Author: Screen Artwork by William O'Connor, Design by Steve Hough, "The Erebus Cross Part One" written by Rob Vaux, "The Explorer's Society" written by Jennifer Wick, Patrick Kapera, Kevin Wilson, and Ray Yand
Category: game
Company/Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Line: 7th Sea
Cost: $19.95
Page count: One GM screen and one 64 page saddle-stapled book
Playtest Review by Lisa Padol on 02/07/00.
Genre tags: Fantasy Conspiracy

7th Sea GM Pack

for Alderac Entertainment Group

Screen Artwork by William O'Connor, Design by Steve Hough

"The Erebus Cross Part One" written by Rob Vaux

"The Explorer's Society" written by Jennifer Wick, Patrick Kapera, Kevin Wilson, and Ray Yand

One GM screen and one 64 page saddle-stapled book

$19.95

Review by Lisa Padol

Playtesters: Avram Grumer, Fred Herman, Joshua Kronengold, Matt Stevens

Additional consultant: Chris Murray, who told me about how the adventure went when he played

The Screen

Grade: B

The screen shows a pirate ship, not my primary image of Theah, but well in keeping with the spirit of the game. I still had to refer to the book, but I've never gotten in the habit of using a screen.

Style: 3.5

Substance: 3

The Adventure

Grade: C-

In an attempt to make completing the adventure possible for beginning PCs, but still challenging for experienced PCs, the author divides it into four hard points, sections which he considers to be intrinsically part of the core of the adventure, and several soft points, optional encounters. The soft points have values of low, medium, and high, depending on how challenging they are expected to be. This is a good idea, although not as new as the author implies.

The premise is a variant on the Queen's Diamonds incident from The Three Musketeers: The youngest daughter of the emperor of Montaigne wants the PCs to deliver a message to her husband, General Montegue, who is fighting a war in Ussura. They must dodge Musketeers and cross land and sea to deliver their message. The concept is excellent, but the execution is weak.

Let us start with the premise. General Montegue is supposed to accept a letter from strangers who claim it is from his wife. In the world of Theah, items can be blooded by Porte mages, sorcerers who can use them as teleport anchors. That is, when a Porte mage ritually sheds her blood on an item, she can do one of two things. She can teleport the item to her, as one of the PCs did in the run Chris told me about. If she is powerful enough, she can also teleport to the item. As Avram pointed out, this is a potential assassination tactic, and this fact should make movers and shakers like Montegue leery of accepting items. At the very least, one would expect him to have a specially trained bodyguard examine and remove any blood from any item intended to reach the general.

Second, the authors presume that the PCs will not read the letter, and they do not provide its text. First of all, never presume that the PCs will refrain from any given course of action. True, Chris reports that his PC would never be so churlish, so dishonorable as to read a private communique from a woman to her husband. Nevertheless, in that same run, another player's PC was quite churlish enough, and he did read the letter. My players decided that their PCs would refrain from reading the letter only because no one had taken the knack (skill) that would allow them to reseal the letter well enough to hide evidence of tampering. Is this churlish? Yes. Out of genre? No. Not what the authors intended? Yes, but if the authors have already determined how the PCs will act, they should be writing novels, not game scenarios.

However, even if the PCs were guaranteed not to read the letter (maybe it's in code or magically scrambled to be unreadable by someone other than its intended recipient), as the GM, I still need to know what it says. This influences how I play the Princess, who wrote it, and anyone who reads it.

For reasons that make quite enough sense for the genre, the Princess chooses the motley bunch of PCs to help her husband, the Montaigne general responsible for the devastation of Castille. The war in Castille is still going on, but the Montaigne are doing less well because General Montegue is in Ussura. The Princess tells the PCs that her letter warns him that he must leave Ussura, as certain forces plot his destruction.

As I told Matt, his Ussuran PC would probably be all in favor of getting the general out of his country. But why, I wondered, would Josh's Castillian swordswoman have the slightest desire to help Montegue get out of Ussura alive so that he could go back to leading an all too effective army against her people?

The author points out that successful completion of the mission means that the Princess will owe the PCs a favor, as will the general. However, I seriously doubt this favor could be used to stop the war with Castille in Castille's favor. The author also says that enemies of Montaigne should realize that the general can destabilize the nation by "drawing support away from the Empereur...his death would be a tremendous blow, one which should be avoided at all costs." I just don't buy this, and my players share my skepticism. Even granting that we are wrong, I suspect the average Castillian would agree with us, preferring to see Montegue dead.

Josh did come up with a reason to help, nevertheless, and one which the author himself suggested: A lady had requested the Castillian swordswoman's aid. She was honor-bound to agree. This is very much in the spirit of 7th Sea, but I wish a better rationale had been provided for patriotic Castillians who remain convinced that Montegue's death will aid their country.

Twice, the author suggests that PCs who balk should be subtly threatened by the Vodacce Fate Witch maid of the Princess. In one case, she is to remind greedy PCs "whom they're dealing with"; in the other, to note that dire fates meet those who cross fate witches. This is anything but subtle, and, in my experience, this tactic is likely to alienate players as well as PCs.

As soon as the PCs accept the Princess' mission and a magical compass that will help them find the general, the King's Musketeers appear. However diligent the PCs have been about arriving secretly, someone spotted them en route to their meeting and informed soldiers who overheard only vague snatches of the conversation between the PCs and the Princess. Understandably, the Musketeers believe that the PCs are plotting against their emperor. Princess and maid flee, vanishing at once, leaving the PCs to a Chase Scene.

All in keeping with the swashbuckling genre, I grant, but the differences in the rpg medium puts a strain on the cliches. I have never been a fan of "Despite all your precautions, you were followed, because otherwise there wouldn't be a scenario." Still, in this case, the author is not being unreasonable: The meeting is in the sewers, and a truly undetectable entrance is hard. Heck, if nothing else, there are probably sewer patrols. But you would think that the Princess took some precautions, and it becomes one more element forcing the PCs' actions, particularly when combined with the Princess' vanishing act, which the PCs are not allowed to duplicate. I find myself sympathetic to Avram's Vodacce PC, who called forlornly after the Princess, "Take us with you!"

So, the PCs are on the run, and must reach Ussura. They have completed the first of the four hard points. The second may precede the third or vice versa, depending on whether they travel by water first or second. My players decided that their PCs would travel by water first.

PCs who follow suit will arrive at a port town full of ships, none of which will accept them as passengers, no matter what. Players are supposed to go through the motions of having their PCs search until "it seems they have exhausted every option". At this point, they are expected to take the heavy-handed hint that they should go into an establishment called "The Place". There, they find not a captain willing to take them aboard, but someone who knows someone who might be able to help.

Hm. I would not want to play through my PC trying and failing to get a berth on a ship. That is boring and frustrating for the player, not merely for the PC. My players agreed, so I said that we'd assume that after half an hour of fruitless searching, a captain suggested they try the appropriate NPC. My players said that this was how it should have been written.

In fairness to the author, it is possible that he's assuming all GMs will have the common sense to fast forward when the search gets boring, although this advice should be spelled out. But the idea that the PCs could not find a ship, despite the Princess' funds, caused Avram to comment, "This is like some weird alternate world where ship captains just don't need money." Josh pointed out that there is a reason to make it so difficult for the PCs to get a ship: It means that their pursuers can't simply hire a ship of their own. At first, I agreed, but there are holes in that theory. If this hard point occurs in Montaigne, as it did, instead of in Eisen, why can't the Musketeers commandeer a boat in the emperor's name? For that matter, why can't the heroes use the documents the Princess gave them to convince someone? And what if annoyed PCs try to steal a boat?

Interestingly, the two soft points I added worked better than this hard point. The PCs were heroic enough to help a village endangered by fire, and canny enough to use their documents to keep a river patrol from searching the boat. The players enjoyed it when the crew of the PCs' boat did the marine equivalent of switching license plates. I appreciate the author giving two names for several NPCs, one for if they're met in Montaigne and one for Eisen. This is a godsend for GMs like myself who find their minds utterly blank when they have to come up with a name for an NPC.

If the attempt to find a ship is made in Eisen, GMs are advised that the Musketeers do hold authority there. But what if one of the PCs is an Eisen noble? The obvious answer is to say that the town is in an area controlled by rivals of the Eisen PC, but here again, it would have been nice if the author had shown awareness of that possibility. Also, be really careful about geography, or your player will gleefully pounce when you say the town is Freiburg, pointing out that his PC is a noted and beloved noble of that area.

On board the ship, an NPC asks if he may examine the magical compass which the Princess gave the PCs to help them find her husband. As a player, I'd be furious if a GM presumed that my PC was carrying it openly. The text on page 35 makes it clear that it can be concealed. But the NPC has to know about it so that he can explain a little about the compass and invite the PCs to visit him in the second part of the adventure. He's staying with the Baron, you see. Which one? The text does not say.

The next hard point involves a forest that the PCs must cross. Here, we ran into a conceptual problem with the maps, although the encounter itself worked quite well.

There are no maps in the GM Screen Pack. If the GM does not let players refer to the maps in the Players' or GMs' guide, all is well. But if one looks at a map, it certainly seems that one can get from Montaigne to Ussura by water, without having to cross a forest. I don't know if we misread the map, if the author misread it, or if he wasn't kept up to date on Thean geography. But I asked Josh, Avram, and Matt--Fred had to leave early--to work with me on this.

Matt: Okay, so all of our characters get hit on the head by a falling anvil and say, "Hey, I've got an idea! Instead of taking the river right where we need to go, why don't we go miles out of our way so we can travel through the haunted forest?"

Despite the problem with the map, the forest section went far better than I'd expected. The PCs met a woodcutter who offers to take them through the forest in return for their protection. He turns out to be a malevolent supernatural creature who will imprison their spirits in his wooden dolls unless they can best him in a riddle contest.

I first heard of this from Chris Murray, who described the woodcutter as the Devil, and insisted that it was perfectly within accepted tradition for the Devil to threaten the soul of anyone in the PCs' circumstances. I was skeptical, but this turned out to be the high point of the adventure. Josh explained that the PCs had placed themselves in the woodcutter's power by accepting his aid. The author not only gives excellent advice for presenting the woodcutter so that the PCs are likely to accept his aid, but also provides ten riddles for GMs to use. Players not so good at riddles might hit on the idea of having their PCs grab the wooden dolls. The author says that this will work, but GMs hoping to resolve such an attempt with dice are out of luck, for no statistics are provided for the woodcutter. I understand that he is supposed to be impervious to harm, but some stats or at least target numbers should be provided for attempts to trick or snatch the dolls away. I am also concerned that entire groups of PCs could be lost at this stage of the adventure, but both when I ran it and when Chris' GM ran it, this did not happen. My players feel that the PCs are more at risk from the too competent Brute Squads that populate the adventure. This section worked like a charm.

The final hard point, the journey across Usurra, did not work quite as well. I'd guess that some of the problems were due to a lack of editing for continuity. For example, the author speaks of Mother Usurra as the force behind the bad weather and worse luck that assails the PCs, as it assails the Montaigne army. However, the Players' Guide and GM's Guide make it clear that the appropriate personification of the weather and the land is Matushka, Grandmother Winter. Someone dropped the ball in the making-sure-the-left-hand-knows-what-the-right-is-doing department. The same someone also seems to have missed the optional encounter with an Ussuran who transforms into a bear in front of the PCs, although Ussurans aren't supposed to transform in front of non-Ussurans. Folks, make up your minds about this!

In any case, the land makes life miserable for the PCs until they say something to indicate they're in Ussura to get the invading army to leave. The author presumes that this will happen before the PCs find General Montegue, but here, I think he overestimates the average group of players. My players, who are quite intelligent, didn't think of this, even though I made a point of telling Matt that his Usurran knew that the land was angry with the PCs. I managed to get the Ussuran to state the PCs' mission by throwing in the optional encounter with Ussuran ambushers, but this would not have worked without an Ussuran PC. That in itself isn't necessarily a problem, but the author's refusal to take into account that things might not follow his script is. As it was, I had to drop heavy hints, twice reminding Matt that his Ussuran probably wouldn't want to see either his comrades or his countrymen hurt before he decided the character would try to stop the fight.

The PCs made their way to the General and delivered their message. The grateful General gladly gave them the second compass--which vanished in a puff of magic leaving behind only an ominous vision of disaster to come if the PCs did not act to prevent it.

Alas, they cannot act, for that is where the scenario ends. I hate the cliffhanger ending. I might have accepted it in a novel or movie, but a published scenario is not a novel or movie. I do not appreciate learning that the very first published adventure--the one likely to be run by many 7th Sea GMs as it is packaged with the GM screen--is published in the expectation that GM and players will wait to play again for 2-3 months until part two comes out, as indeed I had to do.

Style: 3

Substance: 2

The Explorer's Society

Grade: B-

This is a delightful look at the history of and some of the secrets behind the Explorers' Society. It could have used better editing, as the text says that Cameron MacCormick received letters from six people who agreed to fund his expeditions, but only mentions five people.

More annoying than the editing is the presentation of material. Just as there isn't a complete adventure, the material on the Society is not complete. The rest of it appears with the other two parts of the Erebus Cross adventure. Did the folks at AEG try to find the most obnoxious way possible to divide their material?

Style: 4

Substance: 4

General Comments:

I would far have preferred all the Explorer's Society material to have been together with the GM Screen and the complete Erebus Cross to have been in a separate book. Ending a session on a cliffhanger is acceptable to most groups, but the resolution of that cliffhanger should not have to wait until the next part comes out.

Ignoring that, so far as I can, the layout and art of the booklet are good, and the GM Screen does what one expects it to do. The Explorer material is fine. The adventure has several holes and traps for beginning GMs, and the idea of core and optional encounters is not new. Nevertheless, the basic premise and structure are sound. Just don't study the map too closely, and ignore the cliffhanger if you don't want to run parts two and three.

[End of text]

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)