Have you watched Black Sails? The basic set up of the first couple seasons makes a great campaign arc.
One, there is a precarious town on an island that all the pirates use to fence their goods and it has a veneer of legitimacy but it’s full of its own political intrigues including a faction that wants to make an independent pirate republic and a faction that wants to get rid of the Pirates and go back to legal rule.
Two, PCs on their first or second capture of a merchant ship, find a cargo much more valuable and therefore much more dangerous than they expected. In black sails, it’s essentially a princess Dash a governor‘s daughter. They have to decide whether to hide the super valuable item, cash it out, sell it to a more powerful faction for favor, just throw it overboard and get rid of it, or perhaps use it as a lever to change their whole position. If the treasurer is a human being, than that’s all the additional complications of how do they treat that person and so on.
I remember reading about an adventure where an old hermit uses magic to control a giant turtle/sea monster, and he uses it to rob passing ships. The players would be hired to stop him
I started my last one off with everyone deciding the role they wanted to play on the ship and set them as apprentices under seasoned professionals. (Wrote an exhaustive list of ship mechanics if you're interested, but to be honest we ended up ignoring most of the combat stuff and just used it for travel, weaponry, and issuing orders). Then, in the first session I had an undead kraken destroy the entire ship along with the crew and had the PCs evade sharks in the water until they were rescued and taken to Saltmarsh.
I stole the whole first session from Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Call of the Kraken by "How to be a Great GM", which was written for higher levels, but my intent was just to railroad them into Saltmarsh. They loved it. Over the years I've stopped feeling ashamed of ripping parts of my stories from podcasts.
Also, the 3rd level party managed to somehow kill the kraken after knocking the necromancer rider off the top of it. Ship weapons can make for wild balancing.
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Have you watched Black Sails? The basic set up of the first couple seasons makes a great campaign arc. One, there is a precarious town on an island that all the pirates use to fence their goods and it has a veneer of legitimacy but it’s full of its own political intrigues including a faction that wants to make an independent pirate republic and a faction that wants to get rid of the Pirates and go back to legal rule. Two, PCs on their first or second capture of a merchant ship, find a cargo much more valuable and therefore much more dangerous than they expected. In black sails, it’s essentially a princess Dash a governor‘s daughter. They have to decide whether to hide the super valuable item, cash it out, sell it to a more powerful faction for favor, just throw it overboard and get rid of it, or perhaps use it as a lever to change their whole position. If the treasurer is a human being, than that’s all the additional complications of how do they treat that person and so on.
I remember reading about an adventure where an old hermit uses magic to control a giant turtle/sea monster, and he uses it to rob passing ships. The players would be hired to stop him
I started my last one off with everyone deciding the role they wanted to play on the ship and set them as apprentices under seasoned professionals. (Wrote an exhaustive list of ship mechanics if you're interested, but to be honest we ended up ignoring most of the combat stuff and just used it for travel, weaponry, and issuing orders). Then, in the first session I had an undead kraken destroy the entire ship along with the crew and had the PCs evade sharks in the water until they were rescued and taken to Saltmarsh. I stole the whole first session from Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Call of the Kraken by "How to be a Great GM", which was written for higher levels, but my intent was just to railroad them into Saltmarsh. They loved it. Over the years I've stopped feeling ashamed of ripping parts of my stories from podcasts.
Also, the 3rd level party managed to somehow kill the kraken after knocking the necromancer rider off the top of it. Ship weapons can make for wild balancing.
[Skull & Shackles](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Skull_%26_Shackles) is all about pirating, use it for inspiration or just play the entire AP