SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

In the campaign I’m going to be running the players will be having run ins with pirates. It’s only logical considering this is a nautical, island hopping based campaign.

The first adventure has the party ending up on a beach, and discovering a cave that leads into a pirates den (is that the correct word? Maybe lair or hideout?).

The pirates will be made up of a motley bunch, humans, goblins, orcs, elves, Minotaur and Gorgon!

The plan is to have the party caught between two competing pirate captains. The first pirate captain is based on the MtG Planeswalker Angrath the Minotaur. The other being Vraska the medusa/gorgan Planeswalker. Both inspired by their pirate themed appearances from the Ixalan block.

This caught in the middle is not a major plot line, but an on going one that can be used to break up or give relief from the main plot threads.

In the first adventure the party won’t meet Angrath but they will hear of him. The pirates they meet will talk of this feared leader in hushed tones.

However I do need to create Angrath as an npc. I do have a miniature for him already. So what follows is a thought process I hit upon whilst having a soak in the bath (yep deal with that image).

For Angrath Minotaur Pirate I’ve decided to use the Minotaur stat block from the Monster Manual.

But this is Angrath, he’s a Planeswalker. He’s a pirate captain. He needs to be a bit more special. So let’s take some of the character race traits for Minotaurs from Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica where minotaurs a playable race. The horns is basically the same as Gore in the Monster Manual.

But the rest is some nice stuff to give Angrath, for Imposing Presence he’s going to have proficiency in Intimidation. It makes more sense for a pirate captain. You need to inspire that motley crew somehow.

In the art you see from MtG (above) Angrath has that flaming chain whip. It would be great to have Angrath to have one of those in the campaign. But how do I create and stat one of them?

Luckily I don’t have to. In the monster manual the Balor has just such a weapon, a flaming whip. That looks really good. So I’m going to borrow that.

The Balor also has multiattack.

I like adding that to Angrath. Ok he currently doesn’t have a longsword, but a great axe in the stat block for the Minotaur from the Monster Manual. But that’s neither here or there, he gets two attacks, one with the hand weapon and another with the whip.

The Balor has a longsword that also does lightning damage. I don’t want that bit. If I do go longsword (so his weapon matches the miniature) I’ll stat that out nearer the time and give it fire damage also so the sword has a similar property to that of the hammer in the pictures above.

Also from the Balor I’m going to give Angrath damage immunity to fire damage.

I’m not going to give Angrath any spells despite his Planeswalker origins. I don’t think it fits in with how I see Angrath. Although if I was going to give him spells they would be fire related.

And looking up the lore of Angrath online we will borrow the name of his pirate ship for our own use and call his ship the Devil’s Chains.

So that’s my Angrath Pirate Captain for my campaign. Next up the rival Vraska.