So my dear nephew, who’s turning 18 in a few days (time flies), had this special wish to play a pirate-themed ttrpg and I’ve decided to go along with it. Yeah, pirates, not something I had in my mind in the least and now I have this sudden impulse to buy a good bottle of rum but, also, rummaging (oh! the pun) through my drivethrurpg library I saw that I’ve this interesting module that I’d bought a couple of years ago:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/425300/secret-of-the-black-crag

It’s a great mini-setting, with the mysterious, eponymous Black Crag has an end goal.

It’s also old-school D&D.

And I gotta say, and I went back & forth on the subject until the last minute, but I don’t think D&D, retro or otherwise, is a very good fit for a pirates campaign. Sure, it’s doable and I know it has been done plenty, but I can’t wrap my head around the basic premise of an adventuring party of fighter, magic-user, thief and cleric (or any other d&d classes for that matter)… well, it doesn’t scream pirates at all.

So, I’ve searched far & wide (not) and came upon an alternate system and bought the pdf (and ordered a physical copy afterward) of this game:

This is still d20-based, but very much different in every other aspects.

I didn’t have previous experience with those Borg rpg books, I find the look of the line a bit too artsy for my taste to be honest but now that I’ve opened the book I must say I’m quite impressed. And, to my earlier point, with Pirate Borg you can play a brute, a buccaneer, a swashbuckler, a rapscallion or zealot and sorcerer if you feel magically-inclined (or some even more fantastic options like the accursed or tall-tale if you want to go there).

Check out for yourself: https://www.limithron.com/pirateborg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC6DmNex9l0&t=18s

So I’ve got a mini-setting and a cool rpg system to implement it – I’m also grafting a few other short modules to this, not a lot because I don’t think we’ll be able to play very frequently:

• Ascent of the Leviathan by Malrex
• The Forgotten Grottoes of the Sea Lords by Keith Sloan
• The Isle of the Plangent Mage by Donn Stroud

Now, I do have a copy of Stevenson’s Treasure Island somewhere if I can find it…

(We’ve played this saturday, me, my boys, my sister and nephew and had great fun. Quite refreshing as a ttrpg experience. And playing the role of vilainous scumbags seem to suit some of the players very well ha! ha!)