Pirate RPG Campaign Guide: Ships, Crews and Island Politics

Pirate campaigns promise what roleplaying does best. There's treasure over the horizon and danger on every tide, plus a crew of loudmouths who might mutiny the moment you blink. They also bring their own headaches, though. The ship is basically a character, travel happens across open water, and a crowd of rival factions all want a piece of you.

This guide covers how to run, or play, a pirate RPG campaign that actually feels like the high seas. I've chewed on this more than is probably healthy, because building Saltbound, EchoQuest's age-of-sail world, forced me to answer most of these questions in writing. So I'll share what I landed on as we go.

The Core Promise of a Pirate Campaign

Pirate stories are about freedom at a price. Your players slipped the rules of the land, but the sea keeps its own: the captain's word and the crew's vote, the wind, and the hangman waiting in every navy port.

That bit about the vote isn't romantic invention, by the way. The economist Peter Leeson studied pirate governance in a 2007 paper in the Journal of Political Economy, and he found that golden-age pirates "could and did democratically elect their captains". They could also depose any captain who didn't suit them. The captain's power was absolute only "in Chase, or in Battle", and the rest of the time he answered to the crew. I find that endlessly useful at the table, because it means every big decision can turn into a scene.

Pick your flavour:

• Swashbuckling adventure: daring rescues, sword fights in the rigging, treasure maps
• Gritty historical: disease, scurvy, prize law and brutal naval power
• Fantasy seas: sea gods, krakens, cursed gold and ghost ships
• Political: pirates as a nation, with councils, treaties and betrayals

If you go gritty, scurvy alone can carry a season of dread. The naval surgeon James Lind ran his famous comparison trial aboard the Salisbury in 1747, and by the end of May the two sailors given oranges and lemons had almost recovered. Even so, the Royal Navy didn't introduce citrus rations until 1795. Nearly fifty years of rotting gums while the cure sat in a book! That's a campaign theme in itself.

Saltbound sits firmly at the swashbuckling end. The tone note I gave its GM reads "swashbuckling, fast, generous", and the Crown is a real threat without lurking behind every headland. Which flavour suits your table?

Your Ship Is a Character

Give the ship:

• A name and a history: who sailed her before, and what did they leave behind?
• A quirk: she lists to port, the figurehead weeps in storms, the hold is never quite dry
• Stats that matter: speed, hull, guns and cargo capacity
• Upgrades as goals: new sails, more cannon, a better navigator

The Mercy, Saltbound's brigantine, is my best argument for that first bullet. She carries eighteen guns and forty-eight crew, and she's provisioned for three weeks. Still, the numbers aren't what bring her to life. Her history does. The previous captain's logbook lies open on the desk in the stern cabin, next to a locked chest holding the captain's share of the last prize. His battered tricorne gets handed to you on deck, and it fit him badly and will fit you no better. On top of that, the Confederacy expects you to honour obligations he accepted on the Mercy's behalf. Every one of those details is a hook waiting for someone to pull it.

The Crew and Morale

A pirate crew isn't an army. It's a democracy with knives. So track morale:

• High morale: the crew takes risks, works hard and defends the captain
• Low morale: grumbling, desertion and, eventually, mutiny

Morale rises with fair shares, victories, good food and rest. It falls with losses, broken promises and long stretches without plunder. Give three or four crew members names and personalities: the quartermaster who speaks for the crew, the old gunner, the stowaway, the cook who knows everyone's secrets. See Writing Compelling NPCs.

History backs up every line of this. Pirates agreed written articles before a voyage and swore to them, sometimes on a Bible and, in one crew's case, "upon a Hatchet for want of a Bible." Leeson reprints the articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew as recorded in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, first published in 1724. The split was exact: two shares each for the captain and quartermaster, one and a half for the master, boatswain and gunner, one and a quarter for other officers, and one share for everyone else. Roberts' articles even promised 800 dollars to anyone who lost a limb in service, and they banned brawling aboard: "every Man's Quarrels to be ended on Shore, at Sword and Pistol." Low morale had teeth, too. When Charles Vane's crew judged him a coward, his behaviour "was obliged to stand the Test of a Vote", and they deposed him.

Real crews ran bigger than most people assume. Leeson puts the average at about 80, based on 37 pirate ships between 1716 and 1726. The Mercy's forty-eight is cosier, which honestly suits a GM who has to give the loud ones a voice.

Speaking of loud ones, Saltbound's crew is where I spent the most love. First Mate Joss Wren will tell you what the crew thinks before the crew says it themselves. Bosun Marra Quint couldn't stand the previous captain and is watching you very narrowly. Then there's Old Ben, the mostly deaf cook, who makes a superb fish stew and knows every story in the archipelago, and he'll share the gossip if you drink his coffee. On the Storyteller plan each of them gets a distinct premium voice, so the bosun and the cook never sound like the same person. Getting those voices to actually change took some doing. In late May I discovered NPC voices weren't switching at all, because an NPC's lines weren't being woven into the narration, and I ended up matching voices by gender across the whole voice catalogue while I was at it.

Build an Archipelago of Politics

Islands make great campaign structure, because each one is a self-contained adventure with its own rules.

• The Free Port: pirate haven, neutral ground, run by a council of captains
• The Colonial Fortress: navy stronghold, gallows on the harbour
• The Merchant Isle: rich, well defended and willing to hire privateers
• The Forbidden Island: sacred, cursed, or both
• The Smugglers' Cove: hidden, useful, and full of people who owe you, or whom you owe

Then give each island three answers: what it wants, what it fears and what it will pay for.

Each of these has a real ancestor. In the 1710s the free port was the Bahamas, and when King George I's pardon proclamation came out in 1717, it drove many pirates "out of their nest in the Bahama Islands", as the Charleston County Public Library puts it. The Merchant Isle's privateers were real as well. A privateer's commission, a letter of marque, was what legally separated them from pirates, according to the Congressional Research Service. Privateers fitted out their ships at their own expense and took a large share of whatever their prizes sold for, and the British Crown sometimes let colonial governors hand those commissions out. So a governor with a pen is every bit as dangerous as a frigate.

EchoQuest's official Saltbound campaign is built along these lines, although its politics come in blocs rather than one faction per island. The Stradovine Archipelago is split between the Crown of Vallaria, with its navy and customs cutters and the frigate Argent, and the loose Confederacy of Free Captains, who are pirates by the Crown's definition and free traders by their own. Salt-Tongue Village is your free port: by old treaty the Crown's writ doesn't run there, and the harbour master takes her tithe in goods rather than coin. Elsewhere, the Stradovine Free Towns pay the Crown a nominal tithe but govern themselves, and they turn on pirates who burn their own. And in a stone cottage in the village, three hedge-witches sell remedies and weather warnings, payable in fresh fish. My favourite rule in the whole world, though, is about reputation. Whatever you do in Salt-Tongue this week becomes a song in the next port within a fortnight.

Naval Combat Without a Grid

Ship battles can bog down in rules. In narrative and audio play, keep it cinematic:

1. The approach: do you chase, flee, or bluff with false colours?
2. The broadside: one or two exchanges of fire, described by effect
3. The boarding: grapples, swinging lines, hand-to-hand on a heaving deck
4. The surrender or the sinking: what do you take, and whom do you spare?

Sound carries naval combat: creaking timbers, cannon thunder, splintering wood, shouted orders. That makes it ideal for audio-first play.

Don't be afraid to let the chase be the fight, either. The Salisbury's papers from that same 1747 cruise, pieced together in the Lind article above, describe her losing the jib boom and topgallant mast chasing a ship that wouldn't stop until twelve shots had been fired. It turned out to be an English privateer, and the navy simply had to let her pass. That's a whole session, and nobody boarded anybody. Saltbound's rules push the same way. Combat there is gun-and-board, drawn-out fights cost crew, sails and reputation, and most engagements end "in chase or surrender, not slaughter." I'm convinced that's the right call for a story game.

The soundscape taught me a few lessons of its own. In May I added a storm track to the ambient soundtrack and taught the soundtrack to duck under sound cues, so a cannon blast doesn't drown in the wind. I also started dropping duplicate sound cues that fire within 80 milliseconds of each other, so a flurry of identical effects can't stack into one ear-splitting smear. Then on October 2, skill checks started resolving in the same turn. Swing across on a line, and you find out whether you made it before the next broadside, not a whole exchange later. Dropping to 0 HP brings a real setback now as well, which keeps boarding actions honest.

10 Pirate Adventure Hooks

1. The Governor's Pardon: the navy offers every pirate a pardon, for one week only. Half your crew wants it.
2. The Map in the Tattoo: a dying sailor's back holds half a treasure map. Someone else has his brother.
3. Ghost Convoy: merchant ships keep vanishing on a calm, clear trade route.
4. The Sea Queen's Tax: a sea goddess demands tribute this year, and she's picked your ship.
5. Mutiny Next Door: a rival crew mutinied and wants to join yours. Their old captain is alive and furious.
6. The Island That Moves: an island appears on no chart, and it's in a different place every night.
7. Stolen Letters of Marque: forged privateering papers could legitimise your whole fleet, if you can get them signed.
8. The Plague Ship: a drifting ship with full holds and no crew. Do you take the cargo?
9. Council Election: the pirate council is choosing a new Speaker. Everyone wants your vote, and your guns.
10. The Last Voyage: your captain is dying and has one final destination in mind.

Two of these come almost straight out of history. The Governor's Pardon is the 1717 proclamation in miniature. It offered amnesty to pirates who confessed to a colonial governor and swore an oath of good behaviour within twelve months, and both Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard took that oath, then "promptly reverted to their wicked ways". Hook 7, meanwhile, echoes Captain Kidd. He sailed with two commissions from the King, one to suppress piracy and one as a privateer against the French, and he still ended up hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping. The rope broke on the first attempt. Afterwards his tarred body hung in a gibbet at Tilbury as a warning to every sailor on the Thames. Paperwork, it turns out, is only as good as the people reading it.

Which of the ten would you run first? I'd start with the pardon, because splitting the crew down the middle is the fastest way I know to make a pirate campaign personal.

Playing a Pirate Campaign Solo

Solo pirate play works really well with an AI Game Master voicing the crew as NPCs. Ask for a quartermaster companion, put your ship's name and quirk in your backstory, and let the Game Master keep an eye on morale and plunder. EchoQuest tracks your inventory, quests, relationships and story flags turn by turn, so a prize ends up in your hold and the crew's mood shows in how they treat you.

Saltbound gives you a head start. You open the game freshly elected captain of the Mercy, with Joss Wren stepping forward to hand you the hat. Your navigator, Hanno Ash, is a week overdue from the Bone Reef. Meanwhile Captain Nox of the Petrel has rowed over and is sitting in your chair drinking your brandy, and the Argent has been sighted three islands east. Joss, Marra and Ben all get a say in the big decisions, which is exactly how a real pirate crew would want it. And since your character's progress is saved on the server, you can leave the Mercy at anchor on your laptop and pick her back up on your phone.

So, do you sail west to safety, or east to find Hanno?

Set sail in Saltbound →