Draw Steel, Pirates!
Skies of Mor-ladron (SoM) is filled with pirates, especially on the trade routes between the major city-states and within the Worldstorm. My players have spent much of their time in and around the Worldstorm, so I thought it was finally time to create some pirate stat blocks.
This is a first draft of the pirates I'm adding to our Draw Steel game, and I have only run them against my players once so far, but I wanted to share what I have. If you just want to look at the stat blocks themselves, you can do that here.
What Makes a Pirate?
Several things make a pirate—or at least make a fun pirate to fight. First, giving them any humanoid ancestry was important. One of the issues with trying to reskin another stat block is that all the different monster bands are linked to their ancestry, so they all have traits that make them more undead-like or goblin-like instead of more cult-like or bandit-like.
To get around this, I pulled out a bunch of the ancestry traits for monsters and added them to a traits table. That allowed me to add traits like Supernatural Insight (humans) and Crafty (goblins) to the pirate stat block, along with any size adjustments. It's quick and easy and can make the pirates more diverse. You can even have some of the same stat blocks act a little differently.
Second, they're pirates—they needed to be good at fighting on a ship. Sure, you might not always fight a pirate on a boat, but it's going to happen a lot of the time. Since Draw Steel has so much forced movement, you could see the players easily tossing pirates overboard left and right.
I needed a way to keep that from happening, or at least make it a little trickier for the players. I struggled to come up with ideas here. I thought maybe I could have a triggered action where the pirate rolled to see if they stayed on or not, but that seemed like it would take up too much time.
I decided to take my struggle to Bluesky. I asked the Draw Steel community for their input and got a lot of good ideas; you can view the thread here. I ended up going with a couple of options.
The first was a trait called Sea Legs that all of the pirates got (except the pirate Storm Mage). This trait gives all pirates +1 stability when on a ship. I could have just given them 1 stability, but i think it's more interesting this way. If you can catch them on dry land, pirates might be slightly easier to beat.
The second is a free triggered action (an ability the pirate can use in response to something, the trigger. The "free" part means it doesn't use their once-per-round triggered action) called Grappling Hook! If a pirate is thrown off the ship and are still within 5 squares of the side, they can use the grappling hook to get back on board. To make sure that the ability is not super annoying for my players, I also gave it a Malice cost of 2 (Malice is a resource I get as the Director to do special abilities; more on that later).
I can only use Grappling Hook sparingly, but it also means players are less likely to finish off the last of the pirate crew by throwing them off the ship, as I will have more Malice at the end of the combat encounter to spend than in the beginning.
This, combined with the fact that the ship has wooden railings that can stop people from being thrown off for a short amount of time, feels like a good middle ground to create fun tactics. Combat certainly can involve throwing people overboard, but the current setup also encourages the players to get a bit more creative.
The last thing that makes a pirate is, of course, theming. The abilities and names need to invoke pirate lore and make it feel like you are on a ship fighting against a bunch of greedy cutthroats.
Pirate Malice
As mentioned above, Malice is a resource that Directors generate each round and that they can use to power certain abilities. Different stat blocks might have some abilities that cost Malice, like the Grappling Hook ability.
Global Malice abilities add even more spice. Each band of monsters gets three Malice abilities that the director can trigger to add more flavor and danger to the fight.
Malice abilities typically include a 3-cost, 5-cost, and a 7- or 10-cost ability. Here are the abilities I came up with for the pirates.
3 Malice: That's Where the Rum's Gone!
Minions cannot use this ability and it requires a maneuver from the pirate that uses it. When using the ability, the pirate takes a swig of rum and gains 8 temporary stamina while incurring a bane on all strikes until the end of their next turn.
Most Malice abilities don't have a drawback, but I thought it would be fun to simulate the pirates being drunk after having downed some rum mid-combat. I'm not sure about the on balance on this one; it might not be good enough with the drawback. But since it only costs 3 Malice, I'm not too worried about it. We'll see how it plays in future combat scenarios.
5+ Malice: Swing From the Rigging
This ability is basically a slightly tweaked version of the devil Malice ability, as is the next one. (I'm not sure what that says that so many of my pirate abilities are inspired by devils...)
When using this ability, up to two pirates get to swing over to an enemy standing at another spot on the map and hit them with a free strike. Mechanically, it's a teleport. The Director can spend more Malice to move more pirates.
A rope swing seemed like a cool way to get some of that swashbuckling feel in a fight—while also letting me rearrange the battlefield a bit.
7 Malice: Curse of Greed
I am excited about this one. I really wanted a way to incorporate the players' wealth level into something with the pirates, and came up with this ability.
Each enemy of the pirates in the encounter falls under the influence of their aura of greed. As a result, each enemy gains a damage weakness equal to double their wealth level. This lasts until the end of the encounter, meaning the wealthier you are, the more damage you'll take.
The devil ability this is based off is damage weakness 5; normally, the ability could be anywhere from damage weakness 2 to 12. Since the pirates range from level 1-3, it should be relatively balanced. I don't think too many characters will have a wealth level of more than 2 or maybe 3 at this point, since the total wealth level only goes up to 6.
Wealth is a stat controlled by the Director and type of game, so this one is hard to balance for other people. I could be convinced this is a 5-malice ability, but I'll keep it at 7 for now.
Individual Stat Blocks
I don't want to get too into the weeds on all of the stat blocks, as this post is long enough, but I do want to call out a few of them.
Pirate Rogue (minion)
This is literally a reskin of the human raider in Draw Steel. The ability to use a ranged strike before charging in invoked the perfect image of firing off a pistol shot before rushing in with a cutlass, which meant I had to steal it.
Pirate Bravo
The Bravo is the main artillery unit of the pirates, but I also thought it might be interesting to spice things up for them. Ships are not super big, so these guys are used to fighting in small spaces.
In Draw Steel, when rolling for a ranged attack, a creature typically takes a bane if they're adjacent to an enemy. These pirates do not, thanks to their trait Close Quarters Combat!
In addition, Bravos can make a melee free strike against an adjacent enemy after making a ranged attack. (Can you tell I like the motif of pirates fighting with a pistol and sword?)
Storm Mage
The Storm Mage is the only magic user on a regular pirate ship. Pirates who want to be super successful need a Storm Mage—having a sailor who can control the winds is pretty helpful!
The Storm Mage stat block is heavily based on the human Storm Mage, but I wanted to make them more powerful, as they are among the most feared magic users in SoM. I took the official stat block and buffed it up to elite level, meaning one Storm Mage can take on multiple hero characters.
I also liked the Galvanic Arc ability from one of the Wardog stat blocks and changed that to a chained lightning attack. Oh, and Storm Mages can fly. They are a destructive force to reckon with!
Pirate Lord
The Pirate Lord is a leader that gets villain actions. More than any of the others, the Pirate Lord needed to drip with the pirate theme. The Pirate Lord does not have the Grappling Hook ability; it didn't seem on theme for a fearsome captain to worry about going overboard, as they are too good for that to ever happen.
Pirates should have magic loot, right? Especially in a setting like SoM! The Pirate Lord has a triggered action called Iron Boots that provides +3 stability, basically making it impossible to throw one off their ship.
The Pirate Lord has another triggered action called Counterattack, which halves damage. This creates an interesting a tug of war, especially towards the end of the fight when the Pirate Lord is getting low on stamina.
The Villain Actions for the Pirate Lord continue to play with the pirate theme.
Give up your Loot! The Pirate Lord will generously allow the players to choose between resisting the pirates or surrendering to them. Mechanically, players can choose to take damage or be restrained.
All hands on Deck! The Pirate Lord summons more pirates to join the fray!
Cannon Bombardment! The final Villain Action is exactly what it sounds like: the Pirate Lord tries to finish off the heroes with cannons!
Running the Pirates
I have run the pirates once for my players so far, and it went well. If anything, the pirates might be a little weak. Only two of them got thrown off the ship, which I feel is a good number, but I'm thinking about letting up a bit on the anti-overboard stuff to see how it goes.
I only used Curse of Greed on the last round of combat, so it didn't really do much. I'll need to run that again to see its full effect.
Since I'm just starting to use my pirates in the actual game, I did not use the Pirate Lord or Storm Mage in that encounter. It remains to be seen how formidable they really are.
Thoughts?
I plan to keep updating these stat blocks as I use them against my players. Pirates are the main force in the current arc, so they will be getting a lot of use in the coming months.
What do you think? Would you use pirates and abilities like these in your games?
I am open to all feedback on balance and the names of the pirates and their abilities, so feel free to leave a comment with your ideas!