What Makes ‘Ravaged by Storms’ a Standout Pirate Borg Sandbox?

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming chap

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TL:DR:

A storm-wracked sandbox, a furious feathered serpent, and a doomsday clock. Ravaged by Storms is Golem Productions’ newest Pirate Borg adventure — a 72-page mini-campaign where factions clash, hurricanes brew, and the Blight Revenant stirs. I really like it, it’s packed with GM tools like a Storm Generator and Ruin tables, but my first look also spotted a couple of quirks. Here’s what stood out to me.

Disclaimer

Similar to last week’s initial exploration of Emergent, I can’t call this a review. I’ve not played it yet you see, coupled with the fact that I’ve only been sent a WIP copy with some missing images etc and haven’t seen the final version.

As ever, I’ve not received a financial incentive to write nice things, but I am a backer of the Ravaged by Storms Kickstarter. When Golem Productions reached out to invite me to showcase their adventure, I was happy to answer the call. As part of this, I fed back a few suggested improvements to Golem Productions, and as such you’ll find me credited in the book :)

The upshot is that despite that very minor minor conflict of interest, you’re gonna be reading my honest first thoughts on an adventure which is mostly finished, and that I quite clearly can’t wait to get my hands on the finished product!

Oh, and whilst I’m disclaiming, this post contains minor spoilers covering the opening setup of the adventure. Cool? Swinging, lets get started.

What is Ravaged By Storms?

OK so, off the back of successful releases ‘The Way of the Worm’ and ‘The Scarlet Coral Kingdom’, brother - sister duo Alexander Jatscha-Zelt and Sabrina Jatscha (Golem Productions) have got yet another Pirate Borg adventure on the stove. ‘Ravaged by Storms’ (RbS), is currently in a live Kickstarter (well, live until 11th September 2025 anyway) and the campaign has already hit a fantastic 426 backers with over £15,000 pledged so far.

Jatscha-Zelt describes RbS as a “72-page mythic sandbox adventure module designed for Pirate Borg… rules-light, art-heavy, and fiercely OSR.“ and he’s pretty much nailed it.

For those unfamiliar with the idea; since it’s a sandbox adventure there’s no middle or end plotted out for you to awkwardly steer your players towards. What happens is totally in their hands. Player. Agency. My dudes.

There is however, a beginning:

In The Beginning, There Was A… (Minor Spoiler Alert, players skip to the next section!)

A millennia or so ago Mesoans settled in an archipelago in the Bahamas of the Dark Caribbean called the Death Wind Islands. With the help of their Coatl allies (serpentine demigods of wind and storm) they go on to build a glorious city housing all their wealth and knowledge.

Hundreds of years later, those Mesoan chaps are long gone - but their crumbling kingdom remains guarded by the last Coatl; Tzoketuapacatl (bless you!). It’s lucky he does too, because during a siege on the city an undead warrior was touched by a local Great Old One’s juicy venom and transformed into (our BBEG) the Blight Revenant, and this chap is hell bent on claiming the Whisperwind Conch.

If the Revenant ever manages to nab it from the city, the result could be extinction-level toxic hurricanes:

Fortunately, Tzoketuapacatl intervenes. Sealing the city, Revenant, and the Conch behind layers of impenetrable magical raging storm prisons. This is seemingly a cunning, nay, foolproof plan with but. One. Small. Flaw…

You see, it all slowly unravels if anyone gets into the city through the back door and yoinks a second magical McGuffin; the Wind Bone Key.

And, well, ‘sugarpuffs!’ Wouldn’t you just know it!? Flash forward to the Golden Age of Piracy and some swashbuckling scurvy dog has only gone and unwittingly done exactly that! Now there’s a six day timer ticking until the Blight Revenant gets his boney hands on the Conch, and to really stick the boot in - Tzoketuapacatl (who is understandably pretty dischuffed with this turn of events!) is going on a bit of a rampage against all the local factions trying to find the Wind Bone key and is tearing everything up in his path.

Unto this scene, enter stage left; our heroes.

Come on, that sounds pretty Saturday morning swashbuckling, right? I’m in.

What’s it trying to Do?

Be A Complete Mini Campaign

RbS is built to run as a 5-10 session adventure. Whilst you could probably run it straight out of the book, I would always recommend familiarising yourself with the content that you need to run an expected session, and making some notes prior to sitting down at the table.

It has a defined opening, a ticking doomsday clock, and enough locations, NPCs, and encounters to sustain a whole arc without having to do much more work than flesh out some of the things given to you should the players actions necessitate it.

Encourage Sandbox Play

There’s no fixed middle or end.

Instead, the module gives you procedures for faction activity, travel, and naval encounters so the world keeps moving around the PCs. The story isn’t pre-written and can only be understood as something that happened at your table in the past-tense, rather than something that the GM dictates will happen.

That’s really key to understanding how to use RbS: The players choose what to pursue, who to side with, and how to spend their six days before everything goes all Sharknado. The module does have a handful of potential ways the campaign might play out listed at the end, but the purpose here isn’t to say ‘pick one’, rather ‘this is just an inspirational small range of the limitless possible outcomes’.

Be Modular

After all that though, if a Sandbox campaign really isn’t your thing, well the module is also pretty damn modular to be honest. You could easily reach inside and tear out the stuff you like, such as the Lifeless City, or Drownmaids Rest to use as one shot adventures, and then adjust the player agency to taste.

What Stands Out To Me?

The Timer

The six day timer is doing two things, firstly, it’s setting expectations that this isn’t going to be a terribly long campaign arc (5-10 sessions), in fact this campaign is going to be perfect for my Pirate Borg campaign as a keyed location to drop in, and that’s how I’d suggest you use it too.

Secondly though, the timer is infusing the adventure with a sense of urgency which is something I find to be critical in keeping the players moving forwards and not getting bogged down trying to fulfil that ‘videogamey’ habit of exploring all paths and getting every achievement… and then consequently robbing the experience of all it’s tension.

The Roaming Coatl

Tzoketuapacatl is a cool monster, no doubt about it. But he serves a meta-function as a chaos generator and a GM safeguard.

I was thinking about this, we’re all human, and even in sandboxes GMs sometimes drift into predicting how things might play out. Once you start imagining outcomes, you risk steering players toward them. The Coatl prevents that.

By rolling for his actions and storms, and including information on how all the keyed locations change in his aftermath, the board state constantly shifts in unpredictable ways. It keeps the GM honest, preserves agency, and if you make the players feel it; I can imagine it injecting fresh tension each new game day.

The fact that Golem Productions has included this meta layer of thinking about how their module should be ran, and how they can make it easy for you to stick to sandbox principles really impressed me.

Sandbox Toolkit

OK, so yeah - the Coatl is very specific to RbS. But there are other gameplay tools that you can add to your broader Pirate Borg arsenal, and that makes it extra valuable:

• There’s a Storm Generator that provides you with both descriptive prompts, but also translates these into specific player challenges, and suggests potential consequences for failure. Really useful for making weather more than simple flavour.

• A Ruins Generator that lets you roll up some convincing locations for crawling, in case players take a left turn and find themselves somewhere that looks like it could use a dungeon.

• Six new rituals from the ‘Squallbinding’ school to give extra magical options for PCs, all focused around the movement of air; wind, speaking, breathing etc.

Faction Play

Every group on the islands has its own agenda: there’s the pirate group; the Phantoms fracturing under Marceau, the West India Company scheming for control, the Bright Maiden’s mercurial ghost crew, the Coatl’s wrath, Peacatatl, and the Blight Revenant.

They’re all written to act and react alongside the PCs, with different motivations which creates shifting alliances and betrayals, again adding to the richness and variety of the campaign’s path at your table.

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Nostalgia

It would simply be remiss of me not to mention that the art and descriptions are fantastic throughout. I really appreciated that elements of it grabbed me right in the childhood and transported me directly back to Monkey Island, meeting “Herman Toothrot” and tinkering about with monkeys and suspicious statues. Great stuff!

Potential Friction Points

Terminology Consistency

I especially like how the module uses a similar concise framework to my preferred method when it comes to giving area descriptions, however one of the things I fed back on relates to the consistency of the terminology in these areas. I should stress, mine was a preview copy with final changes yet to be made, but I noticed instances where I was uncertain if more than one distinct noun or proper name for a given element was simply artistic flair, or an indication that there were multiple similar elements.

For example, are “Maritime Beast,” “bone cage,” and “skeletal remains.” all referring to the same giant desiccated animal corpse on the beach, or are there three?

It’s fine to do this for many people, but for me personally it made reading comprehension just that little bit more of a challenge. Having to reread lines, over analysing, self doubt, that question - ‘have I missed something from elsewhere that explains this?’.

I’ll be happy to see this resolved in the final product, with the addition of the last few area maps which will clear this up nicely :)

Intentional Vagueness

Since this is a concise OSR adventure, there’s not pages and pages of lore a la WOTC. That’s not to say lore is absent, but rather that RbS is concise and gives you the minimum to make sure the GM is in control of the important facts. This means you’ll have to improvise if more detail is required.

This is going to work absolutely fine for me as all the main details have been covered and I just need to add some flesh to the bones here and there, but if you’re not comfortable with improvisation then it could be a sticking point for you, and it’s worth knowing, going in.

Navigation

There’s quite a lot of page flipping to be had in RbS, mainly in relation to how one of the broad cast of NPS relates to another regarding factional interplay. The nice thing is that you are specifically told where to flip to though, and you’re not just left to vaguely cast about looking for the relevant section.

I think I would have preferred to see some kind of nodal diagram showing all the different cast members, who they are connected to and how. That could have been up front on a single page and would have meant that I’m not regularly having to flip to elsewhere to get the full picture explained to me.

As it currently stands, this is probably the main reason why I said earlier that the module does still require you to read through and make notes, to make sure that you’re in total command of all the relevant information.

Do You Want To Know More?

Looks like Ravaged by Storms has made a bit of a splash, which is really nice to see.

Over at Thaumavoria, Dave has a nice interview up with Golem Productions, discussing RbS and various design choices.

And Rascal News even has a guest piece up discussing the Kickstarter!

There’s also an interview up on Youtube with Mom’s Open Table and the Kickstarter trailer offers a nice tease:

Conclusion

Obviously, it’s clear that I really like the look of Ravaged By Storms. I think it’s going to be an excellent option for inserting into my wider PB campaign. On top of that, you know I’m going to be lifting those GM tools straight out and putting them to use more broadly.

How about you though? Do you think it looks interesting? What would you like to see form a module like this? Answers in the comments below as always :)

Oh, before I forget - If you want to get in on the kickstarter, head over to the campaign in time for the final push before September 11th and grab yourself a slice of the action.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running!

Catch you laters, alligators.

What 'Return of the Jedi' Teaches Us About OSR Game Balance

“Master Luke, you're standing on the…”

“I will not give up my favourite decoration” Jabba interjects in booming Huttese “I like Captain Solo where he is…”

With lightning speed, the force flares through Luke’s outstretched fingers, ripping the blaster from the guards holster into his grasp.

But not quick enough to beat the wet thump of Jabba’s fist slamming down upon the booby trapped floor, sending Luke tumbling into the Rancor’s pit, whilst loosing impotent laser bolts into the ceiling with a loud pew pew!

Ahoy m’hearties, today's post is a lesson on game balance brought to us by 1983’s Return of the Jedi in the way that Luke battles and defeats Jabba’s pet Rancor (pfft, spoilers!). What’s that you say? Last weeks post was about game balance too? Well, yeah, loosely, but it’s my blog and I go where the wind takes me, damnit!

OK, let’s get this show on the road. I want to talk about two versions of the Luke vs Rancor encounter in the context of a TTRPG, in an imaginary one, the entire encounter has all been perfectly balanced. The result is that without any need to think outside his character sheet, Luke and the Rancor square up against each other, going blow for blow, taking it in turns to roll to hit and damage until Luke wins, having used all his spell slots. There's simply no requirement here for Luke to think creatively about the situation.

Let’s just admit it, shall we? We’ve all experienced this fight before at the table, and it was boring for everyone involved.

I know some of you are going to say that there’s nothing stopping players being creative and spicing it up, but the point I want to underline here is that there’s nothing forcing them too either.

Spoilers for Return of the Jedi!

In the true version however, there's no balance - Luke is in a situation that is practically hopeless… yet he triumphs.

Now, ya’ll just settle yourselves down a moment, because I'm going to skip ahead to the part just after the Rancor savagely eats the Gamorean Guard. This moment highlights the deadliness of the encounter to Luke, he knows there's no chance of a fair fight…

Luke:- I grab a large bone off the ground to defend myself with.

GM:- Confronted by this enormous slavering beast, the bone feels pathetic in your grip. The Rancor reaches down and grapples you, lifting you up with one powerful taloned hand that wraps around your waist. You can smell the stench of rotten flesh as you're elevated towards its gaping maw.

Luke:- As it brings me level to it's face, I want to force the bone into its mouth, wedging it open.

GM:- The Rancor roars in frustration, flailing, it drops you to the ground.

Luke:- Is there anywhere I can hide?

GM:- There's a crevasse in the cave wall that you can squeeze into, but you'll be trapped.

Luke:- I roll into it.

GM:- OK, and from your new vantage peering between the Rancor’s legs, you can see a metal door with an electronic lock next to it. It looks like an exit! Before you can act though, with a sickening crunch the bone in the Rancor’s mouth snaps. Bending down, it reaches a clawed hand towards you.

Luke:- Is there anything down here with me I can use to hit the hand with?

GM:- There are some hand sized rocks, and bits of rubble.

Luke:- I grab a rock and smash it down on the Rancor’s finger.

GM:- The Rancor pulls it's hand away in pain, throwing it's head back in rage and let's out a roar.

Luke:- Great, I roll out from the crevasse, and whilst the Rancor is roaring, I want to run between it's legs towards that door and punch the switch to get out.

GM:- Great plan, you sprint across the cave and hit the door release, unfortunately it opens to reveal a secondary gate, metal and grated, the jeering presence of the Rancor trainers beyond push you back. Meanwhile, the Rancor is making it’s way over, crouching beneath the portcullis as it lumbers towards you.

Luke:- How does that portcullis work? Could it crush the Rancor?

GM:- Definitely! You see it’s controls on the wall some 15’ away.

Luke:- Whilst the Rancor is under the portcullis, I grab another rock and use the Force to throw it at that switch.

GM:- Great, roll to hit with advantage…

What Should we Learn from this?

There’s lessons here for GM and player alike:

Firstly, if we accept that balanced encounters lean into being predictable (IE the players expect that they’re “meant” to win) then it’s also clear that this can reduce the interaction of the encounter to simply engaging with the base mechanics of the game. How many times have you heard a player just say “I want to hit him with my sword…” when this is the bulk of an encounter - you know that there’s magic missing.

Secondly, if your players have no expectation of balanced encounters, they will be forced to creatively engage with the situation to ensure survival. The GM should be very open to this creativity, and be prepared to bypass strict mechanisms and favour rulings over rules.

Thirdly, as a player, you should ask tonnes of questions, knowledge is king, so don't be afraid to prompt the narrative that you want to hear from the GM. This behaviour turns passive players into active proponents of the games narrative direction.

Fourthly, As GM, do your best to describe the scene honestly, but don't try to solve the problem for the players. Instead, you should be rooting for the player, give them every chance to succeed with each feasible suggestion they present.

As my fellow blogger, Arthur Brill, writes in The Fields We Know in his post on game balance with (it must be said) far more eloquence and gravitas than I could command:

“Much more important than worrying about creating "balanced" encounters is designing encounters in such a way that players have the ability to size up the difficulty of a potential fight so they know whether to engage or to find another approach. (Run away, diplomacy, stealth, surprise, etc...)

. . .

Information trumps power. Van Helsing (the book character, not the movie version) does not defeat Dracula because he is more powerful than him. He defeats Dracula because he understands both the vampire's power and weakness.”

Thanks Arthur.

This philosophy is what lays at the heart of great OSR gameplay. The thrill comes from player ingenuity, not predetermined balance.

Conclusion

OK, I can hear you screaming that you’ve got the point. I promise, I’ll stop writing about game balance for a bit, next week I’ll write about a cool homebrew I use. Honest.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

Deadly, Not Frustrating: Keeping OSR TTRPGs Fun & Fair

A common reason I hear for folks being turned off from OSR games is their perceived or real deadliness. Most folks getting into the TTRPG hobby these days are the children of Matt Mercer, and following Critical Role as their primary example, so it’s natural they're sold on the idea that TTRPGs are supposed to be a long interactive story with traditional structure, and deep and satisfying character arcs.

When they hear about OSR games and start to understand their deadliness, they get to thinking: “How can I get invested into the story of a character if they die so frequently? This sounds terrible”.

I'm not going to try to tell them that they're wrong, that would be ridiculous, their fun is as legitimate as anyone’s. But I do want to see if I can open a new door for them.

So that got me to thinking, can the OSR come meet this new generation of players in the middle, to make sure that the game is not frustrating and remains a fair and enjoyable experience for them?

Of course it can. I have thoughts on the matter.

How Players Can stay alive in the OSR

My first suggestion is to the players

From the perspective of an OSR player looking in, games like 5e prescribe your characters a set of abilities and optimised choices. The gameplay focuses on providing balanced encounters, and the rules come with a plethora of elements (open Death Save rolls) and abilities (Healing Word) to ensure that player death is highly improbable. The designers want you to buy their long, and event driven story campaigns, and those can easily fall apart narratively if characters start dying.

Contrasting this, the OSR swings the opposite way. Generally speaking any notion of balance or pre-game solutionising is thrown out the window, and cheap ranged spells that you can fire off to heal people and get them back on their feet whilst still performing your main action are typically non existent. These games tend to lean more towards sandbox style play, which means that character death doesn’t have to be woven awkwardly into some pre existing story, because there is no pre existing story.

So the first thing you have to do as a new OSR player is adjust your playstyle. The answer to whatever encounter is in front of you is not on your character sheet. Instead the onus is now on you to use your personal ingenuity to try to shift the dynamics of whatever threat is in front of you, to push the odds in your favour before you engage.

What do I mean? I mean pay close attention to the descriptions given out by the GM, ask questions, fully engage your imagination and start dreaming up wild solutions, ask questions, make a point of being an active participant in the games narrative - ask more questions! Seriously, ask your GM about the situation to gain better understanding, suggest possible additional elements in the world that you can use to form part of your solution.

A good GM should be gratefully receptive to this - they should be rooting for you after all, and when you ask questions it gives the GM opportunity to fill in the gaps of your knowledge!

Of course, it should go without saying - if all else fails, be prepared to run away and fight another day.

Best GM practices To Ensure a Fair Game

Telegraph danger

Be liberal with information, even meta information about the dangers ahead. This will avoid those foul tasting “gotcha moments”. Remember, you are the player character’s eyes and ears in this world, it is unfair to expect the players themselves to be able to act in their best interest if they are unaware of of things that their characters would be very aware of.

For example, everyone in town knows about the dangers of the swamp at night, so the townsfolk stay clear. When you are explaining this to the players, why not show them the swamp random encounter table so they understand exactly what can happen? It would be common knowledge that the swamp was full of giant crocodiles and that there are ghostly lights in the water that try to lure you into peril. Also, lets not forget about the rumours of a nasty old lady who sets traps and kidnaps lost folks too.

Kill your darlings

You know that encounter that you think is going to be epic and you've been really looking forward to bringing it to the table? You need to be able to take joy in allowing the players to come up with ways to circumvent it entirely. Encourage this line of thinking, and when you sense that they’re trying to do this, make sure you equip your players with everything they would know in order to complete their strategy.

The best way to stay alive in the OSR is to play smart. Smart players don’t pick fights when the odds are against them, instead they find another way. Let them, that’s your side of the deal.

Also, keep that encounter on the back burner. The players may have circumvented it this time, but there’s probably going to be another opportunity to recycle it later on. Of course, you should let them avoid it again if they can!

Mothership: Telegraph monster attacks

I wrote a piece a couple of months back. Ostensibly it was about Mothership combat, but there’s this nifty GM style that the game promotes which really helps. Applied more generally to the OSR, it would look like this:

When a combat encounter is potentially devastating, at the start of every round of that combat, tell the players quite openly what the monster is going to attempt to do.

Firstly, this removes any gotcha’s, which is a good thing. Secondly, this creates an exciting feeling of existential dread and panic in the players, knowing what fate lays just ahead of them. Thirdly, it gives the players opportunity to play smart and change the future. Circumvent it, dodge it, whatever verb you like :)

Honestly, this lands a hell of a lot better than the anti climax of just smashing your players into dust out of nowhere.

GOZR: Death or Debasement

Did you catch my piece on GOZR perchance? It’s another OSR game, but it has a rather clever rule. JV West calls it “Death or Debasement”, and when your character would die, you as a player get to make a choice:

1. Death. You can accept that the character has died and get a bonus to the stats of your next character.

2. Debasement. You can say that your character survived on 1HP, however his stats have been permanently degraded in some way that does not break verisimilitude.

It’s cool, because as a player, only you know if you’re ready to draw a line under a characters career or not, and this empowers you to do so. However, it’s not a free pass, taking a hit to stats is a narratively satisfying major setback. Possibly even more so than death would be.

If I was to port this to something like Shadowdark, I might say that the consequence for Debasement is that you drop a level. That feels good to me, but you could go with all sorts, so figure it out with your players.

Conclusion

Alrighty, that’ll do pig. Let me know if I’ve managed to convince you. Also, lemme know if you think of anything else I’ve missed. If it’s good, I’ll add it to this article.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.