D&D General What's your view on a pirate-driven campaign?

[TheSword]

Some D&D ones:

FOR3 Pirates of the Sea of Fallen Stars. Forgotten Realms 2e Sourcebook on fantasy D&D pirates.

Sea of Fallen Stars. 2e FR sourcebook, mostly about the undersea and underwater adventuring and campaigning, but has some bits on the Pirate Isles detailed in FOR3.

Corsairs of the Great Sea. Al-Qadim 2e small boxed set on fantasy Arabian pirates.

Havens of the Great Bay. Birthright 2e setting sourcebook on coastal regions with some pirates.

Rock of Bral. Spelljammer asteroid city founded by fantasy space pirates called the City of Thieves.

SJA2 Skull and Crossbones. 2e Spelljammer anthology of adventures about hunting down pirates.

HR4 A Mighty Fortress is Elizabethan time period if you want to do Sir Francis Drake stuff with extensive period firearms.

LC4 Port of Raven's Bluff. A Forgotten Realms 2e port city with pirates regularly in it.

DMGR9 Of Ships and Seas. 2e rules sourcebook provides rules for nautical adventuring and ship combat.

Stormwrack. The 3e sea themed environment sourcebook with some nautical adventuring rules.

Salt and Sea Dogs: Pirates of Tellene. 3.5 Kalamar sourcebook on nautical adventuring and pirating.

Zoa Citadel of the Bay. 3.5 Kalamar smuggler haven port city sourcebook.

City of Stormreach. 3.5 Eberron smuggler and pirate port city full hardcover sourcebook.

Eberron as a Campaign Setting. 3.5-5e has the Lhazar Provinces of pirate kingdoms but they are not as well fleshed out as other stuff with official adventures and dedicated sourcebooks and such.

Greyhawk has its own pirates areas too such as the isles of the Sea Barons and the Hold of the Sea Princes and the fantasy viking raiders of the Snow, Frost, and Ice barbarians.

Lankhmar had some pirate stuff in the setting, but not much in the D&D adventures or city sourcebooks that I remember.

So many great products in that last. Sea of Fallen Stars was my introduction to pirate RPG. Anyone else remember the island with the crashed Neogi Spelljammer. That is some serious horror vibes going on there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

None of this has to do with the "bookkeeping of piracy" that people are talking about.
They specifically mention things like payroll/shares, barrels of fish, barrels of water, wind speeds, etc.
Not combat.
I have solutions for combat.

But I have an easy solution for those that complain about the bookkeeping of piracy -- ignore it. None of the inspirations for the game focus on that. Your table shouldn't either.

Your table shouldn't have to focus on that. I still think those kinds of sim concerns should be addressed, at least optionally.

 

[Celebrim]

None of this has to do with the "bookkeeping of piracy" that people are talking about.
They specifically mention things like payroll/shares, barrels of fish, barrels of water, wind speeds, etc.
Not combat.
I have solutions for combat.

But I have an easy solution for those that complain about the bookkeeping of piracy -- ignore it. None of the inspirations for the game focus on that. Your table shouldn't either.

I don't think you have to get as deep in the woods as tracking barrels of fish and depending on the campaign setting you probably don't need to track food and water portions if you can assume stops in ports are pretty frequent the same way you don't track food while the PCs are in town. There is a thing where you go off on a two month ocean voyage where knowing you have enough food for 200 men for two months is a thing, and you can get into what happens when the food spoils and things like that if it adds to the story, but it's not required. (Then again, Skull & Shackles never seemed to recognize Create Food and Water existed in the setting, or how stupidly easy the rules made doing that.)

On the other hand, deducting costs for the upkeep of men and ships probably ought to be part of the piracy. These two hundred cutthroats aren't following you entirely out of the goodness of their hearts, especially if they are hungry or thirsty or aren't getting paid. And the inspirations for the story do very much focus on the motivations of the men serving aboard the ship. That is something that comes up even in the most fantasy unrealistic movie versions. So there is a need to ask, "What do pirates think is fair pay?" because you do have to deduct that from the treasure taken. And if they feel cheated, you have a problem. The men are feeling mutinous shows up in even Pirates of the Caribbean, even when the crew is undead and doesn't need upkeep in any traditional sense.

One of my problems with the Skull and Shackles adventure path is that they did a really good job with this when the PCs were a sailor. The officers they served under were brutal and arbitrary and cruel and did not rule with the consent of the crew. And you could easily imagine why the crew would want to mutiny. But after establishing that this was part of the inspiration for the game and a part of the story, the act of becoming elected the new officers didn't in the game really involve promising to do better than that and worse didn't involve actually fulfilling that promise. Under the rules, if we had followed them, we were going to be worse bosses than the ones we'd induced the crew to mutiny against, and paying them lower wages and smaller shares of the treasure than they had received before. And that just makes no sense.

It's not that hard to compute and deduct expenses. Lots of campaigns I think will say something like, "Ok, you've been living in town for a month but we haven't been playing out every meal, clothing purchase, shoe polish expenditure, and haircut Deduct 30 g.p. per level of your character to cover your cost of living for this month." Pirate campaigns are just that with a lot bigger expenditures. You can abstract it out to a high level but it does need to be there.

Also, like wind speeds are a thing and you don't have to track them every day but they do add to the richness of the game of being at sea. Storms and calms and fair winds and having to tack to go up against the wind, and the fact that square and triangle rigs perform differently in different winds and want you to run in different directions make for fun gaming and chases and evasion and so forth. And if you have sailed combat at sea, then to a large extent the speed and direction of the wind are the terrain of that battle and it makes the battle more interesting in the same way slopes and obstacles make a land battle more interesting. Do you have to pay attention to it? Probably not, but at some point it won't feel much like a sea adventure.

And again, Skull and Shackles did a pretty good job of doing this from the perspective of the PC as sailor aboard a pirate ship, but a lot less of a good job of doing it once the PC's became the masters and commanders of a pirate ship.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

IIRC correctly, that's because Treasure Island has no actual piracy

Yes. And yet it’s the trope definer for the “Pirate” genre. Which is important, the Pirate genre has as much to do with actual piracy as the Cowboy genre has to do with cows.

 

[Celebrim]

Sea of Fallen Stars was my introduction to pirate RPG.

This and the publication of some Dragon articles about sea faring combined with dissatisfaction at running the PC's across the Sea of Fallen stars in a homebrew adventure to rescue slaves led my college GM to steer the campaign into piracy and naval combat.

Of course, we found out after just one combat the rules in Dragon had never been play tested but a few tweaks and things went pretty well.

 

[Zardnaar]

The best pirate setting I have seen is Razor Coast by Nicholas Logue - a veteran of Dungeon Magazine and many of the best Paizo adventure paths. It’s written for Pathfinder but easily adaptable for 5e.

I think i have a pdf of that. Bought a Pathfinder humble bundle few years back. Pirate themed.

 

[Lanefan]

Battlesystem would work mechanically, the issue though is that is a different kind of game. D&D is character focused and Battlesystem is more about the army/battle. It would have to be a specific kind of group for this to be effective and fun.

I remeber when battlesystem was new and Gygax was really pushing it, at the table it fell completely flat because players did not come to play a wargame.

I find it is far easier just to focus on the PCs part in the battle and the rest of it happens off screen. The Shadow of the Dragon Queen adventure had some options to do this quite effectively. You are in the middle of the chaos, but the rest of it is just happening.

Which is fine until-unless you need to mechanically resolve what's happening off-screen.

I mean sure, you need to focus on what the PCs are doing; but you also need to know on a somewhat-ongoing basis whether the rest of the pirates are taking the prize ship, being rebuffed in their attempt, or are stuck in a standoff.

Big difference between

--- victorious pirate PCs standing surrounded by victorious celebrating pirates, and
--- pirate PCs who, having won their own battles, are standing surrounded by really hacked-off crewmembers of the prize ship, who have just defeated all the PCs' pirate allies and are ordering the PCs to surrender or else.

Never mind that difference should become apparent well before this point, while the battles are still in progress; which means you need to know on the fly how those other battles are going, at least in general.

Battlesystem might be overkill, but it was the first mass-combat ruleset that leaped to mind.

 

[GrimCo]

Also, when it comes to ships. Most type they used in Caribbean were sloops, schooners and cutters. Merchant sloops had as few as 6 crew members. Pirates and privateers usually had 40-60 (crew for cannons and boarding party). Cutters were even smaller, with 20-30 people. Schooners were a bit larger with crews of 80-100. Depending on the era, of course, cause that Golden Age of piracy was from 1650-1730 ( with privateer era being 1550-1650 and Anti piracy era from 1730-1800). Thats 250 years of ship and maritime combat evolution.

Those small ships usually attacked brigs (20-50 crew), merchant sloops (8-20), barque (50-100), ketch (8-20), smack (3-10). Larger ships were targeted if they were not armed or lightly armed.

So party of pirates in cutter, targeting smaller coastal traders, while boarding, it's doable without using mass combat rules.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So party of pirates in cutter, targeting smaller coastal traders, while boarding, it's doable without using mass combat rules.

And there's no obligation to build up a pirate armada, especially in a ttrpg.

DM: "Guys, if you start claiming a bunch of these ships for your own, this game is going to turn into a a big management exercise and naval wargame. We can do that, or you can just hold onto your sloop and do more standard D&D adventures, with a nautical and pirate vibe."

Players: "Sink the ship!"

 

[ECMO3]

Which is fine until-unless you need to mechanically resolve what's happening off-screen.

I mean sure, you need to focus on what the PCs are doing; but you also need to know on a somewhat-ongoing basis whether the rest of the pirates are taking the prize ship, being rebuffed in their attempt, or are stuck in a standoff.

Big difference between

--- victorious pirate PCs standing surrounded by victorious celebrating pirates, and
--- pirate PCs who, having won their own battles, are standing surrounded by really hacked-off crewmembers of the prize ship, who have just defeated all the PCs' pirate allies and are ordering the PCs to surrender or else.

Never mind that difference should become apparent well before this point, while the battles are still in progress; which means you need to know on the fly how those other battles are going, at least in general.

Battlesystem might be overkill, but it was the first mass-combat ruleset that leaped to mind.

I just remember playing Battlesystem modules back in the 80s where you do part of the adventure and then there was a battle in the middle of and when the battle was going on everyone at the table was like - can we just get back to playing D&D now.

It is a very particular group this works for.