I Was Promised a Pirate Game

I fucking love pirates. I'm not really sure why, but I think it's because it's a genre that includes many of my favorite things:

• Swordplay
• The ocean
• Women in corsets 
• Sea shanties
• Crime

What's not to love? I also think that the crew of scallywags doing piracy on their ship is one of the closer historical (or at the very least, historical-fiction) equivalents for the classic D&D adventuring party, so it seems to me like pirate TTRPGs should be a significant part of the market. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case; upon doing some Reddit digging on recommended pirate systems, I was recommended only two books consistently: Beat to Quarters, a Napoleonic-era game which is incredibly far up its own ass with historical accuracy and only lets you play as the crew of a naval vessel; and 7th Sea. So here we are, reviewing the latter.

Boy oh boy, I did not like this book. I slammed all 250-odd pages of the Player's Guide in one sitting, and for the first time I actually annotated the PDF as I went (thanks, Adobe Acrobat!) I'm gonna talk about this game in the same order as it appears in the books, and that means starting with the setting, which is quite possibly my least favorite part. 

The setting of this book is the continent of "Théah," which is... just Renaissance-era Europe. I don't know how to explain this in a way that captures why it makes me so upset, but the book spends the bulk of the first hundred pages giving what amounts to a B-minus-level recap of my tenth grade European history class. If you can think of it, it's here, just with the serial numbers filed off: the continent used to be ruled by a Roman-empire stand-in, which eventually crumbled but not before officially adopting a messianic religion that it originally persecuted. That religion is now ruled by a Vaticine Church (I mean come on), which is currently embroiled in an ongoing sometimes-violent conflict with the Objectionist offshoot within the same faith, founded by one Matthias Leiber who nailed a bunch of papers to the door of a church. I refuse to give this book the courtesy of using the stupid made-up names for the countries, so I'll just say that the places your character can be from are England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Nordic Countries, or Spain (which is called Castille, a decision that truly aggravates me). All the stereotypes you have in your head of these countries are ported into Théah, with no changes. Instead of harping on all the similarities between this world and ours, I'm going to point out the ways where it appreciably differs.

• There's magic in this setting, which the book calls "sorcery." Irritatingly, it is constantly alluded to throughout this setting section without being fleshed-out or explained until the very end of the book. More on that later, but basically, each of the countries has its own kind of magic (except for Spain and Italy, because they love the Pope-- excuse me, the Hierophant, too much)
• The history of Christianity is slightly different. Here, it's built on a series of four prophets: one was Jesus, one was Muhammad (he comes from the Crescent Empire in the east and everything. It's bad), a third I don't think has a real historical equivalent, and the fourth is the bringer-of-end-times who everybody's waiting around for. 
• The main point of these prophets' teachings (which form the basis of the Vaticine Church) is Sorcery Evil and Science Good, which hooked me when I was reading it for the first time: the idea of a Catholic Church that invested super heavily into science and advanced society past what occurred in our timeline is super interesting, and 7th Sea presents this as part of the "pitch" of the setting. The problem is that the book doesn't do anything with this concept: the in-game year is 1668, and every piece of technology you see in the setting is either perfectly historical for that period in Earth history or invented within the following 50 years or so. Instead of using the Science Catholics as a jumping-off point for a cool alternate history, the authors just use it as a hand-wave convenience so they didn't have to google when the microscope was invented. What a waste. 
• Oh, yeah, there's monsters. I didn't mention that before because the book legitimately doesn't bring it up until the last 2 pages of the setting chapter. Yeah, there's kobolds and sirens and zombies and shit and they get no further mention. 
• There's some neat characters and factions in here. Ireland is ruled by a sort of immortal god-king who kinda just appears and disappears throughout history, which I think is cool. There are also these schools of swordsmanship that each teach distinct and interesting styles, and duels can legally only be initiated by a trained and licensed swordsman. 

If it seems like I'm harping on the setting, I am, and that's for two reasons. First, it takes fucking forever to get through when you're reading it, and second, the actual mechanics of this game are profoundly vanilla. It's exploding d10 pools, you have ability scores, skills, and sub-skills (called "Knacks") that you can point-buy during character creation. Frankly, the entire thing feels like a sourcebook for a generic system (which apparently it might kind of be? Apparently it's the same engine as Legend of the Five Rings, which I have not read and most likely will not read in the future), as though it were just "GURPS: Théah." Character creation seems to be about as much fun as baking an empty pie, although it does introduce one or two mechanics I enjoyed. There's a system of Reputation points that your character has in reserve: PCs get more when they do nice things for people and can spend them to boost their social rolls or call in aid from an NPC. It's a cool extra resource and acts as a built-in anti-murder-hobo measure, which I appreciate. There's also an optional merits & flaws system that's based around the major arcana suit from a tarot deck, which is rad as hell in my opinion. 

The combat system is about as vanilla as you'd expect, although it does make the unsurprising but still stupid choice to have one of the five ability scores determine how many times you get to act in a round. Oh and also, there's racial stat bonuses, so the French (on average) just get to act more times than everybody else. So yeah, if you're ever abducted by some sick serial killer who forces you to play 7th Sea, pick French. It's strictly better than the others. I also haven't touched on one of this book's favorite things about itself: Drama Dice, which I'm pretty sure just work the same as Fate Points. I've never played Fate and haven't read it in years, but you can spend dice to trigger NPC's weaknesses or traits and shit like that, or sometimes add them to rolls. I hate to sound like I'm shirking my reviewer's responsibility, but it's boring and I really don't care. 

The magic system, though, is cool. Granted, it's ridiculously opaque and I'd need a graduate-level seminar on how it works in order to actually use it, but I like that it feels new. There are no spells; instead, each style of magic (which are tied to specific countries) works according to its own rules. Here's the run-down:

• English magic allows you to take on aspects of different heroes of legend, most (all?) of which are based on British folklore. You can be good at bows like Robin Hood, or clever like Jack (of the beanstalk), shit like that. The "Jack" section in particular has some cool shit about how you can place a certain number of magic rules from a pre-made list on your house (things like "I can't die in my house" or "My house cannot be harmed in any way.") 
• The Norse get rune magic. Pretty much what you'd expect. Every rune allows you to either take a bonus on social roles or control the weather, and as you level up you can inscribe runes on objects and eventually on your flesh.
• The French get teleportation. This seems like the most useless one in here, but basically you can step through tears in the fabric of reality and also use that to retrieve objects that you've marked with blood.
• Russians can turn into animals. As they level up, they can partially turn into animals.
• Italians get my personal favorite of the magic-types: they can see into the web of fate and interact with the threads that combine any two people. A low-level witch can look at a person and get a readout of the most important relationships in their life, and at higher levels she can manipulate (or even destroy) those bonds. This whole system is also themed the suits and cards of a tarot deck, and as we've established I'm a sucker for that stuff. 

And that's what's in the book. Hey, let's talk about what's not in the book, and that's pirate shit. 

Okay, in fairness, I did skip over a section that's right before Sorcery where players can create their own ship during character creation, which is cool and gave me a couple ideas that I'll be stealing for my own pirate game down the line. But this book doesn't give you any of the rules on sailing or ship-to-ship combat. It's in the GM Guide instead, and my curiosity was piqued enough that I downloaded and skimmed the GM Guide just to see those ship-to-ship combat rules. They occupy all of two pages, and that's not an exaggeration. 

I think it's fair to say that this is not, in fact, a pirate game. Or, if it is, it's a pirate game and also a diplomacy/court intrigue game, and also a let's-go-fight-monsters-in-the-woods game, but none of those effectively. Listen, I can't really be mad at this game for not being something I wanted it to be, but what's the deal? Why is this the game that everybody brings up first when somebody says "pirate RPG."

Okay, so. At the end of the day, is this the game I was looking for? No.

But is it a good game? Also no.

The setting is lazy when it's not downright offensive, the core system is vanilla and boring, and the entire game is just a slog. This is one of those books that I finish reading and go "Okay, sure, it's an RPG. But what am I supposed to do with it?" I have a hard time believing that there's anything that 7th Sea can do that couldn't be done better by another system that takes half as long to learn. And so, my search for a good pirate RPG continues. The way things are looking now, I'm probably gonna end up just writing my own. Stay tuned for that.