Pirate Borg general thread

[Stormonu]

I wasn't on the KS, but just recently picked up the books (Starter set, full rules, Among the Dead and just recently Cabin Fever). I think I've already got my money back in the entertainment it has brought us.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I wasn't on the KS, but just recently picked up the books (Starter set, full rules, Among the Dead and just recently Cabin Fever). I think I've already got my money back in the entertainment it has brought us.

The worst Pirate Borg game I've ever been part of was merely good. It's a really fun game.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Watching the Backrooms last night made me think about procedurally generated adventures. I'll probably pick up These Bloody Sails at some point, but it occurred to me that I already own a procedural dungeon suitable for Pirate Borg.

I just need to rename The Gardens of Ynn as "Fiddler's Green" and have the PCs hear that there's a ritual to reach sailor's heaven as an alternative to going to Davy Jones' Locker and they will eagerly send themselves into a body horror garden world. The garden as written is heavy on the English garden flowers, but just mentioning hibiscus and palm trees as part of the scenery should probably be enough to make it fit, especially since it's not supposed to be a realistic environment.

 

[overgeeked]

Watching the Backrooms last night made me think about procedurally generated adventures. I'll probably pick up These Bloody Sails at some point, but it occurred to me that I already own a procedural dungeon suitable for Pirate Borg.

I just need to rename The Gardens of Ynn as "Fiddler's Green" and have the PCs hear that there's a ritual to reach sailor's heaven as an alternative to going to Davy Jones' Locker and they will eagerly send themselves into a body horror garden world. The garden as written is heavy on the English garden flowers, but just mentioning hibiscus and palm trees as part of the scenery should probably be enough to make it fit, especially since it's not supposed to be a realistic environment.

I keep thinking of combining the two. What are good spaces in Pirate Borg to include the kind of liminal horror you'd get from Backrooms? My first thought was a ship with too many levels, forts with too many levels, Doctor Who TARDIS spaces that are bigger on the inside, islands that are wildly bigger than they should be, spaces as portals so you could bring in random crap from other games or genres and plop them down in Pirate Borg. That kind of thing. Not really doing anything with it because that's not where my head is at right now.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I keep thinking of combining the two. What are good spaces in Pirate Borg to include the kind of liminal horror you'd get from Backrooms? My first thought was a ship with too many levels, forts with too many levels, Doctor Who TARDIS spaces that are bigger on the inside, islands that are wildly bigger than they should be, spaces as portals so you could bring in random crap from other games or genres and plop them down in Pirate Borg. That kind of thing. Not really doing anything with it because that's not where my head is at right now.

A ship that's too big would work, as would a sea cave that just keeps going far beyond what seems natural, or an abandoned Mesoan tomb, since in the setting, it looks like some of them were involved with the Great Old Ones before European cultists arrived.

The Pirate Borg-compatible Castaway has the PCs wind up on an obviously unnatural island that is probably displaced in time and space where an infinite liminal space would fit in just fine. (It's a very Lost/Twin Peaks sort of setting.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I ran The Sinking of C'thagn this weekend with my usual group in preparation for running it in-store in July.

I think it's an imperfect adventure in several ways:

1. I've bought enough Phil Reed products to be a confirmed fan of interesting formats and form factors, but having the (unnumbered) map on one side of the fold-out pamphlet and everything else arranged on the opposite side is a recipe for constantly flipping during at-the-table play. (And the PDF is arranged like the map is, so there's a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling to find what you want.) It really needs you to buy two copies of the pamphlet to run it well, which is silly.
2. It presents as a sandbox adventure, exploring not-R'yleh, but other than some (but not all) of the greenstone buildings on the map having a paragraph of descriptions, and several random encounter tables, the adventure really expects the pirates to go to the temple and stop the Old Ones from being summoned into the world, which would be Very Bad. Pirate Borg feels like the wrong game to run a railroad through, even if the tracks run through an alleged sandbox.
3. The cult leader (the Sunken One) is mentioned in the sandbox portion, specifically in the coliseum description, but he (?) doesn't actually appear in the temple, although I guess one can assume he's one of the three fanatics in the main summoning room. This feels like an idea that came up in the writing process, wasn't properly followed through on, and wasn't caught in editing.
4. If the pirates find the super-secret hidden stage, going for the treasure (and doing the "right thing") is basically certain death, given that the word "plunge" is used, suggesting things change very quickly in the city.

That said, it's a cool setting that is clearly going to be important to the Dark Caribbean setting. Coins from C'thagn are on the random coin generator in Down Among the Dead and C'thagn has been explicitly mentioned in the previews for the Dark Caribbean setting. I hope it's going to get an updated and fleshed out entry in the sourcebook, because as it is, this needs an above-average amount of work to be successful at the table.

Since I've got a three-hour window at my store, I'm going to take the loosey-goosey clock in the adventure and making it much clearer and taking out its randomness, and letting them figure out within the first hour that something very bad is happening in the temple and that running away is not an option, as the problem will follow them home.

For a sandbox adventure in a campaign, I'd probably go the other direction and take away the ticking clock and everything in the temple entirely and let the pirates just push their luck attempting to loot the city before some nameless Mythos thing, the two different cults, Deep Ones or rival pirates kill them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So, I've been running Pirate Borg games at my local FLGS and ran Cavern of Sunken Tears last week.

(Quick review: It's my second time running it and both times ran incredibly similarly. I don't think most players will deviate from what is clearly the "best" path to play through, which I think brings this down to a C+ adventure. Compare to Buried in the Bahamas, an A adventure, which has real meaningful choices once the PCs get off of the island they're stranded on early on, allowing for groups to unleash their own particular brand of chaos on the Bahamas.)

At the very end of the adventure, as NPC pirates are making an extremely bad mistake out of naked greed, the PCs (who were smart enough to distance themselves from the other pirates with the scary NPCs at the adventure site) were studying some carvings on the wall, attempting to learn a spell. (One player figured out this was a thing and has been turning her non-spellcaster PC into a spellcaster by slurping up all the anyone-can-learn-it spells she can find.)

To learn the spell, the PC has to succeed at two different stat checks. Fail one and you get a permanent penalty on that stat. Fail both and your soul gets Doctor Stranged out of your body and your PC picks up the Haunted Soul race/class. In theory, the PC is supposed to possess their own corpse and wander around in it until it's almost destroyed, at which point they have 12 hours to find a new home or off they go to Davy Jones' Locker. Instead, this player looks around and says "uh, did you say the NPCs just killed the NPC pirate captain?" She jumps into the NPC's body, grabs her friend, and they Weekend at Bernie's the captain back to her ship while the NPCs kill each other, dodging the blood waterfall pouring down the underground pyramid (you can see why the PCs avoid pissing off locals) and took command of the NPC pirate ship.

Just another day in the chaos engine that is Pirate Borg.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The miniatures-centric set of Pirate Borg Kickstarter campaigns has launched. (The skirmish game will allegedly be in backers' hands by November, which is wild, as it'll beat everything else by up to a year.)

The encounter atlas, which is the only thing I really care about, looks like a good way to flesh out an adventure, based on the preview. I could see improvising an adventure with the random tables in the core book and this pretty easily.

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