UncleBear Media

I’ve talked about using shemps for pregenerated player characters, and now I’ll show you how I actually applied the concept. I want to acknowledge that this would not work for every setting or in every system; it works for Brimstone and Gall because all the characters all essentially normal humans, so creating that baseline character and adding flair fits very well.

To begin, I looked over the “Typical Pirate” template on page 237 of the Pirates of the Spanish Main core book. This is a character intended to be used as a NPC, but with a few tweaks can be used as the foundation for a player character. It is what I used to create the original pregens as well.

Here’s the pregen shemp:

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d6, Vigor d6
Skills: Boating d6, Climbing d6, Fighting d6, Guts d6, Intimidation d6, Notice d6, Shooting d6, Stealth d6, Swimming d6
Pace: 6 Parry: 5 Toughness: 5
Hindrances: Greedy, Mean
Edges: Dirty Fighter
Gear: Knife (d6+d4), cutlass (2d6), flintlock pistol (Range 5/10/20; Damage 2d6+1), shot and powder (20)

Starting characters begin with a d4 in all Attributes and 5 points to bump that up; the template in the book had a d4 in smarts, so I bumped it to give the shemp a d6 in everything. The template has 18 points worth of skills and 3 minor Hindrances; a starting character gets 15 points of skills and a Minor Hindrance is worth a skill point, so that balances. I removed the Garrulous hindrance because it really won’t come up in play (Greedy and Mean are simply appropriate roleplaying bits, so I’m leaving them). In the flair, then, I’ll add a Major Hindrance and an additional Skill point.

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• Brimstone and Gall: Magna Cartas
• Brimstone and Gall: The Crew
• Brimstone and Gall: Worldbuilding Lite

Pirates! Lost Worlds! Mad Science! And the Spanish Inquisition!
This is a very basic overview of the world of Brimstone and Gall, intended to give new players the basic information they need to know about the setting.

Where, Not When
This isn’t the setting of the Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG/Pocketmodel game, but borrows the concept of a location filled with anachronisms. Panama is an island chain, rather than a solid land mass, making it a primary trade route and a feeding ground for pirates. The expansionist Spanish Empire controls the area, much to the chagrin of the United States; agents of the Spanish Inquisition, as well as American spies, are everywhere. The islands are filled with native ruins, and the ruins are filled with gold — as well as hostile, magic wielding natives, dinosaurs, and other perils. The islands also make a quiet place for the heirs of Dr. Moreau and Henry Jekyll to practice their fiendish science, and the black ships of the beast men are constantly on the prowl for slaves to be used in dark experiments.

Player Character Roles
You’re the crew of a pirate ship, sailing the Caribbean and the Strait of Panama (explained in a moment). For one-shots, game days and conventions, the pre-generated characters are the crew of a 3-mast vessel called the Ides of March. The pre-generated characters include the captain, the ship’s surgeon, the bosun, the navigator, the master of sails, and the master of guns. All of them have secrets.

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• Brimstone and Gall: Magna Cartas
• Brimstone and Gall: Next Steps
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The other night I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, not one of his best films by any stretch but not wholly without merit, either. In it I found the opening I was looking for to my demo adventure. What I needed was something that started the pirates out on a boat, but got them onto land rather quickly. I’d considered using sirens, luring sailors to their doom by getting them to navigate into a reef, but I wanted to hold off on supernatural elements until a bit later in the adventure. What I did want was immediate action, a big fights scene to kick things off but without having to resort to my standard in media res schtick.

In the movie, a group of smugglers blocks coastal beacons during storms so ships end up wrecking on the rocks and shore. Then the smugglers, waiting in large numbers on the shore, kill the injured and addled sailors and loot the ship at their leisure. So for the adventure we’ll start with the crew trying to get out of the storm and to a port they’ve never been to before. The lair of another pirate captain, nominally an ally. Except it’s a double-cross, an ambush. Then a big melee on the beach, with pounding rain and lightning flashes and deafening thunder. If the player characters are losing, they can run off into the jungle to hide; even if they win, they’re going to end up in the jungle. Yeah, because it’s an isolated cove surrounded by cliff walls and they can’t just walk along the beach.  Perfect. Nice start. Action and atmosphere.

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• Brimstone and Gall: Magna Cartas
• Brimstone and Gall: Worldbuilding Lite
• Brimstone and Gall: Next Steps

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on Brimstone and Gall, my Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG campaign, on a regular basis. This has largely been due to the demands of other projects and the lack of opportunities to play it. That doesn’t mean it’s dead, though. I still have many plans.

Next Steps
* Priority: work on the demo adventure, so I can run it at an upcoming Ides, as well as at RinCon in the fall.
* Update the Grizzlywiki page, with links to all articles to date
* Compile all articles to date into a single rough PDF, for ease of reference.
* Pour through all the old D&D adventures I want to convert (Slavelords, Isle of Dread, Isle of the Ape, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, etc) and make notes on using them with Pirates. Distill these into blog posts.
* Read through Skull & Bones, the D20 pirate game, and see what material can be converted (feats to edges, etc).

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The more I get into pirate stuff, the more I get into pirate stuff. It resonates with me on multiple levels, and is unlikely to go away any time soon. In trying to get my head around the why of it, I’ve come up with the following:

The Minimalist/DIY Aspect: Shipboard life in general has always been about making the most of limited space and squeezing the highest possible quality of life from limited resources. Pirates didn’t have the resources of a navy or mercantile company backing them (most of the time), so they were incredibly do-it-yourself about everything.

The Grass is Greener, Metaphorically: I live in a desert. I live in a desert in the middle of a drought. Even though monsoon season is about a week away and we’ll have some glorious thunderstorms, I occassionally would like a change of scenery. The nearest beach is about 2 hours away, if I want to go to Mexico (I don’t, which has less to do with Mexico and more to do with the fact that my own government now requires me to stand in a long line and show my passport in order to come home). The next-nearest beach is a 10-hour drive to San Diego.

The Anti-Authoritarian Schtick: Governments and corporations want to control everything — for our own good, of course — and button things down with rules and regulations and rights and restrictions, yadda yadda yadda. The idea of saying “screw you,” hopping into a ship and sailing off to where you can make your own rules , or at least wrestle with the unbiased forces of nature instead of grappling with the laws of men, is incredibly appealing.

Fashion and Kit: Form follows function. In addition to looking stylish, pirates had awesome kit. They carried as little as possible on their person, but what they did carry was useful. This might be considered an extension of the minimalist/DIY line above.

Pocket Democracy: Most pirate ships elected their captain, and could vote him out just as easily. Shares of loot were distributed relatively equally among the crew, with extra shares awarded to those with special skills (like a ship’s doctor). Think about your own job. If you were standing at the watercooler and the majority of your coworkers all agreed that your boss was an idiot and that Frank from accounting would have been a much better choice for that management position, how cool would it be to tel the idiot to shove off and give the job to Frank?

Know your Role: Everyone’s job these days is incredibly complex, and what we do increasingly bears little relation to what we were hired to do. That can be rewarding and is rarely boring, but sometimes it would be nice to go to bed at night knowing that I’m, say, a bosun’s mate, and that tomorrow I’ll be a bosun’s mate, and next week I’ll be a bosun’s mate, and that my goals and definition of success weren’t moving targets.

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