I sailed on a replica of a 17th-century pirate ship and lived and worked there for a week as a pirate would. From cleaning the deck to working the sails on the mast.

And based on this, I even tried to create a short house rule for what to do on a sailing ship during a voyage for Pirate Borg. It is not in the Preview, as I created it quite recently, but it will be included in the crowdfunded version.

It will give you short mechanical options on what to do, without bogging the voyage down. And it will also teach you a bit, how life was for sailors at that time. As its based on real life responsibilities on the ship. :)

Ok, wanna hear some random facts about sailing on a 17th-century ship?

For example, work on the ship is divided in 4-hour watches. You have navigational watch, then boatsman, kitchen and free one.  Lets talk about one of the fun ones: navigational.
One of the responsibilities on that watch is keeping track of time.

Ok, there are two main components here in the photo:
- Hourglass on the mast
- Bronze ship bell

The hourglasses are exactly 30 minutes. To the second. 

And you need to turn them around every half hour as close to the last grains of sand as possible, because time was a critical navigational tool. If you were to turn the hourglass a second later, it would create a discrepancy of 512 metres on a voyage between Europe and the Americas. That voyage is around 8 weeks... so many opportunities to make a mistake...and end somewhere completely else then you expected!

And the bell! After you turn the hourglass, you ring the bell. Once for each 30 minutes from the start of your 4-hour watch. So you start with one ring and end with eight rings, and then a new 4-hour watch starts and you reset the ringing to one.

In this way, you can pretty soon tell the time without any clocks. If the crew didn't fuck up the ringing and suddenly you're wondering, "Did we travel into the past?" (which is actually a pretty great Pirate Borg question... look at some of the Mythical Mishaps. My crew are almost time-travelers now, based on their luck rolling an 11 on that cursed table :D)

OK, that's it for now.

See you soon with some other news in our next port!

Also, if you have any questions about life on a pirate ship, feel free to ask in the comments! I will be super happy to have a discussion with you about that. :)