Wot I’m (Hoping) to Play: 7th Sea Second Edition

My Sunday RPG group has gone through many iterations, but our core group loves 7th Sea. So to say we were very happy that 7th Sea was

7th Sea is a swashbuckling roleplaying game game set in a pseudo-Europe that takes some small cues from history, but much more from the history of Swashbuckling books, movies, and games like The Three Musketeers , Zorro, Sid Meier’s Pirates and The Princess Bride.

All the nations in 7th sea are clearly identifiable as a pastiche of various European nations, but more accurately, the LEGEND of those nations… so Avalon, a pastiche of England and the United Kingdom, is associated with the Sidhe, as well as fractious “partners” in the Highland Marches and Inismore (Scotland and Ireland, for example). Their queen became queen after restoring the Graal, a holy Avalonian artifact (gee, wonder what that can be). Castille, is another example. It’s a mashup of real-world Spain and Mexico, with the Inquisition openly hunting down scientists and learned men, while the mysterious masked wanderer El Vago (or El Vagabundo) saves who he can from the Inquisition’s wrath. (Yup, a Zorro pastiche against the Castillian Inquisition).

I could go on for paragraphs about the various nations, (instead I will just direct you to the 7th Sea page on TV Tropes.. prepare to spend some time reading!)  but the core thing is that there’s a lot you can recognize, but it goes for a more cinematic veritas than real world feel. You can say “Well, in England, the King had X powers, so that shouldn’t happen”…. This is Avalon, not England. Plan accordingly.

Things are different, so the core feeling is: Would it be awesome as a movie? Yes? Then it’s there. Some of the game mechanics were a bit wonky.. you got a bonus called Drama Dice for doing thematically awesome stuff, like swinging from a chandelier and knocking over a bunch of bad guys by dropping a giant curtain on them with a single sword slash… but no one really wanted to SPEND those bonus dice to do even cooler stuff, because unspent Drama Dice turned into experience points at the end of a session. But still, in an era that was getting more and more tightly controlled (3rd edition dungeons and dragons was out at the same time (1999-2000), and brought into the gaming lexicon the “free five-foot step”, 7th Sea was a breath of fresh air. Heroes can easily dispatch groups of weaker bad guys, amusingly called, as an homage to the Princess Bride, “Brute Squads”.. Villains however, take a lot more to take down.

They tried various things to boost 7th Sea (including a CCG, like it’s sister game system, the Legend of Five Rings, which was another game that had both a CCG and RPG, and had a lot of similar mechanics), and eventually, giving in to the d20 craze and making a d20 version, which fell flatter then a pancake run over by a steamroller. The game system had been out of print for a decade when AEG, the owners of the intellectual property, sold it back to John Wick, the original creator, as AEG was getting out of the RPG business. Mr. Wick promised a kickstarter, and wow, did he deliver. The goal was a meager $30,000… and it was met within like 5 minutes!

Highest first day of any pen and paper RPG kickstarter in history (something on the grounds of $300K, just in the first 24 hours). It’s now at over $500,000, and there’s STILL A MONTH TO GO.

I can’t wait to see where we go from here.