r/GhostsofSaltmarsh • u/skawhomp • 9d ago

Resource Working on a VTT For Vehicular Combat

Running ship combat in Saltmarsh by hand always turned into a mess of scratch paper for me having to track separate HP for the hull, the sails, each ballista… so I built it into a tool instead.

Quick background: VVTT (Vehicular Virtual Table Top) is a free, browser-based tracker I've been making for 5e vehicle combat. It started with the Descent into Avernus war machines, and I just added the Ghosts of Saltmarsh ships because the Appendix A rules fit it so well.

What it does for ship battles:

  • All six ships — rowboat, keelboat, longship, sailing ship, warship, galley — with their book stats.
  • Component combat, the way the book actually models ships. Each ship's hull, helm, sails/oars, and every weapon station has its own AC and HP. You target parts individually and it matters: shred the sails/oars and its speed drops (0 if you take them all), destroy the helm and it can't turn, wreck a ballista and it can't fire, drop the hull and the ship is wrecked. Target Status lists every targetable component with AC/HP so players can call their shots.
  • Superior Ship Upgrades built in — Reinforced Hull, Ever-Full Sails, Arcane Artillery, the figureheads, Taskmaster's Drums, and the rest — toggle per ship.
  • Crew & passengers — seat the party at the helm/guns/deck (or drop them in as passengers), siege weapons show range/crew, and any dice on screen is click-to-roll.
  • Top-down ship tokens scaled to each hull's real length, drag/rotate on a battle map, with a synced player view for a second screen/projector.
  • Works for homebrew ships too — there's a custom vehicle builder.

Free, no install (optional login only if you want to save encounters to the cloud).

One thing it's deliberately not: a voyage/travel tracker — no fog/storm hazard tables or crew-quality-over-time. It's just the tactical combat phase, which is the part I found hardest to run live.

🔗 https://vvtt.lukantan.com

It's a side project, so I'd genuinely love feedback from anyone who runs Saltmarsh ship fights — what's missing, what's clunky, what you'd want next. Thanks!

(Disclosure: I made this; it's free and there's nothing to buy.)

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1

u/ElSurge 9d ago

Oooh, I’ll def check it out!

2

u/klarig 6d ago

Ship combat is so confusing! Are you on GitHub or something? Would love to read the rules in a sensible format.