First off: Sawbones, Moonie, Reeva or Mygg, if you’re reading this, DON’T!
I’m running a pirate-themed homebrew campaign set in a homebrewed place which I’ve plonked down in The Sea of Falling Stars. I call it The Southern Isles, and its rife with piracy. The de facto ‘government’ is The Southern Islands Company, who run the place for profit and starve the population with high taxes and tithes, and who brutally suppress any rebellion. I’ve used every pirate and maritime trope I can think of in planning the plot, creating encounters and filling it with characters.
I figured this will help me add flavour to the world, and could be a good resource for anyone planning a similar campaign, or one shot or whatever.
Edit: I should maybe note I already played quite a bit in this setting and after a long hiatus I am starting it back up for Season 2, so partly this is a way for me to get it all fresh in my head again.
Very thorough! I like your framework of needing to provide an incentive to join the pirates rather than the navy. That’s exactly the kind of organizing principle I find useful with world building.
Fresh vegetables have vitamin C, too, so you could give them credit for that. If the actual party gets scurvy, and you want to make it a plot point, I recommend you make their most recent battle wounds reopen. That’s a real potential symptom of scurvy, and is likely to confuse them. Technically, it wouldn’t be the first symptom, iirc, but it’s easy to communicate in the context of a campaign, and scarier than bleeding gums, though I think the root cause is the same. (Something about connective tissue breaking down).
I mean, depending how vicious you want to be, lol, I am the kind of person who weaponizes realism in fiction or games. I think a little unexpected horror helps people focus on the story.