"Look folks, this isn't an Arissian palace, but we do have at least a few rules: No starting any fights, no more drinks if you can't walk without help, if you have to vomit do it outside, and no harming any employee in this establishment - the last time someone's hand was raised to a worker here, they left one-handed. Savvy?"

-Proprietor of the Sweet Hideaway Bordello, Madame de Murieux

Piratic Culture

Reavers of the High Seas

There once was a dark age, when folks lived in the same few mile radius their whole life, without a hope of traveling beyond their miniscule borders. Those who wished to discover neighboring peoples, and engage in trade, had to brave harsh terrain, fight off dangerous beasts and monsters, and hide from roving gangs of raiders. Those that did brave the treks and succeed would bring great luxuries from far away places to their hometowns; the people there would be laden with foreign silks and spices, and the merchants would become absurdly wealthy by the standards of their own communities. Eventually, the drive for trade and the desire for exotic goods forced early humans and other Kith to develop ships bigger than mere fishing boats, ships that could fair the high seas and survive. Often, plans for these ships were taken from those developed by Elves and Dwarves, and modified over time. With these early biremes, people could trade farther than ever before. The ocean was extremely dangerous, and the life of a sailor was in many ways harder than that of a caravanner. Still, a successful journey too and back could hull thousands of pounds of goods. This development rapidly increased the sizes of sea bound settlements, from tiny isolated communities into sprawling coastal cities. The early raiding gangs began to fade away, for anyone with enough chutzpah and wealth to trade would do so on the open-ocean. However, many of those raiders took to the seas themselves, building little fortalezas in the remote inlets and coves of Adra. They modified cogs to be faster and sturdier, and trained themselves to board and capture other ships. With these early buccaneers, piracy in Adra was born. Early pirates were fairly unintimidating by today's standards. They expected little to no resistance from the ships they boarded, and came away with huge boons from their easy captures. However, the ingenuity of the pirates drove the tenacity of the merchants and nascent kingdoms. Merchant ships began to outfit themselves with archers and marines, who would not sit and watch when pirates came near. Ship builders built faster and faster ships, ships that could outrun the best of the pirate captains. This feedback loop would intensify, and at times fallback, over centuries, eventually evolving both oversea trade and oversea piracy to the forms they take on today. After the Crisis of the New Era, the once indomitable Arissian navy was forced to pull back in an effort to protect their own ships and harbors from attack. The great oversea trade routes are once more than swimming with pirate ships, both big and small. Most of the pirates are highly adaptable opportunists, roving the seas looking for easy prey; when they spot a well guarded Galleon or military vessel, they steer away, fast enough that any thought to chase after the pirates is usually forgotten. They often serve for organized powers as privateers, agreeing to attack certain enemy ships, and utilizing information from their sponsors to avoid the harder fights. There is a smaller subset of pirates however, and these are the things of nightmares, the pirates and ships that give fear to the name pirate. These are often called Dread Pirates, and they usually command huge frigates armed to the teeth with siege weapons, crewed by hundreds of hardened fighters. In some cases, the most dangerous of these pirates use pirate mages or have taken the secret for Arissian fire, and use it to great effect in burning and scouring their prey's ships. Dread Pirates rarely miss an opportunity to raid another ship they pass, and will only demure when they are outnumbered or severely outclassed. They also strip ships of all their wealth, usually taking everything of value, and taking every living soul prisoner, selling them as slaves. Whether a jolly ship of lovable criminals, or a terrible dreadnought filled with murderers and reavers, all pirates rely on safe ports to stop in. Most civilized ports ban all pirate crews from landing in them, and a pirate ship discovered in such a port will be seized, and all its crew arrested. Therefore, all but the most subtle of captains sail to Pirate Ports when they are in need of supplies and rest. There are a few dozen major pirate ports across the whole of Adra, and a few hundred tiny fortresses and docks controlled by pirates as well. These ports exist in a strange grey zone, with most of the permanent residents of them not being pirates at all, but just people used to dealing with pirates. They work shops and sell goods the pirates, they have services and entertainment to keep them busy when they aren't on the sea, and most importantly, they provide a means of selling all of the stolen cargo. Most trading companies that slap at pirates with one hand will wave at pirates with the other. No reputable merchant likes dealing with pirates, but when pirates can resell cargo for sometimes half of its market value, even the most reputable merchants have trouble ignoring such deals. Therefore, the mercantile companies in pirate ports take in stolen goods, and put a somewhat reputable face on their operations, reselling the goods to more honest merchants in law abiding lands. In some cases, merchants may even unwittingly buy back cargo stolen from them, in an effort to turn around their prior losses. These piratic merchants, more than acting as fences for the pirates, also serve as a political shield for them. Whenever a king, noble, general, or politician begins to seriously consider an assault on a pirate port or stronghold, there is often a representative of said port to whisper in their ear, and place coins in their pocket. When a nation does get serious about crushing pirate ports, most of the merchants and pirates of the port have left by the time the assault is underway, having heard of it well in advance. Pirates since their inception have been a parasite that seems impossible to ever get rid of - clinging mercilessly onto the global trade network, and constantly skimming off of its profits. 

         The Piratic Culture is a nebulous concept that is difficult to summarize. Pirate ports and pirate fleets are spread across all of Adra, from the Wine-faced Sea to the Sun Soaked Isles to the Great Shark Bay even. Each of these types of pirates change slightly in their demeanor and strategies depending on where they hail from, but all of them also share a common set of traits and a common tradition that comes with their trade. Furthermore, the piratic culture is itself is often blended with the cultures of the places it inhabits, with an average pirate crew being made up of people from every corner of the world. This is true of most who live in pirate ports, merchants, craftsmen, prostitutes, and thugs washed up from more reputable places, all sharing a common goal of making by in a harsh new homeland. Then there are the rare natives, those born and raised in pirate ports. These folks tend to have hard upbringings, filled with violence and instability, and rarely with a drop of innocence to hold onto. Setting the origins of piratic peoples aside, it is perhaps most useful to categorize them by the place they hold in the pirate ecosystem. In this sense, there are three broad groups in the piratic culture: first, the pirates themselves, second, the people who live and work permanently in pirate ports, and third, the merchants and bureaucrats that run the complex fencing operations for pirate goods, and make some effort to organize the chaotic pirate fleets. These three groups all have differing goals and temperaments, and at times they blend: a pirate captain may retire to run a bordello in her older age, only to one day take control of the island's commerce from that position of security. Pirates themselves tend to be fairly desperate people. The life of a pirate is usually more dangerous than the life of a common sailor, and common sailors themselves tend to be some of the world's hardiest and most desperate people. Therefore, pirates are the most desperate of the most desperate; runaway slaves, escaped convicts, treacherous minor nobles, and scrubbed out admirals are all the types of people to be found in pirate crews. Pirates tend to be loveless and alone, taking no spouse and bearing no children (no dependents at least). Due to the desperation of the situation, and the aforementioned lack of family, they also tend to fall easily to vices - sex, drugs, alcohol are plentifully taken part of, all in an effort to dull the bleak outlook of a pirate's life. The most temperate pirates try to refrain from killing, and only steal from those they think can afford to lose their cargo. The most violent are unrepentant murderers, taking joy in the suffering of their fellow Kith. The permanent inhabitants of pirate ports, while usually lumped in with seaborne pirates, are rarely much like them at all. They are of course living in unlawful lands, and as such tend to have a certain tolerance to lawlessness, violence, and general thuggery, but they themselves rarely take part in such crimes. Instead, these folk are often refugees from wars, or failed journeyman, unable to establish workshops in reputable places, or once more, escaped slaves or criminals, looking for a fresh start in life. They run stores and workshops, offer entertainment to pirates both rich and poor, and sometimes even farm on the inlands of pirate islands. They are sometimes victims to pirate cruelty, but more often than not, they band together to ensure their own survival. Bordellos staff capable bouncers, merchants hire experienced bodyguards, and farmers rarely go without forming semi-organized militias. Finally, the merchants and bureaucrats of pirate ports tend to sit atop the pyramid of piratic power. It is these individuals who benefit most from piracy, taking on very little risk and making massive profits. All pirates resent them and rely on them, coveting their wealth but needing their connections to sell their stolen goods. The merchants use their power to hold informal authority in pirate ports, sometimes being considered mayors by local populations. They often are themselves former members of one of the other groups, either pirate captains that turn their operations semi-legitimate, or successful residents who turn small businesses into little empires. For those who seriously fight against piracy, these merchants represent the ultimate evil. Often, bounties for their heads in lawful ports run ten-times the bounties of brutal killers. They live like petty kings on their little islands, and form massive webs of intrigue connecting them to ports across Adra. They are unscrupulous, rarely get their own hands dirty, and usually pretty greedy. Despite their power, they are also vulnerable - by the very nature of their positions, they often find loyal servants and muscle to be hard to come by. If they push too hard, excise too high a price, or get too ambitious, they can easily find themselves replaced, and quickly fall victim to the awful beasts they created and fostered.

          The Piratic people are dispersed across Adra, collecting mostly in ports, and then mostly in pirate ports, which exist almost entirely on remote islands or isolated coves. Among the piratic peoples, every race in Adra can be found - rarely are there members of tribal or nomadic peoples, but even they sometimes find themselves in the service of pirate crews. While mostly this culture is used to refer to pirates, in theory the piratic culture can roughly map onto any settlement which organizes its primary industry around theft and crime, which includes a few rare bandit settlements on the continents. While pirates are rarely religious folk, those that are tend to revere Marzedon's pantheon, and in particular the Patron Saint of Piracy, Marius, supposedly the first dread pirate to sail the high seas. The inhabitants of the pirate ports themselves rarely revere Marzedon, instead revering the multitude of gods from their home towns. Sometimes a specific pirate port will have its own local patron god. While putting any characteristics on the piratic people is painting with a broad brush, in general piratic people tend to be resourceful, independently-minded, and fun-loving. They also tend to be unlawful, greedy, and cruel. The piratics speak one of the lingua-francas of their local area, depending on where they operate in. Pirates in Kelior speak Old Keloran; pirates in the Glittering Sea speak Low Arissian; pirates in the Sun Soaked Sea speak Aquan; pirates in the Flaring Isles speak Sowsokain; and pirates in and around Arathia speak Terran. Efforts over time to forge a pirate language have failed, but what remains is a rough code of written symbols which can communicate very simple concepts.

If you choose the Piratic Culture, you gain the following:

~A +1 to your Charisma score~

~Either a -1 to your Intelligence score or a -1 to your Wisdom score~

~As a known language, either Old Keloran Common, Low Arissian Common, Aquan, Sowsokain, or Terran~

~A Sub-Discipline in every knowledge skill on checks relating to Piratic Culture~

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