Posts Tagged ‘Arr Jim lad’

RPS Feature Naval Hazing

Premature Evaluation: Tempest

Blackbeard may be the more familiar household name, and bequeathed to us 90 percent of the archetypal pirate look, but it’s Francis Le Clerc to whom we can attribute the appearance of at least one appendage: the peg leg. Indeed, Peg Leg was his nickname (or in his native French, “Jambe de Bois”, and among the Spanish to whom he gave such considerable grief, “Pie de Palo”). Though injuries of this gravity were reasonably commonplace among sailors at the time, it wasn’t that usual for a pirate captain to persist in his career after the loss of a limb. But Le Clerc was a particularly persistent sort of bastard. It wasn’t until Le Clerc had lost his leg and the use of one of his arms while fighting the English, in fact, that his privateering really took off, not only devastating much of Cuba and Panama personally, but acting as a sort of angel investor for other pirates. In fact, he so totally ruined the then capital of Cuba, Santiago de Cuba, that it stopped being the capital altogether. But a feature that deserves to be even more emblematic of pirates than wooden prosthetics is the theme of betrayal, both of them and by them.

Each week, with his beard smouldering and black flag aflutter, Marsh Davies prowls the oceans of Early Access for plunder, slo(o)ping back to port with any stories he can find. This week he’s been further debasing the reputation of pirates on the low-fantasy high-seas of Tempest, a game of naval combat and light ship management.

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