Pirate Borg Starter Set First Impressions + Character Creation
As a small time creator, I was surprised at Free League’s generosity to send me a copy of the new Pirate Borg Starter Set, GM Screen, as well as the new Pirate Borg Expansion: Down Among the Dead. I am intending to do a review video of the Starter Set on my youtube channel after I run a one-shot of the starter set’s introductory adventure: Trapped in the Tropics for my captive crew of friends who are obliged play a session with me on my birthday later this month.
In anticipation of the one-shot, I decided to crack the Starter Set open, revel in the absolutely stunning production, familiarise myself with the rules, and roll up a pyrate of me very own ‘eart. Read on and chart along with me!
Disclaimer: Even as Free League provided me a copy of the game, all thoughts about this product are purely my own.
Context: Trying to Grok the Mörk
Before we get to Pirate Borg, we would have to talk about the game that started it all: Mörk Borg (Nilsson, Nohr, 2020). I don’t have much experience with MB or the myriad games built on its 3rd party license, Pirate Borg being one of them. For many years I heard about MB and how it won many Ennies, and so I bought a copy of the game in 2023 to try to understand the hype. Based on rules alone, I didn’t immediately get why it was so lauded but I definitely noticed – impossible not to– the extremely bold art and layout decisions which prioritised the heavy metal aesthetics of the game over the book’s legibility. In other words, the book is f*ckin impossible to read!
I think MB's creators know that, and as a gesture of goodwill (and with a breath of relief by many an ophthalmologist), you can find entire rules in simple legible font for free on the MB website, known as the Bare Bones edition. The fact that this Ennie award winning game is completely free online further cements the fact that the game's biggest selling point probably isn't the writing, but rather the killer layout design and presentation. That’s honestly pretty bold a move towards approaching TTRPG books as artwork rather than game.
Months later, I bought a copy of 3rd party Borg game Death in Space (Niblaeus, Plogfors 2022) and ran a solo session for myself, to actually try the game rules. I quickly realised how punishing the Borg games are designed to be. I felt hesitant to introduce the Borg games to my friends, as I myself wasn’t as comfortable with the tenets of Old School Rennaissance style (OSR) games then.
Now in 2026, having run my fair share of OSR games such as Cairn, Old School Essentials, Electric Bastionland and Shadowdark, I’ve understood how the rules light-ness of OSR games allow us to focus more on getting the game to table, and having players invest themselves in the game through the game’s aesthetics and presentation. MB’s simple rules but heavy aesthetics definitely nail that philosophy. It's also easier now to appreciate today, how MB impacted the TTRPG design space in the last half decade. Many contemporary TTRPGs today seem to use like a hall pass, giving themselves permission to go crazy with their art, layout and presentation of their guides, leaning on visual design to communicate the game's spirit.
Pirate Borg Starter Set
Returning to Pirate Borg (Luke Stratton 2023), we see that the powerful and evocative design lineage of MB persists in this piratical iteration of the popular ruleset. The Pirate Borg starter set honestly overdelivers on aesthetics and materials, with a great sturdy box with the softcopy player’s guidebook and a prewritten adventure booklet, multiple foldable battlemaps and story maps for the adventures, a good number of tokens to use on those maps, as well as a beautiful set of chunky resin dice, 6 erasable and reusable character sheets and markers, and also a pad of 25 additional paper character sheets too!
Deviating away from MB’s more extreme design choices (phew), the rulebook of PB is designed to be readable on top of being damn beautiful, which serves our intent today to roll up a (hopefully) good character! Like most OSR games, PB encourages us to create our characters using mostly dice rolls and referring to the result on various tables. With my Player’s Guidebook in hand, and a character sheet and a pencil, it’s time to bring our scurvy-ridden scoundrel into the world! LETS ROLL!
Sailing the 2 Cs (Character Creation)
We begin rolling for starting gear. I roll on a d6 table ambiguously labelled “Container”. I should be getting something to hold my items like a bucket, backpack or satchel. Instead I get a whole-ass dinghy. I guess I should be grateful for such a great container that allows me to stow all my items, along with myself?
For cheap and fancy gear, I roll and get 5 torches, and a guitar respectively. Not bad actually!
Now for ability scores! In PB, there are five scores, namely Strength, Agility, Presence, Toughness and Spirit. You get each score by rolling 3d6 and adding them up. I actually feel abit guilty for rolling rather well. All my scores are 10 or higher! Had I lucked into a building an overpowered character? I quickly realise that I shouldn’t have to worry about that! My scores of 10, 11 and 12 give me no modifiers. Only my Strength and Presence scores of 13 and 14 provide me a +1 modifier. In PB, when we make a test, the normal difficulty rating (DR) to succeed is most often a 12. It's not going to be easy to make those successful rolls in-game!
I do get pretty lucky when rolling for my class,- my character is a Buccaneer, a character proficient with firearms, which is great because my Presence, the score used for ranged attacks, is my highest. The Buccaneer class also automatically comes with a weapon: a Musket + ammo. My class also shifts my ability scores around, and provides me with some special features, and with that, my Presence gets bumped up from a 14 to a 16, giving me a nice +2 on Presence tests instead of the initial +1. Score! I am also thankfully lucky when rolling my character’s HP. They are currently 5 HP strong! Thats way better, and a relief because I’d want my little Buccaneer to at least get a fighting chance before they swim w the fishes!
That’s as much as my luck takes me, as my character rolls and gains no additional weapon, and really lousy wearables. They do not succeed in getting a hat, nor any armour, and start the game out decked in rags!
I roll on a few more tables to flesh out my character’s background and appearance. I like these little story seeds that provide the kindling for a backstory that I could develop over time:
Background: Refugee. I begin with 80 silver and strong survival instincts!
Distinctive Flaw: Paranoid (Makes sense. My character seen some things...)
Physical Trademark: Missing an eye (Might explain why they’re a great shot?)
Idiosyncracies: Says “I know the right way”, but always gets lost. (She sounds a little prideful)
Unfortunate Incidents and conditions: You escaped captivity and will never go back! (Once again, makes sense as a refugee who might have experienced some hardships)
Thing of importance: Animal skull. (I will need some time to figure out what animal it is, and why the skull is important to my character.)
Coincidentally I have been reading a piractical fantasy book series by one of my favourite authors, Robin Hobb, called The Liveship Traders. In the books, there is a pirate ship called the Marietta, and a badass character named Etta. Let’s draw some inspiration from that, and name my character Marie Etta, former refugee, turned Buccaneer!
If you's like to use Marie Etta in your own Pirate Borg adventures, feel free to download her character sheet here :Marie Etta PB character sheet Spectral Hollow
My First Impressions on Pirate Borg Character Creation
- Character creation is quick and dirty. It shouldn’t take a table of players more than 15-20 mins to roll up their characters together! I am looking forward to hear my players curse and laugh as they roll up characters with janky stats! And if said characters perish prematurely in the adventure due to aforementioned janky stats, it shouldn’t take long to roll up another character and have them join back into the adventure!
- The character sheet looks so cool yet still remains mostly functional. I do think the boxes for the ability scores and the ability modifiers are a little small!
- I have my reservations on the average difficulty rating of this game being 12, especially when rolling tests with a D20, and with such tiny modifiers… that’s going to lead to quite a swingy variance! In PB there’s a metacurrency used to mitigate poor rolls known as Devil’s Luck. Let’s hope that that’s enough to help players feel less exasperated, and not have players on unlucky streaks to feel too fed up with their multiple failed rolls and attacks!
- I haven’t read much of the sea vessel travelling and combat rules which are unique to PB when comparing to the other Borg games. Looking forward to learning more about that!
I guess any concerns I have about this game would be addressed after I have actually played it! Looking forward to that game with my friends later this month. In the meantime, I am intending to play a few solo sessions with my new character Marie Etta, and to get a feel of the pre-written adventure: Trapped in the Tropics. I will post some post game reports and thoughts on the Spectral Hollow! Thanks for reading!