Category: 7th Sea

ARRRRRRRR.

It be International Talk Like A Pirate Day, me hearties! Me gamin’ mates and me, we reveled in the holli-day wi’ a special session where we played the Pirates Who Didn’t Do Anything. There were fights, and captains tossed in the brink, and sirens, and many, many cabbages consigned to a cruel fate, by the powers! And did we die?

YES*!

Arrrrrr.

Moe Lane

*At least I did. I got traded a golden cursed idol in exchange for my pants; and I promptly named him Claude and got a stick to put him on so he could see. We were last seen walking into the water to give Claude back to the Sea Queen, but that was OK because I was really a Sidhe all along.

…So that all looks a little weirder when I write it out like that.

Sample Hero: Gerard du Arrant [7th Sea].

I put this together as part of a 7th Sea competition; I wanted to get in on writing flavor text for the game. Alas, they did not decide to go with me.  Alas, alack, their loss. I mean, I’m being arrogant here, perhaps — but I rather liked this.  I think that you can figure out what’s going on, just by looking at what I wrote.

Anyway…

Gerard du Arrant sourly contemplated the scruffy, disheveled, and generally disreputable ruffian staring back at him in the hand mirror.  All in all, he mused, this new look of his failed to satisfy. Oh, the beard could pass muster — when not even an officer in a Musketeer’s regiment can attend to his toilet, then no man in the regiment could be fairly called dirty. And the dirt and the bandages had their own charms; they reassured the viewer that Gerard had done his duty as a soldier, and never mind that this might come as a surprise to some, including of course Gerard himself.

The problem lay in the eyes. Those eyes disapproved of Gerard, and the braver he grew in battle the more they disapproved of what happened after the fighting ended. The Musketeer conceded that those eyes had a point. A soldier killed the enemy; very well, that happened. A soldier might find it necessary to kill foreign peasants; such things also happened, but a decent man would see to it that they happened as rarely as possible. But to kill your own peasants? Even at l’Empereur Alexandre’s express orders? By what right did Alexandre have to order that?

And, more to the point: by what right did l’Empereur have to expect Gerard du Arrant to play bandit by hanging farmers?

Continue reading Sample Hero: Gerard du Arrant [7th Sea].

The 7th Sea: Khitai Kickstarter is half-done.

7th Sea: Khitai ticking along reasonably well, in fact. It’s not going to hit the original 7th Sea’s Kickstarter numbers, of course, but then the odds of that monster success being replicated were always going to be low. Mind you, if it was a new edition of Legend of the Five Rings we’d be seeing a completely different situation in place*.

I do have to admit: if I had a spare grand or so I’d be kind of tempted to port in my favorite 7th Sea character. Liam O’Lathlann (not O’Toole). Like my wife’s character, he was a Finnegan boxer; unlike my wife’s character, Liam was convinced that he was some kind of bizarre martial artist / monk / bard multi-class character who could jump off of walls and hit you sixteen times before landing.  Mostly because my dice loved that character, and I got inside my GM’s decision loop early, and often**.

Good times, good times.

Moe Lane

Continue reading The 7th Sea: Khitai Kickstarter is half-done.

My players and I did combat for 7th Sea today.

It was an interesting time, although we’re all going to have to look more closely at the rules.  I also probably should make sure that the Villains have more dice in their pool to do Villainous stuff. Well, that’s how you learn.

If you’re interested: the major thing that we took away from 7th Sea combat is that it’s a bit more abstracted, or at least that we were treating it as abstracted.  It was very easy to jump about and shift focus, which is fine if you’re used to actually roleplaying and improvising dialogue. If you’re more of the ‘I hit him with my weapon for 1d8 damage’ school of gaming then you might find it less intriguing.

All in all, I think that the combat system works, but it’s not very intuitive. We may end up coming up with significant numbers of house rules.  Which, hey, is just what we all did with first edition 7th Sea!

The 7th Sea’s Explorer’s Society site is live.

Finally. Basically, it’s a format for making your own 7th Sea material and, hey, selling it (you get 50% of any profits, John Wick gets 25%, DriveThruRPG gets 25%).  This is acceptable, given that John Wick’s also made a bunch of free stock stuff available for people who want to do this, including maps, pictures, coats of arms, that sort of thing.  I gotta sit down with my gaming group (we’re in the middle of a 7th Sea campaign) next session and really TALK about this.  This may change how we run games for a while.