Tell me Veeky Forums, how would you do a pirate campaign? Lighthearted? Serious? Golden age of Piracy...

Tell me Veeky Forums, how would you do a pirate campaign? Lighthearted? Serious? Golden age of Piracy, or maybe before or after?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_code
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Pink Mohawk Shadowrun

What I am currently doing.

Dark Heresy starting off with opening random containers, moving on to Rogue Trader. The players are out for themselves, this gives them the illusion of complete freedom, thus throwing them an adventurous curveball feels natural.

Pls user, do continue.

I've got a pirate campaign going. Steampunkish, high fantasy, kind of light and silly to start (NPCs tend to be eccentric, there's a Starbucks-style coffee shop that sells hallucinogenic magical drinks, etc) but not without the serious threats.

The protags are a group of mostly-regular people thrust into an adventure when they are attacked by pirates, and then hired to track down those same pirates. They do this by mostly sailing around to random locations in their steam ship and hoping to find the plot hooks.

I'm currently running a pirate campaign, relatively lighthearted in tone (although it's not really in my nature to pull punches when people fail so things still get very bad occasionally), it's in the setting's equivalent to the golden age of piracy.

I will always regret my WFRP campaign that could have turned into River Pirates of the Empire if I only understood how fucking big the rivers in that setting are when I was running it. We even had a guy whose career path was all sailing based.

So yeah, I'd do river pirates. Perfect mix of ship stuff and land stuff, traveling through cool creepy swamps and visiting seedy dockside inns, always trying to stay one step ahead of the roadwardens.

Rip off "The Pirates of Dark Water" and add a little bit of "The Herculoids" for flavor.

I'd love to run a serious pirate campaign, but I don't know where to find enough people comfortable with participating with indiscriminate murder, even less discriminate rape and occasional human trafficking.

Depends on the group / my mood.

Why do people ask questions like this?

With a soundtrack of Alestorm playing in the background for every session.

Yes.

I would go waning age of piracy, in the 18thC, and honestly, I wouldn't force being pirate at all. Let the players be privateers, merchant-explorers or even pirate hunters, mixed with the historic fantasy flavour of the PotC movies. Strange things happen out at sea, and in unexplored new lands, and its just kind of accepted.

Lighthearted with serious undertones. Its a bunch of drunk thieves going out to find treasure even if you steal it. But sometimes, adventure leads where it may and now your on the oceanic quest to go get the special sea mcguffin and save the world from the oceanic BBEG and of course when you kill him/her/it, it turns out the true bad guys are the rival pirates that you continuously encounter throughout the campaign!

You know, I never found out who’s the guy on the right. That’s Jack, Adewale, Edward & Blackbeard but who’s the bald musket guy? Just a random crewman?

Anyone up for pics?

Hey Gropealope! Got a pic dump for us?

I got you matey.

...

Would put the violence and degradation of humanity front and center. Trust my player enough to let them judge the choices they a re making with their characters

That... Man, I don't know why I never thought to do something like that. It's brilliant.

Haven't seen you in a while clownfag. You doing good?

...

Im surviving. Sick as a dog right now, but at least it gives me time to argue with people on the Manchu pictograph enthusiast website.

...

As in Manchu writing?

Talk about an esoteric hobby.

Detail oriented Master and Commander type game using GURPS

Im talking about Veeky Forums, dude.

Fuuuuck yes. Horatio Hornblower and To the Ends of the Earth are worth basing on too. Would the players be sailors, midshipmen or officers?

That's not a necessity.
Even if you are pirates (As opposed to independent traders/mercs in the Age of Sail) you might not be rapists and murderers to a man. If word gets out that traders surrendered to you and didn't get brutally murdered, more might surrender to you. You also might have an Anne Bonney type who would look down on you raping women (and cut your dick off for it).

I would throw in the lesser known but still excellent Captain Blood.

Throw in Darksun and you’re on!

>I will always regret my WFRP campaign that could have turned into River Pirates of the Empire if I only understood how fucking big the rivers in that setting are when I was running it.
Are we talking the size of the columbia? Or even larger. River pirates just strikes me as odd because it seems like it would be easy for the authorities to set a blockade for them.

this is the case for the campaign I'm currently running

>Human Trafficking

It wasn't uncommon for IRL pirates to fuck up slave ships and "free" slaves to local islands. Many among a pirate crew had been incarcerated at one point or another and would refuse to take part in inflicting the same fate on someone else.

During, in a light fantasy setting, wherein the "New World" was discovered some 15-30 years prior, and a terrible storm cut off the earliest explorers and colonies from the PC's homeland. Not terribly original, but opens plenty of plot hooks.

I wished there was a way to keep the crewman outfit from Sequence 1 or Duncan Walpole's robes. So many outfits were palette swaps.

>I'd love to run a serious pirate campaign, but I don't know where to find enough people comfortable with participating with indiscriminate murder, even less discriminate rape and occasional human trafficking.

Pirates were less murderous than you might think. Their goal was to capture a ship and its cargo with as little fighting as possible, because people fighting back made their job harder and more dangerous than it had to be, and ultimately they just wanted the money, not a bloodbath. If pirates murdered people indiscriminately then everyone would fight them to the death rather than surrender.

As for rape, you might be surprised.

>Captain John Phillips, captain of the Revenge, also set a code for his men in 1724:

>IX. If at any time you meet with a prudent Woman, that Man that offers to meddle with her, without her Consent, shall suffer present Death.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_code

I remember that Bartholomew Roberts also set lots of codes.

I really just want Dark Water style xeno pirates to make a comeback in some form

If you want unambiguous heroes you can always go smugglers en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle

Last time I did pirates, it was in Shadowrun. The group was based on a tiny island in fuck nowhere and worked their way up to controlling an entire ocean.

I prefer my pirates to be of the airborne variety.

Sky Pirates?

I loved Black Sails. So golden age. Doesn't mean I can't throw in a dash of humor and a pinch serious.

>tfw your Christmas present this year was AC4 from Ubisoft

I know that feel, man. Didn't even get any socks or chocolate.

The only thing I really have to go on is the game Vermintide where the river that cuts through the city the game takes place in looks to be about the width of the Mississippi, and that's a pretty small river. I imagine the major waterways could be at least twice that size.

Even so, I don't think any authorities outside of major cities would be able to organize a proper blockade to combat some pesky pirates. Roadwardens in WHF are more like a frontier militia than a proper police force. Plus, like the name implies, they tend to stick to the land.

At least I like it though. They could have given Unity or a throwaway game. They actually gave one of the better ones.

>ctrl-f

>no Poison'd

I just want a good PoD reboot.

I want DMC5 but we can’t have everything.

Stop making me cry, user. Just stop.

Did someone say making user cry?

Run Poison'd a bunch. Fun for a one-shot, but not suitable for a longer campaign. Neat inspiration though.

Tubular