25mm Pirate Ships

I found a few pirate ships, and they aren't as expensive as I thought.

Old Glory Miniatures has some nice ones...though this would force me to make a decision about cannons. I'm still sticking to the no smoke powder rule in my Realms and would prefer catapults on my pirate ships.

Probably the best value is going to be GameMastery Ship: The Ravaged Pride Ship with Mast Kit from Paizo Publishing.

The layers look good and you could have simultaneous action on all decks, but it lacks the pazazz of a resin model on your game table. Afterall, the whole point is for adults to justify playing with toys.

Here you see it with all of the layers stacked on each other and the dowel rod masts stuck in place.
If you got long enough masts, though, you could glue the layers to the masts spaced far enough apart that miniatures could be placed below deck and above deck at the same time. Sort of like a 3D chess set or a a ship with invisible sides.

That might be sort of cool. Also, if you consider the middle deck to be the water line, you could include underwater threats to the ship such as an approaching sahuagin swarm or an aboleth or weresharks or mermen or lotcatha, or any number of marine nasties. I'm definitely warming to the idea.

At $80 each, I could get three of them for what my budget for one ship is at the moment, and then both Razig and Sophie could fight over the ship that my PCs are on. That might be the best way to go, after all.

Thinking about it...there are probably 25mm deck plans out there, or deck plans from real ships that could be scaled to a 5' grid and then printed out and glued on coreboard for even cheaper.

I knew all those Spelljammer deck plans would come in handy some day!

I wish I could remember who made that resin pirate ship. It was really cool and I want to say was around $300 or a little less.