Savage Worlds - GM Content Question for 50 Fathoms

[caballan]

Sorry in advance. I have not been able to find a good place to ask this yet. With COVID 19 wrecking all social meetings, my game group can't play in person for a while. I have been using Roll20 for our last 3 sessions in the 50 Fathoms campaign, but of course that leaves me creating most of the GM Content myself. Getting what I need into Roll20 has almost doubled my prep time. The 50 fathoms campaign has been running for just over a year (not on a VTT though) and they are half way through, so the players and I know Savage worlds decently at this point. However, we have not used Fantasy Grounds before.

Can someone who has the 50 Fathoms module answer these questions for me?

1) How many battle maps have been created? The 50 fathoms print edition only has a very small handful of maps. For example, is there a map of the dark tower? One for the final battle?
2) Have the maps been updated to have Dynamic Lighting for FGU?
3) I saw in the screen shots the generic cut-away pictures of the ships. Does the module contain battle maps for ship to ship deck fighting?
4) How is the navigation of the town and quest descriptions working out for your group? From the screen shot, it looks like I would need 4-8 windows open to run a town and that seems very cluttered.
5) Do the built in character sheets for NPC/encounters work for you? Or do you still find yourself refencing the character information through another means like pdf/OneNote/printed books/etc.
6) Do you use the built in voice chat program or do you use discord?
7) No one in our group has Fantasy Grounds yet, so I was thinking of using FGU since I can't buy both FGU and FGC. Does that seem smart or should I stick with FGC?

In order for my group to use Fantasy Grounds, I would need to front the cost myself. So I know that means I need Savage Worlds core book, 50 fathoms module, and either a monthly or one-time purchase at the Ultimate level so that the players can join using the free demo. So really on the fence on what I want to do. Any general advice or other things I should consider would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[GM BK]

The FG module of 50 Fathoms comes with everything that's in the book itself. Which, if you have it, you'll know there are very few maps within. Even so, I've been running VTT games for years and thanks to google, have built up a library of thousands of maps. Islands, coasts, villages, jungles, ships, etc. If you can think of it, most likely a google search we'll find it for you. This will help you (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?24662-Help-re-sizing-map-images-so-its-grid-matches-the-FG-grid-overlay) line up the grid on the maps you find. I would also recommend downloading GIMP so you can make your own maps and other images, like handouts for the players.

As for town and village descriptions, everything that's contained in the 50 Fathoms book is there, but you don't need to have all those windows open at all times to run stuff in a town. Those images are just showing different windows you can bring up to cover certain story elements, like NPC's and Encounters and such. Some of us run dual monitors and stretch FG across both of them. It helps to give more screen space.

To answer your question about character sheets, they're actually pretty good. You can drag and drop stuff from the modules, directly to the character sheet. These are also links to the information related to whatever they are. You can do this for edges, hindrances, powers, racial abilities, equipment, etc. You should not need to reference this material anywhere else but in the FG interface. One of FG's main features is the fact that you'll never need to open a single book while using the VTT. Everything is there at your fingertips. This goes for players and GM's.

For your last two questions, my group uses Discord, and yes, I would go with FGU over FGC.

Hope this helps! :)

Edit: This should help as well: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?42440-Tutorial-Video-Series

[caballan]

Thanks!

[mac40k]

The 50F module was created quite awhile ago and has certain limitations that other, newer modules may not have. First of all, all of the content in terms of items and NPCs are locked and cannot be edited. This means you cannot even assign a token to an NPC or assign them a different weapon unless you first make a copy of it, let alone update them to SWADE. Similarly, you will need to copy all the items that you wish to make changes to, for example black powder weapons, if you want to update them to SWADE.

There are no encounters set up, instead the (locked) NPC entries are linked in the story entries. This is not optimal and I ended up rebuilding all of them as needed. As one of the first settings/PPCs for Savage Worlds, there are a lot of instances where the text will say something like, "Ramirez students (2 per hero): Typical pirates armed with rapiers", yet the Pirate NPC has a cutlass knife and pistol, so you have to make your Ramirez student NPCs and put them in an Encounter entry, preferably ahead of time or you'll have the players sitting around and waiting for you to make the changes on the CT in real time during the game.

Maps are pretty much nonexistent since you only get a copy of the pictures that are included in the book, but as already said, there are plenty of useful graphics out on the Internet and I've also purchased several appropriate maps (high sea, coast line, ship deck plans, etc.) over the years.

When I ran it I preferred to reference the pdf on my iPad Pro rather than rely on what's in FG since you end up hopping around in the book a lot between location descriptions, Savage Tales, etc, but I tend to do that with any setting anyway since I like to keep my FG desktop as uncluttered as possible and tend to limit desktop as much as possible to just my story entry, CT, and any map currently being used. I also make use of the hotkey bar for things like the map of Caribdus and trading table that I need to pop open frequently so I don't have to hunt them down each time.

If you are on Facebook, you may want to consider joining https://www.facebook.com/groups/savage.pirate.gms/ Lots of helpful folks, not necessary using FG, but plenty of homemade resources being shared.

[Doswelk]

The 50F module was created quite awhile ago and has certain limitations that other, newer modules may not have. First of all, all of the content in terms of items and NPCs are locked and cannot be edited. This means you cannot even assign a token to an NPC or assign them a different weapon unless you first make a copy of it, let alone update them to SWADE. Similarly, you will need to copy all the items that you wish to make changes to, for example black powder weapons, if you want to update them to SWADE.

There are no encounters set up, instead the (locked) NPC entries are linked in the story entries. This is not optimal and I ended up rebuilding all of them as needed. As one of the first settings/PPCs for Savage Worlds, there are a lot of instances where the text will say something like, "Ramirez students (2 per hero): Typical pirates armed with rapiers", yet the Pirate NPC has a cutlass knife and pistol, so you have to make your Ramirez student NPCs and put them in an Encounter entry, preferably ahead of time or you'll have the players sitting around and waiting for you to make the changes on the CT in real time during the game.

Maps are pretty much nonexistent since you only get a copy of the pictures that are included in the book, but as already said, there are plenty of useful graphics out on the Internet and I've also purchased several appropriate maps (high sea, coast line, ship deck plans, etc.) over the years.

When I ran it I preferred to reference the pdf on my iPad Pro rather than rely on what's in FG since you end up hopping around in the book a lot between location descriptions, Savage Tales, etc, but I tend to do that with any setting anyway since I like to keep my FG desktop as uncluttered as possible and tend to limit desktop as much as possible to just my story entry, CT, and any map currently being used. I also make use of the hotkey bar for things like the map of Caribdus and trading table that I need to pop open frequently so I don't have to hunt them down each time.

If you are on Facebook, you may want to consider joining https://www.facebook.com/groups/savage.pirate.gms/ Lots of helpful folks, not necessary using FG, but plenty of homemade resources being shared.

I have upgraded 50 Fathoms to SWADE and fixed a lot of the issues with NPC equipment, however due to the fluid nature of encounters in Savage Worlds (and the lack of maps) Encounters are not included as the numbers of players will vary form group to group (e.g. I used to run 50 fathoms with a party of 8 players, which is a larger group than most, the next time I ran the game the party size was 3).

Likewise the lack of maps is not changed as they do not provide many.

The internet is your friend here...

[mac40k]

I have upgraded 50 Fathoms to SWADE and fixed a lot of the issues with NPC equipment, however due to the fluid nature of encounters in Savage Worlds (and the lack of maps) Encounters are not included as the numbers of players will vary form group to group (e.g. I used to run 50 fathoms with a party of 8 players, which is a larger group than most, the next time I ran the game the party size was 3).

Likewise the lack of maps is not changed as they do not provide many.

The internet is your friend here...

Glad to hear that you've updated it for SWADE. Most of the stuff like no tokens assigned and all the NPCs in the module being locked or encounters calling for minor modifications to existing NPC stats/equipment vs. a dedicated entry still exists however, so my points about prepping vs. dealing with it on the fly still apply. Setting up encounters in 50F often needs to rely on the Random Encounter functionality in FG so you can use the variable notation such as 2*$PC. This also avoids the issue of players missing a session and the party being inappropriately outnumbered, or expecting players to run other players' PCs. In practice, I ended up splitting whatever the encounter called for into (at least) two groups so those that recommended 1 per player ended up being two entries of 0.5*$PC, just to not have all of them acting on the same initiative card. The drawback to this approach is that you can't pre-place the NPC tokens on the map ahead of time since the actual encounter doesn't get generated until you need it. Yes, you can wait until the players are in the School Bullies Savage Tale and drag a pirate NPC onto the CT, open the CT NPC record up, swap out the equipment, assign it a token, and then copy that however many times you need it, but your players may get antsy while you do this. Or you could prep the encounter ahead of time, so all of that is done already and you just have to drag the tokens from the CT to the map and go.

[Mortar]

The lack of included maps is an issue with most products, as they weren't written for the VTT world.

[mac40k]

The lack of included maps is an issue with most products, as they weren't written for the VTT world.

Yeah, traditionally most Savage Worlds settings haven't been very good about providing maps of any kind, let alone those easily usable for VTT. Even though the system leans strongly into using maps and minis (yes, they've included TotM rules as a sidebar for those that don't want to bother with maps and minis, but that isn't the "default" play style), it's always tended to follow the old school approach of expecting the GM to sketch out a map on a dry/wet erase grid rather than provide prepared tactical combat maps. Some of the more recent boxed sets have included a few sample maps (Rippers Resurrected, ETU, Rifts, etc.), but that's still far from providing maps for every encounter included in the PPC like what WotC does for 5e. However, PEG is nowhere near the size of WotC either, so I understand why they can't afford to do that.