I have to admit, I never got a chance to play the first edition of 7th Sea beyond a single one-shot back in college. Still, I owned both of the core rulebooks and a couple of the cultural sourcebooks, and had read through them. I enjoyed the setting, with its parallels to 17th century Europe but a rich history all of its own. Mysticism and treachery were alive and well within the realms. Still, I can’t say that could tell you a single thing about the actual system beyond that it was a roll and keep system with the hero trying to hit a target number. So when I saw the Kickstarter for the second edition of the game, I didn’t jump on board right away. But after seeing that the rewards included PDF copies of all of the first edition books, I happily plopped my money down. It suddenly became too good of a deal to pass up. Still, I wasn’t expecting much. I honestly didn’t even download the advance rules or the PDF of the final product beforehand – I kind of forgot about it.
Then I got my physical copy of the book, and I was absolutely blown away by it. They didn’t just update the rules for a new edition, they took the framework that was the world of Theah and built it on an entirely new, much more exciting and dynamic foundation of rules with which to run the game.
First things first, the book is absolutely gorgeous. It clocks in at 303 pages, all full color, larger than average print and absolutely stunning artwork on nearly every page. From the character references to the half page illustrations to the full two page spreads that introduce each chapter, my jaw dropped upon seeing each of them.
Onto the actual content of the game – after the initial and necessary “what is a roleplaying game” introduction, the first 100 pages are dedicated to exploring the world of Theah – the world in which the game takes place. They make no secrets that the world is heavily influenced by 17th Century Europe, and the cultures and trappings of the world reflect that, but the world stands on its own as a living, breathing organism instead of just a fantasy parallel in this reviewer’s opinion. It starts by introducing the various nations, their respective places in the world, and their relations with each other, covering them briefly in only a few pages each. It gives only a very high level overview of the world afterwards, however. The church, the geography, and high level overviews of various cultural aspects of the world – guilds, secret societies, piracy, ancient civilizations, and the current state of knowledge and scholarship in the world are all discussed at minor length.
Character creation is discussed in the next chapter, again giving a brief overview of the various nations before taking the reader through the steps of creation. There is nothing revolutionary about the system they chose for character creation – you build your character concept, spend your starting points to increase your traits, pick your backgrounds to determine your starting skills and advantages and then spend additional points to further improve those selections or buy new ones. The skill list is broad, encouraging the player and GM to utilize them in interesting ways – for example, you could use the Brawl skill if you simply wanted to punch someone. Or you could use the same skill to wrestle them to the ground or simply to grab them and drag them into an alleyway. The Theft skill is as useful for picking locks and disarming traps as it is for picking pockets or casing a potential mark. They do provide an interesting little questionnaire that you can choose to walk your character concept through before or while you build them to answer more and more things about them as an individual within the world and give them more depth, breadth, and roleplaying hooks.
The most intriguing thing to me is how they chose to handle character advancement. Unlike other games, you don’t simply gain levels or earn points at the end of every session that you can bank to advance your hero – your advancement is tied directly to your hero completing stories through play. These stories are quests or adventures of varying length, some personal, some told as part of the larger group. Every “step” involved in completing the story allows you to buy an advantage of equivalent cost or increase a skill to the next rank that costs that number of steps. So if your story was four steps long, you could buy a four point advantage or improve one of your rank 3 skills to rank 4. Your traits are fairly static – they can be increased only a small number of times, but after the maximum is reached, you can spend your advancements to shift those points around, redistributing them if you find you have a different vision of your character numbers-wise after you spend your initial points. It is through your character’s stories that they will well and truly define who they are, however. How they choose to be a hero is more important than how they are built as a hero.
As to the actual rules of the game, what little I remember of the first edition has been completely rewritten and reworked for second edition. Gone is the roll and keep system that was initially used. Instead, whenever you’re called on to make a test, you choose your approach – which is a fancy way of telling the GM what you want to accomplish. The GM tells you what combination of Trait and Skill to roll, you gather a number of 10 sided dice, and you see how many times you can make “10” out of the results. Each 10 you can create earns you 1 Raise, which can be spent to accomplish your goal, avoid consequences, and gain opportunities. Raises are important for a few other things as well, for example in an action sequence, the number of Raises you generate on a roll determines your initiative – the more Raises you have, the sooner you go.
Changing your approach during the same turn and doing something different costs you additional Raises to accomplish. There are a few differences in how these rules work between the Action Sequence and the Dramatic Sequence, but it’s mostly about pacing and timing actions against everyone else. Action Sequences are fast, frantic, and a little bit chaotic, but they should be. Dramatic Sequences let your characters explore their skills and actions a little bit more, but the core mechanic remains the same. Characters have a supply of Hero Points that ebbs and flows through the course of the game that they can use to power their special abilities and dig deep into their personal wells of heroism. Likewise, the GM has access to a special pool of points called Danger Points. These Danger Points are the villainous counterpart to the PCs Hero Points and can be spent to activate villain effects or simply make things harder for the PCs. Typically, as the Danger Pool increases, so do the player’s Hero Point totals, making it possible for the PCs to continue to answer the villains stroke for stroke.
This game is big on the idea of the social contract – when you pick up the dice, you know exactly what you want to accomplish, exactly what the consequences of failure are, and exactly what additional opportunities that you might be able to seize with a successful outcome as well. Dice pools tend to be on the larger side, and chances of a bonus die or two are plenty, so the game is designed with that in mind – characters are expected to be suitably flashy and heroic. As such, they have a certain kind of immortality built into their characters – I’ll touch on that more in a little bit.
Enemy NPCs come in one of two varieties – Brute Squads and Villains. Brute Squads are the town guard, the pirate crews, or the hired swordsmen that the PCs tangle with regularly. They exist to slow the PCs down a little bit, but also to let them show off. A skilled PC can carve their way through Brutes pretty effectively and efficiently. Villains are the major enemies. They have a single score known as their Villainy Rank. This is a combination of what is known as their Strength and their Influence. It defines exactly how powerful of a villain they actually are. Strength is a measure of their combat ability and ability to take damage. As a villain tangles with the characters in a duel of blades, damage is tracked against their Strength. Strength also determines their combat effectiveness, letting them buy a number of advantages, dueling styles, and sorceries equal to 5 plus their Strength score. Influence governs the character’s social power and ability to well…influence people. It is gained as the villain completes their various schemes and spent to do any number of things, such as recruiting henchmen or discovering facts about the PCs. Monsters are built the same way, as normal enemies, but they have a variety of special abilities that are unique to them.
Sorceries are especially interesting. They are sufficiently powerful, letting the PCs do things that bend and defy the rules. From the dark and dangerous hexenwerke of Eisen to the Glamour Knights of Avalon to the literal deals with the devil that sorcerers from the Sarmatian Commonwealth, each school of sorcery has its own unique feel, its own unique power, and its own unique cost for that power. You don’t get power for nothing. It is going to cost you. Always.
The most interesting thing about this game for me is the assumption that the PCs cannot be killed by chance – happenstance doesn’t kill heroes, villains do. A character cannot be killed by falling from a balcony, that’s not a heroic end for them. They may suffer a lot of wounds at the hands of the villain’s musketeers, but they do not die, they simply fall helpless. Killing a character is a deliberate act. Death is a storytelling tool in this game, and should be used to advance the story. It is never arbitrary, and should be a discussion between the players and the GM. The players should know when their number is being called, because they should have had a talk with the GM about how they want their character to go out, and then play the death scene to the hilt and go out like a hero. This really hammers the home the idea of the social contract that this rule set seems to be pushing for at the table. You can rest easy knowing that the GM is not going to screw you over and kill your character arbitrarily, but you need to be willing to step up the drama for the good of the story.
All in all, I am really excited about this game. Not only did the rules excite me as far as wanting to get it on the table, but also for ideas about some of my own projects. The focus on dramatic action and storytelling instead of playing fair and always by the rules is always refreshing to see, and John Wick delivers it in spades here I feel. There are no equipment lists. There are not pages and pages of rules devoted to the intricacies of dueling with an opponent. Those things are simply not needed with this rule set they developed. The only real complaint I have with the book is that for the wealth of material in there, it feels too short. There are a lot of things concerning the world and especially the metaplot that he touches on briefly to introduce them, and then doesn’t really explain how they fit in the world or how they may fit into a game. I do feel like certain GMs may not feel confident enough to run a game of 7th Sea in the world of Theah because of this. But it also makes me look forward to the wealth of additional sourcebooks that were funded as a part of the Kickstarter that will be released in the coming months. Simply put, this game has a place on your gaming shelf, even if you don’t know it yet. You can purchase the PDF for $29.99 at Drive-Thru RPG. The hardcover book should be available from John Wick Presents in the coming months.
Ben Erickson
