This is an interesting book, it has a lot of information, yet there’s something lacking about it. To start, this is the quintessential book for those wanting to run any sort of pirate campaign, or trader campaign, or simply to have a good reference for ships that your players can use. The book boasts an impressive 53(!) different ship stats! That’s not all, though….yes, there’s more!
It’s got equipment (personal gear), a “slang” terminology chart (nice touch!), the low-down on what makes up a pirate or privateer campaign, a plethora of star ports that you can use in your games, a catalog of some of the more famous (or infamous) pirates, AND 4 new character templates for your players to choose from. It also has a pretty cool “Index of Pirates” in the back, which lists off the other books where you can find other pirates, shadow ports, swoop gangs, patrol ships, and prize ships. In all, a very helpful index indeed. Admittedly, though, it is really only helpful if you have all the books listed in the index (the one small catch).
I’ve used the book extensively, as my players decided that they wanted to try their hand at pirating for a while. Once they realized it wasn’t all gold and glamour, they decided to change their line of work.
My one complaint about the whole book was that the cover of the book was so fancy, but the inside art was lacking. Not only that, but all of the ships that are so meticulously done up, are only represented (not even all of them) by some darkened silhouettes. Not a decent “3-D-ish” look among them. This was a let down for me. So just be warned, if you get this book, you won’t be getting cool pictures to go with the ship stats.
For this particular book, I’m going to use two ratings:
Overall use:
Quality:
© 1997 grimacePCH@aol.com
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