I'm Writing a Treasure Island Setting Guide

Thomas Denmark at Night Owl Workshop was soliciting for a writer for a campaign guide for his OSR game Freebooters, a pirate-themed retro-clone intended to be compatible with the original fantasy RPG. Night Owl appears to like formatting their OSR games in the original 0e format, fondly known as the Little Brown Books. Raiders, Guardians, Colonial Troopers, and Warriors of the Red Planet are some of the company's previous releases.

Specifically a Treasure Island campaign guide/adventure/setting book. Ridiculously long 25,000 word document for the usual pittance found in the indie ttrpg publishing world. Sign me up I said. For the love of all things degenerate the blind fools recruited me to pen a red tide of pirate intrigue and adventure on the Spanish Main!

So VTP is happy to announce are first freelance gig with a written contract and everything! Seriously, I pounced on this cold solicitation because of the subject matter. While the Clockwork & Cthulhu campaign I ran online is well in the rearview mirror of life I still have all the material I generated when the PCs hit the high seas for the New World and got involved in their own fucked up pirate action. Not so much in ship to ship combat, but got involved in the despicable slave trade on the Gold Coast and a Spanish raid on the island of Roatan before they plunged into the Central American jungle to battle evil Mayan necromancers. 

I did a stupid amount of research on late seventeenth century sailing and colonial exploitation for the game run, but it was easy to do because the subject material was fascinating and I had stumbled on some first source memoirs of sailors who experience the pirate trade up close and personal. 

On top of this Treasure Island still remains one of my all time favorite adventure yarns ever writ. Give me Billy-Bones swinging a cutlass at Black Dog's head any day over Bilbo sweating out a riddle contest against Gollum any day! It is not hard to recall the heart palpitations I suffered when Jim faced off against ruthless pirates in the rigging of the Hispaniola off the shores of Skeleton Island. The anxiety I felt while the good guys hashed out desperate strategy under musket fire in the block house. Stevenson displayed a mastery of pace in his famous book and made me wonder how much REH owes to RLS's for his adaptation of brisk pacing when he set out to write his pulp fiction. I read this book, and Howard's yarns, before I ever got ahold of Basic D&D and though as a kid I could not use the technique all that well, pace of adventure has remained an all important ingredient in the games I run.

There are some exciting and unique challenges inherent in turning a pirate adventure story into a full blown campaign setting and adventure and this is what I am really in it for. Doesn't hurt in trying to get some street cred outside of my own self published stuff too!