Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "pirates"

Yesterday I mentioned wanting to write about pirates. Unfortunately, the idea stuck.

Despite modern romanticization, it wasn't much fun being a pirate. You'd spend weeks at a time in a small ship, rotting and rocking and creaking, and filled up to the brim with these brutes and morons that you would hate within a week, if not right away. The food was terrible and there wasn't enough fruit, nobody really knew how to sing but they wouldn't shut up either, the smell was awful but you couldn't afford to waste the drinking water to baths, personal time was right out, and the scenery was the same bloody ocean day after day, maybe a dolphin as a high point. The all too occasional moments of levity consisted of ship battle and raids, storms, cannibal islands, sea serpents or giant octopi, and mutiny - any of them all too viable of getting you killed.

Shore leaves were rare and lasted all too little time before someone upset the locals and you had to flee. Not like you could stay with a bounty on your head. Worse still, your favourite place got annexed by the Empire sometime since you last showed up, and this local voodoo witch was calling all ships to war. What were you supposed to do, ignore this attack on your way of life? Even if you hated every second of it?

If you were lucky, you might have won a few bouts and earned a chest full of silver for your trouble. If you were really lucky, your captain might even have let you spend it all on supplies, alcohol, and women, instead of burying it to some deserted island for some gods'-forsaken reason. If you were unlucky, you would get to hear an Imperial messenger bird cheerfully announce that a torpedo was on its way...

Then, whether because your ship was blown apart and you marooned there, or because you disobeyed your captain about that treasure nonsense, you'd end up all alone in one of those deserted islands. No one to talk to save for some birds and this bowling ball with a face. No more of the songs you once hated; no more being made to perform something stupid in front of a big crowd. Your friends either blew apart and drowned, or betrayed you and abandoned you here: either way it's now just you and your thoughts - and those strange noises of the jungle, unnerving you and keeping you awake at night. No one to keep watch for you here either, reassure you that it was nothing and that it would all turn up well.

Your life used to be as bad as you thought it could get: you thought hell was other people. But now, as the night falls and the mists roll in, you would almost go back to those old days you once hated.

Hell is other people. But hell is being alone, as well. In this chapter of your life, there is precious little middleground to be found. Your attempts at compromise only end with everything going worse for you and everyone around you. All your friends have died. Even love is fleeting and often ends in heartbreak.

There's a theme I can use here. Something to underline all the merry swashbuckling action.

In the last blog post, you got washed ashore to a mysterious tropical island, unexplored and full of peril.



You are all alone, but you are not safe. Here are some of the things you might encounter here:

Trees
Monkeys
Snakes
Giant apes
Tigers
Mysterious ancient temples where neither apes nor tigers go, but that may also contain traps and angry skeletons
Cursed treasure that makes your teeth fall off
Cannibals and their drums
Cultists and their knives
Pygmies and their spears
Amazon warriors seeking for a new king (and after what you've been through, you might even qualify)
Erupting volcanoes
Dinosaurs
Giant birds
Giant bugs
A swarm of mosquito-sized snakes
Cat-sized worms that eat all your food
A bigass frog
Slugs
Brain slugs
Eels
Electric flying eels
Crabs. With wings.
Jellyfish disguised as trees
Exploding crabs that were actually dead zombie crabs controlled by fungi
Octopi that crawl on dry land
Bloodthirsty penguin swarms
Sea urchins that roll around the beach surface and bury themselves into the sand to wait for prey
Ancient and eldritch divinities, possibly in the shape of an iron giant
Shapeshifting smoke monsters
Locked hatches leading to the depths of the island
Shipwrecks
Ghost pirates
Imperial patrols
Carolean conquistadors
Fishmen
Explorer remnants, cause of death unknown
Bizarre and annoying infections
Bananas. But turns out they're poisonous.
The voices in your head
And Hagley's started up his blasted jig again, even though he can't sing or play the fiddle any more than he ever could... and even though you saw him blown apart by the hull splinters and sink into the ocean in pieces...
The dead haunt you, even in your dreams
You hear the Lords of Chaos laugh at your plight
You've gone a week without so much as a shut-eye, and here come the mists again... the kingdom of the lost is rising
You've run out of Huntvapour, yet you're addicted and crave for more
As you look out to the sea, the trees crawl closer to you behind you - they don't think you know, but you know

On the other hand, if we're sticking with the theme of loneliness and isolation, many of these will probably not work too well. Although the amazons could still work if you've got a bad case of anxiety.

I live in a small single-floor flat. It's functional but dreary, dull. You know where I'd love to live?



I don't know how much this choice is influenced by my childhood, but I've always found this sort of buildings ridiculously comfy.



Cosy, squeezed close together, but reaching high up into the sky. It's as if the building itself was hugging you for warmth and comfort.



Just enough space for the important furniture and to walk around them. As much of the space put to effective use as possible. No echo. Everywhere you go, you can touch something.

Climb high up for a great view all around you. Open the window to feel the wind. Wave at your friends outside, or feed the birds.

Put a fire in the hearth to warm up the entire home with ease.

That feeling you get when you wrap yourself in a thick warm blanket with a cup of something warm in your hands, possibly with a person or two - the sort you feel really safe around - leaning against you? Living in a house like this is feeling just that, all the time.



Of course, the reality of things would be rather less adventurous. It would be pretty impractical in most cases. We want space if we can have it, to move around a little, and not stack our things so high up, and not trip and fall down the stairs all the bloody time. If we can spread out around us at all, there's no reason to build up: rather make a nice farm and a field. Well, unless you're a wizard trying to compensate for something.

In order for such a comfy home to come to be, there would simply have to be no room to spread around. It'd be a large metropolis, most likely, packed with people, cramped close together, and so forced to squeeze tight and to reach higher up instead. Or mountainous wilderness, where flat space is hard to find, and you'll have to put your house on a tiny plateau and then make the best of the space you can.

Or perhaps, somehow, both.

I wonder why the moomins saw the need to build up, what with all that lovely green field all around their home. At least the end result's still comfy and probably greatly influenced my own preferences.



The pirate story will have a building such as this. It will serve as a safe haven after the ordeals of two extremes, the hells of other people and no people at all: here we have a lovely middleground, a small patch of comfortable paradise to sit down in and rest.

Of course, it cannot last.

If I said that I listened to some type of music my every waking hour, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Sure, sometimes I'm outside, or seeing my parents... or does it count as "waking hour" if I'm lying in bed and actively trying to sleep? I don't know. Even in those times I usually have music running in my head.

About a decade ago I got into D&D, and I sort of semi-accidentally ended up picking up a "soundtrack" for the first full campaign I was in. I listened to a bunch of music I had discovered at around the same time (mainly Sonata Arctica), always during games and only during games, or at least while thinking and talking about stuff related to it.

To this day I can't listen to any of Days of Grays without getting a really heavy hit of nostalgia. I've never been in a D&D game as fun as that first.



I began to realize just how much power music held, and how much it could influence the going of my (and probably everyone else's) mind. From there on I started to build myself soundtracks like that first: for every game of D&D (and later other systems), for every story I'd write, for some comics and books I like, even a few video games that don't have soundtracks of their own - I would find something to listen. I have a lot of songs and albums and entire bands, some of which I really liked, that I permanently welded together into one specific work or game, and that I only now listen if I want to feel nostalgic.

Sometimes I carefully pick up my music based on the sort of a thing I want to write, resulting in fairly consistent and well-managed stories that keep well in hand and don't go anywhere weird. Other times I just appropriate whatever I really like to listen at the time, which can easily shoot the whole thing into someplace bizarre and unexpected but not necessarily bad. I've done both successfully.

Often, how well this works out - how completely my brain associates the work and the music together, and how much I manage to listen to that same stuff while I work on it - directly correlates to how much I like the end result, be it something I'm writing or something I'm playing in or something I'm reading. If it goes poorly, it can lead to me throwing a story out altogether.

When I worked on The Straggler's Mask, for instance, I listened a lot of Blind Guardian, Twilight Force, a bit of Blackmore's Night and Blue Öyster Cult, and the soundtrack of a game I liked to play at the time, Risk of Rain. A lot of the sort I'd associate with adventure and exploration, but some of it was spontaneous and probably had a hand in the wilder bits of the story.

For The Vagrant's Wings, I picked up a bit heavier stuff like Bal-Sagoth, Celtic Frost, something more soft but foreboding such as Nox Arcana, and then just to spice things up, a bit more Blackmore's Night. It's one of the ones where I succeeded in picking a pretty fitting soundtrack - something for horror and romance alike - rather than just going with whatever, and I think the fairly grounded nature ended up for its benefit in the end.

One of the less successful drafts of mine - codenamed Shadowland - involved a lot of Manowar, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian again, and the Balance & Ruin remix album for Final Fantasy VI. I don't know exactly why the interest to this one just sort of petered out: how much of it was because I had listened to all these soundtracks before, and elsewhere, and couldn't pair together with this story effectively? How much was because I just got distracted by other things and ended up not feeling like it anymore? I wouldn't know. I'd guess a bit of both.

(Although listening to some of the soundtrack kind of puts me back on the mood of returning to that story... which is inconvenient because I'm kind of already juggling between a lot of things I might want to write.)

Chaos Star is sort of half-and-half: I had no idea what kind of music could fit for this, so in the end I defaulted to Iron Savior, Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack, and a little something nice I found on Youtube called Edge of the World. I'm sure the music can take some credit of it probably being the most out-there story draft I've managed to complete so far. It's been pretty hard to edit, though.

I haven't begun to really work on Ivar Stormling of Skar yet, but I already know it's going to involve a lot of Magic Sword and Gloryhammer. How well this works, remains to be seen.

The cyberpunk story, as I think I've said, is pretty tough to grasp and maintain interest on regardless of music - but it has one of the more duty-picked soundtracks, taking stuff from Blade Runner and Deus Ex, and interestingly, Command & Conquer series, especially Tiberian Sun. Lately, though, I also started to click stuff on Youtube at random, listening to a lot of synthwave and such while I wrote it... and I'm still doing this, even though my interest in the story itself has largely died away again.

So we come to the pirate story, currently tentatively named Pirates of The Demure Sea. I probably should look into Alestorm and such stuff, but because of the cyberpunk fallout I'm currently listening to things like this. Lemme tell you, it's helping me spawn out some pretty weird story notes and ideas.



But on the other hand, I had already decided that the Demure Sea is a weird place. So maybe it'll all work out in the end.

It's not just the music - when I write, I do my best to dive deep into the popular culture of everything even remotely related to that stuff. I'm going to watch a lot of pirate movies in the next couple weeks.









And of course,



I expect to have a good time.

You can go and grab Scourge of the Silver Wings now for like three dollars, if you'd like to support my efforts, or wait till tomorrow to get it free of charge. I won't mind.



As you can tell by the cover, this one is pretty heavily naval-themed. You've got pirates, swashbuckling, sailing ships and submarines, cannons and flintlocks, storms and mists, mystery... and two gangs tearing up a small town and a stranger coming in to pin them against one another to be rid of both. You may have heard that story before.

I'll be getting print copies available sometime over the week. I'll let you know as things develop.

Till then, happy reading! I hope you'll like it.