Courtesy Syfy
Cargo ships are great places for action scenes because they fit all the right criteria: a modern construct, often in an out of the way place, with lots of space and many hiding places. Even more exciting are abandoned cargo ships, massive places adrift on the ocean or rotting in a dock, filled with rusted containers and the debris of past crew.
Christian Eneroth created an excellent site in Google's CAD freeware, Sketchup, that includes the MS München, a cargo ship. Details include the ship's statistics, detailed images, layer by lawer drawings and floor plans, and even an overview of the crew with pictures of each cabin. If you need a cargo ship, this is a fantastic resource. Cargo ships feature certain elements that make them unique:
They're large: Cargo ships are responsible for carrying massive objects and large quantities of cargo. As a result, walking the length of a cargo ship can take some time. It's possible to have a chase scene on a cargo ship, or a shootout. Stalkers can kill prey without worrying that someone else on the opposite end of the ship will hear their victim's cries. It's that big.
There's cargo: Cargo ships usually have cargo. This cargo can be useful – weapons, explosives, even vehicles – or could be a plot point itself, like a shipping container filled with dormant monsters. Resourceful characters will leverage their surroundings and use the cargo to their advantage. Depending on the shipping manifest, it could be a treasure trove of mechanical equipment or moldering t-shirts.
There's not a lot of crew: There's a reason cargo ships have problems with pirates. Comparative to their size, cargo ships are manned by small crews. They don't move fast. They are the slow freighters of the shipping industry, crawling along on a predetermined route. Even when fully staffed, it can be very lonely on a cargo ship.
Cargo ships can be used in a variety of ways:
Ghost ship: Like the movie Ghost Voyage, the ship is itself an obstacle. Ghost Voyage created some rules to hedge the characters in, turning it into a dungeon of shorts complete with traps and monsters. Alien duplicated much of the same effect in space. It's more exciting if the player characters are not combatants but the crew, who are only equipped to deal with mundane threats. Speaking of mundane threats…
Pirates! The players might be guarding a cargo ship against pirates. For an overview of how piracy works, see Wired's excellent article. For an example of how to deal with pirates, see the Maritime Security Center's Best Management Practices Version 3. Alternately, the players might be the pirates, infiltrating a ship to retrieve special cargo. v
Precious Cargo: The cargo on the ship is dangerous or rare enough that others want it. It could be a monster in transit, like Monster Ark. It could be a bio-virus. It contain be people from a slave trafficking ring. It could even contain the ingredients for a radioactive bomb (not as far-fetched as it sounds).
For even more fun, consider combining all three possibilities. The players are a secret government team sent to retrieve a dirty bomb on a cargo ship. After a brief skirmish with a few crewmembers, they discover that most of the crew has mysteriously died or gone missing. The reason: it wasn't a bomb at all. The thing in the cargo hold is much, much worse…
If you're looking for the whereabouts of a cargo ship, you needn't look far. International Marine Engineering has some useful deck plans for this purpose:
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