Pirate Borg short campaign post-mortem

24 May, 2026

This post contains mild spoilers regarding Pirate Borg's starting adventure, The Curse of Skeleton Point.

Ahoy folks or something of the sort. I've been postponing this because the Pirate Borg game I was playing concluded around the same time my Cairn table collapsed and I didn't want to do two post-mortems in a row, but now I'm finally getting around to it. Also, I was wondering if I should even do a post-mortem given that I was a player and not the GM - and therefore would have hmmm, incomplete information? - but ultimately decided that yes, I should. I believe it's the correct thing to do to support my completely deranged ideal that players should care as much about their games as GMs.

So before I actually bullet some stuff, the general context is that my partner gave me Pirate Borg as a gift last year and, as part of the gift, she said she would GM a one-shot for me and some friends. Which is like, a really cool thing to do! We were going to run through the adventure site at the end of the book, but at the end of the supposed one-shot we had only explored the island's town so we collectively decided to do a few more sessions until we reached a nice stopping point.

In summary, we played for six sessions until we made out of the island with the Governor dead, two romantic relationships established (and one romantic relationship ruined)¹, a crew of twenty and a lot of plunder. Now for the bullet points.

• The vibes are great! In true Borg-like fashion, the illustrations, random tables, items, spells and all that, are full of flavor. Pirate Borg leans really hard into the grim yet very silly thematic of Mork Borg and transposes it to a Pirates of the Caribbean setting very well.

• I don't get the need for the highly-tactical hex-gridded ship combat. I think it's really weird how a lot of designers look at Mork Borg's very neat and tidy rules-light chassis and think "this is great, I'm gonna base my game on it except it'll have a lot more rules!". Our most fun ship combat moment was boarding and jumping from ship-to-ship, i.e. using just theatre of the mind and regular combat rules.

• Mork Borg's neat and tidy rules-light chassis still rubs me the wrong way in some spots. Avid readers know my grievances with the armor dice and the D&D-isms of target numbers and rolling to hit.

• It was really interesting seeing my partner, who had only ever ran Avatar Legends as a GM and never played D&D, running a game that assumes you know what the OSR is² and so it really reinforced for me how much of that is a play culture (and ttrpg discourse) thing. For someone who is mainly a GM and, due to the scheduling samsara, spends more time reading about ttrpgs then actually playing, I think it's nice to have those breaths of fresh air.

• I think this was my first time playing a really religious character? It was engaging, but I often felt a bit confused due to my lack of knowledge regarding real-life christian faith. Thankfully the focus of our play was comedy and adventure, not introspection. There were some interesting character and problem-solving moments related to it, though, I might try that again in the future but with a fictional religion instead.

• Finally, I haven't yet read the adventure site³, but I thought it was quite fun. Our GM did mention they did some changes to accomodate our goals, but there were a lot of captivating hooks, cool characters, and open problems to solve. The whole "things revive once every sunset" is such a simple but compelling concept.

So, hm, that's it for Pirate Borg for now, lovely stuff. If everything works out, I'll probably be trying to play Frontier Scum next, at the GM seat. From my list of Borgs, that is.

anb

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#nsr #osr #pirate-borg #post-mortem