Corsairs - RPG Overview

Corsairs is an RPG I backed on Kickstarter, and I am sure will be available either on the site for Caradoc Games or DriveThru. It is a sky pirate sort of game where islands float above the Molten Sea. Mining too much of the repellium causes the islands to sink further and may cause them to be lost. The ability to craft these sky vessels has been lost over the years, so the ships are older and often passed down through the family.

You are a Corsair, raiding the shipping lanes and doing your darndest to ruin the trade in repellium. It takes daring, courage, and more than a little luck to survive, but survive you must, for there is war brewing and riches to be made! Corsairs is a micro-RPG designed for short campaigns and one-off adventures.

And for a bit of history:

The year is 486, and your slice of the world is Teboa, one of a hundred islands which float above the Molten Sea. They float thanks to repellium; a wonderful element that is used to power the sky ships. Sky ships are no longer made, such knowledge has passed from the world, and mining repellium has become dangerous. A century of mining has caused Teboa to sink. If it sinks much lower, it will perish. Mining magnates from the Alderil Empire don’t care a whiff. With their inestimable wealth they have bought and sold enough officials to do as they please. Mining continues apace, heedless of the protestations of the Council of Governors. Alderil traders, backed by noble houses and a powerful navy are lining their pockets with the future ashes of your world!

I'll be running a game in this in the next few weeks, so I need to read up a bit more on the mechanics and create an adventure. The rulebook itself is all of 36 pages and is aiming for a swashbuckling, steampunk sort of worldview and game. Pistols and rifles are one shot apiece, so we do have some arms but this does aim for a pirate feel.

It requires 6 sided dice, and uses pools. So your character has 3 basic stats, each of which has 3 skills. Rolls use 2, 3 or 4 dice for a success roll. where 4+ is a success. There may be opposing dice that may subtract from your success as well, such as trying to swing across between ships in a heavy downpour.  While you can only pick one of each level stat for your character, you do get a few extra skill points to add, so there is more customization than initially appears. It seems a simpler version of how Shadowrun lets you pick various levels of things. With only three it is easy to keep in mind (I don't think I ever got that 5th edition Shadowrun character right, and that rule book was horrible!). There are some simple experience points to improve skills up to a 3 max. There is luck, being charmed or cursed, and the players actually roll ALL the dice, needing two sets of dice of different colors. You have a 3D roll for sword fighting and your opponent 2D, so you roll 5, 3 for you and 2 for your opponent, and their successes go against your successes. This would be better a table as there are fistfuls of dice to roll!

So reading the background and there are 3 major political groups, a big one and two smaller ones. The characters hail from a floating island in the middle that is slowly sinking as mining is still happening there from the big empire to the east. Characters obviously do not want their homeland (an island about 154x97 miles to give some scale to the map below) sinking so are raiding ships from the empires to prevent them from mining.

Possible adventures range from entirely on the island, attacking a new mine, having a ship to attack others before they get there, or explore with rumors of lost ships and repellium deposits on other islands. Noted in the description of travelling the skies are massive uprisings of gaseous repellium to avoid. I've added a couple of perpetual storms over a couple of the floating islands.

I'll have to see what sort of game the group wants to play. We've enough for a small ship's crew probably. And the game does come with some character sheets and player help sheets, so I can email those to the players at least. Just have to come up with a good hook.