Playing – Pirate Borg

“A scurvy-ridden, rules light, art heavy tabletop RPG … This game is about being a greedy, filthy, scoundrel.”

So reads the text at Pirate Borg‘s homepage, barely scratching the grimdark surface of the Mork Borg aesthetic of an 80’s metal band album ala Corrosion of Conformity or Iron Maiden splattered across a handbook akin to an independent zine bound into 166 pages of pirates and eldritch horror.

I had backed the Kickstarter way back when, but aside of hacking bits off for a quick mash up game with my nephews, I only managed to get Pirate Borg to the table last week for a test run with some friends and checking off another New Game / Not D&D Game for the year.

TLDR: We had fun. It’s simple and brutal, but still room for some houserules to clear up a few things. We hope to play again!

Things we liked

Like Mork Borg, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and other Old School Games, Pirate Borg shares in stripped down mechanics – roll a d20 + modifier versus a target number of 12, roll a d6 for the entire party (way back when we called it Captain Initiative for the player who rolled for our side), and encouragement to think beyond “I roll to hit”. Avoiding that slog of trading “I roll to hit and damage” back and forth is a trap I find myself falling into with d20 games, even when throwing in some narrative descriptors but still getting caught into the mechanical crunch. Still, the simplicty made it easy to get in, make a character, and get rolling without having to memorize dozens of mechanics.

The character creation reflects that too. There’s a one page character creation sheet that summarized everything but for the character class abilities. I printed off additional copies of the two page class descriptions for player ease, but the information for the one ability of a starting character fits on a post it note. We generated two characters per player for the likely event of a PC’s pirate getting killed off, but between a quick house rule and the reroll allowed by Devil’s Luck mechanic, we managed to not lose any for the one shot. *Houserule – RAW is that only at 0 Hit Points does a character get to roll on the Broken Table, giving a 4 in 6 chance to survive albeit messed up; we modified the rule to roll on that table when dropping to 0 or less. A lot of Devil’s Luck got rolled to avoid death but there is only so much of that resource to go around.

Then there is the overall feel of the setting. It’s an eldritch drenched rum soaked world of darkness that focuses on adventures and monsters, making deliberate choice to keep historical atrocities out of the narrative. That feel gets reinforced with the many tables for random details (we used the Alchemy Table to determine the Secret Firebomb formula for our Black Powder Poet ) and the art of the book.

We ran through Buried in Bermuda, enjoying the bounded sandbox and pushed through it with a levelling up to get a feel for it. It’s a solid adventure, but there were a couple of things we made up on the go, either because it wasn’t covered in the rules or couldn’t be found in the moment.

Things We Wanted to Change

Gonna go point form for this one …

• There isn’t much in the Tall Tales section of the classes, like does a skeleton 0need to breathe if underwater or should an intelligent animal get some sort of special ability based on what they are like better climber for a monkey or improved swimming for a crocodile, so we came up with things on the fly and that’s now the truth of the world, at least for now …

• A lack of detail on broken and torn off limbs (results from the Broken table) like how long is it broken and what sort of suggested penalties ought there to be. There are a bunch of Mork Borg fan made content that gives some guidelines, so minor but ultimately up to the house rules.

• One class has a teamwork mechanic that lowers an attack target number, but otherwise there’s no real benefit to working together. Like should you go with roll at advantage if being helped (best of two rolls) or lower the target number by 1 for each additional help, even though that might seem to run counter to the general bleak feel of pirates of the Dark Caribbean.

• Include some additional Conditions to provide something other than Hit Points to gradually wear the PCs down, like exhaustion, like when they spend all night paddling a makeshift raft for a couple of hours should come with a consequence but not HP.

• How many shanties can a given pirate or crew know? There’s a mechanic for how many they can use, similar to the arcane rituals, but should there be some learning roll to gain the benefits of the shanty or are we just overthinking this?

• Technically I screwed up with the mishaps that are supposed to occur with a failed arcane ritual (thought it was only on a crit fail) but that did at least encourage PCs to try them out. We talked briefly about Shadowdark’s rule of a spell always working once and the fail meaning no more use of it and adopting it but still keeping a mishap to temper the use of them.

• We didn’t really get into it, but likely we will be using the ‘bar of soap’ inventory rule from Ultraviolet Grasslands that allow up to ten items the size of a bar of soap to count as one inventory slot, as long as there is a container to carry them in and this amount might vary from container to container.

We skipped right over the naval combat rules, but I look forward to next time giving them a test for they look to be a pretty solid set of rules without getting to bogged down in the minutae. Meanwhile, I’m working on a more permenant Storyteller Screen with the bare bones information needed, with maybe a few post-it notes to cover unique cases.