History of the Brotherhood

In 1772, a brave buccaneering crew was sent to the stockade by a naval tribunal for a maritime offense they didn't perpetrate. These men promptly escaped from a maximum-security brig to the open seas. Today, still wanted by the landbound government, they survive as gentlemen o' fortune. If you have a treasure that needs burying or digging up, if no one else is drunk enough to help, and if you can find them, maybe you can enlist the aid of... The Brotherhood of Pirates.

That's one version of the origin (and mission) of the Brotherhood, anyway. There are many, as one might expect when one is dealing with a global confederation of seafaring rogues who operate mostly in secrecy and hardly ever in sobriety. Whether it began with but a humble cadre of wrongly accused sailors seeking vindication... or a team of the oceans' eleven most cunning criminals intent on pulling off the most elaborate hijacking of a shipboard casino ever attempted... the Worldwide Salt-Soaked Brotherhood of Pirates grew into an organized and well-regulated (if not quite -respected) consortium of career men (and some women) with bravery by the boatload, rafts of ambition, and almost half as many arms, legs, and eyes as they were born with.

Or it's a haphazard, far-flung patchwork of renegades with little regard for law and even less for order who spend their days on poorly maintained, barely seaworthy, absurdly named craft drinking, gambling, carousing, wenching, and generally trying not to sink or be captured and hanged. Again, no one knows for sure.