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I ran Pirate Borg with no notice and no prep and it was awesome.
Some of our regular group couldn’t show up for our game and we’d all wanted to try PB for a while already.
I got this starter adventure and the core rules at Gary Con. "Buried in the Bahamas". The players all had the book but none of us had read the rules before. I hadn't even read the adventure yet. We all quickly decided that the best course of action was to play anyway! The players read the rules and made characters for about 30 minutes while I read the adventure. Then we played. They explained the rules to me when I wasn’t sure how something worked and we got humming pretty quick.
First I’ll give a quick overview of the adventure, then my 3 on 3 likes and dislikes, and finally I’ll share what I’d change about it for a future run.
Arrrrgh! Ye be warned! Here there be spoilers.
TL;DR: Play Pirate Borg and get “Buried in the Bahamas”. It’s a mini-sandbox with vibes and tropes that flow like rum that’s never gone.
Overview
There’s an introductory scene with the PCs’ ship being boarded by Dark Caribbean™ skeleton pirates. This tiny railroad at the start is meant to be a quick primer for combat and a feel for how fragile the PCs are. The scene ends with the PCs and a few of their crew shipwrecked with a treasure map. There are a couple of additional islands to explore with their own locations, encounters, and dungeons. It’s up to the PCs what they want to do and how they want to do it, but you and I both know they want that treasure. This is meant as an introductory adventure to the Pirate Borg system and it’s filled with hooks for further adventure. There are suggestions on how to expand the module or make it shorter, which I appreciate. As written, this took my table about 5 hours total to finish, spread over 2 sessions.
Likes
1. The layout was superb. I was right in assuming it’d be useful for on-the-fly play. The adventure leans heavy on tropes and gives just enough detail for each encounter so that you can intuit quickly and fill in the rest. Here’s an example location the PCs will stumble across if they investigate the island Rum Cay’s claim to fame:
Freighter Shipwreck
Off the southeast coast is the shipwreck of the HMS Commander, a cargo freighter.
▶ Dive to the wreck: 30' deep, d4 reef sharks.
▶ In the cargo hold:
· 2d20 barrels of rum.
· a sea chest filled with 200s and d10 gold cups.
· a shadow starfish, wrapped around a barrel.
That’s it. There’s some stats for the shadow starfish and the sharks, but this is all you need. I said the ship was deep enough where the top of the crow’s nest was sticking out. The water was clear enough where they could see a trap door propped open in the deck of the ship 30’ below. They could also see the dead-eyed predators weaving through the wreck. The PCs already knew there’s a rumored trove of rum down there, and now they know why it might still be there. Underwater. In the dark. Have fun!
There’s plenty more entries like this. More with implicit hooks for further shenanigans.
Notice the bullet point “Dive to the wreck.” Headings and bullets are similarly organized by logical PC actions throughout the adventure. Here are the headings for the first location, when the PCs are shipwrecked: “Salvage the Wreck”, “Summit the Hill”, “Explore”, “Build a raft”, “Build a Shelter”, “Hunt/Scavenge”. Just glancing at the headings tells me everything that's important that I should press on the players. “The surf glides over the wreckage of your ship. There’s one big ol’ hill on the island covered with thick grass and bushes. The sun will set before long and you haven’t eaten. What do you do?”
2. Referee notes are scattered throughout with tips on how to run the adventure. The notes are in a conversational tone that uses real life examples to draw from. Here’s an example from an NPC description:
Use Scaggs as a sounding board for lore and hints when the players need it. Roleplaying suggestion: Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse. “Hark! Cast ye gaze upon its tail! It hath already been wounded!”
Great advice for a new or veteran referee. Just reading that quote got me back into the pirate mindset without effort.
3. Tools for running NPCs. There’s already a handful of one liner NPCs to work with that are easy to run, but the pirate NPC generator was also useful to generate motivations and new folks to question and hire. I never felt myself wanting.
Dislikes
1. There’s an entry for an NPC that will sell the PCs an overpriced boat, but also brags about her slick new ship that she’ll sell “over my wrinkled, bloated corpse!” You can see where this is going. The referee advice even says “This is a decision fork for your players: buy a boat or steal a ship”. It’s a great setup and my players definitely wanted to steal a ship. The only problem is there’s no information or guidance on the docks. I assumed there was some kind of security, but I was not familiar enough with the Pirate Borg system to devise an appropriately challenging on-the-fly challenge. I made up some stats for a couple of zombie dogs sleeping on the ship along with the proprietor herself who came after sufficient ruckus. The PCs breezed through it and had fun and I’m probably overthinking it. I still would have liked some guidance on the ship heist though.
2. In the main dungeon there’s an optional encounter with a handful of ghosts who judge the PC’s worthiness if they try to steal their ship. There’s no clear guidance on who the ghosts were or what they value though. I really felt like I was flapping wind when I settled on the one on one combat trope since it was the first thing that came to my head. What’s unsatisfying is that the referee notes imply that it could be a fun roleplaying encounter. I just wish I had more to go on. Just one or two wants and fears for the ghosts that I could work with.
3. At the beginning of the adventure, the PCs get a treasure map. Perfect. It’s beautifully illustrated and there’s a curious clue written on the bottom: “Only those with the heart of the sea shall pass the doors of blood.” It sounds cool and my players were constantly thinking about what it meant. The main dungeon has a puzzle door with an offering basin. The players are meant to mix a bit of their blood with some sea water to open the door. It’s not the most intuitive of puzzles and my players did think to offer some of their blood, but not to mix it with sea water. This wouldn’t have been a huge issue except that the dungeon haul is behind that door. There’s a note that PCs could try a difficult check to break down the door or to pick the lock. I honestly am not sure I would have even thought to describe a lock available to pick. When the puzzle is solved the door “slides open via some unseen force.” That doesn’t seem like an easily described deadbolt situation to me.
So, yes, the PCs can always come back to the doors of blood. They can head over to the pirate town sailing the ship they stole from the docks and ask around and form some long term plans on how to crack that door. This I would be okay with if it was an optional challenge. The PCs aren’t going to find everything and that’s fine. I do think that for how I was running it as a one-shot, there should be a timely manner of a satisfying conclusion. And I know how I would do it.
What I would change: Puzzle Workshop
There’s another puzzle at the very end of the dungeon, just outside the treasure room. A clay guardian with the heads and voices of 7 different animals speaks and warns the PCs not to do the thing they want to do. If they go nab the treasure without a key item (a scepter) from the sunken tomb next door, the guardian attacks. The guardian is invulnerable, BUT not if the PCs notice the tapestries of animals along the walls. The SEVEN tapestries of animals along the walls. When a tapestry is destroyed, the associated head crumbles. It’s a cool puzzle, but does require a leap in logic for the players without anything to go on.
Puzzles should be seeded into the adventure and should be rattling around in the heads of players so that when they finally do make the connection, they experience the “eureka effect” or “aha! moment”. This puzzle should be elsewhere in the dungeon. It should reward curious players who interact with their environment.I’d ditch the ghosts from before and instead put another guardian here. It could have three animal heads instead of seven, it doesn’t really matter. Since most of the dungeon is covered in sea water, lets replace those tapestries with fetishes that look like each of the animals. Hang them from the roof of the cave so that they dangle above the ship the PCs want to steal. We can still honor the original spirit (heh) of this encounter and have the guardian judge the PCs’ worthiness, except let's have some values to go off of this time. Perhaps a rivalry with the deep ones that are already seeded elsewhere in the adventure. The guardian comments about how the PCs don’t look like humanoid fish, and that’s confusing for a construct, but maybe they should be killed just to be sure. This is still an optional encounter and the PCs can run away. The guardian will not give chase.
Let's get rid of the doors of blood puzzle. We can still use the pretty map with the clue at the bottom, but it’ll refer to the actual key item to the treasure available in the sunken tomb that’s one room away. Instead of a scepter it will be a heart fetish carved from sea salt. This place is lousy with sea salt anyway. To make the clue text still make sense we can make a never ending sheet of blood drip down from the cave ceiling that blocks the treasure chamber next to the seven-headed treasure guardian. The guardian can repeat the clue from the map and the players are free to ponder what this blood does. But if they disturb the threshold without the salt heart, all bets are off. We’ll use seven wooden animal carvings here too hanging from the ceiling around the room. One of them, the swine, has half of its face rotted away. The rotted areas curiously match a similar pattern of decay on the guardian’s swine head.
Conclusion
Alright. We’ve seeded the puzzle through repetition and rewarded exploration. We’ve offered solution alternatives and allowed for scheming not directly related to busting down a locked puzzle door. We’ve given an in-world reason for the ship guardian to be there and judge the PCs by. Shiver me timbers! I think I’ll be running this one again soon!
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