Adventure Calls: 50 Fathoms

31 Mar, 2025

February’s Adventure Calls book was 50 Fathoms, a plot point campaign for Savage Worlds. This was my suggestion as it was – until recently, stay tuned for March’s entry, which is clearly coming late – my gold standard for campaign design. 50 Fathoms was the first dedicated campaign I ran, starting the summer between high school and college, and I still have a lot of fondness for it. My friend Ben blogged about the (lacking) racial imaginary of the work and said everything which needs saying on that subject better than I could have so I’m writing here about some of the stuff I think the book gets right.

Briefly, 50 Fathoms is a Pirates of the Caribbean styled dark swashbuckling fantasy campaign wherein heroes are tasked with hunting down leads about the Big Bads, gathering weapons and allies to defeat them, and ultimately fighting a big battle to save the world¹. I’m pretty enamored with the layout of this thing. The book starts with a bit of backstory, goes into the rules for the setting, and contains detailed lists of gear, sailing ships, the races of the world and magic spells useful for sailing. Already this is great to me: here’s how to use this book with the core rules, what’s different, here’s a table about supply and demand for different places if you want to make some bread trading cargo. Even paging through the player’s guide gives you a sense of who you can be and what kind of trouble you can get up to in this world, something I think a lot of published TTRPG settings fail at.

The meaty bits of the game that I adore the most though are all in the GM’s section. Besides the campaign adventures, more or less in order, you get a gazetteer which includes all the mechanical stuff and adventures you can find in that location. Most entries are fairly short: the population of the town, how it was founded, who’s the main demographic there, and a couple bullet points of notable locations and people. These also reference page numbers for monsters and adventures which are found later in the book. The reason I point this out is that it’s way, way ahead of its time in terms of being a kind of almost hex crawl and presenting this to the GM in a way which makes it exciting to read and easy to run. If you go to such-and-such island, you’ll probably head to the tavern there, and once you’re in here’s a guy selling a treasure map and here’s what plagues the locals. The game leans into what Too Much Future describes as the “problem town” model of design, with each locale beset by some ghost or ghoulie or evil crime syndicate or pirates; dealing with many of these things impacts the wider world. For example, one adventure requires you to deal with a ghost who is seeking vengeance on a slave trader who you might encounter elsewhere, while any dealings with pirates (positive or negative) immediately drafts you into a brewing war between them and the least-evil incarnation of the East India Company one could get away with writing.

These cross reference points are fertile ground for writing an adventure and planning the campaign. One particularly memorable encounter in my home game was spurred on by placing a meeting place at a ruined fortress with a unique form of wall-crawling zombies not seen anywhere else in the campaign – as soon as I read about those beasties I knew I had to stage some kind of battle there. Overall, I love how much 50 Fathoms makes sure that the information you need to run the game is all in the book, that most descriptions are pretty short and illustrative, and that there’s generally a “less is more” approach to the design.

#Adventure Calls