Setting up a Pirate Borg solo campaign

As I mentioned in last week's post, I have been eyeing Pirate Borg for a while, but I never pulled the trigger on it. Now that I have, though, I'm very happy that I did! It reignited my passion for TTRPGs like no other game before, so much so that not only I immediately made a character for it, but I also started to set up a solo campaign for it!
I also hope to play in or run games with other people if possible, obviously, both in person and online (and for that I already joined their Discord server), but in the meantime, and to get a feeling for the game, a solo campaign is a good place to start.

I've already run a few sessions of solo gaming before, namely in Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord (I still have a couple of sessions of that to post, they'll come in the near future), but I wanted to try my hand at something bigger in scope.
I have started a journaling game of Apothecaria, which is for now being preceded by Creation Myths to flesh out my character for it, but I also wanted something more "traditional". Cairn has been calling me loudly, and while I created four PCs for it and grabbed a solo engine for it, Barrow Delver, I never started that campaign (to be fair, life has also been quite hectic lately, so my time for solo gaming has been pretty limited).

Now that I have Pirate Borg, though, I have been planning and developing this idea ever since making my first character, and I plan on starting it as soon as possible. I wasn't sure about how to start it, though, and I think writing down the process I went through might be helpful for those who, like me, have the itch to try their hand at a solo campaign but are not sure where to begin.

I already knew the system, obviously, and in my opinion rules-light system like this (or Cairn) work well, because you don't have to constantly flip through the rulebook to check that mechanic you can't remember, dragging you out of the game.

My next choice was between using a single PC or a full crew. I went back and forth on this point, but eventually I decided to focus mainly on the first character I created, but to also have a few more PCs, three to be precise, to let them face bigger challenges (and as backup in case Samuel ends his career early, not an unlikely scenario considering how deadly Pirate Borg is!) and I also rolled a few crew members NPCs to know who the rest of the crew is...and in case a lot of characters die!

I also needed to decide which oracle or solo engine to use in conjunction with Pirate Borg. The choice quickly boiled down to either Mythic GM Emulator or Captain & Crew, a set of rules and procedures created specifically for Pirate Borg. I wasn't sure which one to pick, but in the end I decided to go with Captain and Crew, which seems to be specifically for solo characters even, and has a neat mechanic where you roll every test twice, with 2 successes meaning a full Success, only one being a Success with a Complication, and 0 being Failure. I like the nuance this system creates; I might still borrow some tables or roll from Mythic if the need arises, anyway.

I will play this more as a journaling game, where I narrate what happens to the crew without writing down each die result like I did in my Labyrinth Lord session recaps. I'm still debating whether to write it in 1st or 3rd person, but 3rd person is the most likely at the moment.

And here it is! As soon as I find time to start playing this solo campaign I'll report how it goes in future posts; if it's something you might be interested in reading, stay tuned!

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!

May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon

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