Playing Pirate Borg – On Stranger Seas

With the holiday mayhem over for the moment (as well as a major local SCA event), we finally got to sit down and play our ‘adventure of the week’ (more like every month or two depending on schedules) where our band of pirates set sail for plunder and strangeness. Along the way, there are a few rules that we are hacking and lifting from other systems (plus a few forgotten in the heat of the moment and rediscovered after the fact).

Things Tried & Lessons Learned

Fail Forward Dice

A mechanic lifted from a couple of sources as an escalation. Basically, if you fail a non trivial roll, you gain 1d6 that can be added to any other die roll you made, up to 3 banked at a time. It can be added after the roll is made but only 1d6 gets to be added. It hasn’t been asked yet, but I feel that they ought to be available to be used to aid another character if desired (even better if a narrative is given, like “I help Leroy to fight the zombie pirate (rolls 1d6) and Leroy can add +3 to their roll” or “Remember when Tracy taught you that sword parry? Use my 1d6 for your defense roll!”).

Specifically for Pirate Borg, the house rule we tried was that you don’t get a FF die if you spend a Devil’s Luck to reroll. 1d6 is a little swingy, so it could have easily been a larger or smaller die or even a single +1 to help with those rolls so achingly close. Overall, the response was positive and the flow of use was pretty decent. We aren’t carrying them between sessions so less paperwork there.

Naval Combat

What’s a pirate game without some naval combat?

I was super excited about the simplicity of the system that still allowed PCs to affect the battle. I had hacked a few things for a couple of D&D sessions but those quickly grew more complex than what I was looking for. Overall, it worked but a few things felt like they could be better –

• The damage dice of the attacking cannons subtracted from the defender’s hull dice of the ships meant that except for critical hits and ramming, very little damage was being done. A little extra research in the Pirate Borg discord revealed that one of the game creators offered some suggestions of reducing the hit points of ships or (and this is the one I really like) doubling the damage dice when within a close range of 6 hexes. That last one adds more importance to the range game and that feels right. At our table, we had a little talk about it after three rounds and almost no damage done to either ship despite both being hit every round and just stopped subtracting hull dice and get a feel for that.
• We ran the ships like characters so to avoid being hit, the captain rolled a d20 + ship agility like any other defense roll. I’m still feeling iffy about this. The example combat video I watched didn’t have a defense roll, just attacks so might try it that way next time. If nothing else, it should increase how often ships are being hit.
• I totally screwed up this one – the order of actions and movement. We followed the sequence as written – ship movement followed by crew actions. Watching the video showed that actions could be done partway through movement. That feels more natural and we are totally going to do it that way next time.
• Many players but only two guns, leaving several other players at loose ends. However, as the ships drew closer together, some players got creative with things like an arcane ritual to summon a skeleton to sabotage the other ship by dropping it’s anchor and sniping the enemy captain and even trying to get an insight into the enemy captain’s psyche. I suspect that when we use other actions as part of the movement, it will inspire a few more action taken. We also might do a ‘help action’ with multiple players rolling for a single task like firing the broadsides and taking the best roll of the bunch.

Overall, multiple players said that they enjoyed the naval skirmish and would want to try it again.

Multi Classing

As written, Pirate Borg doesn’t NOT allow it so we went with it (“Our game, our rules, our fun”). Admittedly, a couple of the more fantastical classes like the undead also have you take another class so having an intelligent beast become a sorcerer wasn’t that big of a deal. The only real rule we’ve done is that when you take a different class, you just get the random ability as if you had just leveled in that class. Might as well drive this system like we stole it!

Wounds

I found the Pirate Borg wound system a little lackluster so lifted the one from Brimstone & Blackpowder, another Mork Borg game. It has a number of dismemberment results which seemed more far more on theme.

On a related note – zombie bites in this game are crazy! On a single successful bite, a failed DR 8 Toughness roll means the PC is doomed to become a zombie. Yes, on brand but pretty impactful for what is essentially a mook creature. I’m looking at making it a progressive thing, decided over three rolls, potentially with 1 out of 3 rolls being made and the PC has the option of taking an undead class feature but three fails they become mindless undead.

Other Weirdness

Previously, one of the PCs got attacked by a wretched coral polyp after defeating a human who had been encrusted with coral. Given options between losing a hand or accepting the Curse / Blessing of the Coral, they accepted the coral into their life. So far we’re calling it a stage one, gaining -d2 armour and a natural weapon of 1d4 with the afflicted arm. Downside, that arm and hand are less dexterous and limited in what they can do for fine manipulation. Plus, it’s a very distinctive feature but they can cover it up with some effort. I’m currently researching a bit deeper into coral to come up with something interesting for the stage two of the Coral.

Plus, we have an intelligent crocodile who has become a sorcerer …