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ALL REALMS
Historical Naval Adventure · TV-MA
ARTICLES OF WAR
1797. The fleet has mutinied, the fever is in the port, and your schooner carries a King's commission — for now.
1797. The fleet has mutinied, the fever is in the port, and your schooner carries a King's commission — for now.
1797. Britain is at war with France and Spain. The fleet has mutinied at home, and off Puerto Rico a frigate's crew murdered their captain and sold her to the enemy. Fever stalks every port, and a prize can make a sailor rich — or hanged.
You crew HM Schooner Scapegrace, a captured privateer bought into the King's service and manned by pressed men and turncoats. Chase prizes, fight the Guadeloupe corsairs, and decide which articles your crew will sign: the King's, or your own.
Someone has to hold the ship together when the shot starts flying and the people start muttering. In the King's service the Sea Officer is the acting lieutenant with a commission in his pocket and an admiral's goodwill to lose; on the account, the captain the crew voted in — and can vote out. Either way, the Sea Officer is the one who says "follow me" and has to mean it.
The chart, the log and the lead-line are the Sailing Master's whole trade, and half the crew's survival besides. In the King's service the Sailing Master is master or master's mate, the warrant officer no captain sails without; on the account, the navigator no pirate crew can do without, and the reason a chase ends in a prize instead of a reef. Either way, the Sailing Master decides where the ship truly is, and where it is going next.
A ship is only as dangerous as the men serving her guns, and the Master Gunner makes sure the *Scapegrace* is more dangerous than she looks. In the King's service he is gunner of the carronade deck, answerable for eight guns and the magazine beneath them; sailing with a pirate crew on the account, he is captain of the guns — and under either flag, a fight lasts exactly as long as his magazine does.
Rigging, boats, discipline and the rope's end all answer to the Boatswain, and so, sooner or later, does everyone aboard. In the King's service he is bosun, keeping the *Scapegrace* rigged, boated and in line; on the account, he is quartermaster and boarding captain, the one the crew actually votes to follow when it comes to going over the rail. King's bosun or pirate quartermaster, he is always first across.
Every King's ship of any size carries a file of marines, red-coated and drilled hard, and the Marine is their sergeant — the officers' own guard, standing sentry between the wardroom and a forecastle that might one night decide it has had enough of both. In the King's service he is the discipline that keeps a ship's company from becoming a mob; if the crew signs its own articles instead, he is the deserter redcoat who has swapped the King's musket for a sharpshooter's berth in a pirate's fighting tops, and lost none of his aim doing it.
Every King's ship of any size carries a warranted surgeon, and berths him in the cockpit below the waterline where the wounded are carried in a fight. He doses fever with Peruvian bark, dulls pain with laudanum, and takes off a shattered limb quickly because quick is kinder — knowing nothing of what truly makes a wound fester, only what hard experience has taught him seems to answer. In the King's service he holds a surgeon's warrant; aboard a pirate crew he is the surgeon pressed off a prize who, when the chance to leave came, stayed — and either flag needs him for the same reason: a ship that loses its surgeon buries men it might have kept.
Every square-rigged fight and every fair-weather passage needs a hand who can go aloft faster than fear can catch him, and the Topman is that hand — young, quick, and utterly unbothered by height. In the King's service he is captain of the foretop and the ship's first lookout, the one who sights a strange sail before anyone on deck; if the crew signs pirate articles instead, that same nerve for the rigging makes him the sharpest rigging-cutter and saboteur any prize crew ever put aboard an enemy's yards.
Every ship carries a purser to keep the accounts of slops, rations, and pay — a warrant officer everyone suspects and needs in equal measure — and on a few ships, quietly, he also carries letters no captain signs and asks questions no captain need know about. In the King's service he is the Commander-in-Chief's quiet man as much as the crew's grocer, working the same intelligence a station needs out of taverns, prize agents, and frightened clerks. Turn pirate, and the very same skills make him the crew's fence, forger of papers, and the smoothest talker any dishonest deal ever needed.
The King's ships on the Jamaica and Leeward Islands stations — a handful of ships-of-the-line, overworked frigates, and a swarm of sloops, brigs, and hired tenders stretched across a thousand miles of hostile sea. The Navy is patronage and prize money, the press gang and the Articles of War read aloud every month, the lash and the noose. After the great mutinies of 1797 and the murder of the Hermione's officers, every captain on the station watches his own people as warily as the enemy. It is the crew's paymaster, protector, and law — and, if they turn, their relentless hunter.. Lawful, hierarchical, and afraid of its own men.
Republican privateers sailing out of Pointe-à-Pitre under commissions the French Republic hands out almost as freely as Victor Hugues once handed out death sentences. Their schooners and luggers are fast, crowded with men, and ruthless on paper and off it; they have taken merchant ships by the hundred, and the difference between their commissions and outright piracy is a matter of ink. The corsairs pay well, ask few questions about a man's past, and will sell a commission to any crew that brings them prizes — including a British crew with nothing left to lose.. Revolutionary, mercenary, and ruthless.
Men under no flag at all — deserters, mutineers, runaway prize crews, and the open-boat raiders who row out of flat calms along the coasts of Saint-Domingue and Cuba to swarm becalmed merchantmen. There is no pirate kingdom here; the black-flag days ended generations ago. There are only hidden cays, a few fences who ask no questions, and scattered crews held together by shared articles, shared plunder, and the certainty of the gallows if they are ever taken. This is where a crew goes when it goes pirate.. Lawless, desperate, and fiercely egalitarian.
Havana and the long fortified coast of the Spanish Main, at war with Britain since October 1796. Spain's Caribbean is great stone fortresses, the Real Arsenal building ships-of-the-line from Cuban mahogany and cedar, treasure and tobacco, informers, customs officers, and guarda costas whose captains hold a century of grudges against English smugglers. Proud, formal, slow to move, and dangerous when it does, the Crown gave the Hermione's mutineers sanctuary and a new name for their ship — and it will buy any British renegade's knowledge.. Proud, formal, and grudging.
The counting houses, prize agents, insurers, and sugar money of Jamaica — and behind them the planters' interest in the island's Assembly. The merchants are the empire's cash: they buy prizes, advance seamen their pay at ruinous discounts, insure convoys, and fatten on a war that sends ships to the bottom by the week. Their agents are smiling, obliging, and thieves. The whole edifice rests on the labour of enslaved people, and the merchants and planters fear the revolution in Saint-Domingue above everything else in the world.. Mercantile, self-interested, and frightened.
The revolutionary army of Toussaint Louverture, whose soldiers were enslaved only a few years ago and who have since broken the plantation order and fought a British invasion to a standstill that cost Britain thousands of men, most of them to fever. In 1798 the British evacuated and negotiated terms; now Saint-Domingue is nominally French and in practice Toussaint's own. It is disciplined, proud, and pragmatic, trading coffee for arms and bargaining as an equal with any power that will deal fairly. From 1799 it is also torn by the War of Knives against André Rigaud's forces in the south.. Revolutionary and pragmatic.
Gather a crew of 2-6 players. The Caribbean war of 1797 unfolds on Discord — serve the King, or sail on your own account.