I just wanted to take the time to say that I was absolutely floored by the quality of this product. It actually fills a role I find lacking in the sourcebooks in that it really lays out for you how to think about the narrative in story steps and possible avenues to explore dramatic and actions scenes. It's obvisous just by looking at the product you can tell a lot of passion and love of the game went into it and might be the perfect introductory or mid-point adventure to add into your campaign. Definitely will keep an eye out for future products from this team.

Nicely done, and definitely worth a 'pay what you like' price tag. The structure laid out for letting card spreads spark story and character elements is straightforward and simple enough to do on the fly, while being open enough to let you create plenty of depth and complexity off the associations the cards make. Can work with any deck, which is nice for those who may not have the Sorte deck (though it really is a gorgeous deck).

Ghost ships are kind of a staple of the modern take on pirate tales. Not sure if it's just because how much it's been used in the Pirates of the Caribean movies, or it's just something that has always been there, but in any case, it's a cool kind of story that fits 7th Sea perfectly.

This adventure tries to take advantage of a couple of mechanics presented in the game and use them in a very interesting way to simulate the possesion of PC by ghost entities. Frankly, the result is great, with the ghost ship and their inhabitants becoming a very terrifying threat to the Heroes.

The use of Hazards and Dramatic sequences here it's also cool. The way the Dramatic Sequences is written helps a little bit to take a step back on how to use them, and communicates the flexibility that DS are supposed to have.

The only reason i give it a four it's that I wish there were a little bit more of information about how to manage the more mundane side of the story. The ghost ship is treated extensively, as well as the Villain that it's linked to it, but when talking about the more mundane side of the story, about the corrupt Governor, I feel more information about how to handle them and scenes related to this part of the story would have been welcome. The focus in that part of the story it's too much about how to get clues, but I feel like a little more of info on their motivations and methods would have been great.

Still, its a great adventure, and even more at this price. This could easily be used as a stand-alone game for a convention, since it makes extensive use of some of the most particular rules of the game.

A great resource. The basic rules from the core book for Brutes are a little bit limited, and it seems like we are gonna get an updated version whenever the Khitai rulebook it's published, but this document gives you a lot of new options to make your brutes interesting meanwhile. The core book only included a few special abilities for them, but it always looked more like examples to use as inspiration to come up with your own versions than a limited list. The ones listed here go a little bit further. Another must-have.

This adventure it's a must have. The plot is quite straightforward, but it's ideal for a quick game in a con, or with a few friends that want to try the game. It's a good foundation to which add your Heroes and let it grow from there. The great thing about this adventure it's the fact that it's almost a perfect template to manage a naval battle between 2 ships, or with big monsters. The action sequences for that very usual kind of situation in a game like 7th Sea are so full of details and explained that you can take them and use them in almost every naval encounter.

Really useful for my game, i printed it in a small booklet form and it helped my group find the backgrounds and advantages they wanted from throughout the released 7th Sea books.

Lands of Gold and Fire. Probably one of the most anticipated books for the 7th Sea line after The New World itself. It's been delayed a few months while the dev team worked to get it just the way they like it. So how did they do?

Like all the other splatbooks, this one can be divided into the Fluff and Crunch sections.

Nations/Fluff

We've got five new nations with unique backgrounds here. Aksum (Ethiopia/Somali States) a coastal trade nation on the losing side of a war with the Mbey while their empire is in rapid decline, Khemet (pre-Ptolemaic Egypt) a land shrouded in eternal night after the Queen betrayed the gods, Maghreb (the Barabary States) where the wasteland villages and prosperous coastal cities exist in an anarchic alliance to resist an impending invasion, Manden Kurufaba (The Mali Empire) the most prosperous land in Ifri, buckling under a flood of refugees fleeing the troubles elsewhere, and Mbey (the Kingdom of Kongo) decimated by the Atabean slave traders, their ruler has given in to despair and madness, bargaining with eldritch abomination spirits and waging war against the Aksum to capture more slaves to sell to the Atabeans- buying enough weapons in the hope of driving the invaders from Ifri.

There is enough flavor here to make an entire campaign out of adventuring in Ifri drawing from equal parts history and fantasy. The major players in Ifri are featured throughout and all are compelling in their own way- especially the leader of Mbey who has given himself over to madness and dark power to drive powerful Atabean invaders from his shores. Runner-up goes to Mar Veraci of Maghreb, the transgender pirate queen hailing from Vodacce. Mar governs the cities and protects Maghreb in her Blue Queen's place while she is communing with spirits to prevent an invasion from Mbey, trying to ward off the advances from Montaigne and the machinations of her jealous sister.

Mechanics

The book includes new sorcery. Melbur sorcery strikes me as an almost cut/paste of Sanderis from the core book (though there are significant differences), while Heka sorcery is a kind of Enchantment based magic. Most splats contain one magic school per nation, so this is a bit lacking.

New dueling schools are included here as well for more martial players.

There are two new player mechanics that are introduced here. The first, Zahmeireen Weaponry, is a much more in depth unique-weapon system than the current Dracheneisen weaponry- and one I hope they adopt in errata to change Dracheneisen. You select an Origin (how you got the weapon) and a Facet (its effect). Additionally, completing Legends are a potent way to increase the power of the weapon.

Next is the Vile Dice of dealing with the Abonsam spirits. Essentially, bargaining with these Eldritch Creatures grants bonus dice, but using the dice grants corruption.

Verdict

Fluffwise, this book is beyond good. Its locations and people are compelling to read about and beg for adventure. But the Mechanics section is lacking in Sorcerous lineages. Bonus points for having a better legendary weapon system than the original Dracheneisen though. I give it a 4/5. Worth the money and very good, but not necessarily a MUST BUY NOW book.

A pretty simple little story, but definitely one I enjoyed. If your group is into horror and suspence, you can definitely do that with this one, and give it as much of a spooky air as you want.

I was hoping it might have been a little bit longer, and given a little more indication of what NPCs, etc. say. It does leave it quite open for the GM, which is not the end of the world, but you do need to read through properly in order to make sure that the bits you insert as a GM will definitely make sense. It doesn't go into much description, but it gives indication and there was enough for me to make up what I needed too without it being too off-kilter.

I used this as a starter session for my players, none of us have played before this, and it was a good way to introduce them. Enough action and intrigue to keep the players engaged and the story moving. My players really enjoy dark stuff, so I definitely dialled up the horror where I could. A pre-recorded nursery rhyme playing in the background every now and then gives the shivers, and then indepth description really drills it home.

All in all, an interesting story and a great and spooky introduction to the game. It's only enough for one session if you just play straight through, but I could definitely see how a creative GM would be able to take this plotline and make a whole campaign of it.

Full review can be found on my blog, located here:

http://knighterrantjr.blogspot.com/2017/08/what-do-i-know-about-reviews-7th-sea.html

I really liked the insight "Navigating Delicate Negotiations" gave me. It presents great ideas to evolve meaningless chats into exciting back-and-forth parleys.

Instead of offering a crunchy minigame overlapping an already rules-light system, Kevin Krupp's suggestions takes the same rules by another angle that doubles the fun even when the Heroes get bested at close combat or after a naval combat, they can still have a ton of fun and feel accomplished negotiating their way out of a dire situation!

The best example of one-shot horror writing I have ever seen.

I've been looking for a resource such as this for a long time! The encounter tables alone are well worth the price. But the rules and details and optional skill uses just add to the value. Good product for a good value.

I like this product; I'd like to like it more.

I'm an old-school fan of 7th Sea going back to the game's first edition; I was in my Friendly Local Game Store the day the two core rulebooks came out. I'm also a cultural anthropologist and folklorist by training, and a history and literature teacher of about two decades' vintage, just so you know where I'm coming from.

Overall I've found the second edition to be a very pleasant improvement over some of first edition's...quirks. One of the things I've been happiest about in second edition is the much more robust and culturally sensitive attention given to the parts of the game world that aren't Europe. For instance, The Crescent Empire is in many ways a masterpiece of evocative, gameable setting work; in graduate school Turkish folk epic (and folk narrative in Islam more generally) was my area of specialization, and the rules for poetry duels and the like delighted me. The fact that the opening fiction was a clear nod to Farid ud-Din Attar's Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds delighted me. And on and on.

And yet...

There was something not quite right about Crescent Empire. Something that niggled at me, despite my abundant affection for the numerous things it did excellently. It took me a while to figure it out, and it was The New World that finally made me see it.

The Crescent Empire as presented in 7th Sea is so much like the actual Ottoman Empire...except in all the ways that it isn't. No, I'm not dumb; I get that the whole 7th Sea universe is a varyingly loose gloss on seventeenth (more or less) century reality, but not that reality itself. Nonetheless, I can't help feeling like the divergences are starting to go too far for me personally.

(I will get to The New World, I promise.)

In the second edition Crescent Empire, a new Empress has just instituted a series of reforms that are so sweeping, so liberalizing, and so wildly historically improbable, that I couldn't help but shake my head reading about them. The abolition of the class system? In seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkey? My brain couldn't cope. It was a change too far, one so radical that the setting no longer made sense, no longer felt enough like real history that I could accept it even while squinting hard.

The fact that Théah isn't our actual historical world is a great gift: the game's designers can create more space for female, queer, and racially diverse characters. That's wonderful, and I support it fully! But while Théah isn't our world exactly, it needs to be enough like our world that there's a value in adventuring there, and not somewhere far more divorced from Earth's history, like the Forgotten Realms or Middle-earth or Barsoom.

(I had an intimation of the problems that were on the way when I first read the second edition core rulebook. Apparently nations in Théah don't care about the race of their citizens; if you're an Avalon, you're an Avalon whether your ancestry stretches back centuries in the Glamour Isles or whether your parents immigrated from Ifri a decade ago. That's a lovely idea, and I understand the good intentions that underpin it: make it easier for gamers of color, or anyone else, to play characters of color from any of the mock-European nations. I am all for this!

But...

It's not how seventeenth century Europe regarded questions of race and ancestry. At. All. And while I would much rather live in a world with Théah's racial politics than the ones real history has handed us, the historian in me goes a little crazy when I have to imagine a seventeenth-century Europe that is, frankly, more racially enlightened than twenty-first century America. [Admittedly, that doesn't seem hard, these days. sigh])

I could deal with the ahistoricity around race and nationality. I can sort of deal with the idea of a classless Ottoman Empire—I almost can't write the words—if only because there's so much nifty stuff in the other parts of the Crescent Empire book. But I think New World may have broken me.

You see, the Nahual Alliance, the Aztec analogues in New World don't practice ritual human sacrifice. I mean they used to, but they don't anymore. In fact, now they abhor the act.

blinks

I'm sorry? These Aztecs dont' practice sacrifice? What on earth, then, makes them Aztec? So much, so very, very, very much of Aztec society at the time period (give or take a century or two) 7th Sea is set revolved around human sacrifice. The religious imperative to sacrifice captive humans shaped military policy, weapon design, sociocultural organization, art and architecture and literature...I could go on. When you remove that aspect of the Aztecs, or Nahuals, or whoever, you make them something fundamentally other, something fantastic in the pejorative sense of the world. Not Aztec anymore. Something so disconnected from real world history that you may as well be roleplaying in Gary Gygax's Oerth, not John Wick and company's Théah. (No disrespect to Oerth meant.)

Again, I get it. On one level, I think the desire to present Latinx gamers with Aztecs who aren't as morally problematic as the real Aztecs were is laudable. But as much as I love Ottoman culture, I don't love a Crescent Empire flensed of the very real problems and contradictions that made it what it was, that made it so compelling, and yes, so ripe for heroic and swashbuckling adventure. Every culture has these kinds of problems, of course, including all the European ones. The 7th Sea corebook is totally willing to give us, for example, a Montaigne/France that groans beneath some stupefyingly awful situations stemming from the callousness of the aristocracy. We are all but told bloody revolution is inevitable, and why shouldn't it be? That's great! That's super-gameable! Now there's a horrible problem for heroes to get caught up in, and to try to solve!

New World could do that with the Nahual Alliance. Keep human sacrifice—believe me, as a Spanish speaker and lover of Mexico, I have no desire for Mexican or any other Latinx gamers to be offended, but the fact that the Aztecs ritually killed in such large numbers is a massive matter of historical record. Keep the sacrifices, but create a niche for the players to be part of a small insurgency working to bring it to an end. Or better still, have one of the secrets of the game world be that human sacrifice, while monstrous, is something the Nahual must do in order to forestall an even worse evil, like the return of the monstrous elder god beings The New World keeps alluding to. Suddenly we've got moral tension! Ambiguity! The need for tough choices!

You know, all the stuff people of conscience (a.k.a. heroes) face in real life. In real history.

I should point out that The New World, which gives us three civilizations, the faux-Aztecs, faux-Maya (who are sadly way more boring than the real Maya were), and faux-Inka does nail one of those three beautifully. The Inka analogue, Kuraq, is ruled by an awful person doing awful things with necromancy and the living mummies of ancestors, and there's a perfect opportunity for heroes to join, or foment, a rebellion against her. The writer or writers of this section had the courage to give us a culture that was problematic, that had made bad choices, that needed heroes. And those heroes hardly have to be white saviors from faux-Europe; let them be rogue faux-Inkans fighting to make their civilization better. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I guess what I'm saying, in a too-long and roundabout way, is that I wish the 7th Sea authors would recognize that honoring the dignity and worth of non-European cultures doesn't require us to make them nicer than they were in real history. You can respect and admire much of Ottoman, or Aztec, or Inka culture and still condemn many of their leaders' decisions and their religions' practices. As long as you are making a sincere, anthropologically deep effort to understand why these cultures do things that seem contemptible from outside, it's okay to give them warts. Not only are those warts the stuff of adventure—wrongs that need righting—they're historically honest.

I'm reminded of what Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday says in the first installment of Ken Burns's documentary series The West, the installment focused on Native Americans prior to contact with Europeans. He states that the first thing we needed to do was dismiss artificial and romanticized visions of Native peoples as living in perfect harmony with one another, or with the land. They fought each other, they were cruel and petty, and they radically transformed the American Midwest through pretty intensive terraforming (see Mann's 1491 for more detail). They were certainly noble and worthy of admiration, these cultures—but not in every respect, and not all the time. To make them less complicated, less problematic, than they were is ironically to erase a great deal of their authentic dignity.

This is the problem 7th Sea has been having, with the very best of intentions, and that problem comes to a head in The New World. Gone are human sacrifice and the environmental depredation of the Mayan city-states. Super-weirdly, gone too is the scope and brutality of armed conflict between Europeans and Natives; in 7th Sea's New World, this conflict is so curiously muted as to astonish anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the history of contact between, say, Spain and the Aztec and Inka.

You may not care about these things, or you may disagree with me; I rated New World a four out of five stars precisely because I honor the authors' good intentions, so clearly my own mind is somewhat unsettled here. But what I want for the entire world of 7th Sea is not non-Europeans who are deracinated and sanitized in order to make them seem heroic in a generic sense. What I want for those peoples—the analogues of Native Americans, Eurasian Muslims, Africans, East Asians—is complexity, and honest reference to their cultures' flaws as well as their virtues. (Yes, cultural relativism makes discussion of subjective concepts like "flaws" and "virtues" tricky; fine, note the contradictions and foreground them.)

I want Aztecs who are politically complex, religiously sophisticated, architecturally and agriculturally brilliant—hell yes, I do! But I also want Aztecs who sacrifice captives from the states they've conquered, and whose society is in terrible danger of overthrow because of its addiction to a practice nearly all of us would condemn. That's historically honest, as I've noted, and it also makes a better and livelier and more conflict-rich world for gaming.

Your mileage may vary, and again, I want to salute the designers' efforts, which are themselves noble and admirable. But I think it's time to raise the bar a bit, and to have the courage to stare history—all our histories, no matter what our ancestry is—more squarely in the face.

Pretty awesome! Well written and entertaining. Makes me want to run the game.

I had hopes for this and some concerns because of the reputation of the author and articles in it. I'm happy to say that my hopes were justified. I liked this one enough that I bought Play Dirty 2 as soon as I finished this.