List Yer Pirate Adventures

[Len]

Arrrrh!

Last month me an' me mateys went up against Black Molly. I cut the hag down as she ran past me tryin' to make it back to 'er ship. Now folks be callin' 'er the Dead Pirate Molly, an' we took to talkin' funny.

What tales o' pirate adventure does your crew tell over a cup of grog?

 

[Mytholder]

When I was playtesting The Book of the Sea, I said to the players 'I'll run any sort of campaign you want, as long as it's naval.' They decided on...the dread Pixie Pirates.

Five 7th level pixies and a shrunken paladin, armed with a pounch of magical ship-shrinking dust and a thirst for plunder. They marauded across the ocean in a ship the size of a bathtub, crewed by a shrunken crew abducted from a human vessel. Whenever their pressganged crew complained, they shot them with memory arrows and paid them in in-shrunken gold coins. They fought like an aircraft carrier - the Black Bunny would sail close to another ship or port, then the Pixie assault team would fly up and rain down fey death on their foes.

The campaign only lasted a few weeks. It's hard to gm for six hyper players who are screaming in high-pitched squeaky voices...

 

[Gez]

It sounds like it was fun while it lasted, though.

One of the campaign I play in has an interesting starting points: our characters are nobles, in exile from their country because they had to flee after a failed conspiracy to seize power. So, they fled to a far, far away land, where they will try to gather strength and troops in order to come back to the homeland, with a vengeance.

So, we are nobles from a pseudo-Japan, living in a cross between the typical pseudo-Europe of heroic fantasy and the Caribbean (lots of little islands), about to become pirates and privateers as part of a "get-rich-quick" scheme.

Which will hopefully allow us, once we'll sail back to the East, to pit our pirates against the Shogun's ninjas! Yeah!

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

Once my players in an AU rules campaign were sailing in small boats to a Locathah city. They were noticed by a not obviously piratical vessel, and talked with them for a bit. The pirates were about to let them go, when they (being on a government mission and not wanting people to know this) claimed to be rich merchants. Oops! The pirates captured them at a reasonable loss of life, took their stuff and sold them as slaves to partially recoup their losses. In the end this turned out to be a good thing, because a young dragon they had robbed before was tracking one of the items they'd taken from her lair. They got word later that the ship had been destroyed, and now the player that had the item is paranoid Sadly that campaign hasn't been up for a couple months, but I'm optimistic.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

Recently in my Eberron campaign, the party had to find a lost ship, and the only clue they had to go on was that a pirate from the community known as Haven (a pirate community in a hidden cove on an out-of-the-way island) had been seen following the ship.

So, with the help of a captured pirate (a dwarven pirate named Zil), the party travelled to Haven on a House Orien elemental ship, the Brazen Strumpet. Zil got the party's ship through using a series of coded flag signals, but had betrayed the crew and let the pirates know that the ship was not a true pirate ship.

While the PCs were out and about getting the info they needed in the "city," the Strumpet was attacked, Zil was set free and the crew of the Strumpet captured. Upon discovering this, the PCs made a bold trek into the dungeons of the Pirate King's palace to free the crew. After freeing the crew, they managed to cause enough of a distraction back in the harbor to be able to sneak back onto the Strumpet and "steal" it back.

They never found Zil, but I can almost guarantee that he'll be back in the future, as will the pirate that they managed to frame for all the hullabaloo in the Pirate King's dungeons and the Pirate King himself.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

(Mild spoilers for the Freeport Trilogy below.)

One of my PCs was a swashbuckling fighter/rogue, constantly on the edge of doing too much bad, albeit with good intentions. He was weak-willed and impulsive.

Naturally, he's the one that first laid hands upon the saber of sorrow, a powerful cursed weapon long lost in Black Dog's Caves. Over the course of weeks, the saber warped Ianen's personality until he was among the vilest of the blackguards in Freeport. Eventually, during a long period of downtime, Ianen joined the crew of the White Shark, captained by Grinning Jand, the single most depraved, feared, and powerful of the city's many pirate captains. Ianen's twin sister, a noble paladin of Pelor, shudders still when she thinks of Ianen's behavior during that dark time.

Eventually, the White Shark and Ianen returned to port, and with good planning the rest of the group -- most of them siblings, of the merchant house Zarin -- took him down and (barely) alive. Michaela had the saber of sorrow melted down, shaped into a ball of metal, and dropped somewhere in the open ocean. Over several more weeks, Ianen recovered, though he was never quite the same devil-may-care scoundrel he'd been pre-saber. (He also never again strayed from Goodness.)

Two years later, game time and real time, on their way to stop cultists of Yarash from releasing YADG (yet another dark god) to plague Freeport, who should attempt to stop their small and ill-armed vessel but, yes, the White Shark. The battle was furious, the presence of the heroes prolonging the inevitable, but eventually the superior numbers of the Shark's crew and the vicious fighting skills of her captain meant the boarding of the weaker vessel.

That's when Grinning Jand came face to face with Ianen, or -- as he'd been called during that dark time -- "Mako." The Zarin family, Ianen's siblings, blanched as Jand threw his head back and laughed, recounting tales of murder and pillage, expressing his admiration for "ol' Mako here, th' only lad o' all me bloodthirsty crew t' ever give me cause t' heave me guts." And then Ianen lunged for Jand, their sabres crossed with a resounding crash, and the battle was rejoined.

Eventually, battered and bloody, Ianen prevailed over Grinning Jand, and the remainder of the heroes defeated his crew. Ianen's love, Duvray, long disguised as a male navigator, was revealed as a woman. (The group, out of character, never knew Duvray was a woman. They just assumed Ianen was British Royal Navy, I guess, shrugged, and went about their business. There were disapproving looks from Michaela, of course, but paladins are notoriously prudish.) Ianen and Duvray claimed the White Shark as their own, and as the remaining Zarins sailed toward Hell's Triangle, to be carried toward their destiny, the White Shark sailed into the setting sun, tacking her way back to Freeport.

(And, a day later, Ianen's player moved to Seattle, where he'd taken a kick-ass job as a game designer for Microsoft. He's missed. I have some great players, but Ianen's has been the only one so far to truly embrace the piratical cliches that make Freeport so much fun. Thinking about it, the synchronicity of being able to provide so much closure to Ianen's saga was pretty incredible. The timing just all seemed to work out perfectly.)