastles had a height advantage against everybody.  The men in the topcastle would hurl down javelins and darts at the enemy, and when they ran out of those they chucked rocks.  They even had pulley systems rigged up to get a constant stream of rocks up to the topcastle for maximum brain-bashing efficiency.  In the 15th century illustration of a large carrack below, you can see a topcastle on each mast, and the first two have the pulley system for bringing rocks up.  The rear topcastle is actually mounted with a swivel gun!

I have seen fleeting references to men from the topcastle boarding the enemy topcastle, with no explanation as to how, but I can definitely picture an adventurer pulling off that kind of stunt with some lucky rolls.  One poetic account of the Battle of Zierikzee described French sailors hoisting the ship's rowboat up the mast, filled with men and rocks, to act as a second makeshift topcastle.  If your party tries that clever trick in a game, tell them they have history on their side.

Naval Equipment
As far as adventuring equipment goes, you can never go wrong with rope.  Grappling hooks are a must, and for that you might want to use chain, as it is a lot harder to cut than rope.  Ladders are very useful in boarding an enemy ship.

Nearly all weapons are appropriate for naval combat - sailors and men at arms just used their personal weapons.  Weapons that get particular mention include: longspears and pikes, particularly useful in bridging the gap (and height difference) between opposing ships; axes, which double as excellent rope-cutting tools; darts and javelins, commonly thrown from the topcastle and responsible for much death; and crossbows and longbows, used for softening up the enemy before closing to the grapple, and probably the deadliest weapons in naval warfare.  To this list, I would add the repeating crossbow, which I have found makes for very effective and scary opponents, and the rapier for some swashbuckling action.

You may be surprised to learn that armor was very important in naval combat as well.  You may think that heavy armor was eschewed so that you stood a chance of surviving if you fell overboard.  Even George "Railroad" Martin fell into this trap, describing the Iron Islanders as exceptional among the people of Westeros in that they wore armor at sea.  In reality, you don't have to worry about whether or not you can float if you've been pierced with a dozen darts and had your brain bashed in with a rock.  Inventory records of ships indicate that some of the crews of King Henry V's ships were supplied with mail hauberks and steel helmets for defense.  Men wore armor in naval combat for the same reason they wore armor in land combat - weapons hurt.

via Wikimedia

Ship Types
In the Middle Ages, the lines between military and civilian shipping, and between warfare and piracy, were rather hazy.  Merchant ships sailed with weapons and armor aboard, and were fitted with castles fore and aft.  Kings prepared for war by rounding up all the civilian ships in their ports and stuffing them full of archers and men-at-arms.  This means any ship that your party happens to be on could end up in a fight.  Well, that was probably the case already but now you have historical justification for it!  More importantly, it means that every ship the PCs encounter will probably be ready for a fight.

Ships in the Middle Ages fell into two broad categories - sailing ships and oared ships.  That's a bit of an oversimplification, since oared ships also had sails, but it was their ability to go against the wind or even in the absence of it that set oared vessels apart from regular sailing ships.

Oared vessels, like galleys, viking longships, and ballingers, tended to be long and narrow, and rode low in the water.  They didn't have much room for cargo, because they had a pretty large crew to row the ship, but they were fast, maneuverable, and reliable.  Most of the time, they would have been propelled by the wind, but while maneuvering near the coast or in battle, or when the wind wasn't with them, they could use oars for a short period of time.  And put aside the old picture of galley-slaves chained to the oars belowdecks - almost no one used slaves to crew their ships in the Middle Ages with the possible exception of some of the larger Muslim empires.  Oarsmen were free men, and capable of fighting.  On Catalan galleys, some of the most feared in the Middle Ages, up to one third of the oarsmen would leave their oars to fight when battle was joined - a ship powered by slaves would have no such advantage.

Sailing ships, like cogs, hulks, carracks, and caravels, were generally larger, with much greater capacity for cargo or troops.  Their hulls rose much higher out of the water, giving them a natural height advantage over oared ships, compounded by the addition of castles fore and aft.  They were slower and less maneuverable than oared vessels, but larger sailing ships could become veritable floating fortresses in battle.

Not quite like this.  This is pure fantasy.  Although, we are playing D&D here...

One thing to keep in mind is that medieval ships were tiny.  I based the two ships in Horrors of the Floating Garden on real ships, but I doubled their dimensions so that the party would have room to actually have interesting combats on board.  You need a lot of open 5-foot squares for D&D to function properly.  Belowdecks, ships sometimes had temporary walls built in for extra cabin space or some other purpose; this can make fighting belowdecks more interesting as well, but only if you've made your ship extra-big, as I wholly recommend you do, because in this case fun totally trumps historical accuracy.

-your excerebrans d20 despot