Buy a boat. Sail past the edge of the map. Fish up a bottle with a message in it, dive on the wreck it names, and fight whatever has been guarding it since before you were born.
The pirate is the most relaxing profession on the shard and one of the most profitable. You buy a ship, you sail out into open water, and you fish. Most of what comes up is fish. Occasionally what comes up is a message in a bottle — a treasure map for a sunken wreck, which you then sail to and dive on.
What's down there is the good part: crates of loot, rare artefacts, and sea serpents and krakens that take exception to being disturbed. So a pirate needs to be able to fight, but on their own terms, from the deck of their own boat, which is a much kinder way to fight than standing in a dungeon.
Cartography is what turns a soggy bottle into a usable map, and it doubles for land treasure maps too — which is why pirates and treasure hunters are nearly the same person with a different hat. The boat itself is the only real expense, and it pays for itself in a few good dives.
You get 700 skill points in total, which is seven skills at 100 (Grandmaster). Here is a sheet that works, and why each line is on it. You can load this exact spread on the hero sheet in the magazine and slide the numbers around.
| Skill | Points | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|
| Fishing | 100 | The engine. Bottles, big fish, and the serpents that come with them. |
| Cartography | 100 | Decodes the message-in-a-bottle maps. Without it the bottles are decoration. |
| Swordsmanship | 100 | Cutlasses, obviously. Swap for Fencing if you prefer — same sheet. |
| Tactics | 100 | Damage multiplier for when the kraken arrives. |
| Anatomy | 100 | Damage, and faster bandaging. |
| Healing | 100 | Bandages. There is no healer at sea. |
| Magery | 100 | Recall to get home, and Gate so the family can join a dive. Also a boat is a long way from a bank. |
| Total | 700 | of 700 |
It needs no reagents, no bandages and barely any attention. You can train Fishing while doing something else entirely, which is why this build feels so much easier than its skill list suggests.
You could swap Magery for it, but being stuck mid-ocean with no Recall is genuinely miserable. Keep the travel.
Skills go up by using them, and they go up fastest on a task that is just barely hard for you. Climb the rungs in order — each one stops paying off, and that's your cue to move up.
Buy a fishing pole and stand on a dock in Britain, Vesper or Skara Brae. Double-click the pole, target water, repeat. Trainers can push Swordsmanship, Tactics, Anatomy and Healing to 30 while you're at it.
This is the milestone. A ship deed from any shipwright is about 5,000gp — the biggest single purchase of your early career. Learn the commands (forward, stop, turn left, and the key one, drop anchor) and head for deep water.
Bottles only come up in deep ocean, well away from the coast. Sail until the land is out of sight, then fish. Decode each bottle with Cartography, which trains that skill from the maps themselves.
Sail to the wreck sites and fight what's guarding them. Sea serpents are manageable solo; krakens want a friend. This is where your combat skills catch up with your Fishing, and where the money starts.
High-level maps lead to the richest wrecks. Fishing's last ten points are slow, but by now you're hauling up artefacts, so nobody minds.
Cheap to train, expensive once — the boat. Everything else is pocket change, and the first few successful dives pay the ship off entirely.
| What | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| A fishing pole (several) | Any provisioner or fisher | They break. Carry three. |
| A ship deed | Any shipwright — Britain, Vesper, Skara Brae | About 5,000gp. A small boat is fine to start; larger ships hold more and handle better. |
| A mapmaker's pen and blank maps | Mage shop or scribe | For Cartography — decoding bottles, and making maps of your own. |
| A cutlass | Weaponsmith | You are a pirate. There is no mechanical requirement. Buy the cutlass. |
| 200 bandages | Tailor | There is no healer in the middle of the ocean. |
| A spellbook, reagents, runebook | Mage shop | Recall home, and Gate so the family can come diving with you. |
The right room makes training three times faster. These are the spots worth a rune.
A proper port town with a shipwright and a bank close together. The natural pirate home base.
The gentlest 0-to-50 training in the game. No danger, no cost, and you can chat while you do it.
Where the bottles live. Coastal fishing will never give you one, which is the mistake almost every new fisher makes.
The pirate island. Thematically perfect, and a useful base for the eastern waters.
If you've fished a hundred times off a dock and never seen a message in a bottle, that's why. Get out of sight of land. This is the one fact that unlocks the whole profession.
A boat that won't stop is a boat that sails you into a kraken. Learn the handful of ship commands on your first trip out, in calm water, before it matters.
A ship has a hold. Use it — then sail home and bank properly rather than carrying everything on your person and drowning under the weight.
Sea serpents are fine alone. Krakens hit hard and you're standing on a small wooden platform. Bring a friend or bring a lot of bandages.
Britannia runs on favours. These are the people you want in your party and on your friends list.