Campaign Review: Pirates of Drinax

Cover for Stanislaw Lem's ‘The Invincible’; Original artist uncredited

Bottom Line Up Front:

Pros

• Enormous scope with an audacious premise; tons of toys to steal for your table.

• Solid introduction to major factions and the Trojan Reach sandbox; especially good for players new to the Traveller universe and setting.

• Several genuinely well-made scenarios (I especially liked Treasure of Sindal).

• Engaging, fun writing that’s above average for Mongoose. If you like the Traveller setting, you’ll love reading the campaign.

• Many really fun NPC's that are both fun to play as and interesting to plot with.

Cons

• Weak connective tissue; missions don’t naturally build a campaign story.

• "Sandbox" that assumes players follow the script; scant off-rails guidance.

• Critical info locked behind skill checks with limited backup advice.

• Tonal mismatch: swashbuckling pirate adventure grafted onto Traveller crunch.

• Little to no scaffolding for kingdom-building, fleets, or political escalation.

• Mixed production values; some art and maps undercut the experience.

• Subsystems are fine on paper, underwhelming in play.

Should I run it?

Yes!! If you want a sprawling toolkit and you’re comfortable rewriting and bolting on political/kingdom mechanics. If you’re looking for a cohesive adventure path you can run mostly as written, look elsewhere. Treat it as a sourcebook+ rather than a ready-to-play campaign, and you’ll have a great time around the table.

What is Pirates Of Drinax?

Pirates of Drinax is a sprawling Traveller campaign set in the Trojan Reach, where a shattered, joke of a rump kingdom hands the Travellers a corsair and a letter of marque. Their mandate is to raid, bargain, and scheme across dozens of systems to restore Drinax’s power while navigating the Imperium, the Aslan Hierate, and predatory megacorporations. The text presents a nominal sandbox that strings together missions of piracy, diplomacy, heists, and exploration around the group’s rising reputation. Over time, the Travellers choose whether to be privateers, pirates, or power brokers, and how far they will push Drinax toward rebirth or ruin. The boxed set compiles the originally serialized campaign with tools and rules tweaks, and it includes three books: the campaign, a Trojan Reach gazetteer, and a supplement that fleshes out the Aslan High Guard and adds ships to the reach.

Review Scope

This campaign was fun, and I had a blast running it. Between two tables we put well over 150 sessions into it. This review looks exclusively at how the campaign runs from behind the screen: prep load, guidance when players deviate, and table flow. It was also, without a doubt, one of the hardest premium, published campaigns I have run in terms of time and effort to make it work with what my players wanted to do. While the box set has three books, this review spends most of our time on the meat of the set, the campaign itself.

The Review:

As a GM, Pirates of Drinax is a mixed bag with gorgeous ambition and frustrating execution. Its premise is rad: resurrect a fallen realm by playing pirate-kingmaker in the space between empires. As written, it’s boring, overly complicated, and deeply unfocused; there’s no real story that meaningfully builds from one mission to the next. The book is stuffed with cool ideas and mission seeds, but you won’t use many of them anything close to straight because they’re either very railroad-y on the page or shallow at the table.

The missions are hit or miss, as is a common complaint of the campaign. I think it is particularly bad in the first, Honor Among Thieves, which should be among the most exciting and engaging in any published campaign. Stripped to essentials, it reads like:

• Go to a planet and talk to a guy.

• Make a skill check for mission-critical info.

• Fly to another planet and talk to a different guy.

• Go to a patch of space and look at it.

• Board a station, talk to a guy, maybe kill a bug.

• Go to yet another planet, talk to another guy.

• Wander around, poke things, hope a skill check or two coughs up the vital clue.

• Ambush the last guy. Maybe kill him. Maybe capture him. But there’s no way the players would ever think to talk to the guy and maybe come to some other arrangement with him? In a tabletop RPG? In a sandbox campaign? No, never. They will only do what the book expects.

Really! If you run it as written, then you'll get through the first third of it before you get to anything I would define as "Adventure." (Side note- a published campaign like this should have come with an actual introductory adventure or even just short scenario. One that puts the players puts the players in front of Oleb to accept his offer. As you will see, this process of not-quite-doing-enough is constant throughout)

Drinax is sold as a sandbox, but it assumes your players will always follow the adventure in the order and manner presented. As someone with published adventures, I get that. You kind of have to do that a little bit otherwise no one would ever finish writing one. Being stringent works for a one-shot or a short arc; stretched over a long campaign it makes the campaign brittle. The guidance for “what if the players don’t do the thing?” is vanishingly thin. If you want a true sandbox, you’ll be writing one largely from scratch using Drinax’s nouns. Worse, crucial information is routinely hidden behind skill checks, which is just a big no-no of adventure design. And when your players fail, the text offers very few fallbacks, clue vectors, or redundant paths. You either fudge, come up with some other idea on the spot, or watch the campaign stall.

My summary of the first mission is sarcastic and very generalized, but it's not inaccurate. And, once the players finish it, the next mission just… starts. No lead-up, connective tissue, or recurring NPCs beyond Drinax court fixtures. That's more or less how the whole book feels; just like a stack of unrelated scenarios tenuously strung together, not a campaign with momentum that's building. This is where you begin to see that it’s just a collection of adventures in the Traveller universe, but that does not a campaign make.

There’s a fundamental tonal mismatch, too. Traveller does “Spreadsheets in Space” brilliantly: logistics, trade, and ship economics, it’s why a lot of us play this game. But Traveller is not Treasure Island. Drinax wants to be a swashbuckling pirate saga and also a kingdom-builder and also classic Traveller. It tries to do all three and mostly does them at a “Yeah, it’s pretty okay” level. Here's an example quote from the mission Treasure Ship:

The news disseminates out from Arunisiir at a rate of 3 parsecs/week, roughly. So, if the pirates are in the Borderlands subsector, they hear of the grounded ship within two weeks; if they are in Tliowaha, it takes another week or two for news to reach them.

I cannot think of a more unnecessary and boring thing to consider when telling someone about the opportunity to attack a treasure ship. Why didn't one of the the pirates the party dealt with in the last mission just... tell them about it? At least then there would be a direct connection between the two missions and an opportunity to build recurring relationships.

The campaign is nominally about rebuilding a kingdom, but for most of the runtime your Travellers operate at street level. There’s no real trajectory from small-fry corsairs to sector-wide movers and shakers. You don’t meaningfully graduate into dealing with dukes, admirals, and megacorp CEOs as primary counterparts or antagonists. There’s no scaffold for sending out subordinate pirate flotillas, building a defensive navy, or managing Drinax as a polity. My two tables wanted those levers. Every player who touched either of the PoD campaigns I ran asked for some part of empire management. The text leaves you to conjure it entirely, or buy more Mongoose books with the rules you want.

Pirates of Drinax deserves credit, though. The thing is huge, and quantity has a quality of its own. The sheer scope and the audacity of the premise deserve applause. There are standout adventures; Treasure of Sindal is excellent- well-constructed and fun. I just wish the preceding arcs set me up to run it as written without gutting player agency/quantum ogre-ing all over the table. By the time we reached it, we ended up playing a very similar scenario, but not Treasure of Sindal, because the lead-in made a strongly-faithful run impossible.

Context matters a lot here though. Drinax was originally serialized. Gareth Hanrahan had to live with what was already in print, and then was given only limited retrofits when it was collected in the boxed set. His stated design goals of introducing the big factions (Imperium, Aslan, megacorps, Drinax nobility), getting players visiting lots of systems, and give more interesting piratical options than “shoot ship until cargo drops” are met, resoundingly.

Hanrahan’s writing is lively and a cut above Mongoose’s usual dry-as-crackers prose. All three books in the box set are genuinely fun to read, with the campaign itself being a blast. He injects some levity into his writing that helps keep in interesting, and he avoids the more antiseptic voice I expect from Mongoose's Traveller. This really helps flesh out his NPCs. Oleb is a hoot to run as a GM- I mixed him 1 part Flash Gordon Brian Blessed and 1 Part Henry VIII- even writing his intro speech in iambic pentameter because it just felt right:

Created in Midjourney

So now you know the stakes and what I crave. You know your hire and glory promised fair. Before you speak, close up your mortal eyes And harken eastward, where the sunrise climbs: A trumpet rings, a clarion you know, It calls your hearts, it summons forth your souls, To the tune men brightly name Adventure! Now tell me, friends: what answer do you give?

Production-wise, it’s solid but not mindblowing. The art is mixed: some striking spreads, some genuinely ugly pieces. The Blacksand City map, in particular, feels low-effort; it would have been better omitted, I think. Ships of the Reach, the third book, really shines here though. The ship artwork is beautiful and comprehensive. You'll see a lot of ships never illustrated before (as far as I know), and its all done very well.

The piracy rules do streamline things nicely, but in both groups I ran, players had minimal interest in random piracy. They wanted pirate-themed stories, not random cargo-mugging. The shares system didn’t land; paying dependable mercs to crew the ship made more sense to both groups of players, especially given a universe teeming with professional guns.

So where does that leave Drinax? For me: great ingredients, messy recipe. If you run it as written, expect boredom spikes, weird tonal wobbling, and weak ligaments connecting it all together. If you treat it as a setting bible plus a bag of parts, and you’re ready to build political play, succession arcs, patronage networks, vassal fleets, and faction mechanics, you'll get a killer campaign out of it. But you’ll be doing the heavy lifting the book should have done first.

Final grade: C+