Talk Like a Pirate Day Special:
Pirate Borg Review

Arrrr, mateys! It's (yes, really) talk like a pirate day, and so I figured it was time for me to publish this review of Pirate Borg, savvy? Sure, it might be hard to work in pirate talk at work, me hearties, but if your playing a tabletop game all about pirates, then you have no reason not to do so!

What Is Pirate Borg?

It’s Mörk Borg with pirates.

Okay, What Is Mörk Borg?

Mörk Borg (which Wikipedia tells me is Swedish for “Dark Castle”) is a TTRPG with pretty light rules and a very dark tone. The world stands on the edge of armageddon, and it’s up to you whether to embark on a doomed quest to save everything, or simply to carve out a place for yourself among the ashes and wait for the end.

Character creation is quick and easy, which is good, because characters tend not to last very long. You can build a character yourself, or simply roll on a few different tables to see what doomed fool you’ll be playing as for the next hour or so. Combat and skill checks are equally straightforward; roll a die, add the relevant stat, and wait for the GM’s verdict.

I should add here that Mörk Borg feels a bit tongue in cheek, in that Warhammer 40k style where everything is SO absurdly terrible that there’s nothing to do but laugh.

That’s basically all you need to know as you explore a dying world, clash with undead and eldritch horrors, and scrape together whatever riches and magic you can find. Oh, and just in case you thought there was any hope, Mörk Borg also includes a table of horrible things that happen as you count down to the literal end of days. Real uplifting stuff.

In short, Mörk Borg is the doom metal to D&D’s power metal. It’s dark, it’s deadly, and it’s great for bringing that Darkest Dungeon vibe to the tabletop.

So, What Is Pirate Borg?

Pirate Borg is a spinoff of Mörk Borg by designer Limithron, using the Mörk Borg Third Party License. As the name suggests, it swaps out Mörk Borg’s dark European fantasy for dark Caribbean fantasy—think Pirates of the Caribbean if it weren’t a Disney movie. It’s also fully compatible with Mörk Borg, and uses most of the same rules.

But Pirate Borg does a lot more than stick some eyepatches on the monsters and call it a new game. The Dark Caribbean is a fleshed out world (well, aside from the skeletons) complete with its own cities, factions, monsters, and lore.

Pirate Borg also introduces eight new character classes. This includes classic pirate-y jobs like Swashbuckler and Buccaneer, alongside classes like the Sorcerer ('can we twist this dark magic to our own ends?') and the Zealot, whose faith grants them holy power to fend off the monsters.

Pirate Borg is exactly what you’d expect for the most part. What surprised and impressed me was just how much of it there is. The book is over 160 pages long—nearly twice the length of Mörk Borg’s core rulebook—and it’s packed with lore about the Dark Caribbean and rules for all kinds of pirate shenanigans.

For example…

Rum and ASH

What’s the point of being a pirate if you can’t get drunk and party? Some of the first things you’ll see upon opening the Pirate Borg book are rules for drinking rum and “carousing.” Actually, hearing that there was a table of random outcomes for partying is what got me interested in this book in the first place.

If you’re looking for something a bit more hardcore than rum, Pirate Borg has you covered. When the undead horrors are destroyed, they leave behind an extremely valuable substance called ASH (and yes, you do have to write it in all caps). ASH is a powerful hallucinogen, so naturally, the people facing a zombie apocalypse are eager to get their hands on some and escape from the world for a little while. It can also boost your stats, give you magical powers, make your bones glow, or just straight-up kill you.

Oh, and one of the major events as the end of the world approaches is that anyone who’s ever used ASH immediately dies and turns into an undead monster. But your character doesn’t know that! So go wild... it'll be really funny for any of the party members still alive after that.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, Pirate Borg is a great TTRPG, but only if you’ve got the right people. Before you pick this one up, make sure you’ve got friends who are ready to revel in the grimdarkness and embrace the hopelessness of the Dark Caribbean. Players who come into Pirate Borg thinking they’ll be the hero and save the world are only in for disappointment and frustration. Actually, as a general rule for those tabletop players who are venturing outside of the classic entry point Dungeons and Dragons, its a really good idea to look around to see what's out there. There's a theme and mood for everyone... and I just really like the dark-yet-comedic tone that this game gives off.

Pirate Borg is available now on Limithron’s website, and its nice to see that they have a lot of free printables to support the game, such as character sheets, reference guides, and more. It's also a great time to get into the game, as its upcoming expansion Down Among the Dead is live on Kickstarter (and funded in two minutes)! It's a bunch of new content on offer, giving out rules on how to have an adventure as undead after a total party kill, new adventures, and also a brand new starter set box. There's a lot to appreciate here, so take a look to see if you want to jump in at a lower price point.

Bonus Review! D&D 5e Conversion Materials

Well, now I've put my peg leg in it; I waited until Pirate Week, and now these 5e materials are outdated thanks to D&D 5.5e hitting shelves.

Anyway, along with the Pirate Borg core rulebook, I received copies of Limithron’s D&D 5e Bestiary and Guide to Naval Combat (for people who actually do want to be the hero and save the world).

PIRATE BORG 5e Bestiary

There’s not a whole lot to say about the Bestiary, except that it’s an excellent cost-to-content ratio at just $8 for 76 monsters. It’s loaded with Pirate Borg abominations for players to fight, ranging from undead pirates and cursed animals to the mighty Davy Jones himself (who, it turns out, is a gigantic evil turtle).

The low- to mid-CR creatures are well balanced for D&D 5e, no complaints here. I haven’t personally tried the high CR ones in combat yet; then again, when it comes to high-level 5e play, “balance” is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Overall, it’s a worthwhile, low-cost addition to any campaign with a horror or nautical theme.

Limithron's Guide to Naval Combat for 5e

The Guide to Naval Combat is where things really get interesting. Although it’s only 15 pages—even shorter than Limithron’s Bestiary—it includes rules for ship-to-ship and ship-to-monster combat that D&D sorely lacks (cough, Spelljammer, cough).

The combat rules are pretty reminiscent of Starfinder’s ship combat. Most notably, it features different stations for PCs to take and influence the combat in various ways: the pilot moves the ship and makes skill checks for difficult maneuvers, the captain declares what actions the ship will take that round, the gunners… uh, gun… and so on. That makes it so combat is a lot more tactical and more interesting than crews just taking turns shooting at each other.

But there are a couple of things I don’t like about the Guide to Naval Combat: One is just annoying, but the other is a potential dealbreaker.

The annoyance is that, when ships battle things that aren’t ships (like monsters, or PCs), the ships’ HP and damage gets multiplied by 5. I get that it’s because ships are really big, and they should be hard for people to take down with swords and cantrips, but I really wish it had just set the ships’ stats that high to begin with. As it is, my ship has 100 HP against cannons, but 500 HP when the enemy crew starts shooting fire arrows—how does that work, mechanically?

My other concern is that it has naval combat using a hex grid instead of D&D's usual square grid. While that does allow for more tactical movement options, it also makes it a lot harder to transition between ship combat and character combat. Which means any plan that involves directly fighting the enemy crew pretty much requires you to have a square-grid character combat somehow nested inside your hex-grid naval combat.

So I’m on the fence about this particular book. Limithron’s Guide to Naval Combat certainly has a lot of good ideas in it, along with statblocks for 20+ ships to use in seafaring campaigns. On the other hand, a couple of fundamental design choices make it weirdly incompatible with the system that it’s supposed to be a supplement for.

But, overall, Limithron is offering 2.5 excellent books to help you get your pirate on. Whether you go for the full Pirate Borg experience or a high seas D&D campaign, you're in for a good time.

Have fun sailing the dark seas, mateys!