Bacchanalian Retirement

This post takes as its inspiration the pirate lifestyle around which my Scoundrels of Tortuga RM/period piece campaign is set. The core question is this: what do you do with this setting's equivalent of the "Lost for Life" archetype? That is, someone who eschews dreams for the future, and to whom the Bartholomew Roberts quote below seems to apply perfectly:

In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour. In [piracy], plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst is only a sour look or two at choking? No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto.

— Bartholomew Roberts, quoted in Captain Charles Johnson, 

A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (1724)

1. Debauchery as Political Protest

There's plenty of evidence for the fact that most pirates or adventurers did want to retire - at the high end, to buy a pardon and a plantation and live out the rest of their lives as Governor of Jamaica, or buy a ship of their own and give orders instead of taking them; or, more modestly, slink off back home or to the colonies under a new name and live not as a Lord but simply as someone not on the knife edge of starvation. To that, in the context of an RPG, we can add the weird dramatic goals of "pay the old witch woman to remove the curse on my sister" or "buy back the family silver, stolen by el Draque", which may not have happened all that often in real life but are certainly viable narratives for RPG characters and perfectly compatible with the RM retirement model.

However, at the same time, it's important to recognize that the 17th-19th C pirate epoch was one in which social and economic conservatism went hand in hand (see, for example, the existence of sumptuary laws); against this backdrop, some authors have found it possible to recast pirates who "just want to have fun and drink rum" as political activists - flaunting their illicit wealth, dressing ridiculously, and pissing away their plunder not just because it was fun but also as a giant middle finger to the normie world.

In this case, rum-swilling pirates do have a "retirement goal", which is to drink and carouse and overspend enough that they feel - perhaps deep down, perhaps even unconsciously - that their point has been made. At this point, the pirating lifestyle loses its allure and they retire, perhaps even to poverty, but feeling like they have had their fun and defied the finger-wagging authorities to a pleasing degree. The real question is: can they do so while foregoing rational (i.e. sober, emotionally rewarding) relationships, and before the drink kills or cripples them?

2. Drink and the Devil had Done for the Rest

Four rules obtain for the Bacchanalian Retirement Plan. Most of the time I'll be using booze as the core example, but really any kind of excessive consumption might count.

• Your first Dependent gets listed as "Bacchanalian revelry" or "Gambling buddies" or "Whores of Baltimore" or just simply "Rum-soak." It requires Bounty, provokes Vignettes, and heals Humanity just like a regular Dependent; but it never gets Needy or Strained until you make it so (see below).
• Beyond this special Dependent, any regular Dependents you have are always at least Needy. If you want to use them to remove Damnation, you need to throw in a Booty just to get their grudging attention, and they go back to Needy at the beginning of the next session even if you make their upkeep. Missing their upkeep worsens the relationship as in the regular rules. 
• Every time you have a Vignette featuring Bacchanalian Revelry, increment the Upkeep of your Thirst by 1.
• Spending Booty to directly remove Damnation gets you a freebie: every time you do so, you get an extra unit of Damnation to remove, for free.

Treat the rising costs of feeding the character's habit as an addiction, whether it is or not; in other words, a character will prioritize paying Upkeep on their Thirst before their gear or dependents.

3. Cleaning Up

Should a character decide to kick their habit mid-campaign, three things must take place:

• They have to allow their relationship with their "booze dependent" to decay to Severed. This means not only failing to pay its upkeep, but also not removing Damnation through any other means during that time.
• Once the booze relationship is Severed, the character needs to mend bridges with any other dependents (i.e., stop them being Needy)
• They take a Regret, as usual for losing a dependent.

When these three steps have been successfully completed, the character can go back to removing Damnation by paying Booty or relying on the revived Dependents in their life, if any. 

Optionally, going clean like this can become a prerequisite for characters on the Bacchanalian Retirement plan before they can actually retire.