Hello.
I recently bought the Pirate Borg Starter Set from Free League publishing during a sale. It was like $36 dollars; down from $51.
I’d never really given the original game, Mork Borg, of which this is a spinoff, much of a chance because I watched a flip through on Questing Beast’s channel I think and thought it should have come with one of those seizure warnings. The design just wasn’t for me.
But I like the idea of starter sets that include everything needed to play, including “monster” tokens and battle maps and everything. I think this makes life a lot easier and the game more satisfying. The D&D: Welcome to the Hellfire Club starter set that I GM’d for some kids went over really well, and I think that these boxed sets are way more representative of what gear you should actually use than a lot of independent specialty items that I’ve seen.
Not that there’s anything wrong with buying specialty items. As the title for this post suggests, I recently purchased a few parts of Wyrmwood’s wooden dungeon master screen, and that can only be considered a luxury item for a table to have. It’s certainly not necessary. But as I’ll discuss below, it does have a lot of functionality and I’m glad I bought it.
Anyway, back to Pirate Borg, the sale also did a lot to convince me to try it. And who doesn’t like pirates.
It arrived in the mail today and I took some time to go through the contents, and I even took the time to create two characters, and I can say that so far I’m impressed.
The first thing I noticed was how nice the dice were. I didn’t even really know that dice could feel better or worse, but I definitely prefer these to the Dragonbane dice. They have a heftier feel to them and the old style fonts and the high contrast colors actually make them easier to use. And they are sort of like the design language you see on pirate flags.
There are nice touches like that all over the place. The inside of the box has reference information, which leads me to believe that you can use these as a makeshift dungeon master screen (there isn’t one in the box). Just stand these two things up and you have all the reference information you need and enough room behind them to hide some things if you need to.
It only took about twenty minutes to create two characters, which was nice. I had a bit of trepidation when I opened up the player’s manual (abridged for the set), having flashbacks to trying to create D&D characters for the first time, but this was painless.
I will say, I ran into a bit of confusion when trying to apply class ability bonuses to my characters. I couldn’t figure out whether to add them to my base score that I rolled, or the modifier. It appears to have caused some confusion, because there was a reddit post about the same thing, and the AI search results were pretty extensive on this topic. But it was a definitive answer: you add them to the modifiers themselves.
That was really the only hiccup though.
The character creation tables are really well done and make you feel like you’ve created some actual pirates, even though the whole process moves extremely fast. I created a buccaneer who used to be a navigator who is also secretly a zombie and whose flaw is that he gets lost a lot but insists he isn’t. Sounds like a fun character, and it was all by random rolls.
The other character is a rapscallion former medic with broken teeth. A female named Felicity.
I created two characters because there is no included solo adventure, and the player’s manual makes it a point to say that the encounters aren’t balanced in Pirate Borg, that a party of five will have an easier time than a part of two. So I thought a party of one might be just a suicide mission or an exercise in sadomasochism.
I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to run the included adventure solo, but I glanced through it and I think the experience I gained from the Dragonbane “Deepfall Breach” adventures will allow me to just figure it out as I go along. That’s the plan at least. I will report back on it.
The Wrymwood GM screen is a luxury item. I’ve had it for about a week, but the two way dice tower just came a few days ago.
It is expensive, but when you touch it and use it, you realize that it is a quality piece of equipment. I bought it because I don’t have a lot of desk space and needed some vertical storage, and instead of just installing some generic storage, I thought it would be more appropriate for the RPG Corner to actually use something designed for playing TTRPGs. And so I splurged on it.
This is the cherry wood version, the least expensive option, which is fine with me because I have other cherry wood furniture in the room, including the Levenger “editor’s desk” right next to it, and I only have one panel and two connecting pieces on either end, the storage tower and the dice roll tower.
All of these pieces work extremely well. The modular storage tower comes with several extra plastic storage containers, so you can customize it to your needs, and the two way dice tower is easy to use and has a pleasant sound as the dice rattle down it. Not annoying at all.
The only thing I don’t like, and it is probably just because it doesn’t suit my needs like I thought it would, is the acrylic panel that goes in front of the wood panel.
It attaches magnetically. The magnets are very strong. Which I like because it’s secure, but it makes taking things out and putting them in a little tricky, and whenever you open it everything falls to the bottom and out of place.
This is the type of panel you should have if you’re going to have a permanent item behind it, not stuff that you’re going to swap out a lot. I think the magnetic panel with the little magnet holders would have been a better purchase for someone like myself that wants to swap out what’s on that panel frequently. Even the split acrylic panels would have been better. Or one half acrylic and the other half magnetic. But oh well. I can always order those if I want.
It’s an expensive GM screen but I don’t regret the purchase.
I’ll be back with a replay of the Pirate Borg adventure soon.
Thanks for reading!