The only RPG where your scurvy crew may die horribly—and you’ll love every second of it
You don’t play Pirate Borg to be a hero.
You play Pirate Borg to chase cursed treasure through a haunted archipelago, scream “Betrayal!” as your first mate steals the ship, and go down in legend with a gun in one hand and a cursed goblet in the other.
This is not your friendly, rum-swigging, parrot-on-the-shoulder pirate fantasy. This is MÖRK BORG by way of Black Sails and Event Horizon—a doom metal sea crawl dripping with blood, sea salt, and desperation.
Published by Free League and inspired by the bone-crunching chaos of MÖRK BORG, Pirate Borg is a complete, standalone TTRPG where death is certain, the ocean is hungry, and your crew is probably cursed already.
Get the core rulebook on Amazon
Let’s hoist the black flag and chart a course into madness. You’re going to love the ride.
🦴 What Is Pirate Borg?
At its core, Pirate Borg is:
- A standalone RPG system
- Based on the MÖRK BORG chassis (rules-light, narrative-driven)
- Focused on nautical horror, brutal survival, and cursed treasure
You play as:
- Haunted sailors
- Drunk captains
- Eyepatch-wearing witches
- Cursed buccaneers with hooks for hands and blasphemy in their blood
You sail through the Dark Caribbean, an original setting overflowing with:
- Black magic
- Ghost ships
- Forgotten gods
- Rum-soaked prophecy
- Cannibal cults
- Skeleton-filled treasure holds
Imagine rolling dice inside a Dead Man’s Chest while being screamed at by a siren who’s also your ex-wife. That’s Pirate Borg.
📘 What’s Inside the Core Rulebook?
Inside the beautifully cursed cover of the Pirate Borg Core Rulebook, you’ll find:
- Complete rules for running the game (based on MÖRK BORG, but tuned for seafaring hellscapes)
- Seven playable classes dripping with flavor and fatalism
- The Dark Caribbean setting: maps, factions, ports, and horrors
- Rules for ship-to-ship combat and mutiny
- A d100 loot table that ranges from “useless trinket” to “this item whispers to you in your sleep”
- Weather, curses, voyages, diseases, madness, and more
It’s equal parts:
- System reference
- Art book
- Adventure toolkit
- Screamed poem from a dying sailor’s journal
Buy it now if you want to hold a rulebook that feels like it might give you tetanus.
⚓ Character Creation: Fast, Fatal, and Flavor-Forward
Making a Pirate Borg character is like writing the final page of a cursed novel and then working backward.
Character generation is:
- Randomized (but never boring)
- Class-based (each class is dripping in doom and grit)
- Deadly (expect to make several)
Sample Classes:
- The Haunted: Possessed by spirits or former shipmates
- The Zealot: One holy eye, one unholy mission
- The Buccaneer: Classic rogue with gold-lust and backstabbing bonuses
- The Heretic: A sorcerer with bones for dice and a mutinous past
You’ll roll:
- Stats (Strength, Agility, Presence, Toughness)
- Gear (rope, pistol, lucky coin, etc.)
- Background events (a whale cursed you, your crew was eaten, you have a pet eel)
These aren’t heroes. These are survivors clawing their way through salt and sin.
🧨 Rules System: MÖRK BORG… But With Cannons
The rules are fast and brutal:
- Players roll everything. No GM dice.
- Attacks are simple: roll d20 under your stat to hit
- Damage is rolled per weapon
- Armor reduces damage—but also slows you down
- Death can come from a single bad swing, fall, or betrayal
Stress, morale, and corruption mechanics are built in to simulate:
- Long voyages
- Moral rot
- Lingering curses
- Consequences of cruelty
There’s no alignment system—just desperation and bad choices with good flavor.
⚔️ Combat and Violence at Sea
Combat is fast, descriptive, and encourages reckless play:
- Ship-to-ship combat uses simplified rules that feel epic without bogging the session down
- Boarding parties lead to chaos
- Cannons, ballistas, black powder weapons—they all hit hard
- Fumbles and crits happen regularly, and they matter
Every round is a gamble. Every fight could be your last. But if you survive?
Glory.
And maybe syphilis.
🧭 Exploration: The Dark Caribbean
The default setting, the Dark Caribbean, is a masterpiece of genre blending.
You’ll explore:
- Forgotten islands crawling with jungle phantoms
- Abandoned ports filled with blood cults
- Caves that whisper when the tide is low
- Sunken ships filled with not treasure—but teeth
Factions include:
- The Royal Navy (lawful evil)
- The Bone Queen’s Armada (dead evil)
- The Cult of the Black Reef (fishy evil)
- A dozen other terrible groups with secret maps and worse intentions
Your map is a lie. Your compass is cursed. Your crew is high. Let’s sail.
⚰️ Magic, Curses, and the Supernatural
Magic in Pirate Borg isn’t fireballs and teleportation. It’s:
- Speaking to the dead
- Calling fog from beyond the veil
- Feeding your own teeth to a demon to gain favor
Spells are:
- Dangerous
- Vague
- Sometimes possessed
Magic scrolls may scream when opened. Cursed relics may bite. Rituals might require you to burn a crewmate’s shadow.
And worst of all?
It might work.
💀 Death, Dismemberment, and Dying Gloriously
In Pirate Borg, death is not a punishment—it’s a punctuation mark.
When your character dies (and they will), you:
- Roll a new one fast
- Keep the story going
- Feel like your last moments meant something
Your corpse might:
- Come back to haunt the party
- Be traded for coin
- Be worshiped
- Explode on a future island for no reason at all
This game wants you to go out with a bang, a scream, or a mutiny.
Bonus: There’s even a mechanic for “sailing into the storm” as a last stand.
🎨 The Book’s Design: A Work of Gothic, Nautical Art
Just like MÖRK BORG before it, Pirate Borg is more than a rulebook. It’s an art object.
Expect:
- Full-color splashes of rot and ruin
- Layouts that change by section, keeping you engaged
- Fonts that feel like gravestone carvings
- A black-metal visual aesthetic that drips from every page
Even the charts and tables look like cursed relics.
If you ever wanted a rulebook that could double as a death metal album insert—this is it.
📜 What Makes Pirate Borg Different?
- Single-book system: All you need is this book, a few dice, and questionable morals.
- Fast play: Sessions move quickly; setup is under 10 minutes.
- Support for one-shots OR campaigns: Run doomed voyages or tragic arcs.
- Open license ethos: Homebrew like crazy—people already are.
- Genre flexibility: It’s nautical horror, but you can lean into camp, tragedy, mystery, or comedy.
You can sail to Atlantis, die in the Bermuda Hex, or be eaten by a ghost whale with six mouths and one regret.
It’s your game.
👥 Who Should Play Pirate Borg?
Pirate Borg is for:
- Players who love MÖRK BORG, Into the Odd, Troika!, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess
- GMs looking for a change of pace from fantasy high magic
- Groups who embrace chaos and aesthetic
- Horror fans with a sense of humor
- Tables that want character deaths to be fun, not frustrating
And especially for:
- People who wish their RPGs felt like a cursed novel full of ink drawings and regrets.
🧩 Adventure Hooks and Campaign Seeds
Want to run Pirate Borg? Start with:
- “The Kraken’s Debt”: The crew stole gold from a sea god. Now the ocean wants it back—with interest.
- “Mutiny Moonrise”: The first mate claims to be a prophet. He wants to sail into a black eclipse. What could go wrong?
- “Rotgut Reef”: A sunken treasure calls to you. But it’s singing.
- “The Plague Wind”: A ship arrives in port. Everyone on board is smiling. No one’s breathing.
Every page of the book has something to inspire. There are hundreds of random tables, relics, diseases, weather effects, and monsters to kickstart your session.
💣 Final Verdict: Pirate Borg Is Beautiful, Brutal, and Unforgettable
There’s no shortage of pirate-themed games out there.
But Pirate Borg stands alone as the most daring, stylish, and mechanically lean system of them all.
It doesn’t try to make you safe.
It doesn’t care about fairness.
It only cares about how cool you’ll look when it all falls apart.
If you want:
- A unique setting
- Minimal prep
- Maximal flavor
- And a good reason to say “I roll for mutiny”
…then Pirate Borg deserves a spot on your table—and maybe in your cursed treasure chest.
