What Would You Like to See in a Pirate Campaign Setting

[Whisper72]

Add props. Props are always good. Handouts for treasure maps, for ship/deck plans (to be printed out as small maps or as miniature scale maps), for 'wanted' posters, for cryptic letters leading to treasures or solutions to (magical) mysteries.

Add info on flags. Pirate flags, flags that denote ship's status (quarantaine etc.).

Add info on the pirate code of conduct and pirate specific deities / myths etc.

 

[Nebulous]

This is a picture from our adventure last weekend. The party is on a flying pirate ship, the Wind Ghost, and they are in the process of fighting off flying aboleths and kuo-toa mauraders while the crew tries to fire arbalests and pistols. The PCs are not pirates, and this is only a temporary situation on the boat, but it is the closest i've ever come to running a pirate campaign. It's been fun.

I found that totally awesome map on some website, i don't know which one now. It was instrumental in making the fight as fun as it was. Even when the kraken attacked...

 

[David Howery]

Guns. Cannons. Rum. Blasphemous sea horrors. Ancient Curses. Cannibalistic Natives. Gold. Plunder. Booty. Buxom Wenches. Diseases. The word "Arrrrr!." Ships. Naval based Torture.

What else can you ask for?

Keira Knightley?

 

[The Shaman]

If you really want to do something special, forget all of the tired, repetitive "Pirates of the Caribbean" bullcrap and look at 15th century Mediterranean piracy for inspiration instead.

Swift galleys armed with rams and cannon. Corsair city-states. Orders of crusader-pirates. Slaves chained to oars. Pikes, scimitars, and arquebuses. Marines in breastplates and plumed morions. Pirate treasure secreted in the dungeons of ruined crusader castles. Janissaries.

That would be something worth seeing.

 

[VictorC]

A blunderbus

 

[Demmero]

Keira Knightley?

Got over Claire from "Lost" in a hurry, eh? Or are you starting a harem?

Arrr!! A good pirate can't get him enough booty!

 

[SiderisAnon]

I've run several shipboard campaigns. There are a number of things I was always looking for in gaming books, but really never found.


Where pirating is actually represented in an economic way.

First, there should be actual cargo items rather than just "500 gold worth of goodies."

Second, there should be differences in the cargo depending on where you sail and who you attack. (So, if you attack the French near their colony that produces clothing, you're likely to get a cargo full of either the cloth and clothing they are producing or cotton, wool, and dye along with the various supplies the colony is importing.

Third, factors like ship maintenance, food and supplies, crew pay, bribes to wherever you're offloading cargo, and other expenses.

Finally, this all needs to be wrapped up in a decent system that DMs can use which both makes basic economic sense and which can be used within whatever game system you're writing this for.



You also need detailed information on ships since most modern gamers haven't the slightest furry clue how sailing ships work. How big are they? How fast do they go? How expensive are they to buy? How many crew do they have? How much cargo can they carry and how does that effect their movement? What weapons do they carry? What ships are used by pirates? (Hint: Fast, maneuverable, good for boarding.) What ships are used by the navies?

Make sure you include some sample deck plans.


Include in your navigation rules something about using favorable currents and winds. Captains of the era could shave significant time off of their travel in various regions if they knew where the currents and the winds were.

Maps are precious and guarded like treasure.


Though I have to say that you're probably reinventing the wheel unless you can come up with something really new and unique. There are so many pirate and ship settings and sourcebooks out there that trying to pick one is already kind of silly.



Edit: One more thing, spend some time in the library and research real ships and how they worked historically. Some of the supplements out there were painful to read because they clearly had either no or completely wrong understanding of how ships worked.

 

[roguerouge]

Running a campaign that's used pirates, I can tell you that you've GOT to resolve 4 issues.

1. Core DnD has never cared for ship to ship combat. You need to figure out a balanced system of, essentially, mass combat or miniatures combat. That's for the captain. Then, you need to figure out what the other three players are going to do. Balancing those two tasks is key. I've pulled it off because I DM a one PC game.

2. Once they kill the pirates, all hell breaks loose in your game. How much is that ship worth? It should be a lot, both because it serves as a good low-level goal (Team PC wants to scrape together enough dough to own their own ship) and for realism (surely this ship is worth more than a horse!). But what happens to your game balance if they sell it? Does it wreck your expected income levels if your 5th level PCs take a poorly-defended merchantman, selling the ship and its cargo? How can it not? And if you make it difficult to sell a ship, then you've got a different problem: The PC Armada. That can be fine... if you've planned for it. Basically, think about the traditional difficulties with giving PCs a castle and add the problem that the castle retainers regularly go into combat, because they're pirates!

3. You need a rational economic system. Your major quarry is the fat merchantman. One of the ways to determine where to find them is by supply and demand. And as soon as the fat merchantman's ship has been taken, the PCs wish to sell their loot. And do you really think that the players are going to buy the idea that it's now worth 20% when the merchantman was going to make a tidy profit on this enterprise? Piracy is about black market economics, amongst other things, and it brings out the mercenary capitalist in players.

4. A mass combat system, not for ships, but for boarders. If your crew dies, you die, because you can't sail home, even if you defeat the Big Bad. Players are going to want to know how their pirates are doing in battle and be able to save them, while DMs do not want to make 200 attack rolls. Yes, there are ways of fudging it, but you need a system that measures how well one force will stack up against another, while allowing players to get involved.

 

[Voadam]

3. You need a rational economic system. Your major quarry is the fat merchantman. One of the ways to determine where to find them is by supply and demand. And as soon as the fat merchantman's ship has been taken, the PCs wish to sell their loot. And do you really think that the players are going to buy the idea that it's now worth 20% when the merchantman was going to make a tidy profit on this enterprise? Piracy is about black market economics, amongst other things, and it brings out the mercenary capitalist in players.

Pirates traditionally sold booty at a huge discount to be able to sell it off quickly in places where they can actually sell it off.

 

[David Howery]

Got over Claire from "Lost" in a hurry, eh? Or are you starting a harem?

Arrr!! A good pirate can't get him enough booty!

well, KK isn't really my type (skinny and foul mouthed), but she was in a prominent trio of pirate movies, so....