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Conan the Pirate
”TO THE DEVIL WITH EMPTY SEAS! WE’RE BOUND FOR WATERS WHERE THE SEAPORTS ARE FAT, AND THE MERCHANT SHIPS ARE CRAMMED WITH PLUNDER!”
The Hyborian world is home to many dangerous people, and none are more savage, ruthless, or dastardly than its pirates, the scourge of the high seas. A menace to civilization itself, these seagoing bandits have their own ways, customs, and traditions, and Conan the Pirate explores pirates and the pirate world.
Detailed within these pages are the countries up and down the coast of the Western Sea — proud Zingara, wealthy Argos, the western reaches of Shem and Stygia, all the way down to fearsome Kush and the Black Kingdoms — as the setting for pirate-based campaigns.
With this volume, CONAN characters can embark on campaigns of piracy, plunder, and high adventure! So, unsheathe your cutlass and ready yourself for a boarding action, to seize plunder and glory for your captain and fellow buccaneers!
New archetypes such as the Marine, Galley Slave, Merchant Captain, and Smuggler round out the archetypes from the CONAN corebook.
Pirate-themed talents, backgrounds, and gear, allowing you to create your own unique pirate characters, ready to plunder from the wealthy.
A gazetteer covering the coastal kingdoms that Conan raided during his years as a pirate.
A guide to running pirate campaigns, with all-new rules for piracy and plunder, and pirate events describing what happens between adventures.
Conan described at the height of his pirate career, along with the crew of the Tigress.
Statistics for ships — from the Argossean bireme to the Zingaran carrack — and a ship to- ship combat system that allows player characters to pit their own vessels against their enemies on the high seas.
Stunning art and maps, produced by world renowned Conan artists.
Developed with leading Conan scholars, these are the blood-red
The Hyborian world is home to many dangerous people, and none are more savage, ruthless, or dastardly than its pirates, the scourge of the high seas. A menace to civilization itself, these seagoing bandits have their own ways, customs, and traditions, and Conan the Pirate explores pirates and the pirate world.
Detailed within these pages are the countries up and down the coast of the Western Sea — proud Zingara, wealthy Argos, the western reaches of Shem and Stygia, all the way down to fearsome Kush and the Black Kingdoms — as the setting for pirate-based campaigns.
With this volume, CONAN characters can embark on campaigns of piracy, plunder, and high adventure! So, unsheathe your cutlass and ready yourself for a boarding action, to seize plunder and glory for your captain and fellow buccaneers!
New archetypes such as the Marine, Galley Slave, Merchant Captain, and Smuggler round out the archetypes from the CONAN corebook.
Pirate-themed talents, backgrounds, and gear, allowing you to create your own unique pirate characters, ready to plunder from the wealthy.
A gazetteer covering the coastal kingdoms that Conan raided during his years as a pirate.
A guide to running pirate campaigns, with all-new rules for piracy and plunder, and pirate events describing what happens between adventures.
Conan described at the height of his pirate career, along with the crew of the Tigress.
Statistics for ships — from the Argossean bireme to the Zingaran carrack — and a ship to- ship combat system that allows player characters to pit their own vessels against their enemies on the high seas.
Stunning art and maps, produced by world renowned Conan artists.
Developed with leading Conan scholars, these are the blood-red
125 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2018
3 people are currently reading
13 people want to read
About the author
Modiphius Entertainment
86 books12 followersWe publish roleplaying games, boardgames, miniatures, novels, cool accessories and more. Our aim is to inspire those who read, play or encounter our work with tales of heroism, adventure and courage.
As well as our own worlds Achtung! Cthulhu, Cohors Cthulhu and Dreams and Machines, Modiphius also publishes tabletop games based on other major licensed properties, Dune Adventures in the Imperium, Star Trek Adventures, The Elder Scrolls Skyrim and Call to Arms, Fallout the Roleplaying Game and Wasteland Warfare miniatures game, and many more.
As well as our own worlds Achtung! Cthulhu, Cohors Cthulhu and Dreams and Machines, Modiphius also publishes tabletop games based on other major licensed properties, Dune Adventures in the Imperium, Star Trek Adventures, The Elder Scrolls Skyrim and Call to Arms, Fallout the Roleplaying Game and Wasteland Warfare miniatures game, and many more.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 3, 2024
This book is fine.
That seems odd, because "Queen of the Black Coast" is up there with "Red Nails" and "Beyond the Black River" as one of the best Conan stories out there, but "Queen of the Black Coast" isn't about piracy. Conan makes his awesome entrance, leaping from horseback onto a departing ship, switches sides from the Argus to the Tigress, and then all the years of piracy that follow are brushed over in a paragraph and it's only when they find the cursed ruined city that the narrative zooms in again. At the end, Conan admits:
As such, most of the book is a gazetteer of various locations around the coastline of Hyboria. Most of this is mundane politics, like how Zingara is a nest of vipers where noble houses hold all the power and the king rules in name only, or how Stygia is so hostile that it's often illegal for foreigners to even be in the country outside of specific designated ports. Argos is the greatest trade power and knows it, so they put almost all of their naval power behind making sure that trade keeps flowing regardless of what the Barachan pirates have to say about it. This is interspersed with locations like Davu, the City of Forever, the remnant of a hidden lost hypertech civilization destroyed in the Cataclysm, or a city of intelligent spider crabs on the Pictish coast, or one of the Barachan Isles with a surviving colony of serpent men. The Barachan Isles are weird, because they get a map and almost every single island has some hidden occult secret. A ship frozen in time, the aforementioned serpent men, an island also frozen in time, a pyramid and so on. It gets so common that it wraps around to being a little silly. If everywhere has some weird occult secret, then what's the normal to contrast again? This is the problem with "Queen of the Black Coast" only showing the weird ruins with occult secrets and not the plundering of merchant vessels.
That's the first half of the book. The latter half is rules, including the standard set of enemies like sharks and ghost pirates. There's a series of random tables so when your crew plunders a merchant vessel you can roll up what they're carrying, including black lotus or mummies (good luck with the Stygian priests that are probably after you now). There's sea weather, pirate carousing tables, and a surprisingly detailed set of rules for running ship-to-ship combat. Though it seems a little odd, I can see why they did this. Your group of players presumably includes more than one person, so the rules have players take multiple roles like the captain and pilot and lookout, so everyone has something to do during tense scenes. This has the potential to be a lot of fun--there's a game out there called Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator where you need six people to man the captain's chair, helm, sensors, etc., and the fact that you have to communicate and work together is why it's fun. With the tendency to treat a ship as a single unit, at least until you pull alongside and then board, giving people separate roles helps avoid one person rolling all the dice.
But it opens up the question of what should the game be about? Obviously Conan the game has a broader scope than the Conan stories--you can actually play a sorcerer, for example--but the Conan stories explicitly exclude his piracy even though he got a well-known nickname out of it (Amra, the lion) and spent several years doing it. The sea is a hard place to do the slowly-rising sense of doom that the Momentum/Doom system demands, unless you're constantly chasing merchant vessels, and as I mentioned in my review of the Conan corebook, the system of Doom spends is a bit ambiguous. What kind of threats are going to show up in the middle of the ocean that aren't rapidly going to get repetitive? On land, there's far more possibilities than another "Oh, the merchant vessel was a trap and the cargo is actually armed soldiers!"
If you want to play pirates that's cool, but "Queen of the Black Coast" understood that a ship is a thing that gets you to where the adventure happens.
That seems odd, because "Queen of the Black Coast" is up there with "Red Nails" and "Beyond the Black River" as one of the best Conan stories out there, but "Queen of the Black Coast" isn't about piracy. Conan makes his awesome entrance, leaping from horseback onto a departing ship, switches sides from the Argus to the Tigress, and then all the years of piracy that follow are brushed over in a paragraph and it's only when they find the cursed ruined city that the narrative zooms in again. At the end, Conan admits:
There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone.And that's the big problem with Conan the Pirate--we have basically no examples of Conan actually pirating so it's hard to say what it should be like.
As such, most of the book is a gazetteer of various locations around the coastline of Hyboria. Most of this is mundane politics, like how Zingara is a nest of vipers where noble houses hold all the power and the king rules in name only, or how Stygia is so hostile that it's often illegal for foreigners to even be in the country outside of specific designated ports. Argos is the greatest trade power and knows it, so they put almost all of their naval power behind making sure that trade keeps flowing regardless of what the Barachan pirates have to say about it. This is interspersed with locations like Davu, the City of Forever, the remnant of a hidden lost hypertech civilization destroyed in the Cataclysm, or a city of intelligent spider crabs on the Pictish coast, or one of the Barachan Isles with a surviving colony of serpent men. The Barachan Isles are weird, because they get a map and almost every single island has some hidden occult secret. A ship frozen in time, the aforementioned serpent men, an island also frozen in time, a pyramid and so on. It gets so common that it wraps around to being a little silly. If everywhere has some weird occult secret, then what's the normal to contrast again? This is the problem with "Queen of the Black Coast" only showing the weird ruins with occult secrets and not the plundering of merchant vessels.
That's the first half of the book. The latter half is rules, including the standard set of enemies like sharks and ghost pirates. There's a series of random tables so when your crew plunders a merchant vessel you can roll up what they're carrying, including black lotus or mummies (good luck with the Stygian priests that are probably after you now). There's sea weather, pirate carousing tables, and a surprisingly detailed set of rules for running ship-to-ship combat. Though it seems a little odd, I can see why they did this. Your group of players presumably includes more than one person, so the rules have players take multiple roles like the captain and pilot and lookout, so everyone has something to do during tense scenes. This has the potential to be a lot of fun--there's a game out there called Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator where you need six people to man the captain's chair, helm, sensors, etc., and the fact that you have to communicate and work together is why it's fun. With the tendency to treat a ship as a single unit, at least until you pull alongside and then board, giving people separate roles helps avoid one person rolling all the dice.
But it opens up the question of what should the game be about? Obviously Conan the game has a broader scope than the Conan stories--you can actually play a sorcerer, for example--but the Conan stories explicitly exclude his piracy even though he got a well-known nickname out of it (Amra, the lion) and spent several years doing it. The sea is a hard place to do the slowly-rising sense of doom that the Momentum/Doom system demands, unless you're constantly chasing merchant vessels, and as I mentioned in my review of the Conan corebook, the system of Doom spends is a bit ambiguous. What kind of threats are going to show up in the middle of the ocean that aren't rapidly going to get repetitive? On land, there's far more possibilities than another "Oh, the merchant vessel was a trap and the cargo is actually armed soldiers!"
If you want to play pirates that's cool, but "Queen of the Black Coast" understood that a ship is a thing that gets you to where the adventure happens.
April 16, 2019
It’s alright. A few good player options, but lacking compared to Conan the Mercenary and Conan the Thief. Also, for a fairly narrative game, this book has oddly simulationist/complex sailing and ship combat rules. Seems a bit out of place compared to the rest of the system.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews