Playing – Pirate Borg Pt. 2

Once again I managed to get folks together for Pirate Borg!

Last time we did the semi-sandbox Buried in the Bahamas (recommended as a good starting place, with some combat, exploration, and a dungeon puzzle). We were less dark and gritty, more weird and wacky, but still worked just fine. If there was a lesson to be learned, it was “Our table, our play – if we’re having fun, then we’re doing it right!“. Feedback at the end of our second session was that the setting was really cool with the undead and the supernatural and pirates.

Conviently, the Backerkit PDF for Cabin Fever had just arrived in my mailbox so I had plenty to of material to choose from for a second session. We had a really big table of players and did a bit of housekeeping, discussing rules we got wrong last time, trading up the ship gained from last time for a sloop (mostly because it gave the players more freedom to make choices about the direction they wanted to take), and a few house rules to agree upon to match what we as a table expected for a long term game.

1. Do a game once every month or two (based on availability of GM and players)
2. Handwave downtime expenses as PCs earning enough to support themselves but not enough to improve their lifestyles. We were more concerned with the adventure than the riches and book keeping.
3. Keep the adventures short. Whatever isn’t finished before the end of the session is left undone and the next session will pick up at a haven.
4. Slightly less lethal – at 0 or fewer hit points, roll on the Broken table (1 in 6 chance of true death, the others results including losing limbs and just bouncing back with a few hit points after the encounter)
5. Each arcane ritual will work at least once per day (idea stolen from ShadowDark) but the mystical mishap still applies and that ritual cannot be used again until a long rest (as per the RAW ritual failure)

So in short, a non-grinding adventure of the week Western Marches lite (less hex by hex exploration and more seeking out interesting locations and loot what you can).

Now that we’re getting into it, discovering a few places that we need to discuss like:

• the number of arcane rituals being found and learned and how it will impact the long term game without making Zealots and Sorcerers less unique
• long term effects of broken or lost limbs (as per near death / broken results)
• will supporting NPCs of the crew ever gain improvements like hirelings in Mausritter or sidekicks in D&D 5E Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything

I sort of checked off one of my gaming goals for 2025 by putting together something to post on itch.io – namely a hand scrawled ship stats modification to the official ship sheet. The character sheets provided had pirate at the top and ship at the bottom, useful if everybody had a ship of their own. Some had helpfully posted a pirate only character sheet, so I went and started playing with a ship only, copying over that part to the open space of the official ship sheet. My plan is to go and do a better version that has space for things like sea shanties known and key episodes of the campaign under ship’s log.