I began a new game with four players, and the main theme is : Pirates!
My goal in this campaign is to focus on rp, exploration and giving the players more agency than ever (a sandbox, if you will). I'm looking for ideas of sea-based adventures for my players; do you have any ? I'm also curious on what is your view of a campaign where the players are pirates. I already have in mind the inclusion of a few adventures (re-worked for the world of the campaign) of Ghosts of Saltmarsh in mind, but I search more.
(For more context : The campaign sets on the Nomad Lands, an archipelago. At the center of it, the religious captial of Toram extends it's dominion over the Nomad Lands, but not entirely. I suppose the main interest of the players will be the the lands outside the dominion, where tales & legends of the people come to life.)
I love the idea of a nautical campaign! It's a great context for monster-of-the-week type stuff, episodic fare, while still having the possibility of longer-term arcs.
I recommend reading the
Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. While the tales focus on a merchant rather than a pirate, they're suffused with "weird archipelago full of wealth and treasure and
huge danger", which is a great head-space to get into for doing a campaign like this.
As far as adventures go, consider what the ship represents for the players: it's a mobile home base. That makes it a bastion of safety if they can escape from an island/port to it. But...it also represents their fragility. The ocean is notorious for being capricious, a harsh mistress, "between the devil and the deep blue sea" type stuff. Their ship is both their castle and their foxhole--so leverage that! Give them reason, occasionally, to fear for the safety of their ship, so that they'll be willing to take risks in order to keep it safe. It doesn't actually need to put the ship in danger of total destruction. Just needing repairs, and being unable to go to official ports to seek them, is a huge motive.
Further, don't forget that piracy, despite its appearance in media, actually involved a contract! The officers of the ship (usually including captain, quartermaster, carpenter, and surgeon) would get extra shares of the voyage's wealth, while everyone else would each get one share. E.g. captain gets two, quartermaster one-and-a-half, and carpenter and surgeon one-and-a-quarter each, or something like that. And captaincy is elected! You don't have it by right, you have it by the consent of the crew. Elections can't occur during combat, but otherwise, at any otherwise-safe time, a vote can be called, and if the captain loses, someone else gets elected in their stead.
But this leads to an important secondary point. Pirates were very mercenary. They needed to trust each other enough to sail together, but once you had your cash, you could just leave, and they often did. One voyage was enough to earn
years of regular-labor pay, so if you had a particularly profitable voyage you might just retire after the first one. If you are cool with that, embrace it, but I suspect you probably want to have a core of adventurers who stick together, even if their crew changes between major voyages. If so, you'll probably want to consider what would bring together such a band of ne'er-do-wells. What makes them stick together, even in a world as (literally!) cutthroat as piracy? What drove them to this life, rather than a more mundane one? Etc. Reflect on these and make sure the players do too, and you'll have a much
richer campaign experience, because it will feel natural and justified, rather than enforced.
Edit: And one more thing.
Pirates were absolutely VERY cutthroat and violent. But they didn't LIKE violence, very much the opposite in fact. Violence
costs money. Damage to the ship? You have to pay for expensive repairs in faraway ports where the government's reach is weak/nonexistent. Damage to the crew? You have to compensate them for lost limbs, eyes, etc., and sometimes compensate their next-of-kin if they perish during the voyage.
What this means isn't that pirates shied away from combat, but rather that they were masters of
subterfuge and
intimidation. Using a net full of floating crap (old barrels, wood debris, cloth, etc.) behind the ship to make it look like it's laden with goods. Covers over the cannons so, from a distance, they look like just a wooden ship. Flying false colors, only putting up the Jolly Roger or other piratical flag when they're closing in for the theft. Shock and awe tactics. "We'll just take your goods, and leave you your life. Don't get funny ideas." The idea was to keep as low a profile as possible on the high seas until the moment you were ready to scare the naughty word out of your target. You'd absolutely kill every man jack of them if they resisted, but you
wouldn't kill them if they surrendered, because you WANT people to surrender.
CGP Grey has an excellent pair of videos (which this post is heavily drawing from!) talking about what piracy was
actually like in its heyday. If you'd like links,
here's the Captain's video about
branding!, and
here's the Quartermaster's video about
management.
