Adventure Calls - 50 Fathoms

For February, the Adventure Calls reading club read 50 Fathoms, a pulpy pirate-y pointcrawl / campaign setting for Savage Worlds. It's a big one! I wound up thinking a lot about the social fabric the text imagines.

To get it out of the way, one thing I don't want to do is review the supplement, or pretend that this is a review. A lot of 50 Fathoms didn't do it for me, but that's not really the point I think of this exercise - I'm much more interested in highlighting the big swings and hidden gems, and where relevant, analyzing the tragic failures. I'm reading because I want to build up my own toolbox of stuff. It's vanishingly rare that I read an adventure and think "perfect! I'll run it just like that." Instead, I'm reading to see if there's anything I would I want to steal, or anything I'd want to avoid.

After My Ship Disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean, I Was Transported To A World Where Race is Real?!?

In the monthly voice chat, I had two big takeaways - the first of these was about how 50 Fathoms handles race. It's bad, but it's also kind of baffling. On the one hand, the text takes a pretty clear moral stance on history, and does not make any kind of moral relativism argument about how European slavers treated Africans (oh by the way, there's plot critical portal fantasy / isekai stuff happening, so there are historical earth humans, canonically). On the other hand, we're solidly in gygaxian bioessentialism land, with some hardcoded "evil" humanoid species. There are evil fish people (Drow coded) and really evil warlike, savage, red-skinned, hairy humanoids, who worship evil gods with blood sacrifice.

Even below the level of any problematics argument I might make, the effect is that I simply will not use the campaign plot as written (as it relies heavily on the metaphysics of those evil gods and the associated racism). This is notable for a fantasy project only because it seems like the text so clearly is thinking about race, but it doesn't draw any connection at all between the way race was imagined in our world vs the way race is declared to be true in the fantasy world. It's weird! On one page I'll be reading the quest starter to kick out some slavers, and a few pages later we're in the heart of the dark continent, establishing palisades and rescuing ontologically noble colonists from cannibals.

We could continue to dig into examining how 50 Fathoms' racial imaginary (we haven't said anything yet about Orientalism, for example), but that's not really my goal today. It's enough for my purposes to note it as something about the adventure I'd have to avoid or heavily edit in my games.

Prep Pirate Problems, Not Pirate Plots

There is a lot of fun and exciting stuff in 50 Fathoms, for me largely concentrated in the little adventures, or really sometimes just situations, scattered around the islands of the setting. Many of these are eminently stealable, ready to be plopped in to any game involving island hopping. Even more surprising, I was kind of shocked by how many of these manage to set up a fun and interesting situation in a handful of paragraphs (sometimes even just one!).

My favorite adventure is a little longer and slightly more dependent on the context of the setting. It involves a plot to assassinate an evil emperor, but the way it gets there is a lot of fun to me. The adventure begins when the players are approached for a job - a merchant needs a deniable and unrecognized party to sneak onto a boat and steal a bell. He won't say what for. It turns out that the job is an audition - the boat is his, and he's looking for accomplished sneak thieves so he can hire them to sneak onto a different cargo ship and poison the emperor's stash of opium. It's not as efficient as some of the other adventures, but it's immediately exciting to me - I love a stealth mission, and I love a mission with unexpected and far reaching consequences. That the text is so willing to put some of its biggest pieces in the line of fire earns a lot of goodwill from me, too - it makes the setting feel playable, rather than a diorama we're just sightseeing.

There are scores of these! Here's one - the players encounter some marooned pirates, kicked out of the crew of one of the more notorious captains around. They're put-upon, but eager to please and charismatic, and as soon as you let them on board they're planning to stage a mutiny or otherwise just steal the ship. Great problem to have. Here's a slightly longer one - a woman believes her father's been abducted by the emperor, and a little digging around suggests he was kidnapped to work on a new battle barge. Will you go rescue this guy, or are you going to let the empire build a new super weapon? Also, hey, did Disney steal the plot of Rogue One from 50 Fathoms? One more for illustrative purposes - the players are approached by their plucky, resolute waitress at the tavern. She says she's actually been enslaved, and asks if the players are willing to help her escape. If they say no, she smashes them in the face with their drink; if they say yes, she instigates a bar fight to provide cover for her exfiltration. 

I've included that last one for one other purpose; not every adventure is just useable, sometimes for race reasons, but sometimes for sexual violence reasons. I actually think some of the scenarios here are good starting points, if I wanted to run a game that was interested in grappling with violence against women in the age of exploration. Even in that circumstance, just about all of those on that theme would require some editing for me to be comfortable bringing them to the table.

The Social Is Predicated Upon Its Exclusions

Sometimes 50 Fathoms really excites me, and sometimes it doesn't. I think the secret ingredient that most often makes the situations sing is the way the text situates them firmly in the social world of the setting. The best adventures don't happen in isolation - even small islands are connected to others by trade and trade routes. Funnily, I feel it more strongly here than in the town of Orlane from last time. I can definitely imagine social consequences in Reptile God, but maybe the town is so small that the consequences feel more personal than social. In 50 Fathoms, you make the wrong pirate mad, and maybe you can't go to that town anymore, or now you're being chased around the seas with a vengeance, or you bought a treasure map from someone but it turns out it was fake and when you go to get revenge he points you to the local crime boss... And on and on. The world of 50 Fathoms is social, for better and worse, but a big part of the better is that the text invites and prompts you to change that world through play. That's going in the toolbox for sure.