What could undead do on a pirate ship?


Skull & Shackles


Hi everyone,

So tomorrow my players take over a pirate ship and sail for rickety squibs and or attack some coastal villages.

One of my players is a necromancer and will certainly want to have his skeletons perform a duty. The ship will also have some NPCs that volunteer to help.

What could undead do? I was thinking that they could be underneath "rowing" but thats not common in a pirate ship is it? Maybe security/initial boarding party as well?

Also, what are the general roles in a ship that you used?


I would imagine they could do all the labor a deckhand on the ship would have done. If there isn't complex thought involved with the task, the (mindless) undead should be able to do it.

With some simple commands ("Pull in the anchor! Let out the sails!" sort of things), the ship should run pretty smoothly. I would imagine this undead crew would also free up the PCs to actually helm the ship and man the weapons (tasks I would govern as too complex to relay to mindless creatures).


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Undead can do basically any task that is not super complex. They can serve as a deckhand, a rigger, they could serve as crew operating (but not firing) a siege engine. As a necromancer gets more powerful and can create intelligent undead, they could even do more complex tasks such as firing the siege engines or piloting the ship.

In fact, there is a spell called Skeleton Crew which creates a number of undead from corpses that serve for a period of time to perform the specific necessary tasks for piloting a ship. Of course you would not have enough of them at lower levels to be able to crew a Sailing Ship (minimum crew of 20) but you could crew a Junk easy enough.

There is even a piece of specific loot from the Island of Empty Eyes module that summons a crew of (I think) 28 skeletons to serve as a ships crew. It can be used once per week, and they serve for a week. They don't take part in fighting, but will follow the captains orders. It's exceedingly useful because it allows the ship to be under sail 24 hours a day with no rest. They will never tire and never disobey an order or mutiny, and you never have to pay them.


I'm not so sure that a generic skeleton or zombie would be any good at the more complex tasks of sailing. (The spell Skeleton Crew specifically grants them Profession:Sailor) But a limited number could certainly be useful doing the simple grunt work.

In Woormwood terms, I'd say they can perform the crew tasks: Man the Bilges, Rat Catcher, Swab the Decks.

All of the Rigger tasks except Lookout require skill checks with skills they don't have, as do the crew tasks Hauling Rope and Knotwork and Repairs. Runner seems inappropriate, since a creature that can't talk would have a hard time delivering messages.


Thanks, very much everyone for your advice. My players found the spell "skeleton crew" as suggested, they then went to Rickety Squibs, who offered them a way to insert "rowing" holes. THough he kept saying the boat was to small to allow for all the rowers to sleep, the pcs said not to worry about it because they thought these particular rowers would have no need of sleeping.

My players are now roaming the high seas with two NPCs, fishguts who they have come to trust as their adviser, and a troglodyte/jar jar binks type npc they have found helpful in another adventure (used a savage tide adventure from dungeon 144) Besides these two npcs, most of the ship stuff is handled by the skeletons! Sort of a great way to not have to deal with a roamin horde of npcs, I don't think any of my players (nor I) wants to get over 4-5 NPC names to remember at any one time, and undead serve as a great way to handwave the ships mundane tasks without having to deal with pirates who may mutinee, have demands etc. This also gives my necromancer something cool to be in charge of.


That sounds great! I'm glad you found something that works for your group.

Dark Archive

You probably do not want them in the galley.....

Ultimately however, undead are helpful if you can make them semi conscious enough to fight and hold their own in combat. It can make for tricky excursions to port towns as most civilized people do not look fondly at undead or necromancers in general. Heck on the open seas, usually the undead are terrorizing the pirates...Look at Whalebone Pilk!

Now on an interesting side note. My group went to the abyss and managed to capture the Demonwing from the adventure "A Paladin in Hell" When they got to the abyss, most of the crew died, and our death-focused wizard captain managed to raise them all as undead, but instead of coming back as undead, they came back as demons. (the really low level stupid demons)

They served for a time, but the demonwing has its own invisible crew. The only thing is, being made of stone and bi-planar, it isn't very fast on the open seas. So they usually travel in their sailing ship thats pimped out "Hellborne Fury"

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