I've recently started a maritime D&D campaign, so I bought this set of Two Bit Tables for the purpose of--yeah, you guessed it--coming up with ship names without having to think too hard. I have to confess I'm a little disappointed in this installment in the series, though. In the "Historic Battle Name Generator," TBT gives us tables that combine different elements to randomly produce a vast array of names and phrases. The "Ship Names" product, though, seems to take the easy way out by just giving lists of 50 pirate ship names, 50 merchant ship names, and 50 military ship names. I also felt that some of the names seemed rather uninspired; I mean, five of the pirate ship names are "Death's [Noun]" (and why are two of the apostrophes "straight" while three are "curly"?), three are "Neptune's [Noun]," and there area whole bunch of pairs in the pattern "[Adjective-1] [Noun-1]," "[Adjective-1] [Noun-2]." The other tables show similar patterns. This may seem a petty complaint, but in reality, this kind of repetition makes the tables only half (or less) as useful as they could be, since once my PCs are attacked by pirates aboard the "Devil's Kiss," you can bet that they're not going to run into pirates aboard the "Devil's Revenge." Oh, and somebody please tell the author of this product that it's a "dreadnought," not a "dreadnot." Overall, I'd have to rate these tables as slightly below average for this series.
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