Piracy And Other Malfeasance

[MGibster]

Inspirational music?
(Or sign you had a child in the YouTube era?)

It's kind of interesting how pirates went from being the enemies of mankind to friendly kiddie fare. In Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the pirates were brutal, nasty people with the likes of Israel Hands trying to straight up murder 13 year old Jim Hawkins. Even charming old Long John Silver is a brutal killer. When we look at Peter Pan, not the Disney version, the pirates were pretty nasty there as well. They were trying to kill a boy!

 

[kenada]

How do you -- if you do at all -- square protagonists who would be the villains in a different genre? What do you do with the crimes they commit? Are all your criminal heroes "thieves with hearts of gold" like Han Solo, or do you indulge in the grittier side of these stories? And if your "heroes" are rough, how do you make the villains stand out?

I don’t see a conflict. My Blades in the Dark character, Beaker, was not a nice guy. He tried to do right by his crew, but he murdered and schemed to get what he wanted. There weren’t any “villains”, but there were antagonists working against my goals.

I can see the same thing working for a pirates RPG. The PCs may be pirates, but so can their opposition (and allies). Their antagonists would be whoever works to stop them. Not every scenario needs to be good guys versus bad. Sometimes people are just trying to get by in whatever way they can.

 

[Umbran]

Did any of us have any sympathy for the many, many stormtroopers killed off in Star Wars?

There's a reason they are named after Nazis and given helmets that make them effectively faceless.

 

[bloodtide]

I go full "dark".

As a kid I was exposed to all the things like "happy singing pirates"....

......and as an adult I put that all way behind me.

In my games, the "average" pirate, and really most NPCs are not great people. Are there good ones...sure. But, in general, the PCs will travel in the circles of bad people...and very often the worst people.

My game comes very well marked with an "Unrated" warning....


....not that it always works.

Just last summer a group of players wanted to run a pirate adventure. And they were thinking "silly Disney pirates"....... and they were quite shocked when I was a lot more (beyond) "Black Sails".....

 

[Voadam]

It's kind of interesting how pirates went from being the enemies of mankind to friendly kiddie fare. In Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the pirates were brutal, nasty people with the likes of Israel Hands trying to straight up murder 13 year old Jim Hawkins. Even charming old Long John Silver is a brutal killer. When we look at Peter Pan, not the Disney version, the pirates were pretty nasty there as well. They were trying to kill a boy!

Both Treasure Island and Peter Pan were classics for children long before Disney.

Disney’s Treasure Island from the’50s? was hugely influential and a sympathetic charismatic Long John Silver who basically formed what we think of now as pirate speech.

 

[Voadam]

My last PC pirate was a good guy. The background was his pirate crew was orcs he had rescued from tiefling slavers who had a slave trade selling sacrifices to a pharaoh lich. They raided the treasure ships and slave deliveries from that tiefling empire until they got hunted down and his ship sunk with a load of treasure at which point he met the other PCs.

 

[Reynard]

I think that it is interesting that the moral shift for most people seems to be effectively "make the bad guys worse."

 

[Voadam]

I can also remember playing a good guy mercenary and when I found myself in a drow city being ready to work for one evil faction against another, expecting the inevitable double cross.

 

[payn]

I can also remember playing a good guy mercenary and when I found myself in a drow city being ready to work for one evil faction against another, expecting the inevitable double cross.

Not sure how much of a good guy you were playing if they are working for evil factions as a merc.

 

[Cadence]

Not sure how much of a good guy you were playing if they are working for evil factions as a merc.

I mean, how many of us like to think we're good guys but work for a mega-corp or government that's probably doing something awful? (Double-crosses in the form of layoffs or tax-cuts only for the wealthier than us and service cuts for us?)