Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced modders make Blackbeard playable, but here’s a syringe-shaped reason to avoid historically accurate pirate roleplay

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced’s an idyllic pirate adventure, especially given it trains its eye firmly on Edward Kenway’s quest for booty. Naturally, Kenway hangs out with a bunch of real pirates from history throughout his time on the high seas, including the most famous one, Blackbeard. There’s now a mod that’ll let you play as the bearded buccaneer in Black Flag Resynced. So, here I am to point out a grisly reason you might not fancy getting too into roleplaying as Mr Edward Teach (or Mr Edward Thatch, depending on which accounts you believe).

On the face of it, living life in Blackbeard’s boots thanks to modder Kamzik123’s playable Blackbeard sounds like an exhilarating barrel of fun. You light some cannon fuses in your beard, you capture some galleons, you swagger about some ports spending your booty while earning legendary status. Brill, and just like a real pirate. At least on paper.

Warning: The waters that lie ahead in this article aren’t for the squeamish or faint of heart.

It’s at this juncture that I must point you to some historical evidence uncovered about a decade ago by archaeologists exploring the real-world wreckage of Blackbeard’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Among their findings, as documented by CNN, were a urethral syringe used to inject mercury for the treatment of syphilis and a clyster pump used to deliver medical enemas.

Now, in terms of whether the former would have been used by Blackbeard, from the small amount (I assure you) of looking into this I’ve done, there doesn’t look to be an 100% concrete answer. The BBC have noted Blackbeard as someone who “probably had syphilis”, citing mercury as one of the expensive medical supplies the pirate demanded while blockading the South Carolina city of Charlestown in 1718, which, spoiler alert, is an event depicted in Black Flag and Black Flag Resynced.

All of this to say that if, in downloading the playable Blackbeard mod, you’re after historically realistic roleplay, you might need to factor in some stuff you probably won’t want to. To be clear, this IS NOT me advocating anyone injecting things into their urethra while playing a Ubisoft game about jumping across rooftops. Just that, as I outlined when discussing the Netflix pirate documentary which first informed me of Blackbeard’s potential malady on VG247’s podcast (VG247 in peace), being a real pirate was likely far from the fun time fiction often makes it out to be. It’s the same romanticising most Westerns in gaming and on the big screen do for cowboys. Aside from Red Dead Redemption 2, which dutifully bows to historical accuracy by – spoiler alert again – having its protagonist spend a good portion of the game dying from tuberculosis.

Will there eventually be a Black Flag Resynced mod which adds in a penis-injecting minigame? Probably not. This isn’t Skyrim’s modding community we’re talking about. Not that there’s anything wrong with making a mod about injecting the wangs of Tamriel with chemicals, if that’s your thi-wait, how on Earth did I end writing this sentence?