opening match #7: 7th Sea 2e vs. Cyberpunk RED
this one is quite the contrast, isn't it? I almost can't get over how strikingly different these games are. we have one all about heroism and romantic adventures on the wide open seas, where explorers will risk their lives for honor and glory to stand bravely against the shadowy villains of a preindustrial, magical world. and then the other, a game of cybertech and surveillance and hacking and drugs and shady alleyway deals,
set in perhaps the most hectic, grimy, yet also sparkly version of the future, where a bunch of tortured, damaged antiheroes emerge from however much generational trauma you want to imagine, just trying to make
it through the night under the echoing buzz of a corp-ruined, crime-ridden, chaos-loving city.
while I didn't have any prior experience with any Cyberpunk RPG before this, there is plenty of cyberpunk-ish content in the world that I have seen. a handful of Gibson novels, of course. various hacker shows and hacker characters. Mr. Robot, Altered Carbon, (still need to finish watching both of those series, someday.) and even The Matrix films in their way. on top of such general pop culture exposure, I've played a little Shadowrun (more about that in the final opening match, soon-ish), and I watched husband Jeremiah playing Cyberpunk 2077 once upon a time, but none of that counts as playing the RPG of Cyberpunk RED. this one was totally new.
7th Sea, in contrast, is a game I've got some experience with. not a ton, but some. and while we're diving into relevantly themed pop culture, surely I have ingested even more swashbuckling-esque content than I have cyberpunk, since it is often more "mainstream," we might say. all those charming Johnny Depp movies about pirates.
The Mask of Zorro.
Casanova.
Master and Commander.
The Princess Bride, even. practically any good classic adventure movie could fit the bill, from Indiana Jones to
The Mummy. I'd even count the tv show
Firefly, at a stretch. (and
could this reenactment gun show festival thing count too, somehow?)
for this penultimate opening round, I've yet again used a similar outline of sorts: quick table of metadata,
summaries of prior characters and experience with each system, new characters, then thoughts
on their aesthetics, mechanics, and approachability. as I write and revise this post, I'm still deciding which way my preliminary verdicts will lean.
| SYSTEM |
7th Sea
|
Cyberpunk RED
|
tagline =
|
"The roleplaying game of swashbuckling and intrigue."
|
"The roleplaying game of the dark future."
|
publisher =
|
John Wick Presents / Chaosium Inc.
|
R. Talsorian Games |
pub. date =
|
2016
|
2020
|
original cost =
|
$59.99 |
$60.00 |
length =
|
9 chapters / 304 pages
|
14 major sections / 456 pages
|
my exp. level =
| some
| none prior
|
previous characters + pop culture and such
our online gaming group began a grand swashbuckling
7th Sea adventure somewhere in the murky months of 2020, in which I played the young totally-not-Scottish scholar Effie McIntyre. we sailed from totally-not-Great-Britain all the way to totally-not-the-Caribbean and started exploring some spooky ruins. our storyteller wasn't loving it though, so we switched back to
D&D after a bit.
Effie and her compatriots were fun while they lasted though-- we all sailed out from the troubled Highland Marches on the Righ Eileen, a merchant brigantine captained by Effie's uncle, crewed by a trio of cousins and other NPCs. Effie's brother (Baltair-- played by dear Jeremiah) served as first mate. I remember encounters at sea and along the coasts of the pirate-ruled Atabean Islands. there was vengeance afoot, and secret societies, precious ancient artifacts and supernatural skullduggery.
some years later, we got another 7th Sea game going, this time set more firmly on the continent of Théah and its various totally-not-European nation states. for this one, friend Chris and I created and roleplayed a pair of noble cousins from Castille (i.e. totally-not-Spain)-- Zetallia Fierro Greca de Tomas de Rioja y Carleon (yes I stole her first name from Catherine Zeta-Jones because of Zorro, so what?!) and Baltasar Cabello de Carlos-Miguel de Monte Ciervo (known to and loved by his close friends as Baz). the third in our trio was a mysterious Vodacce (i.e. totally not Italian) woman called Andolina di Amati, Lina for short, played marvelously by friend Alyssa.
same friend Alyssa happened upon and recommended to us a neat little 7th Sea podcast about the time we were getting the game started, and I jumped into that wholeheartedly. it's not live-streamed/raw-footage play like the Critical Role folks do, but for me the editing and shorter episodes make it far more digestible and enjoyable. do check it out if you like pirates and fabulous voice acting.
our adventures with Zeta and Baz and Lina only featured a few teaspoons of pirates, relatively speaking. but what a range of adventures we did have! lavish feasts with drinking and dancing in the old castles of the Glamour Isles, deadly intrigue in the dirty streets of Carleon, voyages alongside selkies, and desperate fighting against monsters, inquisitors, and worse. somewhere inbetween all the adventure, Zetallia was given a holy vision of Theus and chosen as a prophet. I wrote a little bit about her reactions to that, and her feelings about home and family and priorities, over here.
new characters
my new 7th Sea character for this tournament is a duelist from the heart of the totally-not-France country of Montaigne. I named her Irène Valois; she is a tall, toned, somewhat vain woman-- a skilled fighter with frizzy dark hair and deeply olive skin. having been raised with all the privilege her noble family could provide, she has trained hard to become a Musketeer, to protect and serve the capital city of Charouse. she also nurtures two competing dreams: to venture east and hunt monsters in the deadly Lock-Horn Woods, or-- perhaps the safer path?-- to join the highly selective Lightning Guard and keep even the mere shadows of any revolutionary assassins far away from l'Empereur's chambers. when she has a night off duty, she loves to spend much of it looking up at the stars.
for Cyberpunk, I made two new imaginary protagonists: Cortessa the lonely, moody Tech and Jaq the brash, vengeful Netrunner. any romance they come with is surely of a very different texture than the classic swords and sorcery of 7th Sea.
Cortessa also goes by Cortex or Tex in their closer circles. I imagine them like an incredibly androgynous mix of Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton-- curly, silvery mohawked hair, pale skin with grease stains up to the elbows. as a Tech, Cortessa tinkers and breaks and fixes and builds stuff with bits and wires, hardware and software and cyberware, scraping by as a freelancer and hoping someday to move out of the dingy streets into an actually nice, actually safe apartment somewhere in a corp arcology. will such dreams ever come true? hard to say. even if they do, they might not be as dreamy as anyone hopes.
Jaq "the jungle queen" Aranda is the Netrunner character I decided to play in our very awesome one-shot two Fridays back. she's from the streets too, but not quite so whiny or desperate about it. she is tough. or at least she looks tough enough that it amounts to the same thing.
{ a sloppy sketch of Jaq } Jaq's only ambition is to get by one day at a time and brutally punish anyone who gets in her way. for the last several months she's been tracking down the rotten Arasaka execs who must have been behind the kidnapping of her family and the death of her 4-year-old daughter. she's going to make the corp let the survivors go or she's going to burn it all down.
our one-shot was quite an enjoyable rollercoaster of violence, hacking, stealth, and playing dress-up. it was great. maybe we will write some spin-off short stories someday.
aesthetics
Cyberpunk RED evokes all the slick and glitchy neon you might expect. crazy punk hairstyles. strobe lights. mirror shades. implants and biotech of all shapes. plus a ton of cutting-edge slang, of course. the single best word to describe Cyberpunk is 'attitude.' and we must acknowledge that attitude can never just be a regular, innocuous noun. there is far too much connotation in it now-- it is a word bursting at its seams with tension, negativity, and conflict. that vibe infuses the whole setting of Cyberpunk, setting the stage for some pretty intense stories.
and 'intense' is another good word for Cyberpunk. it is loud. bold. unabashed. aggressively nonchalant. the book itself blends the look of graffiti and old-school monospace computer console typography. there is heavy use of all-caps and small-caps and drop-caps. the setting and the system also seems to be a bit of a catch-all-- this rebooted cyberworld is to Gibson and sci-fi as D&D's ever-expanding world is to Tolkien and fantasy. from its first pages the book takes up a very "choose your own adventure" kind of layout; all the thumbnailed cross-references in the intro chapter want to be hypertext. they want you to click on them and be whisked to the right page.
every little thing has a place here in this overcrowded futuristic hive. but it feels chaotic anyway. there's too much. it will burst into dark and senseless violence at any moment. I'm seeing Cyberpunk RED as a flashier, more disco, more in-your-face version of World of Darkness. of course, it's more high-tech and futuristic, too. there's not much hope, not much safety or goodness-- just survival.
7th Sea may dabble in chaos and darkness, but it's not the senseless kind. it's a dramatic, sweeping, perfectly orchestrated sort of chaos. like the perfect long-take chase scene across a crowded ballroom. there may be villains and darkness in these stories, but none of it stands a chance against our heroes. I was describing this game to a friend last week as "Zorro + Pirates of the Caribbean + a handful of stereotypical renaissance faires" and I think that conjures plenty of the right vibes: swords. ships. lots of nautical imagery strewn about. maps and compasses. coastlines and courtiers and caped crusaders. many fancy costumes, masques, intriguing magical trinkets, and maybe a few fairy wings if you're lucky.
rich shades of brown and sepia, with touches of copper here and there, all keep the relatively simple book design feeling cohesive and authoritative. chapter headings are in nice big loopy, swishy handwritten type. the art is glowing and neat-- almost-but-not-quite like a bunch of actual portraits from the actual 17th century. it's all more like snapshots than portraits: candid moments of drama and danger, a dash of the mystical here and sprinkles of the mythical there, all laid out to evoke vast possibilities for exploration and adventure.
{ photo of one of 7th Sea's chapter spreads }
mechanics
character creation for 7th Sea is fairly involved, but really fun at the same time. there are no templates or sample quick-builds or other shortcuts. instead, the book invites you to start with a concept: a national origin and a shred of personality, and then build from there using a full 20 questions about their backstory, psychology, and connections in the world. from this deeply creative foundation, only then do you move on to choosing Traits and Skills, Advantages, Quirks, a virtue and a hubris, etc. characters are pretty customizable despite the relatively simple set-up of 5 Traits and 16 Skills. the range of backgrounds and advantages to choose from feels just about right-- not so many that it's overwhelming, and not so few that it's boring.
part of the variety comes from the setting itself. there are 10 nations your character might call home-- from the island nations of Avalon and Inismore to Vestenmennavenjar in the far north and Vodacce off to the south-- each one roughly based on some actual part of 17th-century Europe, but far more mystical and far less racist and misogynist, thank goodness. each nation has a few exclusive backgrounds and a few favored advantages, too.
7th Sea uses all d10s, which is familiar enough to us at this point-- 8 of
the 12 systems I've reviewed so far do. but in this system they do not
work the way dice work in most other RPGs. rather than simply adding up
numbers and comparing them against some kind of difficulty level, a
player in 7th Sea will roll their handful of d10s (based on ranks in a
given Trait + Skill + any bonus dice) and then tally up how many sets of
at least 10 can be made from the results. each set of 10 is called a Raise, and that's the important number. bonus dice can come from all kinds of places-- using one of your advantages, spending your own Hero Points, enacting a virtue
or a hubris or a quirk, or in receiving help from other characters.
depending on where your story is at, you'll roll dice for either a free-flowing Dramatic Scene or for a more structured Action Scene. each character in the
scene will have so many Raises to use to effect change. narrative control for Dramatic Scenes is shared however it makes sense. for Action Scenes, it starts with whoever has the most Raises, then in descending order. how you spend those Raises depends on how your character views the scene, its risks
and consequences, opportunities, etc.your traits and skills will guide your approach to
any given situation, but the system rewards narrative prowess more than
it rewards having a lot of dice to roll (though of course more dice =
more Raises = more potential for showing off your narrative prowess). the idea is to spur creative, narrative storytelling and build a dynamic, collaborative epic of your own. maybe it's also less math? or maybe it's just different math.
over
multiple sessions, character advancement happens in lockstep with the
narrative-- each character is writing
their own story, outlined in smaller "story steps." accomplishing all
the steps in your story will let you level-up a Trait or a Skill related
to it. Zeta's first story involved finding a mentor to teach her a bit
of dueling. once she did, her Skill in Weaponry went up from 1 to 2.
mechanically,
that's pretty much all there is to playing 7th Sea: roll, count up your Raises, and tell a cool story. all the rest is true roleplaying.
-
Cyberpunk RED is also all about the d10, though some d6s show up here and there. we have three options for building a character in this system: one fully custom/from-scratch process and two shortcuts or character templates, which are quite nice as scaffolding, because holy cow there are a lot of aspects to consider. to start, you choose your character's Role, and most things follow from that first decision. there are 10 Roles altogether, from Rockerboy to Nomad (and who on earth knows why they are in the order they are in-- Rockerboy, Solo, Netrunner, Tech, Medtech, Media, Exec, Lawman, Fixer, Nomad-- it's not alphabetical and I can't quite suss out any other organizing principle. is it pure random chaos? who knows). there are nifty flowcharts and tables to help you build your character concept from basically nothing but vibes: pick a Role > Run your Lifepath > Buy your Stats > and so on. it's a pretty fun process too, but does drag on a bit. some of it reminded me of the Wrath & Glory system, where you can choose and archetype and build from there.
thankfully all the flowcharts and template options make it a little easier to make decisions about all the rest. on top of the 10 different Roles, there are 10 key Stats and like an impossible number of Skills. 30? 40? I don't even want to go count them all again, it's so many!
gameplay proper is a bit more straightforward overall, though there can be plenty going on if you've picked up lots of gear, fancy cyberware, or lots of hacking abilities. each specific Role comes with a key Role Ability. for my Netrunner, Jaq, it was the Interface ability. she starts at rank 4, which unlocks a certain number of sneaky, hacker-y "Net actions" (in contrast to "Meat actions," which are normal actions anyone can take in meatspace). Jaq has a cyberdeck with 7 programs installed-- some offensive and some defensive. in our too-short 3-hour one-shot, she used them to divert power from her sketchy landlord's defense systems, infiltrate a hospital's records and surveillance cameras, and switch a stolen helicopter into autopilot for a while. super cool.
hacking aside, the basic mechanics of gameplay involve taking your base rating for each skill (the relevant stat plus your skill level) and then adding the result of a d10 roll. rolling a 10 is a critical success, meaning you can re-roll that d10 and add that result to your total. if you roll a 1, that's a critical failure. same deal, but in reverse-- you'll re-roll the d10 and subtract it from the total result. depending on your character build, and how lucky they are, you'll also get a pool of Luck points that you can spend to add, 1 per point, to your result.
specific stats for weapons and armor and other equipment may add bonuses or change the damage for some actions-- those are the trickier things to keep track of along the way (though no tricker than weapons or spell slots and such in D&D, really).
approachability
I mentioned the "choose your own adventure" layout of Cyberpunk earlier. in some ways, that makes navigating the many many sections and options in the book a fairly flexible process, provided you're paying attention to those cross references and the other wayfinding signals in the margins. I didn't always see or properly parse those things until I'd already flipped through three other sections looking for the information I needed. the order of things is a little confusing at times, so I'm glad the writers put some good thought into breaking it down and signalling where to turn. the book does work hard to make itself accessible in plenty of different ways for players with different levels of familiarity. does it always succeed? I think that depends on how each reader's brain works.
{ photo of the margin thumbnail cross-references in the Cyberpunk RED book}
with so many options for character builds, this can feel like a complex system. but much of the complexity is front-loaded, so once you get yourself set up the game itself can be pretty straightforward. basic dice, basic math, lots of fun. my view of this may be a tad skewed, given that our one-shot barely gave us a chance to get used to how our weapons and damage and health points all worked, but so it goes.
-
7th Sea has its own intricacies, but you can take your time uncovering them as you play. the 20 questions character creation is the most in-depth part of the set-up. with the core book, you've got everything you need in a relatively simple, readable layout. it's a fairly different system, but I'd hardly call it intimidating. it invites a fairly hardcore style of roleplaying and collaborative storytelling, which may not be for everyone. but still, everyone is invited.
if in comparison to other RPGs,
7th Sea seems more difficult or unwieldy as a system, I'm gonna put that down to a general oversaturation in gaming culture of d20 systems like D&D. the abundance of information out there on those systems doesn't inherently make d20 systems easier or more accessible-- it just facilitates an invitational feedback loop of "hey most people are playing these kinds of games, so maybe I'll join the party," on repeat. based on that, D&D may seem easier for most people, and it may in fact be experienced as easier, but mostly for structural reasons rather than game-design reasons (here I'm gonna attempt to cite
this scholar on twitter who has made similar arguments somewhere in her feed but I cannot find the exact specific posts).
I suppose it may or may not be useful to talk about structural access vs. inherent access in my review here. but I wanted to mention it. this game is beautiful and it is well-loved and it can be awesome for players who really gel with the roleplaying style. the game seems especially designed for folks
who love the voices and the improv and the in-the-moment seeing what a
character will do, taking time for describing actions and faces and lines of conversation, reveling in those dramatic moments. it is different from the more broad-strokes, action-for-action's-sake sorts of RPGs in the world, and that means it might require some significant mindset adjustments for players who aren't used to it or who are expecting more quantitative dice-rolling momentum.
preliminary verdicts
it's almost hard to imagine more heightened contrast between any two games. no
other match thus far has captured such extremely and intensely
different worlds and different vibes.
my 7th Sea experiences have been complicated a bit by interpersonal ups
and downs, while my Cyberpunk adventures seem minuscule and rushed in comparison.
how to choose?
there is a sense in which the roleplaying style of 7th Sea is almost-but-not-quite as intimidating and discomfiting to me as the huge, superpowered contexts of Scion and Exalted. its invitation to creative flair within a simple matrix of approaches and dice hasn't totally gripped me as a roleplayer. and yet its setting is intensely alluring. 7th Sea is all the thrilling legends from all my favorite old stories. I think my heart wants this one to win out, even against the attention-grabbing silver chrome neon styles of Cyberpunk, just for the romance of it.
next match-up review: Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire
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