Have you ever watched the creepy parts of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean and thought, “This is too Disney. I want horror pirates!” Enter Pirate Borg. Pirate Borg is Limithron’s pirate skin of Mörk Borg. Now, I was recently rather hard on Mörk Borg, saying the art-forward horror game is just not for me right now. Pirate Borg, on the other hand, is a bit more my style. Still dark – but not doom metal dark – yet it has its roots in real-world pirate history. It has horror themes, without losing itself to the darkness.
Down Among The Dead is a multi-purpose supplement to Pirate Borg. The book starts with three new Player Character Classes. The Antiquarian, an explorer with experience in everything from archeology to occultism. The Deep One, half man, half fish, warriors and shamans from the depths. The Unlocked Soul, resurrected “heroes” back from the Netherworld.
When a Player would Gain Experience, instead of a class feature, they may roll or choose a Skill from the Skills for the Seasoned Sea Rover list. This is a newly included d66 list of abilities. It includes Skills such as the ability to lower a target’s armour tier by one using Surgical Precision or being Dreaded, giving all human adversaries -2 Morale.
There are numerous other lists as well. Motivation During the Apocalypse, a Jolly Roger flag generator, and a coin generator. But wait, there’s more! There’s a Dark Caribbean Island generator and a Coral Reef generator. These use a handful of dice to create a map of (wait for it) an island or a coral reef.
Now we begin to delve into the meat of the book, starting with a location for GMs to use called Anchor Drop Falls. A 500-foot waterfall and lagoon, surrounded by mangrove trees, hiding a cave system filled with mystery and danger.
If a single location isn’t enough for you, there is a loose adventure called Lost in the Locker. The Locker is a place of purgatory and serves as a way station between the living and the dead. Odds are the Players ended up here after a total party kill in another adventure. One of the nice thing about Pirate Borg is that it is it’s “rules light” making it easy to adapt into other systems. Lost in the Locker is a wild enough setting that it could easily be dropped into most other game systems as well. You could be playing a bigger pirate-themed setting like 7th Sea or a fantasy setting like Pathfinder, and your players could awaken (after said total party kill) in the Locker with their current characters. Slight spoiler: the goal of the adventure is to escape from the Locker and the Netherworld.
The next adventure is a more traditional dungeon crawl called Venom in the Veins. 5000 years ago, a shrine was built to The Slithering One. A century ago, Spanish explorers rediscovered the shrine. Recently, operatives of the French Endgame Society entered the shrine to harvest venom for their assassination missions. Now, the Players have arrived. There are numerous listed reasons the Players could find themselves on this adventure, but you could also make up a reason as the GM. including as an extension of the Anchor Drop Falls location earlier in the book, as the entrance to the shrine is behind a waterfall.
Finally, we are given a blood-soaked rescue mission, Into the Maelstrom. A twist of the classic vampire hunt adventure, the Players must find their Patron before sneaking about the massive ship, The Maelstrom. Captained by a Deep One vampyre named Albrecht the Tideborn, The Maelstrom is filled with prisoners to be freed and vampyres to be slain. The adventure is tight enough to run as a 4-hour one-shot, but loose enough that it could be played over 2-4 sessions, or longer.
Most of the land-lubbing in the adventure takes place in the town of Charlotte’s Cove, but there are locations included all over the island of St. Thomas in what you may know as The Virgin Islands, but in this version of history are called The Dead Islands. Depending on the length of the adventure, Players could encounter [potential spoilers ahead] a Deep One village, an orangutan sorcerer, or a graveyard that’s sunken into a swamp.
Down Among the Dead is crammed full of goodness. Almost too full, if I’m honest. One of the things I don’t love about Pirate Borg is the lack of differentiation between sections. It’s a small detail, but a page saying something like “here’s a bunch of random lists and generators, before getting into some adventures” would be nice. Now, that’s ultimately a pretty minor complaint. It’s also a pet peeve of mine, so take it with a grain of salt. That minor complaint aside, Down Among the Dead is a great addition to a great TTRPG.
You can find Limithron online at limithron.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/Limithron.
[David Chapman]
