RPGPundit Reviews: AAARRR!!! The Treasure of Scurvy Jenkins

This is a review of the print edition of Small Niche Games' Quick Play Adventure, "AAARRR!!! The Treasure of Scurvy Jenkins", written by Mike Lafferty.   This product is an adventure for D20 modern and requires the main D20 Modern rulebook for play.

I've reviewed the other products in the Quick Play Adventure series, and I have to give Pete Spahn and co. over at Small Niche some serious props, they have this real knack for finding a genre or idea that is under-developed in the RPG scene, and yet has a lot of potential, and being able to distill the essence of that genre into a very small product.  In Scurvy Jenkins' case, 35 pages of text, plus several pages of handouts with some piratey floorplans for miniature play and sample characters.

What Miami Under Fire did for "Miami Vice", and Operation: Jedburgh did for.. um, I guess "Saving Private Ryan"; so too does Scurvy Jenkins do for "Pirates of the Caribbean".  It is a single 35 page adventure designed for D20 modern, for characters of around 5th level; set in the Caribbean during the age of Piracy (specifically, during the reign of Charles II).  I won't ruin the adventure for people by posting spoilers for it, but I'll explain the basic set-up: the PCs were privateers in the service of King Charles II, who got captured by the Spanish Navy and are being held prisoner in a Spanish treasure fort.  There they've met a crusty old English pirate named Scurvy Jenkins, a prisoner like them, who has arranged an escape plan.  He needs the players' help, and has offered them, in exchange for getting him out of there, a share of his hidden treasure cache (no doubt the product of a lifetime of pirating).

The adventure starts in media res, and essentially the players have already been captured by the Spanish, and have already agreed to help Scurvy, they don't really have a choice in those matters.  This is no doubt to cut down on the size so the adventure could fit the size of this small product.  This makes the adventure itself something of a railroad, so if you (or your players) are the sort that gets easily upset about those sort of things, the adventure itself might not be to your liking as-is, or require a lot of GM adjustment to adapt to independent-minded players that are hellbent on not trusting Scurvy or wanting to do something else.

In any case, the adventure proceeds to be something of a sweeping travelogue of the Caribbean, with the PCs visiting a pirate town, sailing the open sea, fighting all kinds of foes, and ending up on a mysterious island with an ancient and terrible curse.
Oh, did I mention that this adventure is not strictly historical? Instead, it has the kind of fantasy elements that are seen in the Pirates of the Caribbean; ancient curses, lucky charms, ancient Gods, and zombie pirates.   Assuming your players haven't read this review, however, there's no reason they need to know that from the start (unless you think they'd get pissed off at having it surprise them).  The adventure begins looking totally historical and "realistic" and goes farther and farther into the fantastical as the adventure goes on.

On the whole, I have to say that the adventure itself, apart from the railroady aspect to it, is quite good. It has plenty of adventure, and certainly captures the emulation of genre very well.

The book itself is a thin, magazine-style softcover, with a very nice full-colour cover that instantly captures the "pirate" feeling of the adventure, showing a scene from some pirate town of the time.  The interior is all black and white, and has a number of nice illustrations, including many from historical artwork of the period.  Very tasteful.

At the start of the book there is a short, but very well-written summary of the Pirate life and Pirate Age, explaining such things as the difference between "pirate" and "privateer", talking about pirate life and society, the "pirate code" (and the quasi-democracy that were pirate ships), and detailing brief biographies of a number of famous historical pirates. This kind of setting material continues into the main text of the adventure, both in the form of descriptions of the places the PCs visit in the adventure, and in sidebars that are added in appropriate places in the adventure, detailing such things as scurvy, the British habit of leaving wild animals to mate on islands, or the biographies of Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, and Black Bart.

Appendices give stats for all the important NPCs, and details for the pirate weapons, items, and ships.  The floorplans for minis are of a pirate ship, a jungle area, and a temple. 10 possible sample PCs are included.

This product might not have quite enough setting material in it to allow for an entire campaign to be run with nothing else; but it is certainly generous enough in its material that it could allow a GM to craft a few follow up adventures with nothing more than the stuff he gets from this book (and of course, it could act as a very good springboard to a full blown Pirate campaign if the GM were to look up and use some other sources for material).

On the whole, I liked this product, as I liked every other Quick Play adventure thus far.  I have to note, just as with the previous Quick Play adventures, that whether or not you find this product useful will depend a great deal on whether you specifically want to run a game based on its genre. In the case of Scurvy Jenkins, if you've been hankering to run a pirate game for some time, this would be just the book for you.

The Good: Well written, well organized, very complete for a product of its size, lots of setting detail. The adventure is fairly fun.

The Bad: The adventure is also fairly railroady; if you don't dig that, you'll not be too happy.

The Ugly: nothing.

RPGPundit

Hey, thanks for the review!  AAARRR!!!: The Treasure of Scurvy Jenkins and all of our Quick Play Adventures line are available in both PDF and print format.  

Re: Railroading - it's a potential problem with any prewritten adventure, but with a Quick Play Adventures module, it's kind of assumed that you and your friends will be sitting down to go on a one-shot adventure rather than playing in an extended campaign.  Therefore, we try to drop the PCs right into the action.  

For those unfamiliar with the line, the adventures are tailor-made for the pregenerated characters in the back of the books, which all come with hooks that explain who they are and how they ended up where they are at the start of the adventure.  This lets us get right to the action by allowing us to make a few assumptions at least at the start of the adventure: in AAARRR!!!, the PCs are privateers who have agreed to help Scurvy Jenkins recover his treasure; in Miami Under Fire, the PCs are members of a Miami vice squad investigating a series of drug lord murders, and in WWII: Operation Jedburgh, the PCs are members of an elite Jedburgh special forces team that has dropped into Nazi-occupied France the night before D-Day.  

Although the premise of each module is scripted, we try to provide a lot of alternate options during the game in case things don't go as planned and we also try to provide enough setting information that can be used in case the PCs decide to scrap the adventure and go off on their own.  But again, the goal of the Quick Play Adventures is to present self-contained adventures for situations and genres that typically lie outside of the mainstream with focused scenarios and pre-generated characters that allow you to skip the lengthy character generation process, making it an ideal fit for tournament slots or one night of gaming with friends.

I'm glad you liked the adventure.  I think Mike Lafferty did a bang-up job with it.  

Again, thanks for the review.

Pete