Repost since I posted this wayyyy too earlier in the morning today

Repost since I posted this wayyyy too earlier in the morning today

I was wondering if anyone here has run the new 7th Sea. I own the old books from waaaaaay back in the day, and have recently picked up the new edition. Seems nice, but I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out what has changed. Eisen seems a tad different now in the regard that they now have Hexenkraft and Drachneisen is now, like, super-magic and many of the fencing schools have been cut, it seems, as well as a Not!Poland, but besides these, I am wondering what the general consensus of the game is, and if some of the splat-books would be a good investment.

And maybe a pdf dump, pretty please? If only so I can take a look for myself

Other urls found in this thread:

4shared.com/s/fVJZyj8XEce
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski
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Fine, here.
4shared.com/s/fVJZyj8XEce
And to answer your question; it’s flawed as hell and needs just as much houseruling as 1e did due to John Wick still being John fucking Wick and fucking up simple shit left and right.

I thought John Wick was a good game designer?

...

Well, if he isn't, that explains that cringe-ass atheist rant vid on his youtube channel likenen God to a bad game designer or something. idk. I knew he has some lovers and some haters, I just never understood why.

That aside, what would be good to houserule?

The combat, the way villains work, the way the game improves skills and characters (I like the idea the book presents but it’s not practical for most players to write up a goddamn novel synopsis AND have the GM incorporate it into the game along with everyone elses), the task resolution system, maybe some of the magic systems too.

So basically just the entire fucking thing.

So it's a bad game? Like, utterly?

I still play it with my group and my ladyfriend, but we’ve heavily simplified and altered the rules. Let’s just say the basic resolution mechanics and skills are okay once you remove the annoying “all possible actions must have lists of multiple planned consequences and counter-actions”. Nothing special, just okay, a simple single-dice type numbers-counting thing where if the number is higher then a target number it’s good and it then it’s bad.
New setting’s okay though, though if you prey to the Red God of Elephants in fear of the SJW Fiends and their insidious takeover of America or what have you then the rather larger number of female rulers and homosexual characters might be off-putting. Me, I just John Wick deliberately and blatantly targeting a semi-existing gamer demographic for publicity points his game isn’t even popular enough to even get in the first place.

>rather larger number of female rulers and homosexual characters might be off-putting


Outside of Not!Elizabeth and those two bits of artwork at me and my gay friends laughed at and criticized:

>Gay men all have secret trysts in faggy gardens cuz forbidden romance
>All lesbians have their stints out in the open with one bulldyke firing a pistol in the air because so subversive and beautiful

I didn't see much of what you're talking about. Unless I'm really mis-remembering something.

Anyway, that shit can be mostly ignored, I am more concerned with mechanics and how bad they need to be houseruled, or simplified. Makes me kind of glad in multiple points in the books he says "if you don't like a rule, throw it out".

I skimmed the magic section, but from what I hear it's kind of a mess.

The issue is the Risk-Consequence system from Houses of the Blooded (which he literally completely lifted onto this edition of 7th Sea) requires...a LOT of activity and planning on the GM’s part.
Each possible action needs to have a Goal and a method used to get it, which is your fine basic skill roll shit you see everywhere, right? No big deal.
But then each action needs to have a list of Consequences (multiple minor potential side effects to failure or success) and Opportunities (things that can happen that you can spend Raises on), which all sounds well and good except for the system to work correctly the GM for the most part CANNOT make these up on the fly. This means certain actions with would otherwise be simple (as simple as “hit them with a sword”) often become unnecessarily complicated because the GM didn’t write a goddamn flowchart for each thing any player could do. In addition there’s zero guidelines for potential Consequences and Opportunitues, which knowing Wick’s GM Control Freak tendencies sounds suspiciously like something he put in the rules so he can make tasks as difficult or as easy to succeed at as he wants to.

There’s several other rules that are like that as well, such as Villains not following PC rules and instead just being a “power” dice pool that is used to roll that can be reduced by players foiling plots, which sounds rad except then it says “a villain can regain any or all of his dice by doing plots off-screen that the PC’s didn’t know about”, which basically means it’s in the rules that the GM can literally handwave player progress away if he wants to, which is EXACTLY the kind of thing Wick would do if you deviate from the story he’s planned for you.

It’s in the later books mostly; most of the major pirate factions have women leaders, and Captain Reis is suddenly a woman as well even though he’s said to be a she in the core book.
Personally I didn’t care; I mostly just used the new backstory for Reis and kept the old look.

>I skimmed the magic section, but from what I hear it's kind of a mess.
Magic is indeed mostly a mess.
A lot of it is less about sorcery-specific flavorful effects and more about metarule manipulation stuff, and the new Polish sorcery is deliberately incredibly broken and barely has any actual rules in it at all, acting more like a narrative plot device.
The Not!Poland is clearly Wick’s new favorite thing (he mentioned going there twice during the Kickstarter for 2e with a third trip planned) and to some degree it shows in the setting as well.

>even though she’s said to be a he in the core book
Is what I meant.

What was the point of just randomly reshuffling up the countries again?

So he could add Poland. That’s about it.
Most of the other countries are pretty much the same in execution if not in precise detail (Montaigne now has a Forest of Ardennes for example that basically is a fairytale woodland complete with ogres and witches and shit), though Vesten is now WAY different and doesn’t have the clearly metaplot-focused Vendel-Vesten conflict anymore, instead with both working in relative harmony. Jarls and carls are just treated as the “warrior class” protedtinh the Vendel-like traders and are no strangers to modernization anymore.

On the upside the map is less hysterically stupid to accommodate the Sarmatian Commonwealth and not literally every country is bordered by a mountain range on both sides anymore.

They also made Theah not necessarily the focus of absolutely everything, since there is now a fully-fledged Carribean and New World.

...

Bits of the Crescent Empire and (apparently) India.

Numa is apparently like Greece now instead of it’s own city, and it’s located just off the coast of North Africa (Ifri in Terra).

OP here

So, the consensus is: simplify the fuck out of the rules, and Not!Poland's magic is broken as hell. Or is it ALL magic is broken?

Not all of it, but some of it.
Sarmatia’s magic is that you have a unique Demon attached to your character (a “devai”, literally a “Devil”) who has a purview such as “Fire” or “Storms” or “Darkness”, and within that vague aspect your devai can do ANYTHING at all. No rolls needed, this happens automatically. The downside is, the bigger the favor you ask the devai to do, the bigger favor the devai gets to ask in return, with Major Favors being HUGELY potent acts of magic in-game.
There’s hints in the Crescent Empire book that the devai are also daeva from the Crescent Empire myths, so basically it’s literally Evil Genie Magic.
The entire thing is based off of the Twardoski fable, which interestingly is also the clear basis for Olgierd von Everc from Witcher 3’s Hearts of Stone DLC.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski

Also, I dunno about a “consensus” OP; you’ve been talking just to me this entire time. I would have responded last thread you made but I was at work.

>KHEMET
WE

I should be noted that despite the inspiration for the sorcery’s devai being literally Satan, the magic in itself isn’t evil. In fact, each Sanderis sorcerer is actually something of a “jailer” for their unique devai and they are taught as much by their teachers; you’re not supposed to make 7 major deals because this means that the devai’s contract is fulfilled, which likely results in the thing getting free. Each sorcerer “passes” his devai to his apprentice (sometimes upon death), and the 7-major-wish contract resets to the new sorcerer.
In the Commonwealth they actually tightly police themselves and hunt down rogue Sanderis users because they simply cannot risk that a stupid or desperate sorcerer won’t keep making major deals and set their devai free.

So wait, what are the kind of favors the devai asks for in return then?

It depends on the devai.
For minor uses of it’s powers they tend to ask you small but often annoying or troublesome things. The can’t ask you to commit murder or anything like that, but the small things they ask you to do might have long-term consequences you aren’t aware of since the devai not only shares your senses but has been at this whole tit-for-tat game you play with them for millennia. For Major favors, they can ask you to do pretty much anything they want, which is often something extremely difficult, troubling, and very specific. Even if it’s something as seemingly simplistic as a murder the murder will always have consequences far in excess of the act of killing itself.

The only stipulation on the devai’s favor’s seems to be that the favors have to realistically be within the capabilities of their current contract holder.

So if the demon-thing gets it’s sorcerer killed, it doesn’t get free then I’m guessing?

No, that immediately sends it’s contract to the regulating body of sorcerers that teach and police Sanderis users, at which point they begin looking for a new sorcerer to hold it’s contract.
Basically it’s in the best interest of the devai to preserve the life of it’s sorcerer and try and place him or her in situations through coercion or manipulation where it will continue making major deals with it, often by using minor bargains to slowly paint the Sanderis user into a corner over time. Meanwhile it’s in the Sanderis user’s best interest to try and wrangle whatever favors he can from the devai and solve the resultant ruiminerations as cleverly and efficiently as possible so the devai doesn’t get the better of him over time.

Hence the term “Sanderis”, or “Contract”.

why not just NOT hand the contract over to someone new and let them stay locked up forever?

It’s never explained why, but given the rules-lawyers way the devai seem to work my guess is that they have a literal escape clause from their service if nobody holds their contract for a certain period of time.

Dueling is broken too.
Like, way broken. More then sorcery.

As in, *still* broken, like 1st ed?

Differently broken. Duelists are vastly more dangerous than anyone without a gun in combat. I think I'd make dueling all or nothing if/when I run it again, either everyone had it or no one does. Either way, villains will need tweaking as far as wounds and die pools. If everyone's a duelist, villains will need a buff or die in one round. If no one is, villains need lower die pools so combat doesn't drag on to the point of tedium.

I removed dueling almost entirely, with Duelists basically getting JUST their special dueling maneuver and nothing else (reducing the cost of the Duelist talent to 3), effectively giving them an optional “special attack” in combat.
Villains I just treated as PC’s, and I’m trying to remember how I handled Henchmen.

Really, 1e’s Brute>Henchman>Villain thing was fine, I dunno why he changed it aside from not being able to push his stupid self-created Houses of the Blooded system with it.