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This is weird - Golarion is a magical setting, so I usually don't have a problem with this. Undying lich-kings imprisoned in the bowels of massive towers? Neat! Abyssal contagion spreading across the land and consuming everything? Cool! A stone that transforms mortals into Gods? Ayyyy, no problem!
But behind all of these I always hold that there are basic forces and motivations that don't change. Crusaders seek to eliminate evil, rulers try to maintain power, and merchants seek to make money.
And pirates seek to plunder the vessels of those merchants.
This is where I'm having problems. The Shackles is absolutely the worst place where you could stick a large conglomeration of pirates, because there's virtually no piracy to be done!
Consider: There is only one known civilized land to the south of the Shackles - Sargava; which pays a significant portion of tribute to the Hurricane King so it's ships *don't* get attacked. While I can accept that some of the Pirate Lords may disobey this and sink the occasional Sargavan merchant ship, this must be the exception rather than the rule or else there would be no point in paying tribute.
To the West is the Arcadian Ocean, and there's nothing to suggest that any merchant traffic comes from there. To the East are headlands with no civilization, to the northeast are the Drowned Lands, which also lack any significant merchant activity. To the northwest is the Eye of Abendego. North of that is Mediogalti, whose lone town can't provide much in the way of trade. Only much further north do we get to the rich trade route servicing Korvoso and Magnimar.
There's the Inner Sea, of course, but to get to it pirates would first have to risk passing through the Arch of Aroden and the nearby naval base of Corentyn. That area is firmly under Chelaxian control and logic suggests that both military vessels and surveillance by flying devils would be the norm. It's very risky. It would make more sense to simply join one of the established pirate groups already operating in the Inner Sea.
It just doesn't make sense. What merchant would send his own ships through the Shackles to Sargava instead of just leasing space on a Sargavan cargo vessel? The AP provides a Rahadoumi merchant ship encounter in the first module, but it must be a stupid merchant who sent it, and stupid merchants don't stay merchants for long.
As a point of comparison, the pirates who dwelt in the Caribbean had three major trade routes in close proximity to them (America<->Europe, South America<->Europe, and South America<->America, to say nothing of the colonies in the Caribbean itself. But the Shackles don't even have any non-pirate colonies.
I love the S&S AP, and pirates in general, but this thought constantly gnaws at me. Can someone help me out here? Is there something I'm missing?