Skull & Bones: Swashbuckling Horror in the Golden Age of Piracy

Rating:
Summary: Pirates and Zombies
Review: Finally a role playing supplement that delivers it all. A lot of hard work has been put into this and it shows. Kudos to the developers!
Not only do you have several unique character classes but an interesting background creation chapter along with a real and complete treatise on Voodoo. New skill, new weapons, new feats new monsters(!) together with a accurate history of the era, islands and way of life all mix together like good rum punch. If this is a genre that interests you then you will simply have to buy this. Puts all the previous supplements on pirates and seafaring into the rubbish bin.

Rating:
Summary: A Solid Foundation
Review: I found this book to give a good foundation for role-playing in the golden age of piracy. I found it a good mixture of fact and cinematic fiction. The classes and prestige classes seemed balanced to me and all of them seemed to have a place in a pirate campaign. I especially enjoyed the section on the loa and djab. None of the sections were exhaustive in their information on the setting, but then the book is really only meant to be an overview. In my experience, a "high adventure", cinematic style of role playing only gets bogged down with too much background, so I found the setting information in Skull & Bones to be adequate for my needs as a GM. All in all, I am very happy to have this addition to my RPG library, and it will get extensive use in my current campaign.

Rating:
Summary: D20 Stuff Ok Start But History is Marginal
Review: If you're looking for pirate stuff to add to your DnD Campaign this book has it. If you're looking for pirate roleplaying in a Caribbean setting, the authors have done a marginal job of research. Sure you've got the list o'famous pirates ripped off from the Kid's Own Pirate Book at the local library, but these guys know very little about the Caribbean and not much about piracy in the Caribbean. For a book that purports to focus on piracy from 1690 to 1720 there are very strange gaps and contradictions. St. Eustatius the wealthiest Dutch trading colony and prime place to sell pirated and privateered goods is entirely absent from both the map of the Caribbean and the gazetteer of islands. Martinique is listed as very fertile with thousands of settlers and tens of thousands of slaves, yet neither produces and nor demands products? Yes, the French government bans any trade that doesn't go through France, but this is supposed to be a pirate game! Either you're going to be smuggling things in and out or you'll be raiding those French trade ships. There is no real explanation of the politics or history of the era, just dribs and drabs tossed in as 'scenario' seeds. It is instructive that there is no bibliography or recommended reading section, the authors clearly haven't done much. One wonders if they have even looked at Fodor's Travel guide to the Caribbean. The authors have self-consciously modeled their vision of the Caribbean on Tim Power's novel "On Stranger Tides," but Powers had actually read DeFoe's "The Pyrates" and other historical sources. If you want to run a historical campaign, fantasy influenced or not, this book does not give a GM a coherent set of information to work with, leaving the GM to do research without so much as a few suggested books. You get the feeling they spent all their time tweaking feats and thinking up spells, but little reading about pirates or the Caribbean. Actually the best RPG book in print about this era is "Furry Pirates" by Breakey and Thomas, which book also proves you can add fantasy ideas successfully to a campaign without ignoring history and geography. It's sad that this book is at best half a complete product since the same publisher did a great job with their "Testament" biblical RPG, weird too that they could find someone to do serious reading about the Bible and archaelogogy & Middle Eastern history, but no one to do the same about pirates and the Caribbean. If you want ready made 'pirate' classes, feats, spells, etc. this book is for you (hence 3 star rating); if you want a 'pirate' campaign setting it is not really here (this part gets 1 or 2 stars at best). Let the buyer beware.