John Wick's just sent subscribers some information about

>My Loyal Crew

>First, let me talk a little bit about who’s going to be leading us on this little jaunt. There’s me, of course, but there’s also Mark Diaz Truman. He’s running all the business aspects of the project. Mark’s been in charge of the money matters at JWP since our first Kickstarter, way back in 2012. He’s organizing and designing the forthcoming 7th Sea: Second Edition Kickstarter, and when we launch, he’ll be handling any issues or questions that come up.

>Second, there’s the design team: Mike Curry and Rob Justice. Mike and Rob have been friends of mine for a long time and ran the Bear Swarm Podcast for years. They both have keen minds and great insight into what makes a good RPG tick. The three of us have been working on the revised system for 7th Sea (more on that in a moment) and we’ve been talking a lot about how the world.

>We’re planning a beautiful book too… so we’ve got some great folks putting together the final layout. Our art director is Marissa Kelly, responsible for the Epyllion game about little dragons and art director for a whole bunch of other companies, including Evil Hat and Storium. Thomas Deeny—you might know him from the new Firefly RPG from MWP—will be handling the graphic design of the Kickstarter and Quick Start.

(cont.)

>>44715079
>The More Things Change…

>7th Sea: Second Edition is going to see some changes from the first edition. When folks ask me, “What kind of changes?” I often invoke Battletar Galactica. I was a huge fan of the original show—I was ten years old when it came out—and I’m a fan of the reboot as well. In the new BSG, we still had Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, Cylons and everything I loved about the first show. Sure, they had new faces—and in some cases, new genders—but they were still those same characters, just with an updated feel. New special effects, new writing, new cast but same show.

>7th Sea: Second Edition is going to feel a lot like that. All the Nations are still there—Avalon, Castille, Vodacce, Ussura, etc.—but a few of them may have slight changes. Three of them have undergone slightly deeper changes. Eisen is going to be a whole lot scarier, for example. When you come across a small town of terrified villagers who look up to the castle on the hill where “the countess” lives… you’ll know you’re in Eisen. Ussura is getting a political facelift plus a new kind of sorcery that replaces shapeshifting. And the Vestenmennavanjar… well, let’s just say you don’t have to choose between “awesome merchant prince” and “awesome Viking raider” anymore; you can have both at the same time.

(cont.)

>>44715107
>I'm also adding a new nation to the list: The Sarmatian Commonwealth. I’ve visited Poland twice—goin again this year!—and every time I go, I hear the same question: “Why is there no Poland in 7t Sea?” After getting asked this question about a dozen times in an hour, I spent some time researching 17th Century Poland and my answer to that queston is now, “Because I was an idiot.” I made a promse the last time I was there that if I ever re-did 7th Sea, I would include Poland. Well, I’m keeping that promise. I’m very excited for the Commonwealth and after you see what we’ve been doing with its politics, sorcery and history, I thnk you wil be, too.

>A New Engine

>But the big question on most people’s minds is this one: “Are you using d20’s or Roll and Keep?” The answer is... neither.

>I love R&K. I helped design it back in the day. But the fact of the matter is, rolling a handful of dice and keeping two of them… isn’t very swashbuckly. If I want to feel like Errol Flynn, if I want to feel like the Dread Pirate Roberts, if I want to feel like Captain Jack Sparrow, I want to throw a handful of dice and use all of them. And that’s the new system we’ve designed for 7th Sea: Second Edition.

>We’re still using Trait + Skill (the “Traits are too important” folks are going to be very happy) and we’re still using Raises. Except now, you make Raises after the roll. Which means you get to feel like a Big Damn Hero.

>We’ve still got Brute Squads and Villains, but we’ve refined how they work. In fact, a lot of the new system can fall under that category. “We’ve refined how they work.” The new 7th Sea system is fast, elegant and dynamic. It isn’t overly simple and it isn’t like one of my “Littl Games.” But I fee it capturs the cinematic feel we were going for with the first edition of the game, but didnt quite reach. RPGs have changed a lot in almost 20 years, and I want 7th Sea to still stand out!

(cont.)

>>44715149
>The Kickstarter

>I can’t give you an exact date for the Kickstarter just yet, but I can tell you that you should keep your spyglasses on late January/early February. As in, the last week and first week. Yes, it’s that close.
As for when you’ll get a book in your grubby, swashbuckling paws… we want to release the book at Gencon. We’re working ‘round the clock to meet that goal right now. We might miss it… but I’d love to see all of you with 7th Sea: Second Edition books in August. That would put a real big smile on my face.

>Expect more updates like this in the next few weeks as we put together the Kickstarter, finalize the system, and put out a Quick Start. Please let your friends know that this email list is the best way to way to get all the newest 7th Sea gossip...

>2016 is the Year of 7th Sea. Oil up your swords, lift up them sails and run out the guns! It’s going to be a fantastic year.

>Take care,

>Sincerely,

>John Wick

(note: John Wick is many terrible things but he's not illiterate. I've deliberately deleted a few letters here and there, because some of the posts were just a few characters short of fitting in the box and I didn't want to abruptly cut sentences or switch subjects in the middle. That's totally my fault if a word seems misspelled)

>>44715107
>Oh, and we've changed the Vesten/Vendel a lot. No longer will you need to choose between anachronistic vikings and foppish Jewish caricatures

Yes! Yes! Finally, finally we're getting rid of this retarded -

> - Now, they're one and the same!

Oh, 7th Sea. It's going to be just like the old days.

John Wick is one of those guys who needs a partner who isn't afraid to slap him down and tell him "NO". He can do good stuff, but only when he isn't digging his heels in and adamantly refusing to admit being wrong about something.

>>44715107
>Ussura is getting a political facelift plus a new kind of sorcery that replaces shapeshifting.

No, no, NO, Wick! God fucking dammit! Shapeshifting was the one single thing about Ussura which didn't suck!

This is so frustrating. Reading through this, it's like every single line is a step forward, followed by two steps back.

I swear to Theus, if he uses the system from Houses of the Blooded as the basic mechanic for this someone will taste steel. It was a good idea at one point, but holy fucking shit did he try to ride that wave for-fucking-ever since.

If he's ditching Roll and Keep but seemingly keeping dice pools, does this mean he's basically making The Riddle of Steel?

Wick is known to visit /tg/ on occasions.

Everyone post the things you want to see in 2nd Ed on the off chance he'll read it and want to pretend it was his idea.

So are the shitty Italian/Gypsy/French stereotypes still in?

Like, I'm no SJW, but Wick strikes me as the sort of person whose research into history and culture is watching a few movies and calling himself a fucking professor.

>>44716339
I think his research for Legend of the Five Rings was watching Seven Samurai with bad bootleg subs written by Russians.

>>44716339
Well, shitty national stereotypes are basically all that 7th Sea had to offer. If he removes those he wouldn't be left with much else.

Am I the only one who thinks the national sorcery types of Avalon and Montaigne should be changed? Glamour is far, far, faaaaaaar too powerful, and thematically all over the place (English folklore is filled with wizard and witch types, but a Glamour sorcerer almost never looks remotely like either. Most would probably look more like a magical version of a D&D rogue or bard), while Sorte is cripplingly narrow and weak, which is odd for a nation which is supposed to be Thea's sorcery central.

For Montaigne, I say make their national sorcery type Mirage (from the Noblesse Oblige sourcebook). Quite simply, there's nothing that Sorte can do that Mirage can't, and Mirage does it better and does more things. It very nearly renders Sorte redundant, and thematically, it fits Montaigne every bit the same. Hell, I can imagine the cool ways it may influence their culture and architecture. Imagine the mansion of the average Montaigne noble: large, ornate mirrors on every single wall... EXCEPT within the private chambers, where there's not a single reflective surface to be found, lest an ambitious rival attempt to use it against you...

For Avalon, I'm intrigued by the possibility of making their national sorcery the female form of Scrying, from the Sophia's Daughters sourcebook. The one which uses potions and can see the future. Either keep or lose the "only women can use it" aspect (or make it so that the majority of users are female, maybe), I don't care. The variety of potions makes it incredibly versatile (though not as game-breakingly so as Glamour), but the powers are more limited and less useful in combat. Nevertheless, they retain a feeling that fits English folklore very well, serves the wizard/witch archetype, and is still deeply connected to the lore of Avalon and its Sidhe.

Actual Glamour sorcery would just be the purview of the fairies.

>>44716429
Shitty national stereotypes and pretty damn cool magic.

>>44716554

But Montaigne Sorcery is one of the coolest things, and one of the most original parts.

>>44715060

I would honestly be happiest if they just changed that shitty, shitty, double shitty map.

Also, yeah, the setting in general needs a lot of work. I'd like to see it take broader brushstrokes instead of trying to exactly reproduce things, and have more of an actual pirate bent to it.

>>44716255

John Wick, please make map kill.

Also leave the mechanics, they were fun, and made swordfighting actually feel tactical.

Also, for fucks sake, merge some nations and mix shit so you don't just have such a wonky and uneven level of fluff.

>>44716670
I don't mind Sorte remaining (maybe make it the "lost" Eisen sorcery, because God knows their own native type was a whole different league of shitty), but you got to admit Mirage fits Montaigne a lot better, and is a lot more balanced. It's hard to explain how a nation becomes a setting's magical powerhouse when their one type of magic is the shittiest around except for the type which (sensibly) went extinct centuries ago.

>>44716710

For good times' sake, folks

>>44715149

>But the fact of the matter is, rolling a handful of dice and keeping two of them… isn’t very swashbuckly. If I want to feel like Errol Flynn, if I want to feel like the Dread Pirate Roberts, if I want to feel like Captain Jack Sparrow, I want to throw a handful of dice and use all of them.

This has got to be the absolute dumbest reason for a mechanics change ever. What the fuck does this even mean? Does anyone here speak Wick-ese?

Someone post "Play Dirty", before we fall into the trap buying into anything this shithead says.

>>44716815
Don't got all of it, but here's the most famous excerpt: http://googlebordello.crushhumanity.org/internettreasures/hitem.html

>>44716784
Maybe he means that it isn't quite... Snappy enough, for lack of a better word. Too much between rolling and seeing results? Or maybe he thinks not using every single die you roll is somehow not gratifying enough to buckle his swash.
Or he doesn't want to deal with the legal morass that is Roll and Keep right now. AEG sold the entirety of L5R to FFG, which includes R&K as a system. You can't "own" game mechanics, but that doesn't mean that Wick can't potentially get legally buttfucked for using it.

>>44716851

I've never even met this guy, but I'm suddenly feeling the fabled "Urge to Punch John Wick In The Face" I keep hearing all about.

>>44716851

>Immunity

Wh-what? What? What?! That's not clever, that's just saying "haha, your Advantage means nothing to me!"

Not that the rest is clever.

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>>44716339
Most likely. Every nation was a stereotype of SOMETHING.

I honestly can't remember shit else about the setting that was unique.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'm personally hoping to at least see a reference to Thea's Judaism equivalent (well, I'd like to at least have one exist). Romantic, pulpy Judaism, with golems and ancient conspiracies and Rabbis being sorcerers. Yes, it's politically incorrect in all sorts of ways, but you've already went and insulted every other culture in Europe, not to mention the Muslims and Christians. You might as well go the whole way. Jews did feature in the literature of the period, you know.

>>44716016
So he's the RPG George Lucas?

>>44717262
Pretty much, yeah. Except imagine that Star Wars was taken away from George before he could fuck up too much of it, so he went and made something called "Galaxy Conficts" and made JarJar the main character.

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>>44717408
...Hold me, anon. I'm scared.

>>44717262
honestly that's most creative types, especially when they have a hit and start thinking all their ideas are gold

>>44717262
Look, John writes passable fiction. Sometimes, he writes good fiction. Rarely, he even goes so far as to write excellent fiction.

The small problem is that he's a lot better at writing fiction than he is at writing roleplaying games. The big problem is that for all of how bad he's at that, he's still a lot better at it than he's at writing ABOUT roleplaying games.

Guess which he's done the most of the last few years.

>>44716851
>Another example. The character is in an airport. He’s in the rest room and he stumbles across an envelope somebody dropped. He opens the envelope and discovers its filled with thousand dollar bills. Get you get any more lucky? Of course, the money belongs to a crime syndicate or something even more diabolical, and they’re going to be looking for that money and who “found” it (of course, they believe the hero stole it). And all of this trouble because the character was Lucky.

>Immunity gives a character supernatural immunity to diseases and poisons. It’s a very popular advantage. Of course, Mr. Carter had to do something about that.
>I had his scientists come up with a disease that would kill off anyone with the “super gene” that meta-humans had. Carter had a cure, of course. The only problem was all those super fellows who bought Immunity were, well, immune to it.

Is there some way we can prevent this man from breeding? You know, besides his stunning personality driving away any woman with any sense.

>>44716554
>>44716736
>>44716670
Montaigne had Porte not Sorte. Porte was pretty damn useful. If you had the Catch Knack from the nation book you could stunt away projectiles. I had a player once use it to catch a cannonball.

Sorte was the Vodacce sorcery and while thematically very cool it was very weak.

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>>44717408
>>Implying AEG didn't fuck up L5R far harder than Lucas fucked up Star Wars.

>>44720233
>Implying the worst fuckups didn't happen with Wick firmly at the reigns

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>>44720342
>>The end of Celestial
>>Not the shittiest bit of L5R
>>Implying Wick would ever let the Shadowlands Taint become just another source of Super Powers.

Top fucking kek.

>>44718046

Does he even know what the words "Lucky" and "Immunity" mean? Dude is fucking grasping for straws here but he acts like he knows what the fuck he's talking about. Christ, that's some impressive arrogance.

>>44720192

More than useful, Porte was COOL, and the descriptions of its use was one of the precious few parts of the setting that wasn't a generic ripoff.

I kinda liked 7th Sea, but have never bothered to read it all the way through and never played it. Closest I came was cribbing off it for a high fantasy conquistadors game I tried to homebrew at one point, but that died after two sessions.

>>44721306
It takes a special weapons-grade grognard to do half the shit that John Wick does in his games, as well as to put up with said shit.

After a while, players would be like "No, I'm not creating a full support cast and background so you can murder them within three sessions." Of course this was all to make his off-brand Maxwell Lord/Lex Luthor character look super cool.

>>44721793

The thing that confuses me is that he purports to be all about roleplaying over rollplaying... but he's using Disadvantages and Advantages as something like mechanical point punishments instead of chances to make things interesting.

>>44716107
Wait, what? But Roll and Keep is the best part of Seventh Sea's system!

>>44718046
Fuck the what!? So, you get to pay points to get fucked over in his world? Just have the balls to tell players "I don't want you to have these options" rather than this passive aggressive bullshit.

>>44722382
To John Wick, roleplaying means suffering, and any and all aspects of the system are just more means to heap suffering on you.

So, I've always wondered about this. What is 7th Sea supposed to be? It doesn't really feel like a naval RPG.

>>44722834
He sounds like a thirteen year old who just learned to GM and still thinks the game is supposed to be adversarial.

>>44722957
He got his start DMing supers games during the darkier and edgier period of comics. People ate his dumb shit up, apparently.

>>44722955
Swashbuckling.

>>44716851
>Malice retired the next day and nobody ever bought a DNPC again.
>I just converted players from making interesting, fleshed out characters with actual backgrounds into murderhobos!

And the smug asshole thinks he's actually clever.

>>44722382
>like mechanical point punishments instead of chances to make things interesting.
That's literally all it is though. It's like that in 5e too. What do you want? Mechanics that don't affect the game at all?

>>44723039
Are you claiming Wick's actions are remotely defensible from a mechanics-centric point of view? Did you actual read the story in question?

>>44723071

Are they defensible from ANY point of view?

He's not acting as a neutral arbiter, so simulationists and emergent-narrative people hate him.
He's not acting to further the story (unless you count "lock someone in a jail cell he can't escape from and ask him, every single time, what he's doing"), so intended-narrative people hate him.
He's not creating an engaging mechanical puzzle, so gamists hate him.

The only person Wick is GMing for is his own throbbing erection.

>>44723018
So, what, rather than being Master & Commander: The Privateer Books it's Pan (2015)/Peter Pan starring Robin Williams?

>>44723018
>>44722957
That would explain the "Get your true identity exposed in front of your grandmother, who has a heart attack and dies" plot.

>>44723071
It's the player's choice for picking a shitty GM.

>>44723136
no, it's a random Errol Flynn movie

Or Pirates of the Caribbean if you're too young for that.

>>44723129
From a very specific character drama improv point of view it could theoretically be defensible. However, I love character driven stories and I'd never put up with his shit because the same dumb melodrama over and over gets really boring.

>>44723251
Are the Errol Flynn movies actually good and worth watching?

Pirates of the Caribbean would be giving this game too much credit.

>>44723322
>Pirates of the Caribbean would be giving this game too much credit.
and why is that?

>>44723322
Yes? Some of them are formulaic but they're most certainly not bad (or even mediocre) by any means.

>>44723350
PotC has more interesting magic and better ship-to-ship battles.

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Playing 7th Sea is like trying to play GURPS on an actual, moving sailing ship, where you have to remember TNs and Raises and kept dice and unkept dice and drama dice and dick dice. The core rulebook, which is ostensibly about pirates fighting on the ocean, is packed with huge heaps of poorly sorted mechanical options to sift through like a fucking Exalted Charm list...except for the rules for fighting with fucking boats! Those only have a couple pages.

>>44722813
John Wick is a shitty author, but an even worse GM. He basically defined the passive aggressive "WELL I'LL SHOW YOU!" GMing style, patented with such stylish books as "Play Dirty", a manual on how to adversarial GM.

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>>44723452
>PotC has more interesting magic

>>44723457
Oh, also, he completely jumped the shark with the 90s-WoD style metaplot where there were Xel'Naga and Illuminati and whatever else he fucking packed in there that had basically nothing interesting or relevant to "Pirates On Boat", so look forward to wading through that particular tailings pond on your way to the worldbuilding and splat options.

>>44723457

The most fun thing in 7th Sea is the swordplay, really. 7th Sea is a fun system, but horribly stitched together. And while the setting has some interesting stuff, its generally utterly terrible. While the Pirate and Swashbuckling genres have a lot in common, there is a distinction, and the setting flops like a retard trying to bring them together AND shoehorn in terribly dull, generic fantasy crap as well.

And the 7th Sea map has been known to cause people looking at it to have seizures and die from its level of fuckness.

Honestly, I'm sad they're bringing the setting back, they need to take the few interesting things (magic, mostly, for one) and burn the rest down and then rebuild it with a goddamn direction in mind.

Is it still going to be a total waste to buy skills instead of buying as many backgrounds as you can justify?

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>>44723625
John Wick is on the record with such whoppers as "balance in an RPG doesn't matter" and "D&D is not a roleplaying game". There's a better chance that Celine Dion will fly to my house and give me a hummer to the tune of "My Heart Will Go On" than John Wick designing a decent game.

>>44720192
Yeah, sorry about it. I was referring to Porte when I wrote all those things, just to be clear. It was late at night and the two sorceries are named a letter apart (nice design move, Wick). Sorte (strings of fate) is actually really useful. Porte (holes in space) may be cool and original but it is very, VERY mechanically limited (you practically have to be a master to do anything with it a D&D wizard couldn't do in level 2, compared to other types of sorcery that let you fuck shit up something fierce in 11 different ways right from the get go) and barely even does the only thing it can almost do well. Compared to Mirage, which is actually BETTER at transporting people and objects across distances, but can also do a whole host of other things, from spying on people through mirrors to stealing their souls.

I remember a very, very long series of angry posts on /tg/ from several years back which basically concentrated all the mechanical, setting and thematic issues in 7th Sea into one, humorous rant.

Too bad it's no longer on 4plebs and the Waruso archive seems down.

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>>44724611
Well, if you find it, my body is ready.

>>44724802
Well, the archives are dead, so....

>>44725601
Is it on suptg?

>>44725671
It's not a quest thread, so odds are minuscule

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>>44725694

>>44724611

Thankfully the 7th Sea setting is so terrible and bland that you can be certain that whatever you homebrew will be better.

Love that swordfighting mechanic though, really makes combat something to get strategic with.

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http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/5528043/

God, old /tg/ was full of idiots.

>No outlet to ocean! It must be a SALT SEA!
What, there are no lakes in 7th Sea?

>Tree's rarely grow on both sides of large mountain [ranges].
Not strictly true, in any sense. It's not like Switzerland is a denuded desert tundra and Germany an arborial paradise, is it?

>Rivers cannot flow from ocean to ocean! It's impossible!
Maybe they just cut through a small landmass to make a huge canal. Even ancient Egyptians were able to do it.

>the river that splits the continent east to west (RIVERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY) and pierces a mountain range with what must complete lack of respect to gravity.
Rivers do occasionally go from east to west. And mountain ranges do have such things as passes and canyons, not to mention you can't even be sure those are one mountain range and not two or three.

>Rivers do not just end in lakes.
>Rivers do not just end in lakes.
>Rivers definitely can end in lakes, only in that case the lakes are usually called "salt seas."
Did you know, rivers only run to the ocean? All the water is weighed down by the salt.

>Then I saw that Campaign Cartographer is in twelve parts on /rs/.
>Bugger that.

>...most people are glad a new edition [of D&D] is coming out. 3ER was horribly rushed out and was a terrible book. 4E is looking like they learned from that mistake, it has had a year and a half at writing and playtesting.

>>44716091
More like "the one single thing that was thought out".

>>44725826
You're telling me medieval Russia wasn't a magical Captain Planet-esque utopia?

>>44725805
Generally speaking, you don't get freshwater lakes that are just lakes. They always have some kind of natural canal/river to the sea, which is why people settle around them.

>>44725849
I'm Russian and no. Wick's Russia was 10 centuries behind actual 17th century Russia.

Not that i mind, though - old-time Kievan/Novgorod Russia is horribly underrepresented both in vidya and tabletop. I'm tired of seeing commies everywhere.

>>44725937
Given that 17th century Russia was 10 centuries behind 17th century anywhere else, that's drastic.

>>44725805
Well, they weren't wrong about D&D.

But on a less provocative subject, can you really get a naturally occuring river that goes from one side of a continent to another? I'd be more convinced if it had some kind of visible source inland somewhere instead of just one inlet flowing into another.

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>>44725964
Hey, don't you diss Peter the Great, he was trying.

>>44725989
The Great Lakes go about halfway across North America, longer if you count the various rivers that flow into them.

The Yangtze River basically bisects China, which is much bigger than the entire 7th Sea continent.

The Nile is immensely long.

None of these rivers bisect the continent, but I think what the poster was objecting to was the river going east-west.

>>44725995
Didn't he rule squarely in the 18th century?

>>44726263
He started from late 17th.

>>44716851
>As the GM I can completely control the game world and I use this control to create scenarios that my players cannot possibly foresee and which circumvent the game rules completely
>I'm having an orgasm just thinking about what an awesome GM I am.

Jesus fucking Christ.

>>44725805
For a game called 7th Sea there sure is a lot of land and very little sea on that map.

>>44726026
Those are all very long rivers and river-lake systems. None of them, I think, are rivers that have both ends in the sea and run straight across a continent, which is obviously what the poster in the archived thread was worked up about.

>>44726947
One of the most bizarre design decisions regarding the setting was ignoring the Americas and Africa... Yes, there's a Caribbeans equivalent and a lot of waters in Asia, but not big oceans to sail.

The titular "7th Sea" is, in-setting, a mythical sea which leads to America. It was meant to be discovered further ahead into the metaplot but the franchise died too soon.

I have to wonder what the point is of making a fantasy setting that's so deliberately a stereotyped and simplified europe. Is it so players don't feel like they have to read a history textbook to get playing? But from my experience with Ars Magica, you can go pretty far with cliches and ignore historical events completely.

I feel like 7th Sea would save itself a lot of setting derp just by giving you a map of europe in the 17th century and filling the odd with sorcerers and devil worshippers, maybe a few Ruritanian fictional statelets for if you want to go really crazy.

>>44726947
This is a silly nit to pick. Every nation has a significant coastline and in a pre-industrial setting basically all your trade and long distance travel is going to be done by sea, because it's much much faster than carting stuff around by horse. There's room for all the piracy and privateering your campaign could want.

>>44715060
Oh wow a 7th sea thread!

I heard really good things about it. Can someone give me a tl;dr of the system? Or at least a quick list of mechanics shared with other systems so I can get an idea of it?

>>44727832
Lot5R's R&K system

>>44727832
You have attributed and skills - attributes you buy at character creation, skills you only buy if you're an idiot, and instead buy backgrounds that get you sets of skills. You roll A+S d10 and keep A, then add them together and compare them to a target value. So if you had 4 finesse and 3 long blades, you'd roll 7d10 and keep the best 4. Dice explode as well, so a 10 means you roll another d10 and add it to that one until you stop rolling 10s.

>>44727700
The reason piracy became so big in the Mediterranean, Carribian and South Asia was that the seas were large, poorly patrolled by the authorities and offered lots of hideouts for pirates to use. The Barbary Coast was a huge support base for pirates in the first mentioned, the Caribbean was divided between many competing powers who were too busy fighting among themselves to effectively fight piracy, and in Asia all listed factors were at work.

Piracy is pretty damn hard when doing it close to the coastline of developed nations exactly because such waters are of clear national sovereignty, well patrolled and don't offer any friendly ports. Thus all incentives for piracy completely disappear if you design your pirate-adventure setting around the coasts of fantasy Europe rather than on the many historical examples of good places to be a pirate.

>>44717437
There there anon its ok

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>tfw still play the ccg with your m8s

John Wick can get eat dicks though, metaplot was a shit

>mfw those secret society books

>>44716429
>shitty national stereotypes

Speaking of which, is there a fansite or primer on 7th sea nations? I plan on using its cultural notes as a good roleplaying shorthand for fantasy nations. Because let's face it, damn near every fantasy nation is a combination of stereotypes, so its good to be educated in stereotypical qualities.

>>44718046
> Immunity doesn't protect from the super disease
> It does protect from the cure
What. There is no way he actually pulled this in a game, because any human beings response would be to clarify
"So, my immunity does not protect from this disease, despite making me immune to all disease"
"That's right"
"And yet, it does keep me from being affected by the cure, to the disease I should have been immune to?"
"Yup!" With that yup no doubt accompanied by a smug grin, which would immediately be smacked off of Wicks face, as the player leaves.

These things didn't actually happen, did they? This is just him wanking himself off to "clever" ideas he came up with, and didn't give more than a second thought to, before scribbling down, right?

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>>44728824
It's all true, anon. It's all true...

>>44728824
Player leaving would only make Wick's boner harder.

>>44715149
At least he acknowledges that the Polish Commonwealth was a fucking awesome country.

>>44729210
Now the Polish, too, may enjoy complaining about how their glorious heritage has been reduced into a series of racist jokes informed by skimming a Wikipedia page and their language is hilariously misused throughout a book that keeps talking down to the reader about it.

>>44724040
Merge the two to make Porte less specialized.

>>44725937
I'd have loved a Peter the Great character in 7th Sea who's trying to modernize Urussa without pissing off the guardian spirit dingus.

>>44728955
The only problem with this macro is she never had either.

>>44727673

I think it needed to pick a focus and go with it. As much as I love places like Ussura and Essen, I think that they can be dropped if the game were to go very "Pirate Focus" heavy - you would simply need an England Expy, a France Expy, a Dutch Expy, a Spain Expy and a Portugal Expy - the big colonial powers in the Caribbean of popular consciousness. (With maybe an expansion for Barbary Pirates). Then you need sailing zones based on the Carribbean, Africa and the Mediterranean, at the very least, with maybe some American Coast nonsense to go full Blackbeard. From that point you can start painting with broader strokes and getting funky, but 7th Sea's fluff is a mess because of how thin it stretches itself.

>>44728815

Pick up a children's history book of Europe.

>>44729371
Thematically difficult, since on that level, they're already so similar. Mirage is mirror sorcery. Its most basic ability is traveling/grabbing objects/moving things through mirrors. This requires the existence of a mirror world which is not a demonic void (since Mirage allows you to hide in it, explore it, and use it to find/look through more mirrors, etc.).

How would you combine Porte and Mirage without bulldozing the themes of either?

>>44729632
>a Spain Expy and a Portugal Expy
Most EUROPEANS can barely tell the difference. Do you think in a setting based entirely on hyperexaggarated romantic stereotypes there'd be enough for it to stand out? Castille does, in fact, have elements of Portugal in it, presumably for exactly that reason.

>>44726938
More players need to stand up to gms who pull this shit and say, knock it off, that's fucking stupid.

>>44726938
>>44730297
The prevailing theory is that Wick's players suffer from a massive case of Stockholm Syndrome, causing them to voluntarily stay and keep playing with him despite the suffering.

>>44730439
This would explain a lot.

>>44729251
Polandball is already a thing, though.

>>44730439
>>44728824
People like Wick don't pick players who can go "yeah, that's bullshit, bro" on them. They are also very good at projecting their authority to make that bullshit seem natural and par the course.

>I told you it was gonna be a gritty, realistic campaign.
>Why would you roleplay anyway if you aren't willing to accept the consequences of your actions?
>If there's no risk, there's no reward. If nothing bad can happen to your character, why even bother rolling the dice?
>You aren't some sort of ninny who's gonna cry just because your character died, are you, anon?

Slippery slope is a hell of a thing.

>>44730926
The fact that I fervently believe in the first three things has me worried.

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>>44728824
This is a GM who had a player's grandmother die of a heart attack after learning her daughter's secret ID in as drama-bomb way possible, as a 'lesson' for taking the Dependent NPC flaw.

But yeah, how many of Carter's "Just As Planned" plans went off before his players started calling John on his bullshit?

>>44731000
They are all perfectly valid argument, so long as you're willing to give your GM the benefit of doubt.

Besides, as far as these things work, there's usually a lingering doubt on player's part. After all, the guy talks sense, and he seems to be deeply invested into making the story, and he speaks all the right things. So the player believes that this cool, smart guy that's so in the know has their best interest at heart and his fuckups are all due to stupidity on his part, right up until the campaign ends, everybody gets to go home and start thinking it over.

>>44731000
They're all reasonable statements, but his actions don't follow from them. The point of risk versus reward and actions having consequences is that you should be able to make choices based on them. If the consequences of your actions are arbitrary and can't be predicted, then your choices are equally arbitrary, and there's no point to making them.

>>44731128
>>44731150
I know, that's what I mean. The fact that what I totally agree with can be used to justify such horrible bullshit.

But then, I am socialist, so I should probably be used to this by now.

>>44729400
Guardian spirit dingus is pissing me off the most, to be honest. It just reeks of "hippie god of nature", which original slavic spirits were not (okay, were only partially).

But that's how everyone feels about 7th sea setting (and people actually familiar with Japan about Rokugan), so i'll just shut up.

>>44729396
Don't forget that the other big influence on the setting is supposed to be Dumas, which is where the courtly intrigue and swinging on ropes to save the queen comes from.

>>44731176
Yeah, but in the writers' defense, that's just how the Ussurans see it. "Matushka" is actually one of the only two remaining razdhost, an incredibly ancient race of immortals who have created terrestrial life. Yes, that includes all Syrenth races (which ultimately rose up and killed most of them). Yes, Matushka belongs to the species that MADE the Great Old Ones. It's been sleeping under a certain lake in Ussura because it was gravely wounded and will take tens of thousands of years to recuperate, but in the meantime, it is still powerful enough to affect the land in such ways as MAKING PYERYEM SORCERY A THING and CONTROLLING ALL NATURE.

>>44731176
I'm not a fan because its very "The Bad Guys magic is bad, but the Good Neo Pagan magic is good." which is lame. Its not just inaccurate, which I can forgive (and BOY DO I, look at their Ireland), but its DULL. Sorcery being legitimately unsettling and spooky is one of 7th Sea's biggest potential draws, and the metaplot revelations make the good and bad magic too binary. They should've muddied the waters a bit more to fuck over sorcerer PCs less.

>>44731150
>>44731128

I don't know, after the fifth time John bends a player over the table for having a character with a girlfriend, boyfriend or relative, I'd start to ask questions.

Granted, Hero System, were those various examples come from, is pretty well ideal for grogs who want to optimize their characters with oodles of powers, and disads give them even more points to play with.

Want Superman's strength? Just buy 100 Strength Telekinesis with the 'disads' of being touch-based range and requiring a Strength roll. Lot cheaper than actually buying 100 Strength.

>>44731279
Refer to >>44731273. Pyeryem isn't "good", it just doesn't come from the Syrenth (It comes from one of the last remaining members of the race which created them and trapped them beyond the Barrier). In that sense, it's no different from Glamour (granted by the Sidhe) and possibly Laerdom (though we never do learn what the Great Wurm really was). The only reason it's considered benevolent is that "Matushka" regularly helps the Ussurans (purely to further its own ends, mind you) while the Sidhe are known in Avalon practically as a big menace.

>>44731273
>>44731279
>>44731353
Do Ussurans actually get their fighting style in some book? The right to bear arms is fun, but they don't actually use good part of 7th sea mechanics.

>>44731282
>I'd start to ask questions.

You would've, but you won't be there. :^)

>>44730926
>People like Wick don't pick players who can go "yeah, that's bullshit, bro" on them.

And besides that, he explicitly writes that heencourages people with what, frankly, seems to be a horrible deficit of cojones for acting the way he wants, so any such questions would be simply countered with "You Just Don't Get it Man", and "That's just How We Do Things".

>>44731353
My point is that the Syrenth sorcery schools absolutely damage the world, while the price of the Bargain with other beings is left vague and implied to ultimately be of long term positive value. See how the sidhe are treated; we're first told that they're amoral, but they're treated as ultimately a positive influence, especially in the Sophia's Daughters book, ever after.

Yes there are exceptions, but once the big secret came out about sorcery it was treated as "there's some that's REALLY BAD and there's some that's okay" instead of "Sorcery might be a Bad Thing but there are good sorcerers so the moral question is in the GM's hands." that it was before the big reveal.

To put it another way, I feel like the consequences of the Bargain should be more personal, while "You've been drilling holes in a big field to let the devil in." is a cool reveal, it doesn't do much on the character level once you get past that reveal.

I'm using good and evil, here, because heroism and villainy are also supposed to be big themes of the game. The spiritual beings are all described as or implied to be amoral, but some are treated as more amoral than others.

>>44731451
Disappointingly, the only Fighting Styles in the book involve archery, axes and wrestling. There's not, in any of the books, and actually Ussuarn SWORDfighting style. The only thing that comes close is the Fidheli (gypsy) "acrobatic fencing" type style, which Ussurans can get at a discount.

>>44731033

>But yeah, how many of Carter's "Just As Planned" plans went off before his players started calling John on his bullshit?

He probably made it virtually impossible for the players to find out that Carter is really the puppeteer behind the scenes.

>>44731652
>wrestling
Wrestling is fine.
>some foppy asshole with rapier getting into your shit
>nyet, ne sevodnya
>turn into a bear and suplex the fucker

>>44715149
>>I love R&K. I helped design it back in the day. But the fact of the matter is, rolling a handful of dice and keeping two of them… isn’t very swashbuckly. If I want to feel like Errol Flynn, if I want to feel like the Dread Pirate Roberts, if I want to feel like Captain Jack Sparrow, I want to throw a handful of dice and use all of them. And that’s the new system we’ve designed for 7th Sea: Second Edition.
Can I smoke some of that dank shit he's apparently inhaling by the tonne?

>>44716016
So he's the RPG-- >>44717262 FUCKING DAMMIT ANON.
>>44717440
>honestly that's most creative types, especially when they have a hit and start thinking all their ideas are gold
Indeed.

>>44732098
Bitter minds think alike.

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>>44732098
>FUCKING DAMMIT ANON.

>>44732671
It is known.
>>44732692
[angry frog noises]

>>44732829
Wouldn't that just be croaking?

>>44734224
Yes, but angrily

>>44731176
Matushka is just as ruthless as the Syrneth she helped create. She is perfectly fine with keeping "her" people insular and ignorant to the point where they are hundreds of years behind the rest of the continent, just so she can keep them as a weapon against the monsters she helped create. She is only benevolent in the sense that she isn't planning on eating humanity.

>>44731279
Pyeryem is just as bad as the Bargainer's Arts, just in a different way. The Bargainer's Arts will eventually destroy humanity, but Pyeryem is a sure sign of being enslaved, as Matushka is not above taking Pyeryem from a sorcerer who pisses her off enough. Illya only keeps his because his father tricked Matushka and like the Sidhe seems bound by her word. The "bad shit" from Laerdom is that if the Vesten fail to keep their faith in the Living Runes they will all die and the Great Wyrm will return. In addition the mere presence of a Living Rune in an area will cause fucked up shit to happen, like Herje hanging out in Eisen and causing the suicide of Reifenstahl and the manifestation of the Verschlingen.

>>44731353
The Great Wurm is absolutely a Syrneth beasty of some sort. I believe the Vendel/Vesten nation book outright says as much. It is not a member of any of the common Syrne races, but it was trapped behind the Sidhe Barrier and busted through.

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>>44732098
I really don't get why you people hate this guy so much. This sort bitterness should be reserved for Palladium devs.

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>>44735922
I have enough hate in me for both.

>>44736047
Seriously though I don't get it, i liked legends of the five rings despite it's goofiness. What has he done to earn search anger?

>>44736396
see
>>44716851

His book really makes him look like a total douche-canoe

>>44716851
He's an asshole that thinks players aren't good enough for him. Fuck him.

>>44736442
Look he is old school DM who will try to twist what you do to fuck you in the ass and burn your character sheets. I get how that rubs people the wrong way.

But like his games, and I like his observations on role play, and some people like that sort of GM.

I don't get why people seem to be offended by him. I don't feel personally insulted by him and I get the impression people do.

>>44737098
>>Buy Immunity to Disease
>>Don't be immune to disease but are immune to its cure.

That isn't twisting what you do to fuck you, that is flat out saying an advantage doesn't do what it says it does. It is total "That GM" territory. The same goes for his retarded Luck story.

>>44737098
Hello, Wick.

>>44736396
Wick is a guy who thinks all of his players are fundamentally out to screw him. Not just his Play Dirty guide, but some of his stories from his DM advice in 1e L5R make it pretty clear he assumes every player is That Guy until proven otherwise.

His basic argument that if you make the players struggle, they'll enjoy the ending more, is reasonable, but he always frames his examples as if he were teaching players a lesson for trying to get the better of him.

>>44737531
>His basic argument that if you make the players struggle, they'll enjoy the ending more, is reasonable, but he always frames his examples as if he were teaching players a lesson for trying to get the better of him.

Okay I think I can agree with that. His Playstyle seems to actively punish players for breaking John wick's personal list of approved player options.

I do think the idea >>44737067 'John Wick is an asshole that thinks players aren't good enough for him' is some pretty heavy duty projection however. You should reserve that blie for poeople like Anita Sarkeesian.

>>44738229
Wick pls go

>>44723655
>"D&D is not a roleplaying game".
He was right. You can play D&D 4e without roleplaying.

>>44738263
I'm not John Wick, you don't think he cares what people think of him do you?

So...I've never read anything on 7th Sea. Anyone got links to the core rules. wouldn't mind reading the book perhaps.

>>44737098

Hahahaha, they told me Wick went to /tg/ but I didn't believe them at all.

>>44738403
>you don't think he cares what people think of him do you?
What, you think he doesn't?

>>44738403

Uh... didn't you read the stuff he posted? His problem is ENTIRELY that he cares what other people think about him. And he wants them to think he's an RPG genius.

>>44715149
Poland literally never had a navy worth the name

>>44738229

One of the examples he puts up in 1E L5R is of how he punished a combat-heavy Crab character that was lacking in social graces for having been made in the first place, effectively saying the character wasn't allowed to go on the adventure. From the story:

>"I took one look at the character sheet and saw what he was up to. I had a choice. I could tell him to re-make his character, or I could let him play the character as it stood."
>"I chose the latter, and dealt with him accordingly."
Then long boring story where the Crab is prevented from going on the mission, then:
>"Soon after the adventure, the player asked me if he could make another character."

The whole goddamn thing could have been avoided if Wick had said no in the first place, but he felt like he had to make some kind of moral lesson out of it.

Isn't John Wick the fag who said weapons shouldn't have stats?

>>44728686
>John Wick can get eat dicks though, metaplot was a shit
I wouldn't be so hars, but as I loved the core rulebook, as disappointed I was in all the expansions, because all the
>well, in the core rule book we said, they are fighting for the common folk/science/for fun/etc. , they are figthing against all the syrent that want to destroy the world
and the:
>yes they got cool magic, but it is evil, and will destroy the world
So I concour.

>>44740389
That one was in the GM's Screen/Hare Clan get Kolat'd pack. It was the thing that made me realize that Wick was That GM.

>>44740154

Neither did Germany or Russia at the time period they want to portray.

The problem with Wick isn't anything in particular that he's said or written, it's in his attitude. He's a genuinely talented, certainly accomplished writer, but as time went on he became more and more utterly assured and invested in his own genius. It's telling that in an industry containing the likes of Luke Crane, Vincent Baker or the entire Onyx Path writing team, John Wick still towers far above as the absolute master of smugness and self-aggrandizing douchbaggery. So far as he's concerned, since about when he released Houses of the Blooded he became nothing less than the RPG design Jesus (not that he believes in JESUS, of course, presenting himself interchangeably as being atheist, Buddhist or pagan feminist depending on what he feels would make him look smarter at any given moment), and anyone else can either submit to him utterly if they're players, imitate him to the letter if they're GMs, or be wrong and stupid and deserving of his ridicule. His writing has similarly grown more condescending over the years while ironically decreasing in quality, as he's now so certain that he can shit gold that he hasn't seen the need to submit most of his recent works to such in decencies as EDITING or CRITICISM, like lesser writers. As a result, some were LITERALLY unplayable, on a mechanical level. He still sold them for money (at least until he realized no one was buying, which is why they quietly became free).

>>44743559
Notice how his writing style hasn't just grown purpler over the years, it also steadily became less professional and more direct, allowing Wick to talk (down) to the reader themselves as he waxes long and poetic about his own incredible feats in game design and forgetting that somewhere down the line he might need to hide a game amidst all the adulations.

>>44743559
Well that sounds fair. I think he is a talented writers and I even agree with his views on gaming at points. Personally I think his condescending tone is blow out of scale but I can understand the hate. I just prefer look at the art over the artist.

What's Vincent baker done wrong anyway? I thought /tg/ liked him.

>>44743713
Nobody would've minded if he'd be able to keep backing his smug. Problem is that he hasn't produced anything but utter shit in the past decade or so and he's only grown cockier in that time.

Too be honest I don't really have too much of a problem with AYYLIUMS OUT THE ASS in the metaplot others have. I liked the cornball schlockyness with how insane or inane it got, but I can see annoyance as it becomes like the main thing as the line develops and it detracts from the other shit.

But then again having literal bugman ayys means I can open up a magical realm of Kamen Rider crossing over which is always good.

My only real complaints would be that NotItaly is a bit too Drow levels of backstabbing dipshittery to be believably functional. Sophia's Daughters being dumb but not in the fun sense. And fuck the Sidhe and notEngland. The Sidhe are pretty shit with their detect steel senses that is supposed protect you from just fucking their shit up and the metaplot "tragedy" of Redhead Saber falling and accidentally the country over her daughter and some elf D is set up in a way that seems to want you to just watch the trainwreck happen instead of interact with it.

The setting needed a New World analogue to be pushed out sooner despite getting a really janky combo of like the Caribbean and some parts of Africa with the "Midnight Archipelago".

And I don't like how armor is described in the fluff as being obsolete outside of the magic kraut ceramic despite a bunch of art showing armored dudes. Sure they patched it in with the China splat but it was very rough I believe or too late.

My real complaints are on the system itself with how much it screws a starting character out of their points and leaves your "hero" a massive chump. Everything is damn point sink especially the big character defining options of learning a sword school or taking sorcery. Or how doing swashbuckly shit is gonna take a lot of points in various skills

The skill/knack list got more bloated and filled with redundant skills with each passing.

Drama dice being strained as RAW due to it not just being your source of bennies, but also your magic points for sorcery, and XP

The worst thing about 7th Sea was the mechanics of character creation.

You get 100 points. There are 5 basic attributes, 4 of which start at 1 and 1 that starts at 2 (because of nationality bonus, hooray for stereotypes). 1 level costs 8 points, so assuming you want something fairly solid (this is the advice the book gives, by the way), you'll spend 48 points to get a nice 3/3/2/2/2 balance (one fairly important trait is based on your lowest attribute so you generally want to keep them close).

Congrats, you're done with attributes and you've wasted half your character points. Want skills? Oh boy, you're gonna need a whole bunch of them. Most cost 1 per level, but some cost 2, but there's this wonderful mechanic in 7th Sea where you actually need to buy (for more points) the skill (that mechanically does nothing) in order to unlock that skill's "knacks", which are the things that you actually roll. So double point spending there all around.

And that's before you get to the advantages that would make the character unique and interesting...

And of course, forget about playing a more "adventurous" sort of character. Simply being a swordsman (that is, getting a style and unlocking the knacks associated with it) costs a whopping 25 points, AND YOU STILL NEED TO BUY ALL THE KNACKS. 5-10 of them, for 2 points per level. Hope you didn't want to know any languages.

And if you want sorcery? Fuck you, that's 40 FUCKING POINTS (more like 45, since being a noble is really useful and sorcery gives you such a discount on it it's a waste not to get nobility), HALF YOUR ALLOWANCE, AND YOU DON'T GET THE ACTUAL SPELLS, YOU NEED TO BUY THEM TOO, FOR MUCHO POINTO. Think you'll just wait for later and buy it with XP? Nope, sorcery is character creation only.

(cont.)

>>44744373

Now, in most games that give you a pitiful amount of points to build your character, you're encouraged to take a lot of disadvantages to balance this and make the game more interesting. Not so here - you can only take 1 disadvantage, called a Hubris (a personality trait with some mechanics slapped on it), and you get 10 points for it. That's it. One Hubris, all the points you'll get. It also prevents you from getting a Virtue (a POSITIVE personality trait with mechanics attached to it) but since a Virtue costs points instead of giving them taking one is fucking madness.

The things most other games would consider disadvantages, like taking a vow, having enemies, a tragic love, or amnesia? Those COST YOU POINTS. Sure, you can get drama dice when they become relevant to the story, but in most games where flaws only give you in game benefits you don't have to pay for them beforehand. And no, you can't be one handed, or one eyed, or an albino or what have you, because apparently swashbuckling heroes are never physically impaired - that's for villains (not that the options are available to them, mind you).

What makes this so bad is that this is supposed to be a game of high swashbuckling adventure - a genre that is about spectacular people doing spectacular things. The heroes are SUPPOSED to be awesome, and the game appears to be built with this in mind except that in practice the amount of points you get makes it all but impossible to have a properly awesome character (or a functional one, for that matter). Now, NPC's are plenty awesome, which is the second worst thing about 7th Sea and worthy of its own series of posts - the metaplot and NPC's completely overshadow everything the players might ever do.

>>44744389

The most infuriating thing of all, though? It's probably the only tabletop RPG that actually has an equivalent of that guy who buys unique upgrades in an MMOG with real money. In most tabletop games, buying more supplaments gives your character more options, but doesn't make them any more powerful than they would be otherwise (ideally. Of course those options may be broken, but this is another problem).

In 7th Sea, each of the nationbooks has "options" (sure, you don't have to use them, but many pages are dedicated to them) to "enrich" your character (the fortune reading and families/regions)... by giving them lots of free advantages and knacks. You want a stronger starting character? No problem! Buy the supplement - it's that easy.

It's as if there was a Wizard's Handbook for D&D that didn't just include extra feats, but gave "suggestions" that Wizards just start with 2-3 free extra feats, no catch (other than the obvious facts you had to pay for the book, but the company doesn't care for that, do they?)

To be honest fäm the only real sword skill you needed was the one that inflicted knockdown so you could abuse the 0 to hit difficulty roll by taking raises so you can shit out extra damage while keeping your roll at a easy level to beat

>>44744389
>The heroes are SUPPOSED to be awesome, and the game appears to be built with this in mind except that in practice the amount of points you get makes it all but impossible to have a properly awesome character (or a functional one, for that matter). Now, NPC's are plenty awesome, which is the second worst thing about 7th Sea and worthy of its own series of posts - the metaplot and NPC's completely overshadow everything the players might ever do.

That's pretty on par for Wick - he likes to touch himself over how unique and special his super cool NPCs are. Player characters, meanwhile, start as basically level 0 commoners because you have to EARN the right to have an interesting game.

>>44744576
Perhaps this can be solved by dickpunching Wick at cons

This thread has reminded me that while I really adore lots of elements 7th Sea, especially all the fighting styles and political shit in the backdrop and all that other stuff, I also could never actually run 7th Sea because it's a giant backend cluster fuck of NPCs and metaplot and all kinds of shit and I'm like "how the fuck do I get a story in here edgewise?".

So that's something I hope we can get out of a new version, a game where I don't need "setting mastery" to figure out what the fuck I'm doing.

>>44744641
The best way to play 7th sea is to just flush metaplot and all cool superspecial NPCs down the toilet and just play 18th century Europe with some adjustments - even if your setting becomes just a bunch of /int/ memes it's way better than Wick's collection of stereotypes.

>>44744683

I'm really surprised /tg/ hasn't done (or at least I haven't seen) it's own blackjack and hookers version of 7th Sea. As somebody said above you can't copyright mechanics - not that 4chan gives a shit about that

>>44744746
Mostly because nobody gives a shit. Switching stuff up is easy, especially since you don't need all the baggage for different countries, just enough so SWASHBUCKLING: THE SWASHBUCKLENING feels good.

>>44744746
7th Sea 2 (though I guess they'll need to change the name now) was essentially that. Don't have the PDF here but it is in the archives.

>>44744746
They did, it's called Dungeons the Dragoning.

>>44744783
This.

It's just like L5R, everyone who plays the game just switches up what they don't like about the setting (hell, the newest edition actively encouraged it) to the point it's rare to actually find anyone who uses the default setting as-is straight out of the books.

And bitching about the stuff we don't like is cathartic.

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>>44744373
>>44744389
>>44744403

I'm glad I read all the way through the thread so I didn't feel compelled to type all of this out.

Look, the map is stupid, but you can have a perfectly fine game with a stupid map. The writer is a condesending ass, but since he's unlikely to actually be your GM in person, your own GM doesn't have to pay attention to the blatant aspect of punishing characters for being characters.

But it's a game about larger-than-life swashbuckling heros. Meanwhile, the mechanics make it so that a starting character is rolling around 5k3 on their primary roll (and 3k2 on pretty much everything else). That's giving you average results of about 21 and 13, respectively, accounting for dice explosions. The starting TN to hit another fighting character is almost always going to be a 25, and can be 30-35 with little effort. TNs for non-combat skill checks are most often in the 15-25 range. Just by the virtue of Wick's complete ignorance of fucking math (and this is coming from a goddamn theatre major), your "larger-than-life" heroes are completely unable to be larger than life, because they can't fucking DO ANYTHING COMING OUT OF CHARACTER CREATION.

Oh, and don't forget - if you actually use your Drama Dice in play to help you succeed (because, y'know, your dice pool isn't big enough to let you succeed yet), it COSTS YOU XP. Each DD you don't use converts to an XP, so by using them, you're costing yourself the experience points you need to get to the point where you don't have to fucking depend on the Drama Dice!

Christ, I want 7th Sea 2e so fucking badly. And yet I'm being forced to Trust In Wick for it to happen. This hurts my soul.

Here, for anyone who wants them, my alternative 7th Sea Naval Combat rules. For use with a hex grid and Pirates of the Spanish Main cardstock ships.

>>44745465
But anon, suffering builds character! You don't want to be cool for free, you're not a munchkin, are you?

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>>44745538
>suffering builds character

MRW

>>44744403
>>Bitching about the Nation Books Fortune tables

Guess what naga, 1e L5R did the same fucking thing in its clan books with the Ancestor Tables and yet no one ever bitches about those.

>>44746149
When your game is generally good, are going to be less inclined to pick at every tiny issue. If they already dislike large parts of it, and still continue to read, they'll do it while constantly being on the lookout for things to get angry about. They'll find and complain about everything.

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>>44728815

Here you go. Fair warning, it's the one I used for my own campaign - the timeline starts going off-script about 1600-ish so I could set up my own Vendel/Vesten plotline, set up the pieces for a major war more efficiently than canon, and establish the existence of a "not-Caribbean" off the coast of Castille (thus actually giving a solid reason for piratical adventures). But the actual faction writeups and the majority of the back history are 100% canon.

>>44746263

You mind sharing the stuff about the extra islands, if you have it handy? I always felt that it was dumb not to have somewhere for the pirates to actually go, aside from that one where the Brotherhood hangs out.

>>44723023
Pretty sure he uses that one as a cautionary tale in regards to NPC and the wrong way to kill them off.
>>44731778
Nah, the PCs unmasked him and tore him to shreds, by the way his book describes it, John loved it.

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>>44746295

Sure. Three posts. First, large map. New islands are in the lower left corner.

Oh, and the river doesn't cut the continent in half now.

(As an aside, you'll note that I put Denmark back on the map. Now the Vendel live there, while the Vesten have largely abandoned the penninsula for the northern islands. Makes more sense that way.)

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>>44746346

Second, detail map of the "Sunset Archipelego"

The vast majority of the islands are tiny and undetailed. I was wanting a similar island density to the effect of Assassin's Creed Black Flag; islands are fairly close together, but major islands with important stuff on them take a bit to get to. There's a mix of in-close and open-water here, so naval combat can be mixed up a bit (whereas normally it should be "all along the coast" if you're playing in ordinary Theah).

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>>44746346
>>44746366

Finally, map key. Should be self-explanatory. This is my original map key; I detailed another half-dozen or so islands during the campaign, but they were directly related to campaign-specific plot points or PC backstory, so I wouldn't include them here.

Essentially, there's a bunch of poorly-developed naval bases here for Castille, Avalon, Vendel, and Montaigne. At some point there should be valuable resources discovered on some of the larger islands, and that triggers a localized war between the four nations, with independent pirates as a 5th faction, and the Vodacce sailing out and fucking people up on ALL sides depending on what benefits them economically this month (most often the Vendel, though).

Hope you enjoy.

File: 7th Sea Booze Guide.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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Have a bonus. NEA's guide to 7th Sea Booze. This was taped to the inside of my GM's screen, and was probably the thing I referenced most after the giant list of Swordsman's Knack effects. Everybody loves detailed descriptions of what they're drinking.

>>44746263
>Ussura - Not-Russia. This is the not-Russia of Ivanhoe, not the Romanovs.

Unless England is the not-Russia you're referring to I think this Ivanhoe ref is misplaced.

>>44715060

John Wick is one of those guys who was too retarded to realize that the metagame is actually a thing in a game. Absolutely all of his advice ignores the fact that rpgs are based on the idea of actual, living people sitting down and playing a makebelieve game for enjoyment.

The crab story >>44740389 gave is pretty much a perfect example of this in action.

>>44743559
>Luke Crane
>Even in sentence as the name John Wick

Anon pls. This "Luke is le smug" meme needs to stop.

>>44746479
This is awesome.

>>44746479
>Montaigne de Falisci R Wine Ruined Grapes and undrinkable filth. Most valuable in Theah, since Monts destroyed bottles

So if I'm reading this right... the wops take their shittiest wine and label it Montaigne as an insult, and that country invades and smashes all the bottles of it they can find, and now it's a valuable collector's item despite being shitty wine?

>>44746550
>Ivanhoe

I...have no idea how that got there. Nobody ever mentioned it. I'm pretty sure I meant "Alexander Nevsky" as the reference, not friggin Ivanhoe. Which would make sense, given it's about a bunch of boyars and common people - with the important help of Mother Nature via the Battle on the Ice - kicking a bunch of invading western Europeans the fuck out of Russia so they can go back to drinking in peace. Which is pretty much what Ussura is about.

Wow. Sorry.

>>44745538
I don't want to be an idiots gimp, either.

>>44746597

That's entirely correct. It's actually in the Vodacce sourcebook. People collect stupider things.

>>44746550
Might be referring to Ivan IV

Why not kill John Wick's dog to send him a message?

>>44746557
Maybe he should stop acting smug, than.

>>44746644

That would also make sense, given how Ivan the Terrible diminished the power of the boyars, which is a running theme through the Ussura house book. And the whole "throw the dude to be eaten by dogs" is lifted DIRECTLY from Ivan IV. To be honest, though, I wrote that a couple years ago and I can't recall exactly what I meant.

>>44746648
He'll come after you
With his katana
He will not stop
At least until he gets a stroke from hauling his greasy bulk out the front door, that is

Reminding that Johnny was the guy who thought a game about playing mystical Knights Templar could really use a segment in which the players are inexplicably turned into Jews in Auschwitz "in order to learn the true value of human compassion" or something equally inane

Actually, Thirty was generally a trainwreck of mythical proportions and a fucking study in all the things John Wick does wrong. Worth a reading for academic purposes, to be able to compose an antithesis.

>>44738229
You are as much an idiot as Wick is.

>>44746654

Maybe you should stop taking different design priorities as a personal assault on everything you hold dear.

>>44746775
>I love to be constantly talked down to by someone who sincerely believes everyone who doesn't share their extremely specific point of view is stupid and wrong!

>>44746701

>Reminding that Johnny was the guy who thought a game about playing mystical Knights Templar could really use a segment in which the players are inexplicably turned into Jews in Auschwitz "in order to learn the true value of human compassion" or something equally inane


Wat?

>>44744373
>>44744389
>>44744403

...ouch.

There goes my thoughts of playing an Avalon Noble with a Brace of Pistols and that Glamour that lets you catch bullets because you are Just That Fast.

>>44744139

I honestly like Not!England and it's Sidhe. It's fun.

On the other hand: Jesus Christ I got sick of Sophia's Daughters fast. 'Look at us, we know the Actual Truth about basically everything and get two sorts of magic AND other stuff'

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>>44746242
>L5r

>Good

>>44747303
Best org is the Rosicrucian

>>44747226
>I sincerely interpret everything as a personal attack

lmfao m8 you fuckin' dumb

>>44747505

Ah but everyone knows that they have been secretly controlled by the Daughters for centuries!

...actually, that is probably the thing that annoyed me most with them. 90% of notable female characters? Members of the Daughters. It's like they wanted to have strong, outgoing female swashbucklers...then decided to also undermine that whole idea by making them all secretly part of the Matriarchy that's pulling the strings of a heap of places and people.

>>44747532
Not a personal attack. Crane will not bring himself down to the level of any individual, mere mortal. His attacks are on the whole of the roleplaying community - those parts of it which do not hold him up to be the allmighty God of GMing which he knows himself to be, of course - even if, alas, he can only reach those who've bought his books.

>>44747539
Until Thalusai start popping out of the woodwork as they herald NotShocker with their army of half machine-half beastmen and they end up getting rescued by totally not Karate Bugmen of justice dropkicks.

Because
>Implying they will ever let female rider be a lead role.


Also I think hilariously about the Daughters besides that like half of the female members of the other orgs are part of it is that it too has a shit load of plants from the super sekrit BBEG org.

Good thing I never had a player be Sophia's daughter aligned because then I'd need to seriously think of how to tone their Real Truth Behind Everything bullshit down. Probably by ditching most of it outside of being filthy Sidhe co-conspirators because fuck fae folk.

>>44747539
Also, the DoS are horrifically evil.
Sorcery is bad, and we unleashed several plagues to wipe it out.
But sorcery is okay when we use it.
Also, we teach an assassin school.
Nothing says swashbuckling heroine like Poison, disease and hypocrisy.
It's like they made a secret society for evil bond girls.

>>44747712
>>44747664

Yep. Yet you are supposed to think they are the good guys.

If I was going to redo them I'd tone them down a lot. Get them to the same level of 'We know SOME things but not everything' that the other groups are and have more notable female characters that don't secretly work for them.

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>>44746701
>Reminding that Johnny was the guy who thought a game about playing mystical Knights Templar could really use a segment in which the players are inexplicably turned into Jews in Auschwitz "in order to learn the true value of human compassion" or something equally inane

>>44747761
Or just make them what they seem on the surface.

The worst part about 7th Sea was the Call of C'thulhu ancient astornauts bs that eventually overshadowed the actual swashbuckling.

>>44747712
If you'd actually read some feminist fantasy rather than staying away from it on the assumption that SJWs have touched it, you'll find that a lot of the cornerstones of the genres don't shy away from such things. "Pre-First Wave", and post-feminists (that's actual feminists, not tumblrinas asking to be called by a personally tailored pronoun), as often as not, aren't stupid. They know that the heroines of their stories, especially in historical settings (or, you know, what to them was real life - there were feminists as early as the 18th century) cannot and will not realistically free themselves or "defeat the patriarchy" or do any good by swinging swords. The whole idea (and it's quite revolutionary, for its time, because it required adopting a nonstandard mindset to literature back when genres were horrifically codified) is that if a woman uses poison, daggers and lies to kill her oppressors, she is CUNNING. Whether or not she's "good" on some objective moral plane is irrelevant because this is HER story - that she'd do what she has to achieve her goals is a given. Those "feminine weapons" are equalizers in an unfair world.

I'm reminded of an analysis I've once read of the Jewish and radical-Muslim interpretations of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau.

To the Jews, Jacob is absolutely, clearly the hero of the tale. He was smart, and despite being physically weak and socially disadvantaged (i.e. he wasn't the elder) managed to skillfully earn the prize using his brains. For a society which for millennia has faced the same circumstances and thus developed a system of values to fit, this is nothing except commendable. When Jews tell the story, they paint Esau as a slow-minded, weak-willed, gluttonous idiot who sold his Birthright for a bowl of soup.

Radical Muslim interpretations, however, often paint Esau as a sad victim. To them, he's not a weak-willed fool - he's straightforward and honest. And to them, Jacob wasn't cunning - he was a schemer.

>>44747853
>Underdogs will view the use of underhanded tactics as indicative of intelligence and a noble desire for freedom/revenge/representation rather than immoral and dishonorable. More news at 11

>>44747853
I've always viewed Jacob as a huge dick. He won't give a simple bowl of soup to his starving brother, how dickish can you get? Shit, if my brother came in from the woods hungry, I'd make him a cup-ramen or something.

>>44747853
/tg/ applies the same mechanisms when it's convenient for them. You see it a lot in HFY threads.

>the aliens are more numerous
>they are better armed
>they are stronger and smarter
>they already control everything
>but the HUMANS, noble, proud and relentless, will use GUERRILLA TACTICS, biological weapons, terror and sneakiness to defeat them regardless! Nothing brings down the human spirit! No matter the odds, WE WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO WIN!

When Jews or women do whatever it takes, though, that's just low.

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>>44747712

Let me John Wick that up

They're actions did nothing. In fact it only made it worse for they secretly accelerated the degradation of the barrier.

Pic related happens.

Enjoy your demon rape

>>44747843

There is that.

You could keep them having Fey backing if you just made their actual theme 'Fighting for equality/stopping slavery' rather than 'We do that but we are really fighting evil demon aliens'

>>44747853
>Can't defeat the patriarchy

>Fucking runs everything from the shadow because lel fuck you.

>>44747928
My brothers were always assholes, so I'd probably make them beg a bit, honestly.

Doesn't make Jacob less of a prick, though.

>>44747843

>not wanting to challenge the ayylmaos to gentlemanly dual
>Not ravishing their space-hell princesses

AYY LMAO

>>44747952
If a group is running you from the shadow, that doesn't mean they couldn't defeat you, it means they defeated you so well you didn't even notice the fight.

It's something /pol/ always has a very hard time swallowing. The Jews can't be simultaneously pathetic untermeschen AND rule every aspect of society. Society let them rule over it. However you look at it, the Jews come out better (since they were either very, very smart or society is very, very stupid, and society includes the noble white race and the male gender and Christians and all the other people /pol/ would rather believe are not).

>>44747974
It's more complicated than that. The thing about this kind of worldview is that it requires an acceptance of the (questionable) fact that no conflict has clear "boundaries" and that none of them had rules in the first place. It doesn't apply as clearly to things like "contests", which are defined by rules, but consider something like war.

When a small army manages to defeat a large army by having a far better strategy (that is, by outsmarting it), is it "cheating"? After all, the "honorable" thing to do would've been for both armies to charge at each other, face to face, and "fight like men!". But then, of course the larger army would win.

The smaller army are cheaters if you think only within the scale of the personal "battle". They are WINNERS if you think of the scale of the fight.

When a country manages to defeat another country in a war because they had foreign aid, is that cheating? Or does it simply mean that said country was better at PR, smarter about its international relations, more sophisticated in its dealings and better able to apply its available resources?

Part of the reason people like underdogs so much is that an underdog cannot, by definition, win "fairly". They have to bring something MORE into the competition - into the box - expanding the box and revealing the larger space within which they think while their rival is still limiting themselves to that box. That's how David defeats Goliath (the box: a dual between two warriors. the expansion: God, or clever utilization of ranged weapons, depending on view), etc.

In any narrative which includes one party cleverly outsmarting the other, there is a theoretical, equivalent narrative in which a smug asshole is cheating.

Waste all your time discussing asymmetric conflicts and the nature of the underdog

Bu Sophia's Daughter's are a crap Illuminati lite that magnify why people hateed the 90's trend of clusterfuck metaplots

>>44747928
See, I taught in a Jewish school and I was a teacher's assistant in a Muslim school in Morocco. It's genuinely fascinating to see the differences in how the same tale is told. In both cases, you're addressing children, so some playacting is used and the characters are presented in an exaggerated, comical fashion. The details of the STORY remain the exact same but the presentation appears to tell two completely different ones.

As I said, the Jewish version paints Jacob as being first and foremost CLEVER. His depiction is highly reminiscent of the "Jacks" and "Ivans" of English and Russian folklore. He's not a big guy (Esau is depicted as a hulking, ogrish figure), but he's got brains (it may be worth noting that Jewish education, from a very early age, puts a stress on the moral that "brains defeats brawn" to a degree that I haven't seen at all in mainstream American education), and he knows what he's doing. The trick with the bowl of soup is exactly that - a trick. It was orchestrated as such and it is viewed from his side. Esau - stupid, ruled by his baser instincts, borderline animalistic - loses his Birthright because he lacks self-control (and the more "acted out" versions of this story depict Esau as savagely hogging out on the soup, a giant, subhuman oaf who thinks so hard with his belly he barely even notices Jacob's tricked him until it's too late).

The radical-Muslim telling is essentially reversed. Jacob, rather than a lithe, handsome boy with a witty glint in his eyes, is a crooked, snakelike manipulator while Esau - rather than a massive ogre of a man - is simply a decent, handsome fellow working hard while his brother schemes. The circumstances of their meeting are massively emphasized - in this version, Esau didn't just sell the Birthright for soup because he was a glutton, he sold it because he worked SO HARD, and it was SUCH A HOT DAY, and the fields were SO BIG and the hunger was SO GREAT he practically had no choice.

>>44748191
They both sound like some bitch made niggas

Then again

>Sandrakers

>>44748242
I think if you go far back enough in history there's a point where all culture is sand

Sand and penises

>>44748390
I don't like penises. They're coarse and rough and irritating and they get everywhere.

>>44743559
presenting himself interchangeably as being atheist, Buddhist or pagan feminist depending on what he feels would make him look smarter at any given moment
This alone is unforgivable its the right of douchebaggery

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>>44748870
The internet, this one has won!

>>44747843

Clearly the worst part of 7th Sea was a fucking island called "The Highland Marches".

Or maybe its just me that triggered.

>>44748899
Ah fuck fuck up my quoting
>presenting himself interchangeably as being atheist, Buddhist or pagan feminist depending on what he feels would make him look smarter at any given moment
That alone is unforgivible

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Is /tg/ already familiar with this? Heavily, heavily houseruled version of 7th Sea by a fan. I'm curious to see if it's less broken.

>>44749255
Well, skills are about equally broken. Each costs you 10 XP and gets you 4 dots to spend; knacks cost 2 x rank, and you can only buy them if you already have the appropriate skill, so bare minimum you're getting 16 XP worth of knacks if you just buy a better skill instead. Not quite as good if you're doing Advanced Knacks instead, since you only get 2 Advanced Knacks per skill, but it's still bare minimum of 12 XP for 10.

>>44749255
Kinda wish I could find the dude's homebrewed nation but their magic is eh. Feels like a low rent Exalted.

Honestly I don't really care for the guy's home rules. I just prefer to gib more starting XP and cheapen the fuck out of everything and make some things free like languages.

>>44751364
Their magic is pretty much Male Scrying from the Sophia's Daughter book.

>>44752452
I thought it was some low rent super sand mode.

Then again I haven't looked through it recently

>>44752486

Super sand legend for the "ageans" that is.

>>44746263
>>44746346
>>44746366
>>44746417

Bump for more of this.
>>44746479

>>44754605
Man, I'd pay good money for a bottle of Reserva Especial Rum right now. That description was literally mouthwatering.

>>44754706

Like, half of them are. I'm stealing it for if 7th Sea-2 ever does come out. It's not like the rules for alcohol affect the descriptions, and anon was right. PCs will absolutely love description like that.

>>44755603
It will come out but it'll be like Feng Shui 2 where it's pretty disappointing outside of certain changes and the best usage is to combine both editions

>>44755905
Man, Feng Shui 2 was just so WELL MADE, but at the same time lost so much of the depth it used to had. I know it was meant to serve a purpose, but it still feels silly at some points nevertheless.

>>44756137

It feels pretty underwhelming at times when you try and compare the changes.

Like yeah they tidied up the core but they fucked up a bit.

Like the hatred to even simple character customization like stat changing in first ed resulting in a bloated list of archetypes that could easily be folded into like different flavors of main archetypes.

And how they did it in alphabetical order rather than by setting so you can eyeball what junctions each template can go into.

Cyborgs suck and are too tied down into the assumed setting and are really dumb suicide bombers. Which doesn't match with movie cyborgs at all.

The special snowflake attack stats for like a handful of the templates.

The loss of the very customizable creatures and how gimped their shit got.

I still hate the reload rules and the keyframe thing is clunky

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>>44747482

I bet she did that on purpose, smug little slut!

So I've only been skimming this thread, but I get the feeling that 7th Sea is going to return to form of being the worst case of false advertising in the industry. 7th Sea 1st edition is like someone wrote Deadlands and focused the rules and setting books entirely on bankers and tycoons in New York and New England.

>Someone came up to me at a convention and asked why this mostly landlocked country with no naval tradition was left out of an RPG nominally about pirates.
>I decided "Heck, let's throw it in!"

Some poor asshole is going to see the Kickstarter, think the RPG is actually about pirates and swashbucklers, then get a hundred kool-aid drinkers yelling at him when he doesn't enjoy the 17th century court politics wankfest that gets delivered.

>>44760084
>doubting the power of the Polish navy

>>44747578

Calm down dude, just show us on the doll where Luke touched you.

>>44760084
I don't think it has any premise of being an RPG about piracy - it's an RPG about the swashbuckling genre. Piracy is a facet of that, but so's the Three Musketeers, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and similar works.

>>44761878
That's very fair point. 'Land pirates' are a thing. Still John Wick has a not unjustified reputation of being no fun allowed. So we might just get 18th court politics

>>44762295
If that happens I'm gonna get drunk and run the fluff in some random system like, Eoris

>>44762528
You going to have to get pretty drunk to run the Eoris Op.

>>44763273
I'm not OP tho.

But Eoris would be more playable than whatever half baked nonsense Wick can put out

Does anyone think it'll be impossible to die in the new edition? I always liked the "give 3 deaths you're OK with, aside from those you will never die (unless you do something actively suicidal like shove a lit 20-lb time-burst shell up your rectum)." I always liked the fact that 7th Sea pretty much removed the spectre of totally random death from over character's heads. Plus when you put the PCs into a situation that was close to their preferred deaths, they got real serious, real quick.

>>44747974
>The Jews can't be simultaneously pathetic untermeschen AND rule every aspect of society.
thus by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus,

[eco intensifies]

How much are you willing to bet the new system (dice pools but "you use all the dice", raises made afterwards, THIS IS JOHN WICK WE'RE TALKING ABOUT) is going to be the one from Houses of the Blooded? Like in every other game he's published since?

>>44731282
>Want Superman's strength? Just buy 100 Strength Telekinesis with the 'disads' of being touch-based range and requiring a Strength roll. Lot cheaper than actually buying 100 Strength.

My neckbeard grew 2cm just from reading this.

>>44766865

Oddly enough: That's, in universe, how superboy's strength works.

Tactile Telekinesis.

>>44767257
I know, I think the point is that you can take any disadvantage with any power, even ones that should logically have it by definition, which allows for some ludicrous minmaxing potential.

>>44765322

Sort of. I'm pretty sure the rules will make it impossible to die, unless you run across one of Wick's Triggers, which of course aren't known by the players ahead of time. The PCs will be told over and over again in the rulebook that they're special and can't die outside of exceptional circumstances, and then the game actually starts, the GM reads and applies the GM's Guide stuff, and when one player forgets to turn his rapier to a 45-degree angle when bowing to the Queen and her guards murder him brutally. Somewhere in the distance a wolf howls, and John Wick massages his nipples gently.

>>44768099
Godfuckingdamned Rokugan court rules.

>>44768099
>>44768237
And this shit is why a good L5R GM has to be willing to prompt players on things, and to say "Your character would know that doing that is a grave violation of protocol"

>>44769044
How competent are characters allowed to be in L5R? Knowing John, they'd never be allowed to be very skilled, but what you said reminds me, of the concept for a L5R samurai I had, for some weird reason. I'm 99% sure the rules would never allow a PC to be competent enough to pull this off, and I'm pretty sure even me /thinking/ of such a concept made John Wicks neckbeard bristle with anticipation of destroying this character if he ever had it played in one of his games, and I'm curious as to how viable it might be, since it hinges on the PC in question being of notably exceptional skill and competence.

>>44769479
More than characters in 7th Sea

>>44771405
Well, that's good. Now I just need a gm, that wouldn't laugh my charactwr concept out.

Or even a gm in the first place.

>>44716973
He's a smug mother fucker and totally long winded, but he's an okay dude. Met him in person a few years ago when he had just finished Shotgun Diaries. He gave me a free copy, which was just a bunch of pages of rules on printer paper stuffed into a composition book that he signed and wrote "Shotgun Diaries" on the front of. Played in a one of session he ran of Houses of the Blooded and was the only person to bring an intrigue focused character to the table. Fun times.

>>44717084
I do like the quote in the book about the Vodacce.

"Not every Vodacce is a two-faced, back stabbing, bastard. Some are dead."

>>44771719
It's funny after reading all those story that paint Italy as the land of Machiavelli and the Borgias, then you actually go to Italy and find out it's mostly populated by Guidos and Marcos with open topped T-shirts and gold chains who are very possibly illiterate.

>>44769479
You can potentially be as skilled as a human backed by supernatural talent could ever possibly be in the setting. It's possible to get a roll of 10k10+X, reroll 1s, explode on 9s and 10s, roll twice take the highest, where X is somewhere between 6 and 14, depending on the skill and what tiny bonuses you've managed to stack up. The actual problem is that L5R characters function better when they're well-rounded, and you'd merely be crippling yourself if you only spend your XP towards being the best at whatever it is you want to be the best at.

>>44774012
Note that getting that good would cost somewhere in the range of 120-140 xp, which is more than enough to hit school rank 4 or even 5 (Maybe even beyond if you minmax for Insight). But someone who is overspecialized would be lucky to even hit rank 2 at that point, because they've been dumping all of their points into a specific skill, the stat for that skill, and advantages which make that skill better, which means they're losing out on school Techniques and the other, lesser benefits of a higher Insight. They're also somewhat fragile and absolutely a one-trick pony.

>>44774215
>>44774012
I figured it might be something like that. Might still make the character anyway, if I can get the crunch to back up the fluff, just seems like it would be so much fun to play.

>>44772671
>implying they can't be both

>>44777915
>All this time, you've been simply playing into Tony's hands

>>44778031
But what does Tony want?

>>44779492
The syrenth artifact that lets you access everyone's nonna's recipes in an attempt to corner the eatery biz

>>44779640

Also, bowling. All the time.

Bump until I can get home and read the thread

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>>44715107
>Eisen not scary already
>Ussura loses shapeshifting
>Vesten and Vendel smashed together
Christ. I can live with this, but it's fucking dumb.

>>44715149
>Losing Roll and Keep

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK. ROLL AND KEEP IS THE BEST GODDAMN THING ABOUT 7TH SEA YOU SHITBURGLER. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU CHANGE THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT TO USE ALL YOUR FUCKING DICE?!

>>44781838

Because fuck you, pay me. If you people will pay out the butt for some unenlightened, hand-holding game which insists on giving whinging players rewards they don't deserve just for rolling the dice like Edge of the Empire, then you'll definitely shell out for an objectively superior game written by me, given I've written some of the longest-lasting and popular games in multiple genres. The specific dice mechanics don't even matter that much; it's about the roleplaying experience, and if the dice matter that much to you, you're clearly not the target audience.

Go play D&D or something, and leave real roleplayers in peace.

>>44782287

I want to kill your car and steal your dog.

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>>44782287
But will it have an elaborate work of art character sheet like pic related?

>>44782788

Why would anyone who's actually concerned about roleplaying want a record sheet with so many stats on it. I can at least understand - even if I don't agree with - the number-obsessed gamers who insist on giving weapons damage values instead of a simple, "you're incapacitated if you get hit". I mean, statistically, if you want realism out of your games, if you get stabbed through the gut by a rapier or cut from hip to shoulder by a katana, that's what happens. You go into shock and stop being able to take actions. But for some godforsaken reason, gamers like all those numbers and stats, even when a properly designed game doesn't need them.

Adding up numbers and modifiers just gets in the way of real drama and dealing with the obstacles your GM throws in your path. The art in 7th Sea 2e will be top-notch. But as long as I'm involved in the project, I can promise you the system will be kept as rule-light and from pointless complication (like that sheet) as possible.

>>44783212
>implying you can talk when you haven't experienced the magic of talking dogs with stands in goddamned robots on a quest to save God from killing herself

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>>44782788
That is like pic related, but trying really hard to be 'artsy.'

>>44783918
Honestly it's just an issue of trying to cram in too much stuff on one sheet rather with some artsyness that consumes even more space.

It would look less cluttered if they axed the two graphs and were more efficient with the space on the sheet.

On the plus side at least the roll system is simple enough and the combat minigame is fast due to lethality

>>44769044
>>44768237
So under Wick, the Tokugawa Shogunate would have never happened because Oda Nobunaga would have been put to death for being drunk and disorderly at his father's funeral.

>>44784326
Maybe under Wick as a GM with Oda as a PC.
Under the normal rules of Rokugan as a setting, he'd have been quietly ignored or shuffled away by a guard. Probably would have taken a big hit to his reputation for getting drunk when he knew the funeral was happening, but the worst that would happen to him physically might be a bit of rough handling to get him out of the area.

>>44784326
Too be honest familia Rokugan is a incredibly janky fantasy japan analogue with Wick's wonderful idiosyncrasies like Ronin being shit despite Japan and all the damn movies it makes Wick would have watched as "research" for making the game romanticizing them and making them cool

>>44784419
So, what would it take, for a PC(Assuming run by a competent, non-Wick GM, who's using the setting mostly as written), to be able to get away with generally being rather crude, and uncouth? Lots of Drinking and whoring, late to meetings, that sort of thing. Not "Aggressively" disrespectful(Not calling someone names, or anything like that), just Passively so(Wasting someones time, by showing up late).

>>44784535
Basically, all it would take is that you don't take it to the "actively" disrespectful level and avoid anyone who is really powerful. You'll get a reputation and probably won't be invited to any high courts, but it's fine on the low end of things. Just don't expect to get away with it at a central winter court.
Also, being drunk is generally a "get out of being a shithead free" card, since they don't hold people who are inebriated responsible for their actions. Generally. Being drunk when you're supposed to be on duty or have an appointment is going to get you in trouble. Possibly lethal trouble, if you keep doing it.

i've heard a lot of people praise 7th sea's swordplay. Can someone give me an overview?

>>44784621
Actually, that's not quite true. If you show up for a military shift drunk off your ass, even once, you're going to be hit with a dereliction of duty charge, which is as bad as it sounds in a militarized feudal nation.

>>44784774
What about slightly buzzed?

>>44784881
Probably depends on who notices and how close you are to an actual front line.
If you're on the Kaiu Wall, that's as bad as showing up completely smashed. If you're part of some middle of nowhere garrison far away from any war, they're not as likely to care.

>>44784707
Each sword school has a certain fluff and gimmick to it. When you buy into them typically you get a free level in all of the school knacks and then you advance in mastery by gaining more ranks.

School knacks are basically combat maneuvers baked in as a skill you can do a skill roll for rather than just some sort of special rules, like say grappling in most games. And there's a big pool of these maneuvers.


Each school is built with 4 moves with 3 being based on the description and idea of how the styles work. The fourth one is always related to countering your own school and is called exploit weakness(Insert style name). On top of that you have 3 mastery levels. They all give you a special trick which gets improved and or you gain more stuff per level. And it's supposed to fit into the style's description.

Like say you pick up a style for being Jackie Chan chair's and ladders. You're gonna start off with a bonus to using chairs and ladders effectively so they don't break as easily like they usually do with the improvised weapons rule.

A real style in the book that I like is Halfdanssen which is from the viking/dutch nation and lets your fight with a harpoon.

The 3 maneuvers you get are:

Disarm which is exactly what it does when used.
>If opponent's attack misses your passive defense, use an action for a contested roll of your Brawn+Disarm against his Brawn+Attack. If you win, he is disarmed. If you take a -10 on your roll, you can end up holding their weapon.

Lunge which lets you add more damage to your roll at the cost of making you practically defenseless

Pommel Strike which if hits knocks down your opponent which leaves them with low defense which allows you and others to do shit tons of damage by taking "Raises" which is increasing difficulty on rolls by increments of five to do more damage.

>>44785219
pt2

Then you get the mastery levels which go Apprentice, Journeyman, Master.

Apprentice gives you a small bonus to harpooning animals. More importantly it also does this:

>You may attempt to impale a target by taking -5 to hit. If you hit and inflict a dramatic wound, the opponent has their TN to be hit reduced to 5 and they have +5 on all their TNs to hit you. In addition, substantial movement of the harpoon causes 2k1 wounds. The harpoon comes loose once a dramatic wound occurs due to this damage

Journeyman
>You do an extra unkept die of damage (+1k0) with a harpoon. You no longer take the -5 to hit when attempting to impale.

Master
>You do an extra kept die of damage (+0k1) with a harpoon. When you impale an opponent, it takes 2 dramatic wounds to remove the harpoon. You gain one rank of Throw(Harpoon). This can raise your rank to 6. If it does not, you can later raise your rank to 6 by spending 25 XP.

It's a pretty cool and flavorful way of giving yourself a play style of sorts in a game that's fairly combat heavy in its rule focus.

The issue is that if you're using the vanilla char gen rules schools are pretty damn expensive and even more so if you're trying for a concept that uses a school not native to your country. Like I had a player that wanted to be a hot blooded Spanish priest that knows the fist fighting style from the Britbong monks. He'd have to pay 35 xp for that.

But because I'm cool I made it cheap so it was a non-issue

>>44767312
Hero System lets a player do some ridiculously crunchy things if they can work the advantages and disadvantages on a power set right.

>>44785489

Yeah. I wanted to play a Pistol Toting Glamour mage (With only a single glamour but still) and the price to get both of those made me cry.

Non-Nation School + Spellcaster? HAHAHAHAHAHAH, Nope.

>>44782287
>>44783212
I know you're not the real Wick because your language isn't flowery enough.

>>44787105

Also, because my dog is alive.

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>>44787175

>Alfie Allen will never kill your dog

>>44715060
>Let’s you and I take a trip across the continent and take a look at some old friends… and some new ones.
Alright, that's where I tapped out. Fucking John Wick never grew out of being a pompous 16-year-old.

>>44726026
>I think what the poster was objecting to was the river going east-west.
Yeah, no. He was definitely complaining about the obviously retarded fact that the river runs from ocean to ocean and cuts clean through a perpendicular mountain range. Most ten-year-olds have stopped making that mistake on their maps.