Pirate Chill
I'm very impressed with the Pirate Borg box set. It might be my new go to for IRL pickup games after I ran it last week for some drunk friends to great success.
I am finding increasingly that with very casual/non-gamer players I run games for, the idea of having highly procedural gameplay is not appealing to them. "Why can't I hit twice?" is something that has come up very often when I run for the newbs. The more things they need to track on their character sheet the more likely they are to mentally check out before we even begin.
I think this might be due to the fact that most of my pickup games happen right after the pub, which is not the ideal time to be learning a new ruleset. It is, however, the ideal time to be a pirate.
Pirate Borg is not heavy on rules. In my games I don't even tell new players about a rule until it comes up in play. I hear the cool kids call this "Black Box Gaming". With Pirate Borg, you don't need players to read a setting guide or spend an hour in character creation. You can just be into pirates. You know who's into pirates? A lot of fucking people.
I'd wager more people know how to act like a pirate than, say, an elf.
What I appreciate about Pirate Borg especially is it spells out why you would want to play a Borg vs. a more procedure heavy game: you want to just roll with it. The referee has a lot of narrative power here, but is advised to tweak things to fit the needs of the session. If you don't feel like running a full encounter, you don't have to. The GM does not roll for NPC on NPC combat. You just say what happens: the Zombie eats the Englishman (and the crowd goes wild).
Borg games eschew strict procedures in favor of trusting the GM to vibe it out. For new GMs this could feel like too much responsibility, but also having too many procedures can overwhelm. They often amount to a lot of tracking and bookkeeping. Pirate Borg's starter set makes sure to remind you that the players have the power to take this anywhere, and to just roll with it. The game will hold together. Just be zen and vibe with it. Don't worry so much about the rules.
It is no easy task to write a starter set that gives the table this much freedom in a sandbox setting. Luke Stratton understands what it takes to get new players to try your game. I don't mean people who are RPG veterans trying this game for the first time, I mean a first time GM with a first time group. The amount of aides and support and AGENCY this starter box set gives is astounding.
It's easily the best starter set I've ever played through. Everything here is trying to help you. You get your battle maps and minis, which I don't care for personally, but you also get some immensely useful tools like the guided character sheet, the tear-outs, the entire ruleset published on the box's interior, the player's guide, the adventure, the ocean maps. All of it is designed with a mission to instruct and guide the new GM and the new player.
The layout and information design of the module, Trapped in the Tropics, is clean and easy to follow. There is the perfect amount of text on each page. You could run this on the fly if you had to. I don't ascribe to the philosophy that RPG products should always be designed for people who quit reading after 5th grade, but I think it is wise to make your starter set as easy as possible to follow for the uninitiated. Every page gives the GM the exact information they need to effectively run this. Page flipping is minimized. If you are looking at a page mid-game, it's because your players are at that location.
Basically you can run this competently 6 beers and a bong rip in (recommended).
Light procedures are introduced for select parts of the adventure, but the GM is always encouraged to go with their gut instead. The procedures are there to provide a sense of structure should structure be needed. If you want to hex-crawl like a champ you have the tools to do that. You can also just handwave travel if you're in a rush.
As far as the sandbox is concerned the intro is really the only part that is fixed, which is fine considering you need the first scene to hook players in. Giving them a setup with concrete goals they can pursue or ignore is the bare minimum you should do to start a game.
In this game you are pirates. You just lost your ship and a conquistador has already paid you to find treasure on this island. The English will attack right after players introduce themselves. Zombies will then attack the English. Go.
From there, the island is ready to explore. Within minutes the players could get their hands on a shitty little boat and set sail for St. Martin or brave the high seas (bad idea but let them learn). They'd have to deal with the conquistador, but maybe he died in the fight with the English. Maybe they convinced him and the nun to ditch the island with them. Maybe the players put a bullet in the back of his head while he was reading a map (lived experience). Whatever the players choose, the starter set gives you the tools to keep things going.
As written, the adventure will naturally unfold in a manner that showcases the core concepts of Pirate Borg organically. For example: taking the longboat will introduce naval navigation and probably combat, but not as bombastically as finding the sloop which is better equipped for open-sea navigation and naval battles. Both vessels are within a few hexes of the starting area and can easily be found within the first two hours of play. Alternatively, players may build a raft. Regardless, players will naturally find a way to get off Eel island. You the GM, don't have to overemphasize it, they will come to this conclusion on their own. From there, their next stop will either be the small island directly north, or St. Martins.
Whichever direction you choose to go, you get introduced to another major aspect of Pirate Borg. In the north island you get introduced to ASH, the Sloop and potential crewmates. In St. Martins you are introduced to a major settlement and factional intrigue. You also get introduced to ASH there, and hooks for the next adventure, the journey to the island.
For every major location, you get a timeline of events that will occur should players dally. You do get GMPCs in the form of Beltraz and Iris, but you don't have to overplay them. I played Beltraz as a potential threat to the PCs, and kind of an arrogant dick. He will threaten if PCs actively try to defy him, but they are welcome to, and more importantly, they can overpower him if they play smart. The module will not crumble under the weight of drunk players.
In short: I have never felt this supported running a starter module. It succeeds where Another Bug Hunt got so, so close. The attention paid to the user experience here is very impressive.
Is it realistic to expect every RPG to follow this example? Absolutely not. Luke Stratton was able to playtest this across numerous cons and raised well over half a million dollars to get this starter set out (with heaps of additional content). Limithron is one of the biggest names in indie RPG publishing nowadays and is able to get their product seen by audiences who have yet to step into the world of TTRPGs, or dip their toe into a system that isn't 5E. It's a success story on par with Shadowdark and might even have more visibility than that wildly popular system.
Pirate Borg achieved virality and is reaping the benefits of having its time in the sun. Limthron are able to product test and refine their work in a manner that is just too out of scope for 99% if indie publishers. In essence they can provide a boxed set at the level of Free League, because they are able to compete in the crowdfunding market (which is driven by online zeitgeist). Very few TTRPG creators will ever reach that wide of an audience, and even fewer still would have have the resources and backing to do something like this. That said, I don't want to discount the work that went into making this, and I still think it's quite impressive that this starter set can go toe to toe with the big dawg (D&D) in terms of value and quality.
I want to stress that this is not some bar that I think needs to be cleared by new RPG creators. I also don't think this is a must buy for anyone already in this hobby. This isn't going to change your life if you've played an RPG before, unless you're one of those fabled players who's never touched anything not published by WoTC. It's not even particularly brilliant. It's good swashbuckling fun, where you get to be a bunch of asshole pirates.
That's the thing though. My casual players love taking the piss, just to try something edgy or see what they can get away with. In traditional fantasy, this kind of behavior often just ends up with them in jail. In Pirate Borg, this is just roleplay. They're Pirates, what did you expect?
Does all this mean I think people should buy everything Pirate Borg and back every Kickstarter Limithron puts out? Hell no. I just think that it makes for a great port of entry for the hobby. If you are reading this, you already do RPGs just fine and don't need Pirate Borg in your life if you don't already have it. But if you have a friend or family member looking to get started and they like the idea of being a silly pirate for a couple hours, maybe its worth checking this out instead of Heroes of the Borderlands or whatever else they'd order off Amazon.