Here's what I did with the campaign.
I drew a linked tree of "benefits" that the players may receive for achieving milestones in the campaign. For every world they add to the Kingdom of Drinax, they may pick one benefit. There are things like:
* extra ship shares (7 first time, then 15 and finally 22, for a total of 44)
* land grants on the newly added worlds (could be turned into a hideout, exploited in business or used as bargaining chips with Aslan)
* infrastructure, up to and including their own shipyard that builds everything at half price
* establishing a network of unspecified contacts to be cashed in later for some information instead of having to roll the dice
* set up trading routes that offer a stable income or supply some normally unavaliable stuff (like anagathics or meson guns). They do need to allocate a crewed ship for each route and it is a minor liability as it can be used by the referee as a plot hook
We did this in the previous campaign, where they worked for a corporation in District 268 and needed to sway worlds into trade alliances whereas they would receive bonuses similar to the ones described above (I wanted to see whether my players would enjoy the whole business of "subtle conquest", and also wanted to stretch time till the pirate campaign is fully published).
Then when they rolled a bad misjump, I saw the opportunity to transition the campaign deeper into the Reach and decided to use it. 24 parsecs from Nabeth to Asim in one go.
They acquainted themselves with Drinax, which was of great help in repairing the ship back to full J-3 and eventually coming back to their corporate base at Avastan. There they learned news that two of the characters have had their infamy catch up with them (one is an ex-pirate, the other amoral geneticist) -- which was actually the reason they moved to District 268 in the first place, but now it was time to flee into the Reach, and Drinax seemed like a dangling opportunity. So they broke up with the corp on good terms (had to give up their stock investments and their big J-3 refitted liner but got a smaller ship, one hundred percent their own) and yay! Pirates of Drinax!
Since then I ran a custom merc campaign on Pourne, then "Treasure Ship" and currently "Ihatei". They are seriously contemplating how much use a smart manipulator can find for Aslan, especially if he has an estate or three to spare. They are allied with Hroal Irontooth (although the alliance is not yet cemented) and command four small ships of their own.
They left a lot of loose ends from both published adventures they played. The Martin II was destroyed at Exe (the vault survived) so I'm contemplating on how to salvage the later part of that adventure. As for the ihatei, the players hired a smuggler to secretly supply Htyowao clan with TL15 weapons. They are planning a trip to Theev now to acquire said weapons. (It's not like Tech-World is gonna sell them Illegal Weapons in bulk, right?)
It looks like if I offered them Adventure 1 next, they would grab at it fast, since they very much want to kill some pirates (to fix their bad Imperial standing) and they are going to Theev anyway. But I'm reluctant. I am going to cook up something of my own design, and they do already have Theev pirate codes from Hroal.
