Disclaimer: I have written a 2E conversion for this adventure (was originally published for 1e) that's available on Pathfinder Infinite, which you can pick up here for free. You can purchase an original copy of the adventure from Paizo here.

Premise

Levels 4-6+. A group of pirates earn their way onto a new ship, which takes them on a wild adventure across the Shackles in search of magical artifacts and legendary treasure.

I pitched this to my group as a followup to our previous campaign and everyone was super onboard. Pirates feels like one of the first things people try to incorporate into their favorite fantasy TTRPG and I wanted to run some high action, swashbuckling, Pirates of the Caribbean style adventure, so finding this module I felt like I struck gold. Except that it was in 1e, and my players only knew 2e (and barely at that, being 5e converts). So I spent 3 months converting the entire module to 2e remaster rules and made a full conversion guide for it!

Party Composition

Hobgoblin Undine Water Kineticist: Wanted to try out the blaster caster 'spellcaster' and liked the idea of elemental manipulation. Picked water of course, since we are doing a pirate adventure and he's also an Undine. Picked Ocean's Balm for healing, Weapon Infusion for versatility, with Tidal Hands and Driving Rain for offensive output. Chose Pirate as his bonus archetype.

Human Changeling Drifter Gunslinger: Looking for guns blazing wacky antics, he choose Drifter Gunslinger wielding a Double Barrel Pistol paired with a Machete. Chose Pistol Twirl, Black Powder Boost, and Dirty Trick to enhance the fantasy, and chose Pirate for his bonus archetype. He got bitten by a werecrocodile early on, so I gave him the Werecreature archetype, which he leaned into a lot as well.

Skeleton Enigma Bard: Definitely took One Piece as inspiration for this character choosing Skeleton and Swashbuckler as his bonus archetype while wielding a rapier and being goofy and loveable. Understood the limitations of the being undead, and totally embodied the character.

Human Occult Witch: She loved the patron dynamic and picked the Spinner of Thread, delving into the occult spooky themes. Took Cauldron and Magical Crafting to brew potions and craft items, picked Lesson of Elements and Lesson of the Shark for the theming, and chose Gunslinger as her bonus archetype.

I was a little concerned about the party not having much of a frontline, but it wasn't really much of an issue. Most of the encounters in this adventure and dynamic with multiple allied NPCs and interesting sub-objectives other than just "kill everyone until they're dead".

Optional Rules

All of the players started out with existing relationships, each having two established connections with other players to have them skip the meeting each other in a tavern bit. It worked really well, where they already had established dynamics they could work with which sped up the early sections and made long term relationships more interesting.

I used a variant of the free archetype rule I have coined "bonus archetype", where instead of giving out extra feat slots for archetype feats, I just gave out the initial archetype of free as a bonus, and then any additional archetype feats had to be taken instead of class feats. My players found FA gave them too many things to choose from that didn't seem worthwhile, and forcing them to choose a class feat or an archetype feat made things more interesting for them. I have also given out feats/archetypes as story rewards, where my gunslinger gained the Werecreature archetype for embracing the curse and doing some roleplay around it.

I also used gradual ability boosts, since I think it is just waaay better, and smooths out the level discrepancies between classes a lot. You instead get boosts at most level ups, which you can use to spread out your attributes. It becomes viable not putting your key attribute score to +4 at level one when you can just do that at level two without too much issue.

Aquatic Combat

The party is going to need to be able to navigate combat while swimming, as that is going to be fairly prevalent during this adventure. They need to find a way to get a Swim speed, be able to breathe underwater, or gain some kind of advantage while underwater. Or there will be some very deadly combats in this one. Luckily I have created a super handy player's guide that you can give your players to help them more easily create a character that will work well in this adventure. Thematic backgrounds, classes, ancestries, gods to worship, advice, etc.

The Plunder & Peril Adventure

There will be spoilers ahead, you have been warned!

Opening Sequence

The players arrive in the town of Lilywhite during a massive festival, looking for work (or whatever reason you want to come up with). During the course of the celebrations, an opportunity arises when a pirate captain declares that she is in the search of long lost legendary treasure and needs some extra crew. A competition in the form of a race across town erupts, ending in a brawling tavern showdown, which eventually results in the party joining the captain in a voyage across the Shackles in search lost magical artifacts.

I quite like the opening if this adventure, the energy and shenanigans of the open festival is exciting and thematic. Drunken pirates and entertainers fills the streets, and there are activities to participate in to get into character. The reveal of Captain Lanteri is also a fun dynamic. My players were under the assumption that they needed to put the work in to find a new ship, so the excitement of the race and brawl was an entertaining surprise.

Preparing for Voyage

Work needs to be done on the ship before setting sail again, so the party is given some errands to complete and are expected to find a solution on their own. The festival is over and the town is emptied out now, with a handful of charming townsfolk left behind.

This is somewhat open ended and gives the party a chance to explore the town and nearby jungle to accomplish a handful of potential side-quests and roleplay opportunities. There is likely a few days of downtime once they complete the errands, so you can fast forward right to setting sail, or flesh out the town some more and give the party some extra to play with.

Sailing the Shackles

This is the most open ended portion of the campaign while simultaneously being the most linear.

Essentially the party sails across the Shackles visiting three different designated locations where they are to retrieve a piece of a magical artifact and then sail to the next one. There are a handful of events that take place while sailing from point to point, with some optional additional hooks you can feed the party as well. There is also a fairly simple influence challenge which you can include, but that is entirely optional.

You could run this fairly brief, without any detours and going from location to location, and it would be fairly simple.

Or instead, you could use this section as an outline for a much broader adventure that includes many more events and side-quests along the way. Included in the module is some basic information about the Shackles, a few random encounter tables for different environment types, and plenty of room for extra adventure on the high seas.

I added probably double the amount of events, side-quests, and additional content during this portion in my campaign. We dived into a campaign spanning influence challenge to see if they party could sway the crew in their favor, and explored each of the PCs in interesting ways. It was a blast and I would highly recommend. I have included some of these optional events/encounters in my conversion guide.

Buried Treasure

The final stretch of this modules culminates in the exploration of a small island, a moderately sized dungeon to delve, a final showdown, and a big bad terrifying monster. It is jam packed and takes places over the course of just a day or two, whereas the first two thirds of the adventure likely take place over the course of multiple weeks.

I think this is the most flawed aspect of the original module, but there is a lot to work with here, and a GM that puts in a little extra elbow grease can turn it into a spectacular rollercoaster of excitement. I just don't think they had enough page count for this. All of the modules published during this time were first 32 pages, and then 64 pages, and this was one of the first few 64 pages modules and they chewed off more than they had room for.

The party is essentially stranded on an island while the captain sails away to claim the treasure for her own. The party needs to trek deep into the jungle and faceoff against countless dangerous foes before they realize this fact. Once they acquire means of travelling to the final dungeon, the rest of the crew is waiting for them (potentially swayed by the result of the campaign long influence challenge). Delving into the ancient Ghol-Gani ruins (a fairly large and certainly deadly dungeon); the party confronts the captain and her most loyal companions, while trying to survive the dangerous traps and creatures which await them.

This portion of the adventure was a blast to run, it's a pretty major shakeup from the rest of the adventure. The PCs are forced to act on their feet and deal with potentially a very long adventuring day. It is the first real test of endurance and long term strategy for them, after dealing with mostly 0-2 encounters per day for the majority of the adventure. My players loved the final 5-10 sessions. It was high stakes problem solving while all the pieces fell into place around them.

Foreshadowing in key here; depending on the players interactions with the rest of the crew things make shake out here very differently. How do they react to abandonment of the PCs. Do they have any allies that could help them? Have any rival pirates caught up to them to steal the treasure away at the last step? Everything leads into these final moments.

My players managed to piss of Horemheb so much that he deserted the crew and took Hyrix with him (the PCs never did anything with him after defeating him in the ambush earlier in the adventure, they just held him captive in the brig for days). The two of them gathered a small crew and sailed after the Magpie Princess in pursuit of the treasure. After the PCs escaped the island, they confronted Horemheb and Hyrix outside of Ghoral-Rey in a standoff. They agreed to a truce, but eventually the perils of the cyclopean ruins were too much, killing Hyrix and Horemheb off in the final encounters.

Closing Thoughts

What I think is great about this adventure is that you might have a completely different set of events happen during the course of the campaign. Depending on how the PCs interact with the crew, the extra content you might insert into the voyage, etc; things could play out very differently. One of my PCs got bitten by a Werecrocodile in the first handful of sessions, and became infected. This became a central pillar of their character for the rest of the adventure, after I let them take the Werecreature archetype as a bonus feat. There is a lot of room to really tailor this adventure to your players very directly.

Would I Recommend This Module?

Yes!*

This module isn't for everyone. If you don't like guns in your game, this probably isn't for you. It is relatively barebones, with a lot of moving parts and a big cast of characters to juggle, some difficult set pieces to pull off, and potentially a lot of downtime between encounters. I would not recommend this for beginner GMs looking to jump into Pathfinder (try out Rusthenge or Crown of the Kobold King instead!).

I would recommend this to experienced GMs who are willing to put in a little extra effort to do this adventure justice. There is an amazing adventure waiting for you here. I have created a full conversion guide to run this adventure in 2e, which you can find linked at the top. I've created all new maps for every encounter in the adventure, and even created new maps for the ones which didn't have any before. I've also included a handful of new optional events you can incorporate into your campaign to flesh out the voyage. I've even fully updated the influence challenge to the 2e victory point system, with full stat blocks for each member of the crew.

I really am hoping for new Shackles content in PF2e and really hope Paizo is working on something in the future. There is so much fun stuff to play with here.

Player Reviews

Kineticist: The story was pretty opaque for much of the game, though I don't think this was ever a bad thing. The broad goals were always clear (Find the 3 reasons to live) but everyone and everything remained somewhat mysterious until the last 6-7 sessions. Once information started to stitch together it created a nice bit of momentum that carried us to a very strong ending.

Gunslinger: Favourite combats would have been the two cool mind control foreshadowing encounters. First the Sea Weed Field & then the face-hugger snails. Loved the party night in Qwent, loved pissing off Cob, joining Kelizar’s Navy. Lots of little things, tough to pick favourites in a long campaign.

Bard: The story was interesting, I enjoyed the intrigue throughout. I would have liked a bit more build up before beginning the true quest of finding the three pieces. I also felt like the ending came at us quickly. Personally I could have spent another 10 to 15 sessions sailing the seas with the crew trying to earn their trust and facing small encounters along the way. Maybe that's just me LOL.

Witch: I really liked the pacing of the campaign and felt like we always had a clear goal. I loved getting to explore Quent and how the mystery elements unfolded. I loved the NPCs, the scenes, and the monsters. I do wish we’d had a little more “pirate culture” content, but I think that might’ve come down more to the characters we created rather than the campaign itself.

Links

Check out my previous module review for Fall of Plaguestone here.

Read about the handy adventure design tool forgotten about in 1st Edition here