After some proper explanations, it all started making sense. The Joytown envoy was an old friend of Greenlump’s, and the whole capture was a ruse orchestrated by the two. Now I get that you don’t fully understand the brilliance of our cap’n plan here, not everyone is as quick witted as me, so I shall tell you how things were supposed to go.
So, this envoy fellow of ours was supposed to bring our cap’n and his captors to Joytown where they would be very handsomely rewarded and we and all of our imprisoned crewmembers would be executed. But with some good disguises and Captain’s trickery, we were about to put a very unique spin to these events. Our dwarven captors would be handed in, we would be handsomely rewarded, and no-one would be executed, since we would be long gone once our little prank became known. This wasn’t the end to this plan however. You see, Joytown wasn’t the place that put a bounty on our head, theirs was surely the biggest, but others wanted the satisfaction of bringing us down themselves. Not the dwarves fortunately, which was the reason why captain was raiding their waters in the last few weeks.
Our cap’n was about to do a con of the century, he would himself collect the bounty on his head, and he would do so more than once. We knew that the word would get out eventually, but we were keen on finding out how many times we could do this; as it turned out, quite a lot.
One would think that when offering so much money, they would be better prepared for such schemes. We even expected them to often see through our illusions and disguises, in which case we would offer our true cap’n instead, who would then use the little magical failsafe on his cutlass, that often allowed him to escape from prisons in his earlier years, or so he told me at least. But no such precautions were taken. Was our bribed envoy such a trustworthy man? Were the authorities so excited to torture our cap’n that they forgot to check if it was really him? Was our plan so genius and yet stupidly simple that it didn’t occur to them someone might just do it? Are the sophisticated races so trustworthy and gullible? I do not know the answer to that. Oh, and by the way I know that some of you might consider yourselves members of the sophisticated races, and you think that I somehow am trying to insult you. That is not my intention, all of you who listen to me and think of joining us I consider honourable members of the monstrous folk as we are called, and I don’t care about you others, you can go knitting and carousing and drinking wine, and whatever your kind does.
But anyway, we managed to collect bounties from Joytown and all the other Free Cities of the sea of Joy. three kingdoms of the Sun Empire also fell victim to our brilliance, The high elves of Weastaria were our last attempt, but their system was far more thought out than the others and we barely escaped unscathed. After that, we stopped doing it and we decided that we needed some proper force to defend ourselves before word of our cap’n return got out. With all the money we stole, we started amassing the biggest pirate force to have ever sail this sea. Everyone was welcome in our crew, sophisticated or otherwise: As we speak now, we have a small fleet of ships manned with goblins, kobolds, trolls, gnolls, orcs, minotaurs, and more…
And that’s how the story goes so far, but not how it ends. This is why I am here in this very tavern at this very moment with this very purpose: We are going to be the first force to successfully raid Joytown, we are going to attack that wretched island, we are going to rescue my old crew, we are going to get our capital ship “The Flotsam” back from their greedy hands, and after that, we shall be the most feared pirates to ever sail these seas.
I’m not offering you just a place in our crew, I am offering you to become history, our names shall be feared for the centuries to come, emperors and kings shall cower before us, and we will become legends. So feel free to stay here in this dusty old tavern and drink your ale, but those of you who wish to be remembered, who wish to have all the gold and treasure you want, those of you who wish to see the wonders of this world, only to pillage them to their last coin. Those of you who wish to be free…join us. Join us, and fight under the flag…of Captain Greenlump.