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Corsairs

A role playing game of sky ships and floating islands. · By caradoc

Review (5/5)

A topic by kumada1 created Jan 08, 2021 Views: 344 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2

Corsairs is an enjoyable cloudpunk narrative ship-skirmish rpg.

The PDF is 32 pages, and it has a nice consistent feel to its art and layout. Everything is black and white, but there's a lot of gray-shading and weather stains and the body text is quite easy to read.

Corsairs' setting is also genuinely fun, in a free-feeling, pulpy way. You play the crew of an airship on a world filled with floating continents that hover over a sea of magma. Airships are powered by the same mineral that causes the continents to float, so constructing more of them means sinking continents, and the powers-that-be are racing to make a lot.

Dice-wise, the core mechanics to Corsairs are simple but feel good. You roll a d6 pool, scoring hits called Draft. If a task has a difficulty or an opposing character, you roll a separate pool and hits reduce Draft. Your normal dice explode and your difficulty dice don't, so if your pools are at least equivalent the odds are still in your favor. Furthermore, zero Draft still counts as one Draft---you just succeed with a complication.

This is nice and effortless and weighted towards success, and combat is likewise simple. Playing cards determine the turn order, and attacks deal damage equal to their Draft. Healing restores HP equal to your Draft, and yelling at enemies can force them to swap their initiative with you, but mostly you just batter away at enemies with your attacks and react to complications as they occur.

Character creation is quick but meaningful, and you effectively rank three stats in order of how much you like them, then assign a few points to skills associated with each stat. You also pick a crew member that you like, and one that you don't like, setting up a nice complex party dynamic right off the bat.

Which is important, because the party will be acting in complex, interconnected during ship to ship combat.

Corsairs feels like it's *really* built for combat between ships, and the fact that it has a full rpg system bolted on underneath that is nice, but might have been optional. Ships have full hit location charts, as well as Hull points underneath those that excess damage can spill onto. There's quick but strategic rules for acquiring and chasing quarries, as well as for assigning different crew members to different stations on a ship. There's options to demoralize and board ships, or to break critical parts and trigger different part-specific effects.  There's also rules for maintenance, crew shares, supplies, and booty.

For GM tools, there's a bestiary, a full condensed recap of the rules, and some advice, but the book stops short of offering a scenario or campaign. It's not too hard to come up with your own Corsairs material given how easy it is to bait an adventuring hook for pirates, but some canon material here would have been really neat.

Overall, though, if you like stuff like Castle In The Sky, Aeronaut's Windlass, or Sunless Sea, you'll like this. And if you like medium-crunch games where logistics and decision-making and character banter swirl together into a cool team effort to do crime, you'll have an excellent time here.

Minor Issues:

-Page 9. Round one, you go first. You verbal barrage the next enemy in initiative and swap turns with them. Then you act on your new initiative and verbal barrage the next enemy and swap turns with them. Etc. As long as you don't fail a roll, you can stunlock all enemies every other round. Is this intended?

-Page 9, second to last para, "they to use" they can use

-Luck and Bad Luck having very similar names but being completely different mechanic elements (a meta currency and a feature of 0 hit rolls) feels a touch confusing. Calling Luck something different, like Panache, would avoid this.

-It might be worth adding a note that Charmed and Cursed always expire after one roll unless a specific rule says otherwise, just to avoid situations where it's unclear when an effect ends.

-Page 13, Luck, does this mean you roll your Wits d6s, or that if you have four dice you get four Luck?

-Page 23, Repair And Resupply, 2nd para, "or for player's" players

Developer

Thanks for the fantastic review Kumada1! I really appreciate you taking the time and posting your thoughts! So good to read! You were very thorough!


In terms of your minor issues:


Verbal Barrage - I thought I had cleared this up in the final document, but apparently I did not! :D It is intended that a character acts once a turn - so Verbal Barrage is a way of taking a higher (or lower) initiative slot for the next turn. In the event that someone Verbal Barraged [apologies] a target in a lower initiative slot, they would indeed swap cards, but since the character had acted already they would be skipped, and the new initiative order applied on the following turn. My oversight sorry - as I said, I thought I had clarified that! 


Good note on the use of terms, I hadn't considered the similarities, thanks for that.


Charmed and Cursed are fuzzy Conditions - it might be that a storm causes all movement on the deck of a ship to be Cursed, and that effect would last as long as the storm does. These conditions are meant to be applied to an in-game situation, and I wasn't clear about when they end for that reason, but should have been clearer about the context in which they do apply (and when they might expire).


Luck - The second, if you have 4D6 Luck, your character has 4 Luck - thanks, I need to clarify that!


Thanks for noting the typos!


Thanks again for your wonderful review! It really made me smile!


Cheers,

Giles.