New Campaign: Reavers on the Seas of Fate

Our group is starting a new campaign, and this time I’m the gamemaster! It’s called “Reavers on the Seas of Fate,” and is using the Pathfinder RPG rules to tell tales of piracy and horror on the high seas of the world of Golarion.

As usual, we’ll be posting session summaries, character writeups, etc. on the campaign home page.  Since I’m GMing, I’ll also be sharing “behind the scenes” reports on how I design and run the game.  I’ll start by explaining how “Reavers on the Seas of Fate” came to be.

Well, we’ve been enjoying the Paizo Publishing Adventure Paths quite a bit.  We played through Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne.  Unfortunately, there we got stalled.  We have a large extended group of gamers and there are other campaigns underway with some of the same people, and so Legacy of Fire and Council of Thieves were already being used.  We evaluated Second Darkness but pretty much hated the latter parts of it.  Earlier Dungeon Magazine-era APs like Savage Tide and Age of Worms had been read or played or run by people in the group as well.

So I decided so step in and run one myself, cobbling an AP together from various bits.  An aside on my terminology – a “campaign” is any game with the same characters progressing through multiple adventures, but those don’t have to be linked.  You could run a long campaign with completely unrelated adventures, or composed of mega-adventures (like if you ran through Temple of Elemental Evil, Scourge of the Slavelords, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits).  The meaning behind calling this an Adventure Path is the assumption that there will be an overarching plotline that covers all levels of play.

I knew I wanted to do something pirate-themed.  My first 3e game was a pirate campaign set in Green Ronin’s Freeport and we all loved it; that gaming group, Wulf’s Animals, is still active in Memphis, TN to this day!  I mentioned “Pathfinder Pirates” to the group and got good response.  So I went off and came up with two different coherent  options to run by them.  One was a traditional pirate campaign, somewhat sandboxey, with an equal focus on the life of piracy and more organized adventures.  The second was an Eastern pirate, or “wako,” campaign, where we use Asian races and creatures, with more of a supernatural spirit-hunter aspect to it.

I wrote up two potential premises and sent them to our group mailing list.  If you don’t have a mailing list for your gaming group, you need one.  I like Yahoo! Groups, they’re straightforward to use and besides the mailing list has calendars, polls, a file repository, etc.

Anyway, the two options presented for comment were:

Option 1:  Wako (Asian Pirates)

“A fate like that can kiss my ass.  I believe in one thing.  A better tomorrow.”

Rules:

Humans (Japanese, Chinese, maybe other SE Asian, Indian) and maybe spirit folk and/or hengeyokai (none of the standard races).  Probably not really use variant classes, just make some cosmetic changes and call clerics sohei, wizards wu jen, etc.  Often not using typical Pathfinder/Golarion stuff so would mean more work for DM and the players – Eastern weapons, races, culture, etc.

Setting:

1.  Go to Western lands and do “fish out of water” feel; could use Freeport, Riddleport, and other published stuff

2.  Use Tian Xia in Golarion (basically homebrew, as there’s nothing published for Tian Xia yet)

3.  Use Rokugan; there’s lots published for this, but a lot of it isnt really helpful.  Very into all that L5R clan crap which I don’t like.

Plot:

An ancient puzzlebox created by evil alchemists has opened a gate to the spirit realm, letting in all kinds of bizarre Asian monsters. The box broke into 108 pieces each of which is now embedded in a phantom/demon, and they all need to be reassembled to close the gate…  The evil spirits have taken over and influence the leaders, so the players have become pirates out of necessity, but are righteous rebels working to banish the phantoms and restore the Empire.  (I am even now stealing this plot from an anime called Tokko I’m watching on Chiller.)

In this option I can use some published adventures but not that many.  This would be more rural+ocean+maybe undersea. Dark horror/action.  There would be general reaving and a “dimensional crossrip” thing (like the Worldwound or Shadowlands) letting in loads of bizarre Asian monsters to fight.

I expressed concern about taking on new rules *and* immediately “going Asian” with them, but was willing to if people wanted to.

Option 2: Western Pirates

“At them mateys!  No quarter!”

Rules:

Pathfinder stock, some house rules

Setting:

1.  Pure Freeport.  Freeport is cool and theres no end of Freeport adventures.  (Is anyone too familiar with any of them?)
2.  Pure Golarion.  Use the first two Second Darkness adventures (if Paul doesn’t have them memorized) and then perhaps head to the Shackles and Mwangi Expanse areas.  Is Golarioney and I can strongly leverage written adventures.
3. Combine Golarion’s Port Peril, Riddleport from Second Darkness, and Freeport into one uber pirate city and do both.  Probably the most material rich option!

Plot:

This would work best with the players being more general pirates.  I’d have a lot of adventures but with no real “AP” I could do it sandboxey at the same time; you could expect getting a ship, losing a ship, having to join the crew of a pirate that beats you, getting pirates you beat to join you, empire building…  Depending on what you go and mess with, it could be really easy and you get to slash fools or really hard and you have to flee or get owned (traditional sandbox play, not APL=EL play).  This would be more urban+ocean+hidden treasure dungeons.  Gritty swashbuckling feel.

Decision

Everyone chipped in with their thoughts.  People did not like the “fish out of water” option, wanting to stay in the Orient if they were Asian.  They saw that doing Asian (when many of us didn’t even have the PFRPG book in hand yet) might be too much to bite off at this point, though it was intriguing.  There was strong response to the “Tokko” puzzlebox plot, however.  Players were concerned about running too sandboxey and then just kinda drifting aimlessly around sometimes.

After thinking about it, I decided to go with Western pirates, mixing Golarion and Freeport, but to adapt the Tokko plot somehow as well.  I only had a couple weeks to prep and the Asian thing would need a lot of pre-work on setting and rules.

Next time, developing the campaign!