History

The 7th Sea system, designed by Kevin Wilson and John and Jennifer Wick, was released in 1999 by AEG in the form of the Player's Guide and Game Master's Guide. A series of splatbooks followed, one for each of the core nations and secret societies. These books, along with other supplements such as a series of adventures and the 'City of Freiburg' boxed set saw the company through 2001, though by the end of that time the original designers had moved on. For the next few books, AEG switched to the 'blue-edged' book format, which filled in some of the corners of the world and advanced the metaplot of the setting. At this point (late 2002 or so), d20 was becoming a hot commodity, so with flagging sales, they rebranded the series as 'Swashbuckling Adventures', a hybridized version intended to be used either in the classic 'roll and keep' fashion or using a new d20-based system. A new series of core rulebooks came out, followed by a few more splatbooks. But what d20 giveth, d20 taketh away, and by the end of 2003, Alderac officially ended the 7th Sea/Swashbuckling Adventures line of printed books.

They maintained a presence online, and even released new material in PDF form for free on their web site, largely through volunteer efforts. In 2006, they started selling almost the entire line of 7th Sea material in PDF form from DriveThruRPG. At first, this consisted of scans of the printed books, but by mid-2007 almost everything was available in its original electronic format. The original print runs can be found used if you search around (AEG still has some, which you can purchase from them directly) and versions will turn up on eBay for generally reasonable amounts if you watch long enough. A couple of the more popular titles were fetching ~$100 at one point, though the availability of the PDFs has somewhat depressed this market from its former heights.

At this point, franchise is finished, at least as far as AEG is concerned. In the last year, they've even withdrawn their former (minimal) support of the 7th Sea web presence, meaning no more official supplements will be forthcoming even from that quarter, though a dedicated following of fans does still produce extra content on an irregular basis. So it seems like a good time to step back and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the system, and see if it's something that can work for your gaming group. At the core, you need the Player's Guide and the Game Master's Guide (reviewed here), and while some of the splatbooks can be helpful, none of them are needed to get started in the land of Theah.

So, what is the world of 7th Sea?

Setting

The basic conceit of 7th Sea is 'an alternate 17th/18th century Europe with magic'. Theah has its own distinct history and geography, but you get a series of obvious and intentional parallels with nations, people, events, and organizations from European history from the late 1600's to about 1800 or so. There's Avalon (England), Castille (Spain), Eisen (Germany), Montaigne (France), Ussura (Russia), Vendel (The Netherlands/Scandinavia), and Vodacce (Italy), along with the two 'exotic' locales of the Crescent Empire (Turkey/the Middle East) and Cathay (Asia). The rulers are often parallels of one or more figures from European history ('Queen Elaine' is a combination of Queen Victoria and King Arthur, for example), and events are drawn from the time period as well (Montaigne is invading Ussura abroad and is poised on the brink of a revolution at home; the Inquisition is gaining influence in Castille; Eisen is recovering from a great war; etc.) Conspicuously absent are parallels for Africa and the Americas: though these were intended for future supplements, the game line died before anything official happened on those fronts.

The added magic works through bloodlines, giving characters (and NPCs) the potential to have the 'full-blooded' or 'half-blooded' version of five different core sorceries, each associated with the nobility of a particular country. (Other sorceries are revealed in the supplements, but the basic five are the most common and well-known.) Each sorcery was quite specific: Glamour (Avalon), a legend-powered Sidhe magic; Porte (Montaigne), the ability to rip holes in and through reality; Pyeryem (Ussura), animal shape-shifting, Laerdom (Vendel), rune-based magic; and Sorte (Vodacce), card-based (and female-only) fate magic.

The intent here was to present a setting where you could pull in what you liked from our own history, and not worry about trying to be precise about it, or worry that your gaming group would change history as we know it. The addition of magic lets you pull in the mythic history of Europe as well (legends and fairy tales), and adds its own bit of myth and mystery to the mix.

The result is a crazy pastiche of history and fancy, painted all over with swashbuckles. If you tried to use everything in a single campaign, you'd end up with a lurching monstrosity. But if you take a 'salad bar' approach to the material and pick and choose the bits that work for you, you can end up with a great game.

System

The basic system has become known as 'roll and keep': you roll a number of d10s and keep and add up a subset of them. Rolling '5k3' means you roll five d10's and keep the highest three. If any die rolls a 10, it 'explodes', meaning you get to roll it again and add the new figure to the original. If you roll another 10, you add 10 and keep going until you run out of 10s. If the total of your kept dice meets or exceeds a target number (TN), you succeed in your attempt.

Additionally, the player is supplied with 'drama dice': extra d10s that can be spent to do special actions or added to a roll. If you roll a 17 and needed a 20, for example, you could spend one of your drama dice and hope to roll a three or better.

The TNs generally jump by 5's: a basic action is a TN 15 by default; a tougher action is TN 20, and so on. There's usually no official benefit from rolling particularly high--a 16 is as good as a 50 when you're trying to beat a TN 15. It's natural for the group to add an extravagant narration to a great roll, though, and this is the first of many places where 'house rules' tend to spring up. Otherwise, it can be disappointing to have a psychologically 'awesome' roll with an in-game mediocre result.

The way the numbers work out, it turns out that the number of dice you keep has a much stronger effect on the outcome than the total number of dice you roll. There's a significant benefit to be had going from 2k2 to 3k2, but a smaller benefit from there to 4k2, and even smaller at 5k2, etc. In contrast, a 4k3 is a ton better than a 4k2: the first will beat a TN15 62% of the time, but the latter, 85%.

So with that in mind, when I tell you that the number of dice you keep is determined by one of your character's five traits, and that the total number is a combination of the character's trait and a specific skill (7th Sea has many many 'knacks', which are grouped into 'skills', but it's the character's level in a knack that counts when rolling dice), you will not be surprised that an 'optimized' character will have a lot of points in their traits, and a million knacks at rank 1. This is exacerbated by the fact that although increasing your skill and trait level both get more expensive the higher you go, increasing your traits gives you incrementally better and better results, but increasing your skills gives you incrementally smaller and smaller benefits.

In practice, however, it remains a perfectly workable system. If all your players appreciate the relative strengths and weaknesses of how and when to spend XP, they won't get out of sync with each other, which is the main drawback of a slightly imbalanced system like this. Likewise, an observant GM will be able to tell what sort of TNs are easy, hard, and difficult for the players, and can scale the opposition accordingly. And for those who like to fiddle, there are a stable of house rules you can find online as various other groups have tweaked the system to better fit their own playing style.

The 'drama dice' system also helps with game balance. Each player gets a set number of them at the beginning of each adventure, and can gain more at the GM's discretion by doing dramatic things. As such, they work beautifully--I've seen them used many times at good moments in the story, and serve a dual purpose of keeping the drama high and keeping things from getting too frustrating for the players. One does get the sense that the Wicks and Wilson were experimenting with this new toy a bit, and there are extra rules pertaining to drama dice that don't turn out to work all that well. The most obvious example (and the rule most often house-ruled away) is that drama dice can be used either to increase a roll or as XP at the end of the adventure. Many groups (ours included) found this led to players hoarding the dice so they could get the XP, which in turn leads to increased character failure and more player frustration. There are a few easy potential fixes: have earned drama dice give XP immediately or upon being spent, or just divorce XP from drama dice entirely. The second problem is that they are used as a currency for several of the magic systems, leading again to player hoarding and decreased effectiveness of magic-based characters. This can be a bit trickier to fix, but again, the internet is your friend here.

Magic

The magic system in 7th Sea tries something not often used in RPGs: there are only a few highly-specialized magic systems. Your character can either have one system at full strength (being 'full-blooded'), or one or two systems at partial strength (being half- or twice-blooded). As you might have guessed at this point, the ability to do sorcery is inherited; the strongest lines are in the nobility. Additionally, each sorcerous/noble bloodline is associated with a particular nation. The sorcery types for each nation are loosely associated with the real-world mythology of their counterpart nation. This has an added benefit of serving to enhance the game world, giving many nations an extra twist.

The full-blooded advantage doesn't really come into its own until after the character has spent a lot of additional XP, which can cripple a beginning character, but being half-blooded seems to pay off right away. Again, there are no rules for a player 'discovering' latent magic in their character's blood, but it's not too hard to cook up some house rules for this situation if the group agrees.

Happily, apart from the high cost of full-blooded magic, none of the magic systems seem otherwise over- or under-powered. I've seen characters with all five of the core magics, and in each case the players have enjoyed their unique abilities, but didn't outshine the other players.

Metaplot and Secrets

One of the objections people had to the game back in the day was the slow rate at which the metaplot came out. As the nations and secret societies books were released, new secrets about Theah's history were revealed, but no new events took place. Finally, two years later, the "Waves of Blood" book was released (unread by me) which synchronized the CCG with the RPG, and advanced things a bit. And another year later (2002), "The Montaigne Revolution" was released, which finally significantly advanced the timeline. Then came the rebranding as d20, which again put the metaplot on hold as new core books were released. And then the line died, leaving any future timeline unpublished, though bits and pieces can be found online as forum posts from line developers.

The upshot of this is that while trying to synchronize your own campaign with the 'official' timeline while the books were being published was tricky at best and impossible at worst, at this point it is simplicity itself. If you wish to mold your campaign to the official storyline, all you have to do is get 'The Montaigne Revolution' (which contains more than just the titular event within), possibly 'Waves of Blood' and an adventure or two, do a little online snooping to find out what the authors had in mind for future events, and you're set. Similarly, you could just ignore it, since the vast majority of the available source material never advanced past the '1668' date of the core rulebooks.

Figuring out the history and secrets of the setting is a bit more tricky, as these were revealed in dribs and drabs throughout the books. For the most part, however, the secrets are described in the 'secret society' books. And if buying those doesn't appeal to you, there are again various places online that adequately summarize the main points, so that you can either avoid them, note them, or seek them out in your own campaign.

Our Experience

So, what's it like to play in a 7th Sea game? I can tell you what I've experienced, which will have the added benefit of revealing my biases along the way.

As it happens, Kevin Wilson (one of the co-designers of the system) is a friend of mine. Back when the game first came out, another friend said, "Hey, let's play Kevin's game!" and organized a campaign for us to play online. The setting was interesting, and soon I had statted up Brother Francesco Cadiz, a half-Castillian monk who had inherited Ussuran sorcery (shape-shifting) from his mother. Since the church preached that all sorcery was evil, the conflict between faith and inheritance intrigued me--was sorcery truly evil? Could I be devout and still practice my sorcery?

We managed to rescue ourselves from a shipwreck, explore an underground Syrneth ruin in Montaigne, defend a noble's mansion from a Sidhe attack, and escape from an Avalonian politician before real life intervened and our GM had to bow out. But at that point we were hooked. We switched GMs and characters to become Musketeers and recovered stolen treasure from a group of actors, switched GMs again to become agents for the Explorer's Guild, discovering treasures and thwarting villains, and switched GMs again to thwart a series of assassination attempts on a Vodacce prince. A few years later, I finally gathered enough momentum myself to run a group of new and returning characters through Ussura, where they managed to thwart a coup attempt on Tamara v'Rissanova, convinced Montegue to stop invading the country, failed to stop an assassination of the Gaius, but saved his spirit skin, and awoke an ancient sleeping drachen.

It's been a rich, fertile ground for roleplaying. The semi-familiarness of the setting gives it a great hook you can grab on to as both a player and as a GM. As a GM, it meant that I could find equal amounts of inspiration from the source books and from history. As a player, it meant I could grab and modify known character archetypes from that period of history or from fiction set in those eras and countries. We didn't find the setting as pirate-y as perhaps it was advertised, but we did indeed find it swashbuckle-y, and produced lots of great scenes and stories using the system. So if you're up for a slightly retro swashbuckling experience in a creative setting that invites tweaking, check it out!