This one HURTS. I LOVE the 1st edition. It's probably one of my all time favorite settings, and the system worked great. I usually lean for lighter systems, but for swashbuckling, I loved the in depth dueling system. It's not perfect, but it's darn close.

The Second Edition dumps so much of what I liked, and just fell flat for me. The system is far more abstract, and yet less mechanically sound (or so it seems, I could never get people to play this one, where I have a few years of running the first edition.) So many of the major conflicts I loved getting into have been resolved, and so are gone or reduced (the Fae are less menacing, the Vendel/Vesten conflict is gone, the War of the Cross is mostly cleaned up, Montaigne's War against Castille is over,) and while they delve into lots of characters, they just are less interesting than the older versions for the most part.

The Sarmatian Commonwealth is a FANTASTIC addition to the setting.

So in the end this was a deep and painful disappointment. At least the art is really good, and you can put the Commonwealth into the first ed setting pretty easily, I just need to come up with some sword fighting schools for them.

I have a lovely/hate with this book. I played the First edition to death and loved the setting. Some of the changes they did I don't agree with. That said I do love they have expanded the world (new and old) and added a lot more background to the countries so they feel less like cut-outs of real world areas.

I found that the reboot of the setting in 7th Sea 2nd edition was very well done and interesting. The inclusion of more inspirations from other regions of the world was nicely done as was the rebalancing of how magic works in setting. The mechanics of the 2nd edition, however, just did not click with the group that I play with. We found that it the framework of the gameplay and rules was too light in places we wanted more structure and that it involved a lot of additional work for the person running the game. I know that many people have enjoyed the system, so I would just suggest that you do a little research about it before buying the game if your intent is to run the game with its own system.

Over 40 years of playing RPGs I can say without doubt that 7th Sea second edition is my favorite table top role play game of all time. It has all the best parts of parts of RPGS without all the tedious accounting work. You pick an approach to scene, chuck a fist full of dice, and tell stories.

The rules are streamlined and easy to teach. I spent most of my time with 7th newbies saying, "we don't worry about (inventory, encumberance, cash on hand, etc) in 7th Sea, if it makes sense for the story then your character has (a knife, can carry the box, can pay for dinner, etc)"

I love that I can invest a lot of time and detail in my character's story without fear that two unlucky dice rolls will kill them off. You can develop a character as the true protagonist of the tale.

Anyone looking for shared storytelling swashbuckling adventure must play this game! If you love GURPS, math, and/or making tons of individual dice rolls to drive your game you will not like 7th Sea 2e.

The 2nd edition rulebook has brought me hours of joy! In fact, I came to love the game so much I was motivated to write adventures and supplements for it.

What I love about this book:

• Character creation is easy, engaging, and fun
• The core mechanics are explained very well, especially the player-facing one
• The Nations are presented in a way that brings them to life, makes them feel unique, and inspires lots of plot hooks and campaign ideas
• The basic character builds are easy, but the flourishes you can add with Backstory and Advantages allow for endless variety.

What didn't work as well for me:

• Some of the GM-facing rules are hard to find in the text and hard to visualize
• Similarly, a few more examples of mechanics in action would be helpful, especially around consequences, opportunities, and Dramatic Scenes in general.

Anyway, the game's been out long enough that I can enthusiastically recommend it. My group and I got a lot of good play from this game, with more to come! I hope you'll try it too.

Not a fan of how the rules are structured, especially not the inclusion of two bulleted lists that contradict each other. The ruels as written don't appear to make much sense, honestly. The artwork is great, but that's pretty much the only thing I liked about this.

A great game that uses mechanics to stay faithful to its intended genre. Want exciting chases, daring heroics and assaulting fortresses as you slip the guards in the smoke? Then this is your game!!

The first edition of this game was possibly the most fun I've ever had as a player. The second edition changed a few things in the setting, which maybe didn't make it better, but didn't make it worse either; it's still an awesome setting. Swordsman schools lost some of their luster, but weren't ruined. Sorcery was retooled in some very interesting ways - if possible, it's even better than it was in the first edition. Character generation is great, and I really like the way backgrounds and advantages are presented. My biggest gripe? The core mechanic is useless. I'm a veteran gamer of the crunchy and the fluffy, the trad and the indie... and I've tried to run this game multiple times, watched APs, and googled advice on how to run it. And the story falls flat on its face whenever the dice come out. It's a real shame because they had a perfectly serviceable core mechanic in the first edition - not perfect, but decent.

Ring Side Report- 7th Sea

Originally posted at www.throatpunchgames.com, a new idea every day! 

Product- 7th Sea

System-7th Sea 2nd Edition

Producer-Chaosium

Price- $18 here https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/185462/7th-Sea-Core-Rulebook-Second-Edition?src=hottest_filtered&filters=10101_0_0_0_0?affiliate_id=658618 

TL; DR-Great if you like story, bad if you need hard rules. 90%

Basics-It’s a Pirate's life for me!  7th Sea is an RPG set in a world on the cusp of the age of exploration after a massive civil war in fantasy not-Europe.  Also key to this game is its unique approach to combat and mechanics. Let’s dive into this one.

Base mechanics and rounds-Each scene in the game is divided into action and dramatic scenes.  Action scenes are high octane events where characters fight to the death against other humans or monsters!  Dramatic scenes are slower time periods where players may try to sway the king in a debate or sail a ship across the sea.  But, unlike most games where you choose an action, know your dice, and roll to see if it happens, in both scenes, you say exactly what you want to do.  THEN the GM says what attributes and skill you must use. You then take a total of 10-sided dice equal to the sum of that attribute and skill and roll them.  This is where the game becomes interesting and extremely different. you can use one or more dice that add up to 10 and that counts as a raise. Each raise is one action you can do in the scene.  Then, the GM will describe the scene where the main goals are, side goals are, possible hazards, and if any timed events are. You can can do exactly what you said you were going to do each turn with the person with the most raises going once first and continuing until his or her raises equal another player.  If you want to do something you didn’t ask the GM to do at the start, it uses two raises. Want to hurt a guy? One raise does one damage. Want to rifle through the desk? One raise. It very simple and very fast. Base monsters and humans are part of brute squads that do damage equal to the number left in a brute squad with numbers ranging from 1 to 10 numbers per squad.  Named monsters and NPCs are treated just like characters and rolling dice just the same.

Advancement-Characters advance via completing story steps.  These are amazingly subjective, but that’s an integral part of this RPG.  Every story step is one advancement and different things like skills and advantages require different advancement costs.

Magic-It wouldn’t be fantasy if the game didn’t have magic.  Magic is an advantage you can take like any other, but the different flavors of magic color your use. Some are things that require a sacrifice.  Some require a code of conduct, and some require you to build up a pool of tokens that counter your ability to do things but hurt the enemy. It's an interesting take on the use of magic, providing a diverse set of subsystems that don't break the game in their implementation.

Mechanics or Crunch-Overall, 7th age plays quickly, but it's VERY loose.  That’s its goal, but it's so loose my players had major trouble with the game.  One player couldn’t comprehend that he could just see the hidden stuff by spending a raise.  Upon being told he already rolled he rolled again and asked what it meant. It's a HARD shift for a murderhobo to join a story RPG.  I like it, but even I would like some more explanation to some of the more fluffy rules built into the system. Nothing here is bad, but it is a game that needs more than just a few quick half page explanations to show how it works. 4.25/5

Theme or Fluff-7th Sea is an amazing world.  It's fully filled out and well developed.  It's a place with lots of stories to tell as well as a lot of places to explore.  It’s got everything the age of exploration needs and all the fantasy that your average Pirates of the Carabean movie needs to tell epic high seas fantasies. 5/5

Execution-  PDF?  Check!  Hyperlinked?  CHECK! Great layout and ease of readability?  CHECK! What do I want? Well, honestly more. It's a pretty short PDF and the fluff part of the story is well defined.  That fills my soul with happy. What isn’t well defined is how to play. It took me way too long to see that your raises were your initiative and how you spent them one to one.  I’ve read a few of these books, so I feel that's a bit on this book. But then again, this is a solid paradigm shift. This ISN’T just reskinned DnD, so your traditional frame of reference if you came in as a solid d20 player isn’t as useful as you may think.  If you get used to thinking outside the box, you will be fine, but if you need hand holding like I do during my transition from DnD to story RPG, you might get lost a bit in this book's flow. 4.25/5

Summary- 7th Sea is a fun story game with less crunch than I’m used to.  My wife loved it and gravitated to it easily. My other gaming friends couldn’t handle the story based shift.  That’s the major take away-if you want more baked in story, this is the game for you. If you need more solid crunch in your game, then maybe give this one a pass.  The book is solid, if you can handle the stuff it leaves out because it's not important. If you need those pieces, then maybe just play DnD on a pirate ship. But if you can get into the flow of a story game and handle most of the game being hand-waved away because those parts are honestly not part of the story, this is a fantastic take on the pirate fantasy RPG.  90%

This is a place holder. This gameis a great game for the heads up asap

Really glad I didn't drop money on the KS.

The game overall lacks. Period. A system. A setting that wasn't already established in the first edition. Mechanics. Any sort of flow that would try to implement what meager mechanics there are in a cohesive and rational way.

I like the Corruption page, and the map of Theah this go round.

This is written immediately after the merger between JWP and Chaosium was announced.

If you're new to Theah and the 7th Sea, WELCOME!

For those that haven’t followed 7th Sea since it’s historic, record-breaking Kickstarter return, you are in for a treat. I’ve been running it since the quick play guides were posted online and my groups have nearly sworn off other systems entirely. If you want games in the style of Princess Bride, Assassin’s Creed, Crouching Tiger, virtually any Musketeer or swashbuckling movie or tv show, this game has you covered without modification. Nobody is useless, nobody suffers from wasted turns, and the experience system is driven by YOUR stories rather than some souless numerical bucket you have to fill.

Scrub guards that don't matter to the story, don't matter. Heroes are Heroes. Villains are truly rat bastards that get what's coming to them. There's danger, action, romance, intrigue, and more importantly, you never have to suffer for your epic: you get it act 1, scene 1. I hate writing game reviews, but for what the 7th Sea team did with 2nd edition, I have NOTHING but glowing praise. You won’t be disappointed with this purchase.

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

As someone who adored the original 7th Sea, this feels like a return to a beloved game and a massive evolution of it. John Wick is a game designer who's made a ton of games, most of which feel like they've led to this.

Characters are swashbuckling heroes with mechanics to back that up. The nations of Theah present an interesting fictional Europe (and beyond!) with magic and myth amongst it. The setting is deep, but still ultimately about the player characters.

The previous edition had a good fictional Europe, but this version feels both more researched and more progressive, which it should be as this is a fantasy world.

The system is roll and keep (them all!) which is similar but more extreme than the original 7th Sea. Now all those lovely dice are clumped together in batches totalling 10 each. These results allow you to not only succeed at what you're doing, but select which other risks in a challenge you deal with and which don't. This level of agency of the players is sublime.

So far I've only played, but cannot wait to run this game for my group.

Some context first: I never player first edition so I cannot compare it with the old material (no fanboy resistance), and I backed the kickstarter.

Now, my impressions:

After reading it for the first time, my mind wasn't able to assimilate the game system. I liked a lot because it's simplicity and because it was narrative oriented, but the change of paradigm was so strong that I didn't assumed it. It was like seeing a Lamborgini Diablo and having its keys... wow, what a car but... uuuh... will I be able to drive it?? How?? I was very afraid to use the system to my players, and also I was afraid to not knowing how to use it as a game master and doing it bad.

I also disliked the lack of equipment and description of weapons, armors and tools of the setting. I had to search what a zweihander was, and seeked videos in how it is used. I think items have a personality, too, and that may affect the story. I dind't know how to manage it.

Until two weekends ago, when I played a one shot demo as a player... and I enjoyed it a lot. I was playing an Inismore Bard trying to make his friend a reputated hero... and it was the character I enjoyed the most of all characters I ever played. EVER.

So I game mastered that same adventure to a pair of friends, with pregenerated sheets: an Eisen Krieger and the Inismore Bard. I was afraid, and I warned them that the game would be a strong change of paradigm (they are players used to Rolemaster and Dungeons and Dragons).

The result was fantastic. They enjoyed a lot the game. When oportunities were first introduced, a player asked me "wait, you're telling me I can decide what happens in the scene? Seriously?". I told them "well, if it is appropiate with the story and the narrative, yes, you can". He was overjoyed, and used it to make the narrative very interesting.

They enjoyed also the combat system. When they saw that narrating what they heroes did to overcome the brute squads gave them extra dice, they enjoyed explaining the movements of their heroes... and surprisingly, they kept on doing so forgetting to claim me the extra dice: they simply were inmersed in the narrative.

I found myself comfortable with the system, with less weight in my shoulders, rules and narrative speaking, and it was easier for me to keep the story on.

When I asked the players their impressions, they insisted in how they liked feeling part of the story, to participate in the narrative and can decide events in a scene and not only reacting at what the GM throw them. They also liked narrating themselves what they heroes did and how. They asked me for another session. They want to keep playing the adventure and the game. Yay!! ^^

Now the fear is gone. The change of paradign is still there, but I am re-reading the rules and I understand them a lot more now. And the equipment? Well, the Eisen player wore a plate armor on the chest, a panzerhand and a family shield that used to narrate how his Eisen Krieger bashed some brutes to the sea... and he didn't care that there were no rules for the shield nor the armor. And me, neither.

So, I reccomend it? It depends. Want to play simulationist? Forget this game. Want crunch? Forget this game. Want tons of pages describing how to rule everything? Forget this game. You hate FATE-like systems? Run away from this game, now.

You want light rules and share the weight of the narrative with the players? Take it. Want to be narrative? Take it. Don't care about initiave modifiers and damage reductions and calculations about how difficult is to be hitted? Take it. Do you see your players as your heroes? Take it. Do you want a system that helps to focus on the history with rules oriented on helping you instead of slowing the pace of the story? Take it.

You are warned: you will love it or you will hate it. If you remember that there is a BIG change of paradigm, things will be easier.