100 Pirate Hooks

Not that kind of hook. 

I actually didn’t plan on having this be the first real post for this blog, I just got inspired last night and wrote these up, leaving me with a complete post’s worth of content. It’s kind of apt, though, considering how much I’ve always loved pirates and lists. 

These are written for a flexible setting, with the only real constants being widespread sea travel and some scattered supernatural elements. You could easily reuse them with sky pirates or space pirates. Or land pirates, if you want. 

BONUS FUN: see if you can find the ones I stole from One Piece

You can also toss in these (http://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2019/02/d100-encounters-in-islands.html?m=1), from one of the blogs that inspired me to do this and which I’ll add to my list of incredible blogs once I get around to actually making said list. 

https://youtu.be/tObx8cRtUAI

https://youtu.be/9QVxXoeCyCU

https://youtu.be/2jjn-uoENPA

1. A colonial governor’s pet sea serpent has escaped again and is menacing ships. The governor has decreed that the serpent must be captured alive, which has complicated things for would-be hunting expeditions. Your crew can collect a hefty bounty if you return the beast alive or emotionally devastate the governor by killing it. 
2. A treasure fleet from one of the great colonial powers is returning from the colonies with loads of plunder on board. Taking even one of the ships would be a difficult but lucrative endeavor. 
3. A colonial treasure fleet was sunk by a storm on the way home, and now it lies with its cargo somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. 
4. A mysterious castaway washes up with a story to tell (roll again and base the castaway’s story on the result).
5. Turtles large enough to carry islands on their backs are massing in one location in order to mate and lay their eggs. An egg or baby island turtle would fetch immense prices, and many of the turtles have treasure hidden on their verdant backs. 
6. A writer is collecting material for a book of pirate stories and wants to travel with an authentic pirate crew. 
7. The island’s rum supply has been tainted deliberately or accidentally, causing erratic behavior and hallucinations. 
8. A navy ship will soon pass by the crew’s current location carrying a set of powerful experimental cannons from their testing site to a foundry where more can be made. 
9. A more powerful pirate attempts to convince your crew to work for him via a combination of incentives and threats. 
10. A famous whale, identifiable by a huge and distinct scar, charged into the midst of a sea battle and swallowed the chest over which the battle was being fought. The whale has become much more aggressive from the pain of having a huge metal chest lodged in its gut. 
11. The crew hears about a line of legendary islands surrounded by impassable waters that can only be navigated in a certain order involving some seemingly impossible task, such as sailing up a mountain. An incredible treasure is supposedly buried on the final island in the chain. 
12. Revolutionaries are willing to provide your crew with money and supplies in exchange for hitting a series of high-risk government targets. 
13. A young man is making his way across the seas chasing the sea captain who seduced and abandoned his sickly mother and will do anything for a crew that can bring him closer to his target. 
14. A massive storm has devastated the defenses of a nearby colony, leaving it ripe for raiding by even a small vessel. 
15. A local colonial governor or naval officer has been cracking down on piracy, and the local pirates will flock to follow anyone with the guts to take him down. 
16. An old drunk offers to sell your crew a magic compass that points to the location of a legendary treasure. 
17. A rich noble’s pleasure vessel has drifted into nearby waters and offers a tempting target. 
18. A wandering vagabond who knows the location of a great treasure or magic item will offer it up to the crew that helps them rescue their beloved, who has been arrested and is currently imprisoned on a prison ship sailing to a penal colony. 
19. A dreamy naturalist is planning an unsanctioned expedition and can’t go through official channels, either due to wanting to keep it a secret from rivals or due to having been dismissed as a crank by the scientific community. They will pay handsomely to anyone with a ship who can take them to their (inevitably perilous) destination. 
20. A massive sea monster that has slumbered for years finally awakens. 
21. A former pirate or naval officer wants revenge on the crew that mutinied and marooned them and offers an authentic treasure map to anyone who helps them. 
22. The navy has finally finished its first prototype Leviathan-class dreadnought, a seemingly invincible ship the size of a small island designed to end the golden age of piracy. Naturally, your crew wants to destroy or steal it. 
23. The lieutenant of a famous pirate captain has been captured and is about to be publicly executed. The captain is calling on anyone who will join them to help storm the execution and rescue their subordinate. 
24. The crew finds a map that purports to lead to a city of gold on a wondrous island floating in the clouds. 
25. An organization of abolitionists is offering generous bounties to any pirate crew willing to attack and liberate slave ships. 
26. The Flying Dutchman or another cursed seafarer believes that your crew or one of its members is the key to breaking his curse. Curse may be real or psychosomatic. 
27. The indigenous population of a recently-colonized region are offering treasure to anyone willing to help them resist the expansion of whatever imperial power is attempting to devour them. 
28. A single survivor returns from a lost expedition that departed many years ago seeking a legendary treasure. The survivor came within arm’s reach of their goal only to lose it and is certain they can find their way back if they have a crew to help them. 
29. A noble has ran away from their obligations and wants to be a pirate. They’re not very good at it yet, but they’ll generously pay anyone who helps them. 
30. A master shipwright or other professional (legendary navigator, doctor, cook, etc) has recently deserted the navy due to a grudge against a tyrannical admiral, and could be persuaded to help any crew that makes trouble for their nemesis. 
31. A crew of pirates have found a way to live inside and control a massive whale, and have started attacking other pirate crews as well as merchants and naval vessels. Track them down and eat or steal their whale. 
32. The crew encounters a ship from the past or the future that has been displaced in time. 
33. A bitter naval officer stationed at a remote post discovers a magic trident with incredible power and uses it to turn the surrounding islands into his personal fief. Liberate them and take the trident for yourself. 
34. An eccentric inventor with an anarchic bent is looking for someone to test his new diving suits. 
35. Raiders from an undersea kingdom are kidnapping and enslaving surface-dwellers. 
36. A storm traps the crew on an island ruled by a tyrannical sorcerer and his put-upon supernatural assistant. 
37. The crew encounters a seafarer who turns out to be an exiled princess, undercover and trying to retake her kingdom. 
38. The navy has acquired a device that can control the weather is and using it to bombard places frequented by pirates or political enemies with unnatural storms.
39. Your crew finds a cantankerous, reclusive inventor who is testing a flying machine. 
40. Ships are being menaced by undead sea monsters that turn out to be giant hermit crabs or octopuses using the bones of long-dead monsters as armor. 
41. A legendary brawler/duelist/gunslinger has sailed into town and willing to take any challengers. 
42. Massive mangrove trees have started rapidly growing from the sea for unknown reasons. They have a tendency to form around undersea ruins or shipwrecks, which they lift up to the surface as they grow. 
43. Holes begin to appear in a massive ring of perpetual storms that isolates part of the world, allowing passage to this isolated region. 
44. The crew discovers that a group of con artist impostors are pretending to be them to take advantage of their reputation. 
45. A portal to another world opens and mysterious ships and monsters have started emerging. 
46. A group of pirate crews are competing to see which of them will get to use an experimental submarine. 
47. Another crew challenges your crew to a set of ritual combat challenges. 
48. An Ahab-like whaler blames your crew for his latest failure to hunt down his animal nemesis after seeing a vision of one of the players in a drunken haze. 
49. Same as above, but the whaler is convinced that the person he saw is the key to helping him finally kill his target. 
50. The navy has discovered a way to control sea monsters and is sending them to attack pirate ships. 
51. An item being sought by your crew shows up as the prize of a local gambling tournament. 
52. A noble wants a rival secretly taken down and is willing to pay your crew to do it. Is probably planning on double-crossing them and killing them later to cover up the evidence. 
53. A naval officer in the region has become obsessed with a possibly-magical book of prophecies and is convinced that your crew are destined to be his nemeses. 
54. A famous sea monster (or simply an unusually large and delicious whale) has been spotted in the same region as the crew and is acting unusually aggressive due to either illness or pregnancy. 
55. Both naval ships and a massive storm are closing in on the horizon. 
56. A colonial official is willing to pay you to stop doing pirate things. If you accept his offer all the other pirates will hate you, if you turn him down he will dedicate himself to destroying you. 
57. The latest island your crew sails to seems to be welcoming and friendly to pirates, but it’s actually the secret hideout of a huge crew of bounty hunters who lure in passing pirates with hospitality, wear them down with drinking and partying, and finally capture or kill them. 
58. The navy is testing a new weapon nearby that can create whirlpools. Taking it for your own crew’s use would be tempting, but would instantly making you targets of every government and rival looking to claim or reclaim it for themselves. 
59. The crew stumbles onto an island where a noble strands prisoners and hunts them for sport. 
60. The crew is hunted by the vengeful survivor of a ship they pillaged in an earlier session or during their backstory. 
61. A mysterious murder happens in the port the crew is staying in, and they’re the prime suspects. If they don’t clear their names, they’ll have to flee the town and won’t be able to return. 
62. The crew encounters a ship in perfect condition drifting in the sea with no crew and no apparent signs of what happened to them. 
63. A doctor or chef with a grudge against pirates is posing as one and infiltrating crews to poison their members before moving on to the next ship. 
64. A pirate and a navy officer are madly in love with each other and ask your crew for help pursuing their forbidden love. 
65. Your crew hears about a group of recently-escaped convicts who each have part of a treasure map tattooed on their bodies. 
66. An island that only appears for one week every hundred years is about to appear again. 
67. A famous crew of bounty hunters have decided to chase after your crew. 
68. A pirate captain in the area is secretly working with the navy to betray and hunt down other pirates. 
69. Your crew hears about a legendary treasure frozen in a block of the ice at one of the poles. Other crews have heard about it as well and a race ensues to see which crew will pit itself against the ice first. 
70. A wealthy and successful pirate captain is retiring, and is offering a chunk of his fortune to anyone who can complete a series of challenges centering around a race across an infamously hazardous sea lane. 
71. Your crew hears about or sails into a famous sea-dungeon floating in the center of a massive sargasso bloom, made from hundreds of shipwrecks that have collided with each other and are held together with entwining seaweed. 
72. The citizens of a town are chafing under their tyrannical colonial governor and are willing to pay pirates to get rid of him. 
73. An allied crew asks for help hunting down a traitor to the pirates’ code. 
74. Your crew encounters what seems to be the ruins of a golden city but is actually a trap set by the navy to lure in pirates. 
75. Your crew learns about a prophecy that the region they’re in is about to be hit by a storm of massive proportions accompanied by marauding monsters. 
76. Your crew is sought by a promoter looking for toughs to put on a good show in his fighting pits. 
77. Your crew gets a tip that a magic item or treasure map is about to be auctioned off nearby and they can either storm or infiltrate the auction to  obtain it. 
78. Your crew hears about or sails by an island ruled by feuding warlords, each willing to hire pirates as mercenaries. 
79. Your crew is hunted by a sinister cult after they find what seems to be a mention of one or more of its members in an ancient prophecy. 
80. The oceans are becoming increasingly impassable due to a series of dark rituals being performed on remote islands to summon storms and monsters. 
81. A wrecked ship falls from the sky in front of your crew. 
82. An entire island falls from the sky in front of your crew. If you can survive this, the island is full of treasure and monsters. 
83. The colonial authorities have cut off a sugar-farming island for disobeying them and intend to leave it to starve. The townsfolk will freely offer their sugar and rum to any smugglers willing to bring them medicine and other supplies. 
84. An ally or enemy of the crew dies but returns to life possessed by the haunted hook hand of a vengeful ghost captain. 
85. The crew comes upon a beached whale that will soon die if not pushed back into the water. The whale is the beloved pet of the king of the merfolk, and he will be furious if he finds out that your crew let it die. 
86. An alliance between pirates splinters after they reach the treasure they were after, located in a ruined temple at the center of a circular lake in the middle of a ring-shaped island. The pirates are currently stalemated, each crew pointing all their guns inward to shoot anyone who tries to row across the (monster-infested) lake to grab the treasure. Basically your crew sails into an aquatic version of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. 
87. A pirate with rather extreme religious positions is looking for allies to help him kidnap the pope or another suitably important religious figure. He’s trying to do this because he really wants to argue with the pope about an obscure point of doctrine and doesn’t really care what happens to him afterwards. 
88. Mysterious, confounding storms plague the region. They turn out to be caused by a floating temple housing a magical weather-controlling artifact, which was broken free from its moorings and damaged by an earthquake and is now drifting around, its magic machinery misfiring erratically. 
89. Your crew wakes up one morning to find out that the sea around their ship or island has frozen solid. This is because a crew of icy undead pirate sorcerers are planning on pillaging your ship/island. 
90. A naval officer has discovered how to raise undead and is using them to supplement his ranks. 
91. Mysterious towers filled with traps, monsters, and treasure have begun rising from the sea. 
92. The navy is planning a full assault on the pirate colony of Libertalia, and the pirate council that runs the island has put out a call to any crew willing to defend it. 
93. An island has broken out into civil war, and the rebels are willing to trade treasure and resources for pirate assistance. 
94. Your crew discovers that a veteran pirate rumored to be the only living man who knows the location of a legendary treasure has been apprehended by the navy and is awaiting execution in a supposedly impregnable prison. 
95. Temporal magic causes an underwater volcano to prematurely erupt and begin the process of forming into a new island at a massively accelerated pace. The same magic is causing the bizarre deep sea creatures it dragged up from the geothermal vents to mutate into monstrous new forms. 
96. Your crew encounters a small island that’s been converted into a ship and functions as a massive casino and pleasure barge. 
97. A mad chef is seeking legendary sea monster to see how it tastes. 
98. An underwater city rises from the sea and declares war on the surface world. 
99. The only extant map to the Fountain of Youth has been found by a devoutly religious naval officer who sees it as blasphemous and wants to destroy it. 
100. Your crew encounters an island that’s actually a massive organism that uses magical mirages of treasure to lure in people and then eat them. The island monster is intelligent and communicates telepathically, but will only talk to you if it thinks you can help it find the one thing it craves: a mate.