The Other OSR: Pirate Borg

They came for the freedom of the new world. They came for the richness of the climate and the beauty of the islands. They came for the plunder, carried by the great Spanish treasure fleets, ferrying the ingots of silver mined in the Americas home to make Madrid the capital of the richest nation in the world. At times they would be given permission to harass and steal from the ships of other nations. At other times, they would be chased across the sea as criminals and when caught hanged to a man. Then the Scourge came. The bodies of dead sailors made to walk again, ghosts of those driven from their ancestral homes, skeletons strewn with seaweed and the muck of the sea, and monsters unknown, let alone imagined. They came from the sea and fell upon settlement after settlement. The survivors holed up in the towns and cities which could be fortified and strongholds that already were. Then a strange discovery was made. The ash of the burned and ground undead had strange effects upon the body and mind. When consumed, it could debilitate and destroy either, causing limbs to wither and rot, make you hear colours, see sounds, and feel taste, turn the world grey and lifeless, but it could toughen the skin, make you see in the dark, and even make you aware of the universe. This is ASH. It is a drug that can be brutally harvested, but sold for untold wealth. It drives its own black market, but has caused conflict and trade wars across the region. Addicts have sunken eye sockets, darkened lips, and faintly glowing bones. The most notorious source of ASH is Nassau Town, the ruins of an imperial colony on New Providence Island, a plethora of driftwood shacks and canvas tents that is home to the Brethren of the Coast, rebels, thieves, and vagabonds. Elsewhere, the loss of support from London has driven Lord Hamilton, governor of the Jamaica colony, to employ pirate crews to protect British interests even as the power of the West India Company grows. The French Indies has drifted into indolence and incompetence, dominated by criminal syndicates and cruel cultists. The Viceroyalty of New Spain on Cuba has grown rich and fat on the transport of bullion and ASH, but quivers under the beady eye and sharp accusations of the Inquisition. Folktales of the cities of gold and temples strewn with jewels and treasures lure the unwary to the Yucatán, but few return. Everywhere and elsewhere, cultists lurk, worshipping their foul masters, the Great Old Ones, as laid out in the dread pages of The Necronomicon, welcoming their prophet, The Sunken One, each Solstice in remembrance of the day that the Scourge arose and in the hope that The End of Days will come. Welcome to the Dark Caribbean.

The Dark Caribbean is the setting for Pirate Borg. Published by Limithron via Free League Publishing following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is based upon Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and also published by Free League Publishing. Mörk Borg is notorious for its Artpunk style and layout, vibrantly done in chrome yellow and neon pink, seen by some as distracting and unreadable. Pirate Borg is not so much Artpunk as ‘pirate punk’, its colours muted in comparison, but actually far busier in terms of layout and content. There are typically a lot of tables in any roleplaying game based on Mörk Borg, but Pirate Borg has even more! It is a book packed with tables and information and tables of information that is all useful, but which keeps coming and coming at the reader! One thing that Pirate Borg does share with Mörk Borg is that both are pre-apocalyptic roleplaying games, the end of the world hanging over everyone’s future, but where in Mörk Borg everyone actually knows that it is coming, this is not the case in Pirate Borg. In the Dark Caribbean, there is a sense of pervading doom, of hopelessness, but not necessarily of the end. The roleplaying game does include a history that ends in the Abyss—and the Game Master’s copy of Pirate Borg cast into the sea—but this is not hardwired into the setting. The Game Master is free to pick and choose what he wants from the history or ignore it altogether.

In Pirate Borg, the Player Characters are members of a crew, adventuring across the Dark Caribbean. Each is defined by his Abilities, Class, gear, and Devil’s Luck. The five Abilities are Strength, Agility, Presence, Toughness, and Spirit, each rated between ‘-3’ and ‘+3’. There are six Classes and two optional Classes. Each provides adjustments to Abilities, basic Hit Points, and starting Devil’s Luck. The Brute is a raging melee fighter who gets a trusted weapon like a ‘Brass Anchor’ or ‘Rotten Cargo Net’ and when he gets better, he might gain a ‘Boomstick’ or ‘Grog Breath’, the latter enabling him to belch in the face of an enemy and stun him! The Rapscallion is a sneaky, cutthroat scallywag, which as a Class requires an ordinary deck of playing cards to play. The Rapscallion starts with a single speciality such as ‘Burglar’ or ‘Sneaky Bastard’, and gain more or even double up on already possessed specialities. He can also drink Grog to heal himself. The Buccaneer is a sharpshooter and treasure hunter, and is also a skilled tracker. The Swashbuckler is a brash fighter, who might also be an ‘Ostentatious Fencer’ or ‘Inspiring Leader’, and when he gets better, he could be the ‘Shakespeare of Insults’ or a ‘Calculating Cutthroat’, the former adding damage to attacks with his wounding taunts, the latter letting the player achieve critical hits on a natural roll of nineteen as well as twenty. The Zealot has prayers like Heal, Curse, and Holy Protection, which are learned randomly and can be cast several times a day without the need to make a roll or a test. The Sorcerer draws power from supernatural spirits and ghosts to cast spells like Spiritual Possession, Clairvoyance, and Raise the Dead, not whilst near cold iron or holding metal.

The Haunted Soul is either a ghost, conduit for restless spirits, has an eldritch mind, is a zombie, suffers from vampirism, or is a skeleton. Each provides a benefit and a penalty. For example, restless spirits constantly communicate with the conduit to grant a random Arcane Ritual which can be cast without a Spirit test, but must be cast before dawn the next day or conduit suffers damage. The Tall Tale can be one of the Merfolk, an aquatic mutant like a crab or The Great Old One, or a sentient animal such as a ‘Foul Fowl’ or a ‘Clever Monkey’. Although both the Haunted Soul and the Tall Tale are given as optional Classes, they are not really Classes, but closer to a Race or a Species as in other Old School Renaissance roleplaying games. This is because not only do they not get any better with experience, but the player also then rolls for an additional out of the standard six. Their inclusion, though, is unbalancing, granting a Player Character extra abilities that other Player Characters without either the Haunted Soul or Tall Tale options simply does not have the equivalent of. Further, the six core Classes not balanced either, especially when it comes to their progression. Several of the Classes like the Rapscallion or Buccaneer have multiple specialities or features that can be taken twice, whereas the Brute and the Swashbuckler do not. Of course, there is no need for the Classes to be equally balanced, but some rough equivalency would not have gone amiss.

To create a character, a player rolls for his Abilities, Class, gear, and Devil’s Luck. Gear includes weapon, clothing, and a hat. Optional tables provide for backgrounds, distinctive flaws, physical trademarks, idiosyncrasies, unfortunate incidents and conditions, and thing of importance. Of these which a group might want to avoid is rolling for Class since it avoids too many of the same Class serving in a ship’s crew.

Name: Peter ‘Green’ Wright
Class: Sorcerer
Strength 0 Agility +0 Presence +1 Toughness 0 Spirit +4
Hit Points: 4
Devil’s Luck: 3
Holding Breath: Two minutes
Carrying Capacity: Nine
Spells: Raise the Dead
Background: Merchant
Distinctive Flaw: Paranoid Physical
Trademarks: Increasingly gangrenous
Idiosyncrasy: You become a murderous grump when hungry
Unfortunate Incidents And Conditions: You have no memory before a few days ago.
Thing Of Importance: perfect cube made of crystal
Gear: Container – bandolier, Cheap Gear – pipe & tobacco pouch, Fancy Gear – blanket & pillow, wooden knife (d4), old uniform, wig

For the most part, Pirate Borg keeps everything mechanically as simple as Mörk Borg, though with some adjustments for the genre and setting. A player rolls a twenty-sided die, modifies the result by one of his character’s abilities, and attempts to beat a Difficulty Rating of twelve. The Difficulty Rating may go up or down depending on the situation, but whatever the situation, the player always rolls, even in combat or as both Mörk Borg and Pirate Borg terms it, violence. So, a player will roll for his character to hit in melee using his Strength and his Agility to avoid being hit. Armour is represented by a die value, from -d2 for light armour to -d6 for heavy armour, representing the amount of damage it stops. Medium and heavy armour each add a modifier to any Agility action by the character, including defending himself. This is pleasingly simple and offers a character some tactical choice—just when is it better to avoid taking the blows or avoid taking the damage? Armour can also be damaged, due to a Fumble when defending, reducing its protective effectiveness, and a critical hit in combat inflicts double damage or allows another attack. A Player Characters whose Hit Points are reduced to below zero is dead, but at zero, is broken and can recover.

Every Player Character also has the Devil’s Luck. Each Class receives a different amount of this, but all can spent to inflict maximum damage on a single attack, reroll any die, lower the Difficulty rating of a Test, neutralise a Critical or a Fumble, and to lower damage suffered by a random amount.

A Player Character may also have access to Arcane Rituals, such as Dark Delusions, which creates illusions in the minds that can see the caster; Phantasmal Fauna, which summons a ghostly hound or shark until sunset; and Thalassomancy, which fill the lungs of targets with sea water, causing them to suffocate. There are some truly nasty Arcane Rituals in this list. For example, The Black Spot which literally marks the target for death or Release the Kraken, which summons one of these great creatures in the nearby sea. If a Player Character fails to cast an Arcane Ritual, then a roll may be made on Pirate Borg’s Mystical Mishaps table. Other forms of magic in Pirate Borg include a quick and dirty pair of tables for handling alchemy and a list of Ancient Relics, such as the Conch Shell of the Abyss, which enables the wielder to ask a corpse one question or Mermaid Scales that when eaten grant the ability to breath underwater for a few hours.

Pirate Borg being a pirate roleplaying game, the one thing that it definitely needs is rules for ships and nautical combat. A vessel is defined by its Hit Points, Hull, Speed, Skill, Broadsides, Small Arms, Ram, Crew, and Cargo. Hit Points includes its condition and the health and morale of the crew; Hull, its armour; Skill the skill and training of the crew; Broadsides, the damage inflicted by a vessel’s main cannons; Small Arms the damage done by swivel guns and muskets; Ram, damage done in a ram action; and Crew, the minimum and maximum number of crew the ship can carry. Combat is conducted in thirty second rounds, and in that time, the captain moves the ship, the Player Characters take an action, and the Crew can take actions such as ‘Fire Broadsides’, ‘Full Sail’, ‘Boarding Party’, and more. Speciality Crews include Legendary Captains, Strict Bosun, Deck Sorcerer or Priest, and so on. The rules cover crew skill, morale, cargo, repairs, and optionally—surprisingly, weather! An earlier section gives a list of sea shanties that the crew can perform each day, which might be to raise the crew’s morale or put out all the fires on a ship! Besides tables for flotsam and jetsam, encounters, and events, Pirate Borg lists stats for and illustrates a wide variety of vessels, from raft, dinghy, and canoe to galleon, man-of-war, and ship of the line. Added to this are a fortress, and to fit the Dark Caribbean, a ghost ship, a ship of bone, and a vessel from the deep. This is a very pleasingly comprehensive list.

The bestiary is categorised into pages of dark terrestrial, dark avian, dark aquatic, and dark flora. Added to this are families of creatures. Thus, for skeletons, there is the Lookout, The Rank & Vile, Deadeye, Hulk, Bosun, Warlock, and Cap’n. It does similar things for zombies and ghosts, whilst also adding a scavenging seagull and the amusingly named obscure oyster cult. Deep Ones and the Coral Shoggoth add an element of the Mythos. Big beasts of the sea include the Undead Megalodon, Kraken, Davy Jones, and Leviathan. Marrow Cannons, like the Marrow Carronade and the Marrow Mortar are sentient, undead weapons, whilst there are stats for archetypes such as the Naval Mastermind, Inquisitor, Necromancer, and Sunken One. This is an excellent selection of creatures, highly thematic and fun.

Besides tables for generating random ships and derelicts, treasure maps, riddles, uncharted islands, and jobs and quests, Pirate Borg includes a mini-sandbox for the Player Characters to explore. This is ‘The Curse of Skeleton Point’ which a description of an island, its key locations, and important NPCs, threats, and plot hooks. They include widespread word that the local governor’s daughter is missing and that he will pay for her safe return, legends of a treasure hoard in the castle at Skeleton Point, and an evil witch in the swamp. Each of the major locations—Coral Town, the old lighthouse, the Nameless Temple—and more, are all given very easy to use two-page spreads, with the castle given more space. There are three mini-dungeons too, and all together, ‘The Curse of Skeleton Point’ offers a lot of play. If there is anything missing in the scenario it is that given how up-front Pirate Borg is about ASH, it does not have much of a role to play in the scenario.

Physically, Pirate Borg is a smorgasbord of tables and options. In fact, so many tables that they threaten to overwhelm the reader. This is not say that the tables are not useful—they are—but rather that the layout can feel cramped in places and sometimes it does feel as if the text needs room to breathe. Whilst there is an index, one extra devoted to the book’s many tables would have been useful. Otherwise, the presentation, the artwork, and the writing are all well done.

Pirate Borg is lacking in terms of advice for the Game Master. Bar advising the reader that this is not a roleplaying game about slavery, genocide, sexual violence, or other distasteful aspects of history, there is no advice on how to run Pirate Borg. In the main then, it is primarily relying upon the previous experience of the Game Master and her players to run and play Pirate Borg. However, with that experience, what both Game Master and players will find is a fully realised and accessible setting whose genre will be familiar to most and which does not rely upon a detailed knowledge of the Golden Age of Piracy. Although it does include a nod to the coming apocalypse, unlike Mörk Borg, in Pirate Borg, this does not hang over the players and their characters like some ever present doom cloud, leaving them room to explore and adventure in the setting, which consequently feels more open and detailed. Pirate Borg is not only easy to play, but its familiarity is also easy to grasp, and it supports with everything that a gaming group will need for a pulpy pirate horror game in the Dark Caribbean, and more.

—oOO—

Today, Thursday, September 19th 2024, is International Talk Like a Pirate 2024.

The Kickstarter for PIRATE BORG: Down Among the Dead is currently running here.