Whilst Boblin was doing his scheming and spying, our cap’n was using his wits and knowledge of the Joytown underworld to find himself some new additions to the crew. Stealing a ship is nice and all, but it wouldn’t be of much use without some proper sailors to sail her. After scrounging through a number of rotten and shifty taverns, captain found himself in a nice sizeable company of races that were commonly despised by others. Persuading them was no hard task as most of them were piss-poor and bloody angry, mostly thanks to the fact that no decent establishment would hire them and everyone was always looking down on them. But while the old goblin saying “strength is in numbers” is sacred, numbers alone wouldn’t do here, our captain needed some brute muscles as well. Unfortunately the brute strong races usually look down on us goblins as well, and our captain was mostly unsuccessful in persuading them. Most useful to his endeavour would be minotaurs, strong as bulls (hehe…) and phenomenal sailors, but our kinds don’t really see eye to eye, with their honour idiocracy and all. He managed to convince about half of the orcs in Joytown (which means two) but it still cost him a nice bit of begging and grovelling. He exquisitely gambled with a dark dwarf and swindled him out of a stone golem. Mind you the dwarf was long gone when our captain realized he forgot to ask for the command word, but I think he has it in his cabin up to this day, and a fine piece of statuary it is. Our cousins the trolls would have been excellent, but apparently there never was a single troll in Joytown, possibly because they do not really understand sea-travel. After a long search, it seemed that only one other option remained…ogres. They are strong and brutish, that be true, but we goblins like a little bit of subtlety, and while the other strong races can at least grasp the meaning of the word, ogres usually respond to subtlety with “smash, smash, smash”, so our captain didn’t really want to hire them…but he had no choice. He heard that there was a group of about two dozen ogres in town that were looking for a way to legally “smash some humies to bits.” Once our cap’n approached their leader, he noticed that they were at least a little bit more civilised and intelligent than most others of their race, which was a good sign. The bad part was that they were trying their best to be respectable members of society to battle the so called race prejudice. Mind you they were as bloodthirsty and brutish as all other members of their kind, they just wanted to break bones under the banner of civilised races. They wanted organised blood games, arena fights to the death, and other legal ways how to kill people. They usually worked as bouncers, debt collectors and bodyguards, but they created this small community of theirs, because that’s what the proper races do. Once our captain found this out, he realized what had to be done, he had to convince those ogres that stealing a private military vessel, killing the people on it, and using it to do acts of piracy was not forbidden by the law. Fortunately for us, goblins are the best lawyers in the business and from what I’ve heard this wasn’t the hardest case due to a few key points: 1) The plutocratic Joytown laws were made to make the rich get richer and powerful, anything not regarding money was deliberately left with as many loopholes as possible, so the rich can do whatever they want. 2) Our captain is and was a masterful forger. 3) No matter how civilised, ogres are not the brightest. 4) Everyone believes what they want to believe and if someone wants to believe that “humie skulls need smashing to bitz” then it isn’t hard to convince them it is so. So after a little bit of subterfuge, the ogres decided to help our cap’n to “reclaim his stolen ship from the thieves, with the right to kill anyone who defies this order issued by the city council, and to then sail with us as corsairs working for Joytown, but with the ability to raid Joytown ships as well, for the purpose of hiding their true allegiances.” Now that our captain had both crew and information, it was time for the final phase of the plan.