The weird thing about Montaigne - as a matter of fact, about almost the entire 7th Sea line - is that it works best as a supplement for games other than 7th Sea. If you're looking for a small host of plot complications and twists, good NPCs with backstories that scream to be made into adventures, weird weapons, unusual sorceries, 7th Sea is absolutely ideal. You can use a supplement for 7th Sea without needing to play 7th Sea, in other words.

I say this primarily becausse 7th Sea is, and always will be, at the heart of a major debate, basically focusing around whether 7th Sea is too fantastic to be a good swashbuckling game. This debate has cropped up in just about every review of the game, or its supplements, and God willing it'll crop up in the sassback forum of this review.

Me, I'm not even going to get into it. Some people don't like how fantastic Theah is and some do. I'm not fond of how fantastic Theah is myself, but anybody who 's running a fantasy campaign might find some good stuff to mine from it. Those who want to use Montaigne as inspiration for swashbuckling action will get just as much out of it.

Anyways. Montaigne is essentially France in the last few years before the French Revolution; the nobility is stagnant, decadent and depraved, while the peasantry's been crushed by years of oppressive taxes and general bastardry. The Emperor - well, l'empereur, and you can imagine me making the appropriate Frenchy-foo floppy wrist gesture as I'm saying that - is busily dealing with even potential threats with an iron fist, resulting in a pointless war with Castille (Spain) and Ussura (Russia) which is costing Montaigne thousands of casualties. l'Empereur has also kicked the Church out of his country, which means that Montaigne nobles can now use Porte magic quite openly. Porte magic is teleportation magic, but the space that you occupy when you step through looks very, very much like Hell.

Fortunately for the populace, there are heros - the Musketeers shine as the ideal of heroism, while dozens of other duellists and sorcerors contribute to the ongoing task of stomping evil in the head. Basically, you've got about three hundred years of French history and fiction condensed to the same spot; you can play The Three Museketeers Face Down the French Revolution, if you want. (One of the designers pointed out that 7th Sea's countries are basically geographic areas based on fiction; for Montaigne, it's French romantic fiction.)

There's a few missteps in the book, but the bulk of it's pretty decent. I enjoyed the breakdown of the various families of Montaigne - each family has its own sort of story hook, so any noble character automatically has a few traits that can make for good role-playing. For example, the Gaulle Dul Motte have a cruel sorceror as the head of their family, as well as a higher than average concentration of ghosts in their home province - but any character from that family gets an extra couple of ranks in the Scholar knack and a better reaction to ghosts. If you want a character who's a frail student of the occult, or maybe a fourth daughter who spends most of her time talking to things that aren't there, the Gaulle Dul Motte work perfectly. And there's about six or seven different families in there, enough for the average player to find his favorted role.

What I didn't like - and this is one of my few complaints - is the breakdown of the entire country by province. I can't stand when role-playing books start breaking down into travelogues - I.E "Nith-Wag has a residency of 18,000 people, and its primary exports are grapes, cheese, and furious political thought. In conclusion, Nith-Wag is a land of contrasts." I suppose that there's a need if you want to run a game where the crops of a particular province are important, but I'm just not seeing the value.

The NPCs. Good lord, there's material for miles here.

Take, for example, Therese Rois et Reines du Rogne - she's been married three times in her life, but kept her own name. She's an elderly woman in her late sixties who was a former Musketeer, gradually moving from the sword arm to the political field as a way to protect the Emperor. Even though the Emperor's slid into raving insanity, she's still fiercely loyal to him - to the point where she's thrown one of her children into the Thean equivalent of the Bastille - but behind the scenes, she's not sure that she's doing the right thing.

As a hero, she's fantastic. You can use her as the goad behind the party, somebody who tells them "I'd love to drop a word in l'Empereur's ear about how well you're doing, but those bandits are still plaguing the Summer Road, and my goodness, you still haven't dispelled that ghost? Tsk. Still time yet, I suppose." Or as a powerful patron that just happens to be a little old lady.

As a villain, she’s perfect; utterly loyal, but with the whip-smarts to know how to keep herself from becoming a puppet. Any foe of l’Empereur is a foe of hers, so any character attempting to bring l’Empe – you know what? He’s now the Emperor. Anyways, any attempt to bring down the Emperor, or limit his power, brings them up against a person that’s both an excellent swordsman and a powerful politician, with a vengeful family behind her if they happen to kill her. Complications galore.

There’s other characters who aren’t so good, and, to a man, they’re largely relevant only to AEG’s metaplot and not to your game. Some of them, like the Napeoleon-surrogate Montegue, are the movers and shakers of the world of Theah, but the odds of the characters needing to actually fight him are slim. As it’s been pointed out, some of them are said to have major metaplot roles when they’re actually quite minor, such as the unlucky soldier Jerome. Others have secrets that are so labrythine that large portions of the metaplot would be changed if the PCs were to find out.

I’ve never been a fan of AEG’s system, to be perfectly honest. There’s rules in the back for new uses of Porte magic, a method of gaining random benefits and backgrounds from the draw of a Tarot card. A trio of new fighting schools – one for street brawling, one concentrating on rifle fire (that one for the Musketeers), and a Jackie-Chan-esque school that relies on taking whatever’s handy and clobbering the enemy. A list of different accents from around the country, which in turn affect how easy it is to learn a particular language – this on the theory that it’s easier to speak a language if you don’t have to prevent yourself from rolling your R’s. New weapons, like grenades, horse cannon and bayonets.

And then there’s the Intrigue sheet. God, I love this thing – it lets you map out the exact relationship between different characters in your campaign, a lot like the format of the early Vampire: The Masquerade books, except without being filled in. Even better, there’s mechanics for establishing connections in the court without having to tediously role-play two hours of social banter with the Lady Jamatte – just make a Wits Etiquette roll, and you can make a new entry on the relationship chart. On top of that, there’s the ability to burn points and roll skills in order to determine if you can be introduced to a new member of the court, ferret out secrets, mooch money, blackmail – you could have entire sessions where the characters try to manipulate their web of connections in order to get what they need. I love this stuff like I love my thumbs; it’s a way to run a Dangerous Liasons-style campaign without shifting through an entire court’s worth of NPCs.

The puzzle swords: They’re the Montaigne equivalent of magical swords, each of which has been turned into a clever puzzle which only the owner can untangle. Players who get one aren’t going to be getting Stormbringer, but there are some neat effects in here which could provide a lucky edge for a PC or a nasty holdout knife for a villain – a barbed edge, a grappling hilt, a specially poisoned needle in the hilt, dart-throwing, and so forth. Some of them are a little silly, like the ability to shoot a burst of fire, but there’s plenty of good ideas here for the enterprising GM to use.

The Style section gives a brief bit of advice on how to run Montaigne characters, and then launches into describing the hideous secrets of the characters that couldn’t have been given in the earlier part of the book. There’s some good material in here, but it should have been in the first part of the book; the book assumes that it’ll be read by players at some point, but…I just don’t see the point, to be honest. If players want to spoil their fun by reading the book, they can, but I imagine that most GMs deviate from what’s in the book anyways.  They’d save the reader a fair bit of flipping back and forth to associate the hideous secret with the character’s original writeup, at least.

Is it a good book? The characters that were added in for the sake of metaplot alone are a bit of a waste, but the rest of the book is good solid fun, and I keep thinking that some kind of attempt should be made to adapt the courtly intrigue system over to the hyper-political beast that is Vampire. If you’re looking for an idealized, romantic version of pre-Revolutionary France, then this is a great place to start; even if you’re not, you’ll find a couple of good story hooks in here. I think that I’d recommend it.

-Darren MacLennan