The Accursed Game

I've been watching Crossbones on NBC and enjoying it, because 1) I like pirates, B) the acting is good enough and the plot intriguing enough, and III) it's potential source material for 7th Sea, which is a game I dearly love but is, apparently, cursed.

I feel I should take a moment to explain that while I do not consider myself a superstitious person, I believe I have enough empirical evidence that I can convincingly explain that every time I play this game, bad things happen. Come, I shall conceal nothing from you.

First, a Bit of History

7th Sea debuted in 1999 as an almost-but-not-really companion game to Legend of the Five Rings, but while the latter was based heavily on Kurosawa-style Samurai action, 7th Sea was a swashbuckling adventure based in what I like to call "fantasy Europe with the serial numbers filed off, using all the coolest parts of a nation's history" (Elizabethan/Arthurian England, Inquisition Spain, Borgia Italy, Viking Scandinavia etc).  While L5R was very lethal, 7S was of the "whenever possible, use a chandelier" school of heroic over-the-topness. In short, it's a fun game in which it's hard for your PCs to die stupid deaths and it has enough history porn to give Renaissance aficionados massive boners.

There was also a little movie that came out in 2003 that made pirates popular in the media. You may have heard of it.  Despite this, and despite the fact that 7th Sea is culturally accessible to pretty much everyone in the western world, the game went out of print in 2005.  (For the record, the second and third movies of the PotC trilogy came out in 2006 and 2007, so pirate fever was still raging at the time. And yes, you could play as pirates in 7S -- in fact, the first supplement for it was a pirate sourcebook.)

Contra Legend of the Five Rings, which features a culture foreign to most of the world, and is currently enjoying its fourth edition.

Still not convinced 7th Sea is a Jonah?  Fair enough. Read on.

How It's Affected Me

One

I discovered 7th Sea back in '99 or 2000, but the first time I played was circa 2004. It was a fun game, and my players Got It, and we all had a blast. Shortly thereafter, though, I lost my job, was unable to find another, and due to deteriorating health from malnutrition (most of my savings were going toward rent, and so I was eating lots of fast food and Ramen noodles) I moved back to Florida. A friend of mine from college knocked up his girlfriend, and I basically said  "In exchange for a break in rent I'll help take care of the baby." They accepted my offer and helped me move. 

I stored my 7S books with said friend. They didn't have a room for me at the old place, so I slept in my old bedroom in my parents' house while they looked for a new one. During the pregnancy, his girlfriend increasingly froze me out, and this only got worse after the baby was born.  I just attributed this to hormones. and tried not to take it personally. However, when they DID find a house, I asked "Cool, when can I move in?"  and she said "Never. I don't trust you with my baby. In fact, I don't want you coming around at all." Needless to say, I had done NOTHING to deserve this, and when I pressured my friend about it he agreed that there was nothing in my behavior to warrant mistrust or suspicion. But she didn't want me around, and he was a pushover and didn't fight it. So I cut ties with them, because what else do you do when someone basically says "I think you might abuse my baby based on no facts whatsoever"?  That was in spring 2005. 

http://teresenielsen.deviantart.com/art/7th-Sea-Vodacce-64739431

Two

I didn't touch the game for a while. The next time I dug it up was in 2008, when a player in my then-running L5R game was getting tired of running her Star Wars game and wanted something new.  I said, "Hey, have you tried 7th Sea? It's great!" and promptly loaned her all my stuff.  I made a character (detailed here), we played exactly ONE half-assed game, and she never got around to running another. 

Not long after I came out to her about being genderqueer. I figured I could trust her and she would understand. On New Year's Eve, I gave her a kiss at midnight (chaste, on the cheek) because she looked lonely. I didn't ambush her, I just said "Hey, give me your cheek for a moment" and she did, so I figured it was okay.

It wasn't okay. This is odd, because she also drove me home that night, and could have said something about it then, or in any of the days thereafter. You know, like adults do. Instead, she went behind my back for the next few weeks, turning the rest of my gaming group -- who were easily-manipulable horny engineers in their 20s -- against me. I don't know what she said about me, and I couldn't get a straight answer out of anyone on the subject. They all looked sheepish and evaded my questions. Personally, I think she told them I was queer and it made them uncomfortable, and she knew it would make them uncomfortable, and she did it because she wanted to be the only girl in the group.

Three

In 2010, I ran a game over Google Wave. It was a bit of a horrorshow, because these people failed to understand that 7S is a game of action, not a goddamn Shadowrun where everything must be planned to a fare-thee-well or else the GM will screw them over. No, I specifically told them "If you act appropriately heroic and dashing, I will give you villains that are equally egotistical and have classic Achilles' Heels," but for whatever reason they couldn't process that.

The game lasted a few months before I essentially said, "I give up. You are taking days to deliberate over things which should only require a few seconds of thought. It is not fun for me to constantly flog you into action. This game has become work, and so I'm ending it." The fallout from this was that someone with whom I was a good friend basically stopped talking to me -- we didn't have a fight, we just sort of fell out of each other's orbits, probably because we had a fundamental disagreement about How Games Should Be Run. Oh, and my girlfriend dumped me without any warning.

Another good friend who played in that game also "broke up" with me, but that was years later. I still attribute it to the Curse, though. 

http://teresenielsen.deviantart.com/art/7th-Sea-Eisen-65778922

Four

In 2012, I attempted to run another online game with another batch of people. I will say that this group, at least, seemed to Get It in terms of playstyle, but the group fell apart pretty quickly: one player decided he didn't have time to play and therefore dropped out of the game after the first session; another basically had a bad attitude about it from the beginning (didn't make a character, and then complained that I "took away all his creativity" when I made a character for him, complained about the mechanics, etc) and was a drain on everyone else, so when he said "I don't like it but I'll give it one more session" I replied "You obviously don't want to be here, so don't bother." I think another player liked getting drunk and/or stoned during play, but he was actually the least of my worries.

The end result of this game was basically the same as before: someone who I thought was a good friend (Mister Bad Attitude), and with whom I had talked over IM for many hours over many months, basically stopped talking to me. Again, no fight, just drifting apart... when someone is constantly marked "Busy" on GChat I respect that and don't bother them, and after that game suddenly this person was busy all the time. The last time he spoke to me was on Christmas, where he asked me for money. Before that, I don't think we had more than 5 minutes of conversation in the previous year, usually me going "Hey, how are you" and he'd reply with "Alright" and then not say anything more.

http://teresenielsen.deviantart.com/art/7th-Sea-Vendel-65130070

I Report, You Decide

I am currently four for four in regards to not being able to sustain a 7th Sea campaign, and every time I play in one, it always results in relationships getting all twisted. Now, to be clear, I am not specifically saying that it is the fault of the game that I lost my job, or friendships went sour, or I was dumped by my girlfriend. Some of those might have happened anyway. Maybe the game brings out something unpleasant in me that drives wedges in friendships Or maybe the game just shows up whenever things are about to get really shitty for me. 

All I'm saying is that 7th Sea is basically a Jonah, a Foul Weather Jack, a Stormcrow, and that wherever it goes, misery seems to follow in its wake -- at least in regards to me. 

So, you tell me: Am I being ridiculous and freaking out over coincidence? Or have I established a pattern of repeatable bad luck through empirical evidence?

And that, dear players in my Traveller game, is why I will never, ever, play 7th Sea with you, either as a GM or as a player: I value my friendship with you too damn much to risk going 5 for 5.

http://teresenielsen.deviantart.com/art/7th-Sea-Pirate-Nation-65929428

Julie D'Aubigny

Even though its skill system is horribly clunky and every game I run seems destined (cursed?) to fall apart, I still have a deep and abiding love for the 7th Sea role-playing game. Much of these love is due to the fact that not only can the system adequately model a person like Julie D'Aubigny, but she would also make a perfectly viable player character concept or a splendidly frustrating recurring NPC foil.

This happens, like, every other game session in 7th Sea. 

Julie D'Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you're visiting this website.

Go read the rest of the article, it's amazing.

What I find remarkable is that, despite all of her promiscuity, she apparently never had any children. While some may point to this as evidence of contraceptives or herbal abortificants, I prefer to think that she was so badass that no merely mortal sperm could penetrate her eggs to fertilize them. It would take someone like Superman, or at least Sean Connery, to impregnate her.

On the other hand, it is a bit of a pity that she never had heirs, because how awesome would it be to have her as an ancestress?

But perhaps they could exist in the realm of myth and legend. After all, doesn't this title seem perfectly plausible?

"And here is the story of how I impregnated Julie d'Aubigny,"  by Baron von Münchhausen.

Sometimes the posts just write themselves...

...but in this case, it was written by one of the players in my 7th Sea campaign. This is one character's rendition of the events of their first adventure, after arriving safely home and telling the tale at the local pirate dive:

Cariene accepts the tankard, steps up in front of the crowd with the hearth to her back, and throws back the drink, chugging it all in one go. Lifting her empty mug high before the crowd, she shouts, “HEAR MY TALE…” then drops her voice low, “of the agony of good Avalon privateers, men of stout hearts and iron sinews, dry-docked and languishing in the foul prison-pits and oubliettes of Muget. Tormented by the fresh sea winds, they were, their moans and cries carried aloft, dancing upon the waves, carried by the spray and foam across the seas, to catch the ear and tug at the heart strings of the handsome and dashing ALASDAIR MACBAIN, and his crew of reckless freebooters…”

She then recounts how they landed on the docks, and how HERJA, “potent with ancient weather-wisdom” called up a fearsome storm to cover their sneaking into the port, and how they had made their way into the very bowels of Muget’s “foul dark loathsome fortress.” She tells how the keen steel of Herr Wolfram shattered the chains and smashed the locks that oppressed the poor, brave honest seamen who had been cast into the foul depths of dark stone beneath the moaning sea.

Meanwhile, she recounts how she had climbed countless stairs to the highest tower to steal the secret knowledge of that grim place. But she was thwarted in her attempts by the arrival of the wicked and sinister Lady Dominique Leveque d'Aur. Cariene explains, in salacious detail, how the fiendish noble first tried to seduce her with her slinky, snake-like beauty, and to poison her with envenomed wine. But of course Cariene was too clever to be so caught, and she spurned the evil viper’s advances. Enraged, Dominique drew her blade, and the two began a desperate duel, leaping from tower-to-tower, across rain drenched battlements where the wind howled and tore at their clothing and the lightning crashed and burned across the sky!

A puddle caused our heroine to slip and she fell down from the wall, across a stairway, over a stack of barrels, to sprawl in the mud, her sword out of reach and her foe, laughing, standing over her, preparing to strike a fatal blow to her heart. When suddenly the spirit of justice himself, as if summoned by the very ferocity of the storm, EL VAGO appeared. His blade flickered faster and brighter than the lightning that wreathed his head, and his booming laugh filled the cold, black heart of the Lady d’Aur with terror. Screaming, she fled into the night to cower like a frightened child in some hidden place.

But the garrison of the castle had been roused, and now the freed sailors and their rescuers were forced to fight a pitched battle against an entire regiment of marines, hordes of cavalry, and vast batteries of artillery. Only by their ferocious courage where they able to route the massed ranks of the enemy, but just as the battle seemed to be won, the fiendish Lady d’Aur made a last-minute appearance to fire a cowardly shot at el Vago’s back. Mortally wounded, he fell to the earth.

But just as all hope seemed to be lost, the stout-hearted and innocent young ENZIO arrives. Hearing the plaintive cries of others trapped in a hidden oubliette, he’d released a wise doctor and his staff, being punished by the vile Lady d’Aur for the crime of mercy upon the poor peasants she’d been torturing on her lands. With the aid of the good doctor and the purity of Enzio’s tears, el Vago was healed.

Rushing to the port, the crew liberated the gallant corvette Bec de Corbin and made for the sea. But the storm had abated and the air was still. The battery overlooking the harbor trained its guns upon the helpless ship, preparing to smash it to splinters and send its gallant crew to the depths, just as they seemed poised to win their freedom.

Then did Herja clamber to the crow’s nest and in her mighty arms gripped the beard of the West Wind. They wrestled and struggled all through the rigging, the wind sometimes a giant with gnashing teeth and fiery eyes, or a hissing cat, or a wild crone. But no matter what form it took, Herja kept her grip, until the wind relented and she hurled it into the sails, sending the ship dancing over the waves, as light as foam and spray, leaving the smoke and cannonballs of the clumsily commanded battery far in their wake.

And then did the whole crew raise a cheer, breathing once more the free air and looking forward for another chance at vengeance against the hated enemy, side-by-side with “Captain Alasdair and his crew of reckless freebooters!”

SWFGM ISO PC

Me: An accomplished Game Mistress of many systems with years of experience, capable of improvising quickly and willing to run a fun, high-octane and high-drama game.

You: A role-playing gamer of the pen and pencil variety, capable of playing well with others, who doesn't whine when things don't go your way, and able to act instead of just react.

The Game: 7th Sea, a romantic and swashbuckling game of action, adventure and intrigue, set in a fantasy version of Europe-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off during the Age of Exploration.

The Requirements: Willingness to join Google Wave; willingness to install Dropbox on your computer so you can access the game books I provide; ability to check Wave and respond to it at least once a day, but 2+ times are preferable.

If you are interested, either leave a comment here, or email me at erin dot palette at gmail dot com. You have the option of making your own character or taking over the character of a former player.

Jack. Just.... Jack.

My gaming group has just started up a 7th Sea campaign. For those of you who don't know what that means (and shame on you if that's the case!), 7th Sea is a swashbuckling game set during the Age of Exploration on a world that is basically Earth but with the serial numbers filed off.

Oh, and there's magic.

And the European nations are arranged according to coolness factor, rather than chronological accuracy. So you've got Pre-Revolution France butting up against Inquisition Spain, while post-Thirty Years' War Germany exports mercenaries to both sides. Ivan the terrible runs Russia, Vikings plunder Dutch trading guilds and the United Kingdom is made up of Elizabethan England, Robert the Bruce Scotland and Ireland has its own king, which never EVER happened.

In this universe, the Irish are called the Inish, and there are faeries everywhere. And I don't mean Disney fairies, either, I mean terrifying inhuman kind. In fact, Inismore and Avalon and the Highland Marches are called the Glamour Isles, and the place is just drenched with magic and superstition.

My character is Inish, and male (it's easier to play male roles in 7th Sea, in my opinion, especially in a pirate campaign), and... well, see for yourself.

(Apologies to those folks who have no clue what I'm talking about. Lie back, close your eyes, and think of home. I'll be done in a moment.)



The Tale of Jack

He doesn't remember his name any more.

It's been so long, and he's gone by so many aliases, that for the life of him he simply can't recall the name of his birth. When he tries to remember... things... happen. Very bad things. No, it's better just to let the past lie, and ride the madness instead of fighting it.

We can call him Jack. That's a nice name. A good strong Inish name. Because even if he doesn't remember who he is anymore, he knows he's Inish, by Theus. Call him an Avalonian and he'll bash you in the delicates until you stop whimpering and pass out from the pain.

What Jack does remember, though, is being poor. Poor, and cold, and starving, with a family to feed, and the harvest having been so poor on account of the drought. Desperation drove him to do the unthinkable: poaching small game in a forest claimed by a Sidhe lord. And it worked, for a while.

But he was caught, as the heroes in these tales always are. Now, Jack was never a particularly strong man, or fast, or even smart, but what he had in spades was a quick wit honed to a razor edge through desperation. And as the Sidhe lord prepared to slay the filthy poacher, Jack uttered the words that would change his life forever:

"Fancy a game of riddles?"

For Jack knew well the love of games most Sidhe possessed, and this one was no different. "Now just to make this interesting," he continued, "we'll put a wee wager on this game. If you win, then you kill me, and everything that is mine becomes yours." Jack was pleased by this last bit, because even if he failed, his family would fall under the Sidhe's protection, and they'd never starve again. "But if I win.... then I get your magic. It's life for livelihood, you see."

The contest, as the bards would say, was epic. It lasted far into the night and well into the morning. The Sidhe was immeasurably old, and incredibly wise, but rather lacking in imagination, and Jack had nothing BUT imagination. It was a duel for the ages.

Sadly, Jack can't recall the winning riddle. The contest had been going for hours, and he was exhausted, fluttering into and out of the half-sleep that separates our world from the next, and it within those borders that genius and madness meet and have loud, riotous sex. The spawn of their coupling was a riddle that was so complex, so maddening, that the Sidhe was unable to answer.

"So you're admitting defeat?" he asked. No, said the Sidhe, it would prefer to think about it for a while. "Suit yourself," said Jack, who promptly lay down and started snoring.

Come the morning, the Sidhe was still there, looking more perplexed and frustrated than it did before Jack's nap. "Far be it from me to lecture you about the rules of the game," Jack offered, "but I've given you more than enough time to answer, and truth of the matter is I'm more than a bit peckish and rank. So if you don't mind, I'll just be toddling off now..."

NO, said the Sidhe. A BARGAIN IS A BARGAIN. TAKE YOUR WINNINGS, THIEF.

Jack felt the power come upon him, Glamour coursing through his body. And so much more! He was becoming stronger, healthier, handsomer (teeth started to grow back)... he could even recall an education he'd never had. The Sidhe had given him more than just Glamour. But why? Part of him worried about this unexpected generosity, but he was more concerned with returning to his family and sharing with them his good news.

The miles melted away under his feet as he ran home, and threw open the door... to find the Sidhe lord sitting at the table, taking breakfast with them. Jack's family looked up at him with unrecognizing eyes, startled by the strange man who burst into their hovel. And when the Sidhe looked at him, Jack could clearly see the cold malevolence burning in his eyes, and he fully realized the bargain he'd struck.

They had traded lives. The Sidhe now had his family, who all loved him instead of Jack. And Jack, in becoming the Sidhe, not only gained his powers and memories, but also his debts. Sidhe live for a very long time, you see, and acquire many enemies over the course of eternity, and now every single one of them was after Jack to collect what was owed them.

Jack did the only thing he could think to do, which was Go Very Far From Here Very Quickly. He joined the crew of the first ship leaving the first harbor he found, and he has spent the past twenty years at sea, and he hasn't aged a day.

He's done everything, from hunt whales and leviathans in the icy Vendel seas to the lowest forms of piracy imaginable. He's been shipwrecked, marooned, imprisoned, pardoned, and once even mutinied against. He likes to tell stories about being on Berek's crew during the sinking of the Castillian Armada, but the truth of the matter is he was sick as a dog with dysentery the whole battle.

He's an excellent topsman, with a sense of balance that borders on eerie and a thorough grounding in the basics of sailing: rigging, knotwork, and even swabbing the deck. His keen eyes make him an excellent lookout, on the occasions when he's not thoroughly shitfaced on rum. These occasions are rare.

Jack is a functional alcoholic, however, and even when he's utterly smashed he's a competent sailor. But he drinks to keep the madness at bay.

Madness, because over the years he's forgotten nearly everything about his family, or his life before the Gift. His memories have instead been replaced with maddening visions of Bryn Bresail,of living a life he knows isn't his in a world that makes no sense. He has a thousand years of experience crammed into a brain that can barely handle a hundred. His dreams are haunted by a woman, beautiful and blue as ice and green as the sea, and as cold and deep and murderous as either. He's not sure if she's his wife, or his mother, or his sister, or if she wants to help him or kill him.

Theus help him, he thinks it's all of the above.



Extra! I rather imagine Jack looks and sounds like this, only Irish instead of Scottish: