This ship design has been perfected to its current standards, but still it does not match the splendor of the Alicorn Star that Nimf provided. The typical unicorn-ship is made of wood and some have gone so far as to enchant the ram/horn with special abilities. Keeping the ship painted white and having the ram/horn polished makes for a lot of work for the crew — after all with a ship that looks like a unicorn it should look pure and noble. For those that love weapons and find that the ship has too few, just place more weapons on the same deck of the heavy catapult and/or add more to the underside of the ship, where the legs are.
All in all this ship is a must for those that love beauty.
Other Configurations
Dark Unicorn: This metal unicorn ship is painted all black by its evil captain and plies Realm space for its victims. The captain is said to be a red wizard from Thay (where wizards are said to have performed horrid experiments on living unicorns with an injection of demon blood too corrupt them to evil). The heaviness of the metal hull limits the Dark Unicorn to land only on land (it too heavy to land in water... it would sink under the waves), but increases the AC to 18.
The Alicorn Star: The one and only Alicorn Star is a centaur-built and crewed ship, and is fashioned from living wood: the vast majority of the hull is a single, living piece, and to an extent is self-repairing. Metal fittings, bracings, and the piercing ram are bonded magically to the hull, and give a +2 enhancement bonus its armor class.
Unlike the unicorn-ship the Alicorn Star has four main deck levels, three above the gravity plain and an inverted deck below the gravity plane, which is also the water-line when landing in water. When the ship is sailing on a calm waters of a lake, the unicorn's lips just clear surface of the lake. The lower deck has emplacements of two forward heavy ballistae in the knees. The ship's bridge is situated at the rear of the highest deck, behind the catapult. Everything is scaled for centaur usage, and the weapons take correspondingly less crew to operate (suggest half human compliment). Due to the fact that the Alicorn Star is built to centaur-size its ceilings are 12 feet tall and has a keel length of 240 feet and 55 feet beam. All in all the Alicorn Star should be close to 100 tons by the original 2E rules and 50 tons by the D20 ship contruction rules here at the Shattered Fractine.
The inverted deck is accessed by a ten-meter "hole" traversed by a bridge that corkscrewes 180', centered on the gravity plane. There were also "tunnels" in the forelegs allowing access to the knee ballistae. During water landings these were sealed and inaccessible.
The ship's power source is actually a living creature, called a Kara. Kara are non-corporeal energy creatures able to survive in both Wildspace and the Phlogiston. They don't usually fraternise with organics, but the Star's Kara, nicknamed Beauty by the crew, is blind, at least in regard to a normal Kara's poly-dimensional senses. Vulnerable, she serves to move the Star in exchange for its physical security. A helm is needed: a mage wearing an artifact called the Crown of Seeing. This extends a mage's senses and facilitates a telepathic link with Beauty, essentially enabling her to function with full vision. But in most respects, treat it like a normal spell-jamming helm. Beauty resembles a spinning sphere of glowing rainbow energy. Some 30' in diameter, she occupies a large multi-deck spherical chamber in the ship's "hind-quarters".
Captian Satin Truebolt, an imposing centuar captian, pilots her vessel mostly in Truespace.
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Open Game License v 1.0 Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
Created by ©2002, Matthew Webber
Image by Matthew Webber
d20™ System, Conversion of Unicorn-Ship ©2002, Mark T. Doolan
Notes: I toiled over the deckplans for nearly 18 months till I was pleased with the deckplans, when I showed them to Matthew Webber, the first words he used to describe the deckplans... Inspired!