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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paul Farquhar" data-source="post: 9781098" data-attributes="member: 6906155">This is what I would absolutely avoid in a pirate campaign. Freedom and independence (and from a gameplay perspective player autonomy) are central themes in a pirate story. I would call a campaign where the PCs are crew who are sent on missions a Star Fleet campaign. If the PCs start out as crew, I would kill off the captain and senior officers in episode one, leaving the PCs in charge. I would also trash the ship, so that they have an incentive to seek wealth to fix it up. Ideally, the player-ship should progress from zero to hero like player characters do.I'll see you History* and raise you Fantasy. In a fantasy world there is no reason navel technology would follow the same path as the real world, and a mash-up of lots of different tech levels and societies is the norm. And ships can be any size the DM likes. Also, there is no reason why the PC ship should be standard for the region. For example the PCs may stumble across a huge magically advanced ship run by magical automatons - this was basically the Blake's 7 set up, which makes a good model for a pirate campaign (the recent Nautilus TV show was pretty much Blake's 7 under water).*Large three-masted ships are on the standard D&D equipment list. You would have to run a very non-standard D&D setting to remove all the Renaissance-era technology.</blockquote>