Yarr – Talk Like A Pirate Day 2024

Yarr - Danish Gold - A one-shot for Talk Like a Pirate Day 2024

If you want to know more about Talk Like A Pirate Day you'll find that here.

I like pirates and pirate stuff; so it was natural that I would be into a Pirate role-playing game, such as Yarr!, and also natural to want to do something 'piratey' for Talk Like A Pirate Day.

I am, as of writing this, in a play-test group for an as-yet-undisclosed-RPG-designer and I wanted to try out some of the material they were working on to gauge how it worked in a real live RPG session to give better feedback. The fact Talk Like A Pirate Day was coming up was the prefect excuse. I came up with the following:

Danish Gold

Captain Morgan has put the word out he is looking for a crew to head out into the Wild Atlantic in search of treasure.
Rumours of a burial site filled with gold thought to belong to Old Scandinavian explorers await for those sea dogs willing to put their backs into it.
If you are interested there is a pint o'grog at the Lame Dog for you.
Slackers need not apply.

• The plan for the players was simple. Meet with Captain Morgan and negotiate passage as crew and work detail. Sail out to the island and dig for treasure. Return home with gold aplenty.
• The trouble for the players was Captain Morgan is a distasteful man and will not take no for an answer lightly. The main (and quickest) way on and off the island is with Captain Morgan. The gold is cursed.

As this scenario was for a one-shot in order to use some play-test material, I decided to put a bit more effort into the background of the island should I want to use this for future games and I really enjoyed the research and work I put into this.

After my last attempt at map making, here, I thought it would be another great idea to make maps and handouts for this scenario.

I wanted an island to house everything on and after a bit of internet research came across redblobgames.com which allowed you to generate island maps. Playing about with the settings I got a map I liked, downloaded it and began my magic - grey-scaling the map, placing town locations and adding detail like town names, etc. Most of the annotation work was done by hand for the purposes of this map, but if I was to use this again in the future, I might decide to annotate this digitally so I could change or add things to the map more easily.

For the grave-site, I cropped the area of the peninsula I wanted to use, then enlarged that to A4 as I planned to hand annotate this also. Again, if I decide to use this going forward, I will probably annotate this digitally as well so as to make changes more easily.

I also put together a simple collage of images of the burial sites for the players to give them an idea of looks of the place.

The players would meet on and island elsewhere (I use an island called Hope Island as my go to generic Caribbean Island of choice and as a base for my pirate games) to gather rumours and negotiate with Captain Morgan before sailing out on adventure.

Holmsa Island

An outlying island to the north-east of the main Caribbean Islands, about 80miles into the Atlantic. This island is approximately 18 miles across and was previously settled by Viking explorers many years ago. There are some small settlements where the descendants of those original explorers still reside (~100 people in total).

• The largest and main village on the island is Olafsvellir, located to the south-west. Low fences surround the village and sheep can be seen grazing in small paddocks, as well as roaming free in the hills outside the village.

• The second largest village on the island is Holmr, located to the north. A ring of pine trees surrounds the village.

• The third largest village on the island is Mork, located to the north-east.

• The smallest village on the island is Bildsfell, located to the south.

• The island is quite insular and few foreigners live on the island.

• The island trades goods and services with the other Caribbean islands.

• Each settlement has a few ships which travel between Holmsa and the Caribbean.

• The island is owned by the Danish, and Danish is the primary language spoken there. Secondary language is English. Some of the islanders still know Old Scandinavian and Runic.

• The north-east corner of the island is used as a burial site for the whole island. Everyone on Holmsa gets buried here.

Aki Gettson (NPC)

Guide and Shaman of Holmsa Island.

Weather beaten and grey flecked bushy beard wild hair, this burly older man wears layered furs and leathers. Carrying a wooden staff with several runes carved along it's length, he wears several carved wooden pieces as medallions.

The Burial Grounds

In the north-east corner of the island is a peninsula which is used as burial grounds for the island. At the end of the road just before the burial grounds there is a stone lodge house and stable used for shelter by funeral attendees, and beyond this is a stone bridge leading to the peninsula and the burial grounds proper.

There are three stages of burials on the peninsula. Furthest away from the bridge are old burial mounds surrounded by stone circles, typical of those used in traditional Viking burials. This general area also includes large marker stones (menhir) at the front and back entrance. Coming closer to the bridge is a section of early Christian Viking burial mounds, typically a medium depth grave with a single rune-covered marker stone at one end. Closest to the bridge are the modern Christian graves.

The One-Shot

The game went well and we all had fun, although it ran over two sessions rather than the planned one. Some of that was my fault, some of that was contributed to two of the players having to leave early. Also Captain Morgan, whilst being a distasteful NPC, was outright vilified by the party where they did everything in their power to kill the Captain during the game. Not what I had planned and I did have to improvise quite a bit, especially after they managed to kill Captain Morgan and his personal Bodyguard and First Mate!

I was happy with the play-test material, and more than happy with the Island of Holmsa. I hope that what I have presented here is useful, and if I can think of another scenario I will use this again next year.

J