Where & When
The date is never specified, except that it falls in the 17th century. The costumes suggest the latter half of that century, and the mention of a king narrows it down further. Fan consensus tends to opt for the 1690s, but not universally, and we can pick any date from 1660 to 1700 without contradicting anything. The story is set in an unnamed village on the Cornish coast that is likely not intended to represent any specific real-world location.
Setting
England went through significant political upheavals in the 17th century, and these did not leave Cornwall unaffected. If we are taking the consensus view of the story being set in the 1690s, however, only older people will remember the Civil War and England’s time as a republic… although, for what it’s worth, Cornwall was staunchly royalist. The Glorious Revolution was much more recent, and King William III had not been on the throne for long, although, depending on the exact date, he’s probably off fighting the French, rather than ruling the country in person. (If we’re early in the decade, his wife Mary II is governing on his behalf, but she died in January 1695).
Not that many of the characters in the story are law-abiding enough to care about the details of their monarch in London…
Elsewhere in the world, Scotland and the Dutch Republic are separate nations, but also happen to be ruled by William III. The conquest of Ireland had been completed within living memory, so that, too, is under William’s rule. France is under the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, and Russia under Czar Peter the Great, with both countries enjoying a period of national glory. Italy is fragmented, and Germany is still the Holy Roman Empire. In the Americas, Spain rules most of what is now Latin America, but the British and French also rule significant tracts of land beyond the Atlantic.
At this point, there are thirteen British colonies in continental North America, but they aren’t the thirteen we’d immediately think of today, as two will refuse to rebel and end up in Canada, Carolina has yet to be divided, and Georgia doesn’t exist. More significantly for a story about pirates, the Caribbean is divided between British, Spanish, and French rule. Depending on the definition used, we are either just before or in the early part of the Golden Age of Piracy, as pirates began to move beyond the Caribbean to plunder shipping on the Indian Ocean and elsewhere.
Depending on the nature of the campaign, we may want to pick a specific real-world place for the village in the story to be, and it’s almost certainly the case that we will want to give it a name. Here, we have the advantage that the serial was filmed on location, so that the outdoor scenes are of actual places in the area. Of course, those places aren’t as close together as their purported counterparts in the story, and the one standing in for most of the outdoor village scenes isn’t even on the coast. But, nonetheless, we can assume that the setting is somewhere nearby, in the extreme west of the county.
The area in which the filming took place is about 35 km (20 miles) across, and there are plenty of small fishing villages along this part of the coast, not to mention the town of Penzance. However, while that would be the closest major settlement, and likely where Blake raises his militia in the final episode, it’s too large to be the place that we see.
The scenes of the TARDIS landing were filmed at Nanjizal Bay, about 2 km (just over a mile) from Land’s End, the most westerly point of the British mainland. There is no village close enough to be the one in the story, but the closest in the direction towards Penzance is Porthcurno. If we don’t wish to simply make a place up, this is as good an option as any.
The coastline in this area consists of cliffs up to 70 metres (230 feet) in height, which can be sheer close to the sea, but are more traversable where they dip down to the many sandy coves dotted along their length. Unless there is a storm making the rocks slippery, or the PCs lack proper lighting at night, a climbing roll would not be required to go up or down the cliffs at these points, assuming a modicum of caution and a slow pace.
In this respect, it may be worth noting that, while being in the south, and thus one of the warmest parts of Britain, Cornwall is also an exposed area on the west coast and consequently gets a lot of wind and rain from the Atlantic. Storms are common, especially in winter; it’s no coincidence that there were so many shipwrecks close by.
There are three beaches close to Porthcurno, one of which forms the village’s harbour and is readily accessible, having no cliffs on the side towards the village. A more likely landing spot, however, is the cove to the west, Porthchapel Beach, which is about 100 metres (330 feet) in length and surrounded by cliffs on three sides.
The smugglers’ goods are hidden in a stone sarcophagus with a concealed opening mechanism in the graveyard. We are told these consist of brandy, tobacco, and fine silks, all of which were commonly smuggled goods at the time. As portrayed in the story, most of the villagers are in on the smuggling ring, which, again, is not unreasonable for coastal villages in 17th-century Cornwall.
The other key fixed locations in the story are the inn and the squire’s house. The former is unremarkable, and, given the small size of the village, would have only a few rooms available. (In the serial, the innkeeper denies having any until the Doctor convinces him he is a friend of the churchwarden, and they don’t end up using them anyway). There probably was an inn closer to St. Levan’s at this time in the real world, but even if we stick with that location rather than moving elsewhere or inventing a fictional village, that’s easy enough to ignore and require the PCs to make the short trip to Porthcurno for lodgings. If we want to introduce any female NPCs into the story at all, a barmaid is about as genre-appropriate as it gets.
Squire Edwards would be the major local landowner in the area, as indicated by his notably richer style of dress and full periwig. His home may be an old manor house, or it could be a large farmhouse with attached stables and servants’ quarters. There is every indication that it is intended to be close to the village, although likely not within its boundaries.
This brings us to the pirates and their ship, The Black Albatross. The pirates are searching for “Avery’s gold”. Although it’s not unambiguously the case, many fans have assumed that this refers to notorious real-world pirate Henry Avery, who went into hiding with his riches in 1696 and was never publicly seen again. It’s from this that we get the usual presumption that the story is set in the 1690s rather than some other decade, but it runs into the problem that a pirate captain of the same name appears in Curse of the Black Spot, set in 1699. The two Averys don’t have the same life story, and neither matches the real-world details, but the tale given here may be a fake made to cover up the pirates’ ignorance as to what really happened.
At this point in history, piracy was a major concern, having spread from the Caribbean to many other oceans around the world. Most pirates were professional sailors, often having joined after their own ship had been captured (they usually weren’t given much choice in the matter, assuming their captors needed more crew). The majority, at least in the Caribbean, were British, with American colonists and escaped slaves from Jamaica and Barbados making up the bulk of the remainder; according to records of the time, other nationalities made up less than 5% of the total. In the story, Captain Pike appears to be from a higher social background than we’d normally expect; perhaps he was a naval officer who mutinied.
Considering that they were sailors, it’s unsurprising that most pirates originally hailed from major port cities: London, Bristol, Swansea, Boston, and New York. The treatment of the escaped slaves, such as ‘Jamaica’ in the story, seems to have been variable. On the one hand, even aside from the prejudice of the day, they were unlikely to have started out as experienced seamen, leaving them little option but to carry out the menial tasks. On the other, at least some ships were recorded as having integrated crews that treated almost everyone as equals.
We don’t know what sort of ship The Black Albatross is, and it isn’t visible in any surviving footage, if it was at all. Pirate ships tended to be either small, fast single-masted sloops or larger, two-masted square-sailed ‘brigantines’. This one seems to be quite large, so a brigantine is perhaps more likely. These are not as fast as sloops over short distances, but they can catch more wind in their sails and overtake smaller ships given time. Or it could be bigger still, as some of the most famous and successful pirates (Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, the Dread Pirate Roberts) had converted three-masted merchant ships to serve as their flagships.
Perhaps the main thing that distinguished pirate ships from any other sort is that they were bristling with cannons, stripping out most of the interior bulkheads to make room on what would originally have been a civilian ship. It would require some significant alterations to the plot to create a situation where The Black Albatross has to enter combat… but if it does, we would expect it to be formidable. That was, after all, rather the point.
Scenario
Perhaps the first question in adapting this is how to get the PCs involved if they aren’t being randomly propelled through time. This is particularly the case here because, being about as far west as it’s possible to go in England, Porthcurno isn’t on the way to anywhere. Of course, we could get around that by using a different location, such as Dorset, but if we’re sticking with somewhere at least close to where the serial was filmed, we’re not in the sort of place that travellers are likely to pass through (unless they’re lost).
Thus, if we’re taking the setting as is, we need to reason for the PCs to be heading here, and the locals are unlikely to believe tales to the contrary (as, indeed, they don’t in the serial). One possibility is for them to be, like the pirates, looking for Avery’s gold. In this case, they could be acquaintances of Longfoot. Fearing the pirates, he may have sent a letter calling them here to act as his protectors in return for a share of the gold. For the plot to work, they have to fail at guarding him, so the best bet is probably to have him die immediately before they get there, placing them under suspicion of the murder.
In that situation, the PCs are likely to start off not knowing about the smugglers, although they would at least be aware of Longfoot’s former shipmates. Another possibility is to go the opposite route, with the PCs being undercover agents for the Revenue men, replacing Blake in the story. They arrive in the village to investigate the smugglers and initially know nothing about the pirates. Here, they can interact with Longfoot before Cherub kills him, again placing them under suspicion – with the added twist that Edwards has every reason to be suspicious of them.
Much of the original story consists of the protagonists being separated and trying to get back together again so that they can leave. In a game, we don’t necessarily want to split the party, and, depending on the circumstances, it may be difficult to get the PCs to surrender so that they can later escape. But that can still leave a cat-and-mouse game as they try to avoid one side or the other, and we can add in additional details about the village and surrounding countryside to give them other things to explore and NPCs to investigate. With as many as three different factions in the story – the smugglers, the pirates, and the authorities – they have a choice as to who, if anyone, they should side with.
The chances are, however, that we may be better off adding in non-historical elements that just aren’t in the original story. One relatively minimal alteration would be to make this a time travel story where the PCs have specific objectives as part of a ‘Time Patrol’ or the like. There’s no historical event here at risk of being derailed, but there could be an anachronistic device amongst Avery’s gold, giving the party good reason to try and find it.
A more significant change would be to make this a Cthulhu scenario (or similar), likely giving it a ‘folk horror’ vibe that’s well-suited to western Cornwall. Here, the smugglers are cultists or Deep One hybrids planning to summon something awful from the depths. Once again, Longfoot could be the way in; he may not be as good a Christian as his cover as a churchwarden might suggest, but there are still limits, and he could call on former associates to investigate.
Unless we want the Penzance militia to charge in to the rescue at the end, we might want to cut out Blake, but the pirates remain a complication as menacing in their own way as the cultists. For a more pulpy version of the same idea, the PCs could be the pirates, although this changes the dynamic and reduces or eliminates the role of Captain Pike if we want the players to have much freedom of action.
It’s also possible to move the story to a different setting. Using Carolina instead of Cornwall isn't much of a change, and a space opera setting might be going too far, but fantasy could be a good middle ground. Pirates have a venerable history in fantasy RPG adventures and remain a popular theme to this day. We can make Cherub a hobgoblin, Edwards a snobbish elf, and so on, but we’d probably also want to add spellcaster NPCs to at least one faction and have traps, and perhaps even a guardian construct defending Avery’s gold.
The location should be somewhere out of the way, but since the village is small, it can be placed on the edge of any coast that’s either on some extremity of land or close to a wilderness border. For that matter, many fantasy settings seem to consist of wide stretches of all-but uninhabited land between cities, in which case almost any coast would be suitable; the coastline west of the Fields of the Dead in the Forgotten Realms, say, or south of Emon or virtually anywhere on the Lucidian Coast of Tal’Dorei. A small village in the world of Freeport is also genre-appropriate, although, like pirate cities in other fantasy settings, Freeport itself is too large for the sort of story told here.
It may also be worth noting that some fantasy RPGs specifically use a 17th-century setting, rather than a typical sword and sorcery or high fantasy one, with 7th Sea probably being the prime example currently being published.
One notable element of the TV serial is that at no point do any of the guest characters ever realise that Polly is female. That’s largely due to the fact that she’s wearing trousers, and long hair was fashionable for men at the time, but, depending on the desired tone of the scenario, it might be amusing to have the same misunderstanding plague one or more female PCs. Assuming, of course, that the way they dress makes this in any way plausible, which it may not.
Rules
Although the 17th century is less popular as a setting than, say, the 19th, any generic, and most sci-fi, RPGs should have little difficulty in dealing with its weaponry and technology. The tech level is 4 in GURPS, 3 in Doctors & Daleks, and 2 in Traveller. By this date, only elite cavalrymen wear any armour, and certainly neither the pirates nor the militia will be doing so. We see the militia using muskets, while some of the pirates have flintlock pistols, both of which make sense for the time. The cutlass was, it should be no surprise, the melee weapon of choice for pirates (and sailors in general); in most systems, it’s a regular one-handed sword, or a scimitar in 5E.
Two slightly unusual weapons do appear in the story, however. The first is Captain Pike’s bladed prosthetic, but that is basically just a small hand axe and can be treated as such. It’s his right hand, which might imply that any weapon he’s holding in the other is subject to an off-handed penalty (although not necessarily, of course) in systems that have such things.
At one point, ‘Jamaica’ is given a cat-o'-nine-tails, although he never uses it. This isn’t really a weapon in the normal sense, since it isn’t intended for fighting with; it’s purely a punishment device. It’s a multi-headed whip with the cords made of thick knotted leather, but systems that have rules for using whips in combat should note that this makes it less flexible, and it’s relatively short – you can’t use it for the sorts of things that Zorro uses his whip for. When used for its intended purpose, it will do damage, but that’s against a restrained and unarmoured target, usually stripped for added humiliation. It won’t deliver much damage per blow, perhaps just one point in most systems, although it will rapidly incapacitate through pain. Of course, give a victim enough lashes and the damage will mount up and may prove lethal.
As noted above, it’s unlikely that we will need any stats for The Black Albatross unless we change the plot radically. If we do need them, however, we can assume a typical 17th-century two-masted brigantine ship. This would be about 80 feet in length and up to 150 tons displacement, with a top speed of around 8 knots (15 kph). Although they could be manned with a skeleton crew of just 12, pirate ships carried far more than this, perhaps around 60 to 80 men. A plausible pirate refit could have provided the ship with 12 smallish cannons, each firing 3 to 4-pound balls. (Or chainshot, a common tactic to take out a target’s rigging without sinking it and any treasure it might be carrying).
Savage Worlds: Size 11, Handling -1, Top Speed 9 mph, Toughness 16 (4), Crew 12+60
BRP: Pilot skill, Rated 3, Handling -5%, ACC 1, MOV 15, Armour 10, SIZ 85, HP 80, Crew 12
GURPS: Size 6, Top Speed 9 mph, Accel. 1 mph/s, Decel. 1 mph/s, MR 0.05, SR 5, HP 4,500, DR 6, HT 12, Crew 12
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