Ok, this is a very small hack for 7th Sea that introduces an additional use for the Danger Pool, with some (hopefully) interesting consequences.

The addendum is this – Danger may be spent to:

• Introduce a consequence into an action or dramatic sequence. This can be done when villains would act (even if there are no villains in the scene) and takes effect the next time villains would act.

Pretty simple. The timing is the most complicated part, but that’s harder to explain than it is to implement because it’s specific to how action order works. To unpack it a little, when the GM starts with “Ok, 5 raises?” then normally any villain with 5 raises would act, then players would. This spend happens during the slice when that villain action would normally occur, whether or not there is actually a villain acting.

Ok, so that’s all well and good, but why do I want to add such a rule? Two reasons, one simple, one a little more involved.

The simple one is this: I end every session with a stack of points in the danger pool, and that is not desirable. I want more things to spend them on.

This is a result of the fact that the uses of the danger pool end up fairly limited for me in practice. Murder doesn’t come up often. Increasing the total needed for a raise is such a jerk move that I use it very rarely. Activating special abilities is fine, but the kicker is that adding dice – which seems like it should be the go-to move – is less useful than you might think. Consider when you roll dice as the GM. It’s more or less limited to action/dramatic sequences, and specifically it’s at the beginning of the sequence. So it might come in handy to beef up a pool or offset a bad roll, but once the scene actually begins, that’s it. Introducing a spend “in flight” gives me more opportunities to spend danger (and by extension, puts more pressure on me to help my players generate Hero Points, since that’s my most efficient way to get Danger). I think if I can increase the flow of currency, it’s going to feel a lot more fun to spend it.

And that leads into the second reason, and that is that this allows for more dynamic action.

To unpack that a little, it’s worth looking at how action sequences actually play, with and without villains. If you have villains, then villain actions provide a certain amount of push and dynamism in the action, but only some, because the villain is usually greatly outnumbered. If you have only brutes, then there’s no real dynamism, since the scene only reacts to the characters if there are brutes still standing at the end.¹

This is complicated further by the lack of henchman rules². Villains are kind of a big deal, and including a villain in every fight is actually quite complicating if you do it by the book. So how do you get the tempo advantages of a villain without actually having a villain in play? With danger.

So, spending to make things happen during the fight has some obvious benefits, but there is also a subtle benefit to the pacing. See, when a villain spends a raise to act, that action happens. There is no threat or buildup – they simply do it, and that can lead to some rough situations, as illustrated by the villain in the example stealing the MacGuffin by sheer narrative brute force.

So, in contrast, one of the key cadence elements of diceless play (which sequences effectively are) is threat -> response. The opposition does something which will have consequences if it carries through, which drives players to take action to counter, redirect or mitigate (though not nullify – nullify is the “I Dodge”, it’s dull). By introducing consequences in flight, the GM is now armed with threats, and players can respond or ignore as suits them, but in either case it introduces a little back and forth.

(Now, I have to admit there’s a third reason. I have some awesome tokens that I use for Danger & Hero points, and one of my favorite things to do as a GM is to toss one into the middle of the table and declare something horrible. It’s just fun. So any excuse to do that is a win.)

Anyway, this is going to be used in my next session. Will report on how it goes.

1. Unless special abilities are triggered, but those have limitations, and have a weird sort of absolutism to them as written. Especially kidnapper and thief if the point of the conflict is to prevent a kidnapping or theft. ↩︎
2. Henchmen were a construct in First Edition 7th Sea, who were better than brutes, but less good than villains. They’re actually very easy to implement in the new 7th Sea – just give an NPC a die pool and let her roll without the other villain trappings – but it feels like an intentional absence, so I tread carefully around it. ↩︎

We started with a flashback to the previous session to throw in a little extra color for the night when Zeta watched the Ladies’ townhouse before departure. She spotted Marcella sneaking out, tailed her, got made, and had a very civil exchange (both of them masked, of course) that gave a little bit more of a sense of the NPC (and tied her into Zeta in advance of the game to come).

The first half of the session revolved around the arrival of Princess Bera at the court of Kirkwall and the assorted problems that came with that, especially since The Macduff remained conspicuously absent. The group was kept close at hand by simple virtue of the fact that Bera and Marcella trusted that they weren’t enemies (a certainty that could not be extended to the rest of the court). This lead to a few things:

• Captain Quinn was a loud voice in favor of the new Princess and got in at least one scuffle over the topic. How much of his motivation was genuine support for Bera and how much was “Screw you, Macduff” is an exercise left up to the viewer. He also got drawn into a poorly thought out romance (his usual kind) with Marcella.
• Doctor Valdis was the only one in the group with any real sense of why a Princess of Vesten didn’t make much sense, which lead to some axe-throwing-and-discussion with the Princess that revealed that this marriage is part of her father making a bid for the seat of the High Thane. Valdis also had some business discussions with Edwin MacBride, which revealed MacBride’s interest in closer trade ties with Vendel.
• Basillio was offered the position as head of Bera’s guard. He deferred, so instead Bera and Marcella asked him to help them find some trustworthy (or at least reliably-bought) men to serve as her guard so she did not have to rely on Highlanders.
• Basillio and Zeta went recruiting, and found an old comrade-in-arms (and student) of Basillio’s named Paolo (explicitly sourced in Basillio’s current story), and recruited him for the job. The interview consisted of a fight with Bera, which went well enough to get him the job.
• Arrangements were made for an obnoxious MacBride cousin to be available to earn a beating from the princess, which played out as planned.

The second half of the session was mostly fight and aftermath. At a party, attendees started passing out due to drugged Wine, and a large number of men (who it turned out were working for the embarrassed MacBride cousin) attempted to kidnap the princess, and the only ones in a position to fight were the PCs (who disdain this Avalonian swill, excepting Captain Quinn, who had Glamour magic to keep him going) and Paolo. This all seemed bad enough, but then a dart hit the entertainer’s dancing bear, and marksmen started getting into position on the wall.

Basillio and his companion went back to back in front of the (semi-conscious) princess and held off the incoming brutes while Zeta and Valdis wealth with the Marksman and Captain Quinn placed himself in the path of the rampaging bear. Things seemed to be almost under control when Paolo’s shadow reached up an started strangling him, and Basillio’s shadow stepped out of the ground and assumed a duelists pose.

While Basillio fended off the shadow and the remaining brutes, new brutes arrived, and were intercepted by Valdis in a most violent fashion. Zeta took off over a wall to try to find Marcella and Quinn faced down the bear. Things were not looking great for the Princess until two things happened.

First: Quinn beat the bear. Not through strength, but by sheet dogger stubbornness (and taking 18 hits in one go, and shrugging it off). Having established dominance, he rode upon the bears’ back and into the mob of brutes descending on Basillio to devastating effect.

Second, Zeta found Marcella – unconscious – but upon approaching her was attached by a figure who literally stepped out of the shadows, struck, and stepped back into them. As she readied herself for him to strike again, he instead spread the shadows to darken the entire room, and moved to strike. However, Zeta spun a web from the threads of fate, allowing her to sense where her attacker was and catch him by surprise. He was previously hurt, but something else pulled him back into the shadows, dispelling the darkness and also dispelling the magical shadows back at the party. Valdis finished off her reinforcements with aplomb, and all seemed well enough again.

Obviously, some chaos followed, and the offending MacBride was dealt with by his own clan in a fairly gruesome fashion. But there was no time to rest – in the absence of a way to hurry the MacDuff home, it was necessary to reach out to Vesten and make the correct political noises. And, of course, what ship would be better suited to delivering gifts and news than The Gates?

—

Ok, GM time

• We didn’t touch the dice for the first half of the session. This is not meant as a broad statement about RP, but rather is kind of indicative of the fact that 7th Sea feels like a diceless system with dice to me, and I’m starting to embrace that for all its complexities and apparent contradictions.
• But partly because of that, I pressed hard on this fight. All in all there were ten 5-strength brute squads, plus the adversary using shadow magic.
• We also have fully adopted the “Duelist school damage bonuses don’t apply against brutes” rules, which continue to work well. Without those rules, Basillio and Paolo (who got 12 raises in the first round) would probably have obliterated most of them in a single round.
• Basillio’s Melee is now a 5, and the jump from 4 to 5 is nowhere near as scary as the jump from 3 to 4 was.
• It is really proving night and day to see Glamour next to Sorte. Glamour is fun, exciting and sees constant use. Sorte is flavorful, but hard to engage usefully. I am absolutely going to be writing some hacks for it.
• I leaned very heavily on the enemy’s magic during this fight, mostly because I had a surplus of danger points and a hankering to use them. When he did a magical effect, I paid a point, since that seemed fair, but it was a little ad hoc.
• We had just gotten the Pirate Nations preview, and I’d given the players some free XP, so we looked over the mechanical bits with some enthusiasm (I also have OPINIONS about the book as a whole, but that’s another post). The Ocean’s Favorite was perfect for Captain Quinn (lots of bonuses for being an awesome ship captain) and Basillio is pursuing My Word is My Bond because it’s colorful (Swear to do something, spend some HP, for the rest of the scene, so long as you are upholding the oath, add the # of HP as raises to every risk you take).
• Also, we collectively erased Archery Dueling and the Speed Load Advantage from our universe.

All in all, it was a fun session, and pushing the fight hard paid out very well, and I think there’s room to push harder. I’m still not satisfied with how to handle villains at a tactical level, and I need to think about that more, but I now feel a bit more comfortable leaning on brute squads, so I’ll probably start exploiting them more.

That said, I really need to re-read the rules about brute squads taking risks, because I’m definitely not clear when they roll dice and when they do not.

I originally planned for this session to go in a very different direction. When we last left the group, about to depart Carleon for Crieux, they had a mysterious passenger to pick up at the behest of a March proto-industrialist, but no context for why that was so.

When I’d originally conceived this, the plan was that they were picking up an analog of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elaine is tired of the MacDuff’s overtures and wants him married off, so arrangements have been made. There were lots of politics surrounding this that would have driven play, but I realized in planning that it would also move the center of gravity of the game more than I’d like. It would also draw in Montaigne (which no one is tied to) and it really draws the game towards Avalon at the cost of Vendel.

I’d also considered throwing a wrench in things to get them off the ship for a while. Get it impounded, or maybe use the Syrneth artifacts that Vadis is looking to sell to draw them inland for a session or three.

But after chewing on all that, I threw it all out the window, remembering that 7th Sea is a game about the heroes, and that I needed to focus on immediacy.

So with that, I started the session by cracking open the politics. The last dinner before the left Carleon was by invitation of Sir Math, one of the Knights of Avalon, and for our purposes, played by Brian Blessed. He’s not a super political guy, but he knew that Quinn was about to step in something, so he warned him that he was picking up a bride for MacDuff, and that there had been a lot of problems with previous attempts. They also discussed the possibility that Sir Mandrake(guy whose effects Quinn had brought to Elaine last session) had died as part of all this, but Math expressed some skepticism at the idea that Mandrake was actually dead.

Math’s wife also revealed herself to Zeta as a fellow Daughter of Sophia, and had in fact provided shelter for Lyonetta, the young fate witch they’d been transporting. For the rest, it was mostly a night of carousing and a general good time before they set sail.

The trip to Crieux was uneventful – it’s a short jaunt, and one of most highly trafficked routes on the 7 Seas, since it’s the main route for goods to flow between Avalon and Montaigne.

Once they landed, they sketched out their plan: Take care of basic logistics like selling their wares (including Valdis’s artifacts) and buying new stock, then see about picking up the passengers.

Valdis reached out the the local Invisible College hangout (they’re not very subtle in Crieux), and after a bit of a nerd-off, picked up a fanboy and an introduction to a member of Explorer’s Society. He, in turn, looked over the artifacts and declared them to be about half a weapon and very valuable, and he was more than happy to make an offer then and there. The main problem was that actually pulling together the money would make more time than was available, so he proposed a lesser amount, and something to sweeten the pot. Valdis expressed interest, and when they re-met, he had the money and a Vesten Axe with Capital-r-Runes on it. Valdis was amicable to this arrangement.

The others went wine shopping, which ended up being a ton of fun. The plan was to buy cheap plonk to sell back in Avalon, because the Avalonian’s don’t know any better. Unfortunately, it turns out the entire wine industry in the city is predicated on the fact, and it was a matter of which terrible wine to buy.

Zeta was very theatrical in her response to samples, which earned her applause from a Vodacce seller, who – while speaking in Vodacce – was very frank with her about the quality of his wares, but also about how well suited they were to the crudeness of the Avalonian palette. Much banter followed, greatly helped along by our Avalonian sea captain happily embracing the stereotype. The seller also revealed that while this wine was atrocious(fn), and selling it off here was just a by-product of the real business, because while this was horrid wine, it made exquisite brandy, and he offered samples which confirmed this assertion. He offered a few bottles along with their purchase, and a deal was made.

With all that arranged, they met with their soon-to-be guests, who turned out to be the red haired Lady Marcella and her Vesten Bodyguard, a tall woman named Bera, who was unimpressed with our heroes. Arrangements were made for the ladies to come to the ship in the morning, and all was well, though Zeta camped out overnight on the opposite roof to observe.

The next morning is, of course, when it all went horribly wrong.

While Zeta was watching the lady’s house, Basillio was overseeing the men and Valdis was off getting her axe, the wine arrived to be received by Captain Quinn, who did not notice that the promised brandy did not accompany it because he was more interested in the delicious wine. He was also there to receive the ladies, and if the ship had not just had major repairs and renovations, it would have been a perfect moment for “you’re braver than I thought”, but we had to pass on that.

Zeta arrived soon after and -upset about the lack of Brandy – inspected the wine barrels to discover that half of them had been emptied and filled with gunpowder and very slow-burning fuses. They were disarmed, but Zeta & Basillio were so indignant that they insisted on dealing with this rat of a wine merchant in the hour they had before departure¹.

Rushing off to the wine warehouse, they actually found the vendor quite injured, warning them of an attack and apologetic about the whole thing. A figure on a nearby roof took off running shortly after they arrived and Zeta pursued while Basillio stayed to “tend to the shopkeeper’s wounds”, which also meant getting the brandy².

Zeta’s quarry “incidentally” tore down a flag as he passed it, and Zeta immediately recognized this as signaling the rest of his crew to switch to plan B. From her perch, she saw movement towards the harbor, and took off in that direction, getting to the ship narrowly ahead of a gathering mob heading their way. She warned everyone, but also realized this was probably a distraction, and she looked around until she spotted the small rowboat, heading out to be in the path of where a ship leaving in a hurry would probably run into it. Pointing the bodyguard (and her long rifle)³ at it resulted in a satisfying explosion.

Meanwhile, Basillio returned and found himself at the back of an angry mob, but the clever application of one of his advantages (to convince against violence) allowed for an old man carrying a box to pass through the crowd, unharmed (Scuse’, Scuse’). Which meant he was on hand when the mob attacked.

They rushed the ship as it was casting off. There were ten 5 man groups, and the sailing check managed to reduce it by one per raise, so some excellent captaining reduced it to 4 before the fight began. But the Brutes were just an (effective) distraction, as one last assassin was climbing up the back of the ship, and Zeta swung down to stop him.

I had decided I was going to try an all-brute fight scene sometime, though I had also decided I could only do it if something else was going wrong, since I feared beating up brute squads is quick and dull all by itself. And that proved largely correct, with two qualifiers. First, we experimented with saying that duelist maneuvers don’t apply to Brute Squads, and that went smashingly. Basillio was still monstrously effective (particularly because he has 4 dots in Melee now, so he gets a lot of raises), but no longer out of step with the rest of the group, so that totally worked. We also had a nice moment when Quinn had one brute left and Basillio had one raise left so the last brute got finished off with a dramatic throw of the sword. It also let Valdis discover her axe crackled with electricity and…well…she perhaps had a bit too much fun.

Zeta’s fight was a little bit more interesting since it was a genuine back and forth with no real damage – he tries to enter the captains cabin, she yanks him out, he takes a swipe at the rope she’s hanging by, she grabs onto him, he takes a deep breath and lets go of the ship, she twists in mid air so the hit the water with her on top. In their struggle in the water, his mask comes off, and it is of course Giuseppe, one of the orphans she trained alongside. As we move into the next phase, Bera is up on deck lining up a shot and I’m about to go to the dice when Zeta’s player hands me a hero point to trigger her ability to escape bonds. Sounds legit to me – she slips free, Bera takes her shot, Zeta grabs a thrown rope as the ship pulls away, leaving behind, some blood, but no body, and Basillio declares that’s the last we’ve seen of him⁴!

A circuitous route and some canny sailing through a storm got The Gates to Kirkwall without engagement, but at this point the group was wary. They came to a stop outside the city and sent Valdis in on a launch rather than attract further attention. Valdis, in turn, found MacBride, who took her to the Regent (Ilsa MacDuff, the king’s cousin), who arranged for a warship and honor guard to sail out to The Gates (Valdis was prominently on deck to avoid the “run like hell” reaction). The ship pulled alongside, the honor guard gathered, and as the ladies came up on deck, there was one more assassination attempt from the rigging of the March⁵ ship, but Zeta shot first, throwing off the assassin’s aim. The assassin fled to the water (where he had some manner of fast moving boat) and there was much furor.

But eventually it settled down. The regent finally announced herself formally, and as the ladies step up, Marcella steps aside and Bera announced herself as Bera Learsdottir, princess of Vestenmannavenjar. And that’s where we wrap.

(And just to answer, no Vestenmannavenjar doesn’t have a King, at least not officially The throne of the High Jarl has been empty for about two centuries and is little more than a curiosity in a civilized city like Vendel, so the appearance of a princess is interesting in several ways.)

—

All in all the session went well. Obviously, it was a spotlight episode for Zeta, because I’d felt she’d gotten the short end of that particular stick to date. I’d had a few rules hacks I’d hoped to try out, but they didn’t come up, so I’ll keep them in a back pocket for now.

The main challenge continues to be coming up with mechanical challenges I find satisfactory. There’s no “right” number for consequences and opportunities that I can tell yet, and practically speaking damage consequences are something of a sop against this, but they are not always applicable (At least until I write my reputation as health equivalent intrigue hack). Now, sometimes the mechanics line up just right, and the consequences and opportunities feel absolutely natural, but sometimes they’re a bit more of a force. It’s lead me to realize that I want better cues for this from the character sheet, so I’m going to take some steps in that direction.

With all that said, a few conclusions:

• Saying Duelist skills don’t work against brutes worked great. There are some edge cases (like signature weapon damage) I need to adjudicate, but all in all? Great.
• I am officially much more liberal in my interpretation of “Choosing to fail”. Specifically, I am going to offer opportunities to fail before the dice even get picked up, with the usual reward. Yes, that is a bit like compels. The one complication is the Arcana which grants 2 points for choosing to fail – I need to decide to either limit that bonus to dice situations or just be EXTRA mean,
• I had a very interesting discussion with Basillio’s player over languages. He hadn’t taken linguist because he wanted language to be a source of complications, but it’s binary nature has stymied that. We’re going to try something, and he’s effectively going to get a “Zero Point Advantage”. The Zero Point version of linguist works like regular linguist, except you’re not very good at the languages outside of your wits, and the GM may freely create consequences and opportunities based on that gap⁶. And yes, this has me thinking about other zero point advantages.
• Once the Sorte Deck is in my hands, I will absolutely be flipping the top card during rolls and trying to come up with a risk or opportunity based on the card.
• I want to try making the improvisation rules a little more liberal, only chargin the tax if the stat changes, not just the skill. That is, if you start with brawn plus weapon, and you want to spend a raise to knock over a statue (Brawn + Athletics) you would normally need to spend 2 raises to do it, but under the new model it would only be 1 because you’re still within the bounds of might thews. This is a rule I wanted to try this time, but it didn’t come up.
• I leaned a little bit more on the villain rules this time. I’m still a little sketchy on the use of villains in a scene, but the plot level rules for villains remains a delight.

1. They were actually considering coming back after this journey, but I absolutely bribed Hero Points for immediate action, since it made for much more trouble. ↩︎
2. The players were, I think, expecting the shopkeeper to reveal himself as an assassin, which made his scene with Basillio delightful, since he’d ask for utterly innocuous things and they’d be laden with threat. I’d actually considered this twist, but it struck me as a bit too much of a Xantaos Gambit (and GM Force) to have made the guy they bought from JUST HAPPEN to be the bad guy. ↩︎
3. Momentary GM slip up there – I had forgotten we had no sharpshooters in the group, so we had to fall back on an NPC’s coolness, which I don’t like doing. I was hoping they’d like Bera, though, so it worked out, since it felt natural rather than stompy. ↩︎
4. Have I mentioned that I love my players? ↩︎
5. For lack of a better adjective, I’m trying out “March” in the same way one might say “Scotch”, since “Marshish” is terrible and “Marshian” hurts to even think. ↩︎
6. In many other systems I’d offer the player a cookie (a Hero Point) for this happening but note that I explicitly did not do so. There is a genuine advantage to the advantage, it’s just….complicated. Should I make more zero point advantages, I would apply similar thinking – make it something worth taking on its own merits. (I also find it a nice nod back to 1e 7th Sea’s drawback-you-pay-for). ↩︎

We had our second session of 7th Sea this past weekend, and it continued to be fun. I’m still wrestling the manatee a little bit, but I think I’m getting it under control.

We tried an experimental rule, and it partly worked. During action sequences, rather than having me “buy” dice from them (Giving me Danger Points and them Hero Points) they had the option to spend unused dice as soft failures.  That is, they were treated as raises in terms of when the character could act, but the player was obliged to describe their character failing in some way (ideally an awesome or funny way).  When they did so, I got a DP and they got an HP.

It mostly worked. It meant more actions (including failures) which slowed things down a little, but it also introduced a little bit of interesting decision making regarding when to take a failure.  The main concern we had was that it’s technically abusable by allowing a player to opt to take a BUNCH of failures, but that is reasonably easily mitigated by demanding players optimize their success building. If it’s still a problem after that, then I’ll consider switching to allowing only a single incident. But with those considerations, I’ll probably keep it around.

We started with a little background material, as I asked each player what they do and where they stay while in port. We got some nice background details out of that (unsurprisingly including the names of a few drinking establishments), but the most interesting bit came out of The Swordsman attempting to go to church.  This was complicated the fact that he was a devout Castillean in the middle of very Objectionist Vendel.  So we went to the dice and he ended up with the options Castillean, Honest or Safe: Pick one.  He picked honest.

If he’d gone safe, I probably would have had him find the church where the local Vodacce mobsters go to church (which may not seem safe, but the mobsters take the church very seriously), so instead I improvised a bit and decided it was the improvised church of a group of Montaignians who had fled their country to what seemed the least bad option to them – the Vesten may be godless, but they don’t bother you so much about it. So they joined in that community’s church, and all seemed well, but at the end, an old man seemed to recognize The Swordsman, and said many things in Montaignian which neither he nor The Acrobat could understand before saying, in Old Thean, “We Remember” and pressing a coin into The Swordsman’s hand. (EDIT: The Acrobat’s player has reminded me she has the Linguist advantage and could understand JUST FINE, but heard Montaigne and wandered off, bored. My players are wonderful).

And here, I note, is why I love my players.  They are genre-sensitive enough that The Swordsman’s player knew perfectly well the coin was hooked into his Tragic Backstory, so he did not ask for any details about it.  We understood what it signified, and details would not be important until they were important.

Anyway, having looked over the character’s stories, it was pretty clear we had another sailing voyage ahead of us.   I dipped into the hooks from last session and laid out two things: Red had some cargo she wanted moved surreptitiously, and Lyonetta, the fate witch they’d smuggled into Vesten had encountered problems on the last leg of her journey (to Carleon) and needed help.  Red’s mission was to Kirkwall (which, as a table, we agreed the Scot’s pronounce as “Kurkle”) but that would also bring them close enough to Carleone for help Lyonetta.

Planning the journey proved fun – because we were using a light patina of travel rules, the players could look at the map and figure out a few possible routes, I could talk about what they knew about each one, and they could make an informed decision.  Realizing they lacked the loose cash for a very profitable trip to Kirkwall, they opted instead to load up on beer and stop over in “The Gut” (Gotkirschen, a wretched hive of scum and villainy atop a Syrneth ruin) because The Captain’s pirate ties meant he could come and go in relative safety.  The thinking was the beer would sell well in the Gut and goods of dubious origin could often be acquired there at good prices.

And it mostly went according to plan, until a group of raiders decided that stealing the beer from the docked ship would be easier, and violence ensued.

It was OK Violence. One medium villain and a bunch of brutes – I didn’t flesh the villain out to much, but I did decide he did 2 wounds when he hit (because the dude was huge) which was a bit handwavey on my part, but seriously, this guy did not need a full sheet, or even a name.  Also, the acrobat had some time to do damage before the fighting properly started, so there weren’t a huge number of Mooks either.

The most interesting thing about the fight is that it happened while The Professor was negotiating the sale of the beer, so I opted to take advantage of the raise structure to thread those scenes together, as if a TV camera was cutting between them.  Thus, when other folks rolled their attack skills, she rolled for her negotiation, and every time turn order came around to her, the haggling proceeded, with her counterpart making a slightly better offer.  As a result, the fight culminated with with villains fleeing and the Professor being offered two crates of Syrneth artifacts, and who says no to that?

They took the Artifacts, and spent the last of their pennies on a shipment of linen of dubious value, but had some “legitimate” cargo to take to Kirkwall.  And so they did, and that also went well, until the sea monster attacked.

It was a Kraken style thing, so they were mostly fighting tentacles.  The Professor had a lovely moment where she severed one and got covered in black ink.  The captain went below decks and removed the chains on the port side cannons, causing the whole ship to list to starboard far enough that the cannons were angled down towards the creature.  And then, of course, the Earth Shattering Kaboom.

Naturally, as it slipped beneath the waves, it had several crewmen in its tentacles, something that was an invitation to the Swordsman whose story’s 4th step was to sacrifice himself for the crew.  He cut one guy free, pinned another in place with a belaying pin, and jumped over the side after the last, emerging with him after a suitably dramatic pause, and pretty well loaded up with injuries.

So it was that a very badly wounded ship limped into Kirkwall. The secret sale of Red’s goods went seamlessly, but they had to take some precautions to not get ambushed selling off their Linen.  They could probably have sold the Syrneth artifacts here, but they would go for much more in Montaigne or Vodacce, so that would have to wait.  As the session ended, they had enough money to get the ship afloat, but not enough to repair her fully (or buy any new cargo, though they did pay the crew, because responsibilities) so next session we get to find out what goes wrong next.

It was a good session, though not as strong as the first.  I hadn’t planned on them going to The Gut, so it had a little bit less of a sense of place than I would have liked, but I did fair service to the character’s stories, so I’m happy with that.

So, first Full session of 7th Sea was Saturday night.  It went pretty well, though I’m still juggling some system mastery concern.  

The characters are:

• The Captain: A large Avalonian man possessed of superhuman luck
• The Swordsman: Once a bodyguard of the Hierophant, then a failed seeker of revenge, now he is a very dangerous drunk.
• The Professor: A Vesten woman serving as axe-wielding accountant and quartermaster working on a theory of economics.
• The Acrobat: A Vodacce fate witch who hid her talents in the circus, but has been forced to flee her home.

The plot was simple and classic – they were in port at Vesten, but near broke. They approached The Professor’s Patron (Guildmaster of Usury) for a loan to take advantage of a tip she had on wood prices in Rurik.  They met in a coffeehouse (of course) and the Guildmaster took the opportunity to play chess with The Captain (who lost well), and the Guildmaster made an offer: She would cut them a loan at no interest in return for them delivering unspecified cargo from Rurik back to Vendel.  They, of course, agreed, took the loan, bought two shipments of Wood and set sail.

They managed to avoid trouble on the trip over, though the winds were unfavorable – what should have been a 3 or 4 day trip took 6, but that was still in bounds.  They sould off their cargo, turning a very solid profit – between the tip and the Professor’s skills, they doubled their money.

Their contact for the Guildmaster’s delivery was a veiled lady, accompanied by an obvious duellist and half a ton of war dogs. They had a very civilized afternoon tea while she got a read on them (and to a lesser extent, they got a read on her)  before they took possession of a mysterious chest. The Acrobat saw to it that the transportation back to the ship was well-concealed, as no one noticed one more wagon of produce going through Rurik.  

All was going well, except the Acrobat had also been contacted by The Daughters of Sophia, who needed someone smuggled to Vendel. She met up with them, and arranged for the young lady to meet the crew at a bar near the docks.

Things went a little wrong there.  The Acrobat paid a drunk to make some ruckus when the lady arrived, but left the details unspecified (which pinged her Hubris).  When she arrived and lowered her hood, The Captain was utterly smitten (his Hubris), the Professor was distracted by a discussion of currency policy (not technically her Hubris, but close enough) and the drunk grabbed the lady and started dancing with her, forcing The Swordsman to step up to her defense.

Which meant no one was watching when a couple of guys knocked The Acrobat over the head, threw her in a sack and dragged her away.  When they realized she was missing, they rushed the lady back to the ship and prepared to go looking for her. Well, everyone except THe Captain.  He had to make sure she was ok. Possibly over wine.

Meanwhile, The Acrobat came too as she was tossed into a carriage. She used a hidden knife to cut free, but discovered she was under close scrutiny by two thugs and a Vodacce gentleman who was very clearly their boss. The boss seemed upset at the thugs for grabbing the wrong woman, but they protested that they had grabbed a small Vodacce woman.  Dripping with false remorse, he pressed The Acrobat for information about “his wife”, but seemed to accept her denials and released her back near the bar.

And so it was that she was returning to the ship as the search party came out, and when they met, the Vodacce gentleman and his band of thugs emerged from the shadows, intent to board the ship and reclaim the woman.  Naturally, this lead to violence.

The Swordsman and The Vodacce Gentleman flashed their swordsman pins and opted to fight as gentlemen while he ordered his thugs to deal with the rest of the rabble. They fought for a time, with both taking fairly severe wounds. Meanwhile, there was a reminder that while the professor may be an economist, she is a VIKING economist. One of the Brute squads was reduced to a pulpy mass in short order, and another terrified into retreating.  Meanwhile The Acrobat split her attention between the brutes and manipulating the strands of fate surrounding the fight.  The captain also emerged and pitched in with violence and luck.

Matters ended somewhat inconclusively, as the newly-cowardly (thanks to Sorte) Vodacce Gentleman retreated with the remainder of his men, and The Captain deemed that the number of the bodies suggested that a hasty retreat was in order.  There was some resistance from the crew to a late-night departure (leading to a conflict between a crewman and The Swordsman), but The Captain made it clear this was not subject to debate, and they made a night departure.

Yet despite that, when dawn rose, there was a ship on their tail.  Inconceivable!  Unless they had been trailing debris, which explained the absences in the stores The Professor had noted.   Rather than test a tail chase, the captain ordered the ship turn towards the dangerous and foggy shore, taking a highly risky route in hopes the pursuer would not follow.

This forced the betrayer (the same who had argued with The Swordmaster) to attempt to flee in a launch with the cargo. The Acrobat spotted him,  The swordsman pursued (and resolved the matter decisively), but was now in a launch that was not attached to the ship. Thankfully,  The professor lept with a rope and managed to secure the launch before they had gone to far.   The pursuer, meanwhile, was not as nimble as The Gates, and fell behind.  The rest of the trip to Vendel was uneventful, save for the interrogation and execution of the mutineer.

Upon returning to Vendel, they delivered their cargo and tried to sell the furs they’d bought in Rurik, but they did not get a very good price for them, and after paying back the loan, paying the crew and performing maintenance on the ship, they ended up having exactly broken even.

Notes:

• We have 2 Sorcerers, 1 Duelist and one non-of-the-above. This is proving a really interesting spread to test out the length and breadth of the game.  
• Notably, the sorcerer’s are much more Hero Point hungry than the non-sorcerers.  Curiously, Our Duelist probably generates the most Hero Points, but also needs them least, so he helps a lot.
• That point when The Acrobat got kidnapped may have had all the earmarks of a GM force, because it did, but it’s a little more interesting than that because I had the player’s permission going into it. She had a two point story queued up, the stages were “Get captured” and “Free myself”, so I was responding to her invitation.  It made for a much nicer dynamic this way.
• When she got away, I presented the risks as follows: There’s an opportunity to distract him and dive out the door of the moving carriage, but that will come with 2 wounds that you’d also need to mitigate. Alternately, 1 raise and he’s not sure if you’re lying.  2 raises and he seems to believe you. 3 raises and he *actually* believes you.  She got 2 raises.
• I am going to need to generate a *lot* of reference sheets for this.  The core rules are super simple, but things like keeping track of what each sorcery does (because they all behave differently), the various dueling maneuvers, the Arcana (because we have a fate witch), plus the Hubris, Virtue, Story and Quirks of every character. Oh, and maps.  Flipping through the book for all this was SUPER awkward, so I’m going to need to figure out how to condense things into a tight match.
• Holy *crap* the GM’s ability to spend a Danger Point to make raises cost 15 rather than 10? That is, SUPER nasty, and really needs to come with a warning label.  Outside of a scene, it’s a good way to convey “This is hard”, and I’m ok with that, but in a fight scene? Can really hurt.
• Two duelists with similar weapon skills going at it involves a *lot* of negation.  It was not hard for them to fall into an alternating slash/bash cadence, which makes the fight very nickel and dime. It only sped up when I opted for the bad guy to risk a lunge (to which the appropriate response is also a lunge).
• I frequently found myself thinking “I really want this to be a difficulty 3, and I’ll shape the response based on how close they get” but that’s on the way it should be done. I am working on ways to think about difficulty:
  • One approach is very much “Success, but…”.  1 Raise gets you success with one or more consequences, and successive raises mitigate those consequences. Using the same kind of thinking that helps come up with good moves can help here.
  • When the players are looking for information, my instinct is to say “One fact per raise”, and there are situations where that works ok (albeit as a little bit of a boring risk), but I’ve found it works fairly well if you use an elimination approach. That is, when The Acrobat was trying to spot the traitor, I said “Ok, there are 5 people who might look suspicious. Each raise will let you eliminate one”.  That felt a lot better.
• I am not satisfied with how I offer opportunities yet, partly because they serve two sometimes conflicting rolls.  On one hand, they’re bonuses, things you can pick up with an awesome roll. On the other hand, they’re temptations – reasons you might mitigate your own success to grab a cookie. A lot of time, an Opportunity that is really good in one role may not fit for the other. Not sure if that’s a structural problem or just a drawback in how I think about them, but I definitely need to chew on this a little more.
  • The roll by The Acrobat in the carriage was a weird one because I explicitly offered a branching choice in that via Opportunities.  I’m not sure that’s strictly legal, but I’ll probably toy with it more.
  • I am tempted to prime the pump with opportunities. Figure out things that might appeal to players or take things in cool directions and just have them in my pocket, waiting for a chance to offer them as opportunities. It’s an area where light prep may save some headaches.
• We used my house rules for trading and travel and they worked pretty well.  I made a very small tweak to allow for more chances to roll the dice, and I’ll probably add that in, but otherwise it held up very well.
• I spent a fair amount of time before the game trying to figure out how fast ships traveled in Theah. The real answer is: it’s complicated – wind and currents and seasons and complicated cull-to-sail math all play into this.  At some point, I’m going to map the winds of Theah so I can get super nerdy, but in the meantime, I settled on a rule of thumb – 9 knots is a pretty good clip for a sailing ship, and it’s about 10mph, so it makes for easy math.  So the VERY simple navigation rules are:
  • Assume your ship will go 10mph under optimal conditions (and remember, it moves 24 hours a day, so ~240 miles).
  • Every Journey has 3-5 risks (maybe more), which might be things like:
    • Unkind Winds (-2mph, can be taken many time)
    • Rough Seas (ship takes 2 hits)
    • Spoilage/pilferage (lose a point of cargo)
    • Sickness (lose a point of crew)
    • Danger! (Catch the attention of pirates or similar)
    • Interdiction (Get stopped by a patrol boat. Lose a day, possibly other consequences)
    • Misdirection (End up off course by some amount)
  • Each raise on the Sailing risk can mitigate one of these
  • If you support the idea that different ships have different speeds, you can use these rules, just start from a different baseline than 10mph
• The Captain has invested heavily in Mad Luck, and I think that’s going to be *terrifying*.
• I need to figure out what to do with Lashes that are still in effect at the end of a session. The player can dump them relatively safely when all is done, and it seems untoward if the GM could just hold onto all those Danger Points between sessions, but seems cheap if they don’t.  But the alternative seems to take some to the tooth away from Sorte.  I think I need to read the chapter again, build my cheatsheet, then see if anything springs to mind.
• My players are conspiring to try to convince me to buy more dice from them, which suggests I need to spend my Danger Points more liberally.  I can only remind them to be careful of what you wish for.
• I am regretting the absence of a “wildcard” skill, and may end up adding one in my game.  For the unfamiliar, this is an idea stolen from Eden’s Cinematic Unisystem – the skill list included one skill that was just a blank line, with the expectation that if there was some skill that *really* mattered to a particular character but wasn’t really relevant to the game as a whole, it could just get added there.  “Merchant” might be a good example in 7th Sea – not really relevant for most games, but for a character like the professor, it’s pretty relevant.
• I still need to come up with a name for this campaign.

We ran chargen for 7th Sea last night. I don’t have a name for the campaign yet, but we laid a fair amount of groundwork. This is going to be an interesting game, since my tastes usually run to the Musketeer end of things, but the players were explicitly interested in the seafaring route. And I cannot fault them – the rules make it VERY easy to start with a a ship (as it should be).

The characters are pretty fun: We have

• An Avalonian captain, who has bought a fair amount of Luck sorcery and ties to the Brotherhood of the Coast
• A Once-great now mostly drunk Castilian swordmaster who will eventually be on the path to redemption.
• A Vodacce Circus performer, assassin and secret Fate witch
• A Vesten Scholar/Accountant/Quartermaster who is developing early theories of the so-called science of “Economics”

We’d all talked a little bit before chargen, but we’d explicitly held off on decisions until we were all at the table, and we walked through the process together. A few observations and notes:

• All in all it went very quickly, and the only real slowdown came in picking advantages, since they are slow to process. I’m not sure there’s a solution to that.
• There was a certain amount of angst that not being a duelist would be a real problem in combat. I am hoping that’s not the case, but honestly, we’re all going to find out together. Of all things, it made me wish there were a few more flavors of badass available that didn’t just stack with the dueling schools.
• When Hubris and Virtue came up, I gave the players a choice for each – choose, or generate it randomly. If generated randomly, they got either 2 points of skill or 1 point of advantages for each. Yes, it was a bribe. Most of the players took it, except the swordsman who felt it as worth picking The Wheel (Unfortunate) for hubris, and I cannot fault him because IT IS THE BEST HUBRIS IN THE GAME (It’s the “gain two HP when you choose to fail” one).
• The players were glad to get a ship, but it was immediately apparent that while the ship rules were suitable for a game that happened to have a ship, they were a little sparse for a ship centric game (though we all love the achievements). I’ve written some house rules for that and I’ll be doing something with them.
• Picking languages ended up being a fun dance, mostly for what it suggested about relationships between characters, but it made me glad that Linguist is only one point.

We actually got chargen itself done quickly enough that we had time for a brief tutorial scene. I had a moment of inspiration and realized I could kill to birds with one stone, and also illustrate how the story system worked. I asked everyone to find a skill they wanted one point in (in retrospect, I would have suggested a skill or a 1 point advantage) and have them write up the one-step story necessary to get it. I took those stories and used them to craft a fairly simple scene (a barfight, followed by quickly fleeing town) that incorporated them all, allowing them to try out the rules and see Stories in action. it worked pretty well, and I’d absolutely recommend it for anyone kicking off a game. A few thoughts from running the game:

• It is going to be very tricky for me to get a sense of how to throttle opposition. I threw fairly weak opposition at the players (intentionally) but I hadn’t really gauged how weak. Going to be a while before I figure out how to strike that balance.
• We had a weird situation where things were almost resolved when we ran out of raises. The next round ended up getting cut off short because otherwise it was an exercise in overkills.
• I had intended to use these awesome pirate coins I’d brought to track raises, but honestly, the physical dice are more useful for that. I will instead use the coins for Hero and Danger points.
• I ended up answering my own question of how I’d handle social combat (answer, just like anything else) as my players went heavy on the intimidation in the bar fight, and I was entirely happy to treat it as damage.
• The rules for acting without a skill are REALLY harsh. Maybe a little too harsh. I’m ok taxing one raise, but taxing half the characters raises (on top of what is going to be a not-great roll) feels onerous.
• The scene was not complicated enough for context-switching to raise its head, so I’m still waiting to see how that plays out.
• Opportunities can be tricky to come up with on the fly. I kind of want to attach them to characters. Skullduggery had a fun mechanic where the player was primed with a number of one liners that the GM knew about, so the GM could set up the moments that would be perfect for delivery. I wonder if I could do something similar with these characters – come up with a handful of opportunities (in general terms) that match that particular character, so I can queue them up as moments of awesomeness.
• I need to do a better job of communicating what can be done with raises. Cheat sheet incoming.

All in all, we had a good time. First session glitches aplenty, sure, but I think we’re all ready to start up the adventure next session, and I am going home with 4 stories that I can use to build that, which is a nice place to be.

One of the best, most intuitive RPG systems I ever played largely revolved around us throwing nickels on the the floor.

This was back at an AmberCon Northwest many, many years ago. Ameer Tavakoli was running a game about the guardsmen of Amber. I was playing the stoic, brutish head-knocker and Fred was playing the well-connected manipulator. I could not tell you a lot about the bulk of the game (though I remember my character pretty well) but the endgame really stuck with me. Over the course of the game, as we’d done things to accrue resources and influence, we had earned nickels, and when endgame came (and the city exploded in violence), we switched to a different mode of play.

The GM also grabbed a handful of nickels and started tossing them down, declaring something that was going wrong with each nickel thrown. We, in turn, could throw our own nickels to declare counters and responses. As suited my character, I stepped in to take the brunt to things, and I burned through my entire reserve of nickels against the initial result. Fred then stepped in in a very Fred-like fashion, bled he GM dry with his own GM spend, then when he had things completely under control, closed with “And, remember – I have a lot of friends in this town” and dumped his double-handful of remaining nickels.

I’m sure it does not sound as cool in the retelling as it was in the moment (the curse of a fun game) but it’s a memory I value, partly for the fun, but partly for its educational value.

See, while the actual experience of the game was very fluid and engaging, but if I had articulated it purely as mechanics, it would have run the risk of being stilted and boring. After all, it’s just a spend-counterspend system, with the ultimate success or failure being determined by which side has the most nickels. That doesn’t seem much fun. And, in fact, if we had approached it mechanics-first, then it probably would have been a number-crunching slog.

Instead, we were approaching it from a game-first perspective, with this currency serving as an interesting sidebar on what was going on. Through a combination of strong GMing (Ameer is amazing), player buy-in and a hard-to-track-but-easy-to-judge information set, we were enthusiastically willing to approximate things rather than sit down and crunch the numbers. That is, our behavior in the moment was much more engaged than it might be at a distance.

This is important to me because it’s a reminder that a lot of things that might seem like problems on paper depend a lot on how they’re pursued in play. This is most strongly on my mind in regards to the new 7th Sea raise system because it is, on some level, also a nickels system. It has some other mechanics, yes (and they’re important, but secondary for the moment), but really you could just start off each scene with rolling dice to generate nickels for everyone, then have them throw them on the table declaring awesome things.

This is pretty cool, but clearly can be awesome or a drag depending upon buy in.

Now, 7th Sea does have some mechanics to try to fight off the drag, and I’ll drill into them at some point, but they’re no magic bullet. It is entirely possible for the raise system to change from a game to an exercise if the enthusiasm is not present. That is: If you do not want it to work, it won’t. That doesn’t guarantee that it will work if you want it to, but it does call out the first hurdle to overcome.

When I talk about wanting to see 7th Sea in action, this is what I want to see. I want to know if I can get enthusiastic enough to throw nickels with reckless abandon, or if I will find myself forced to count pennies. I want it to be the former, but it is exactly the sort of thing that is revealed only in play.