Title
Aldana Steel

Inspirations and References

AEG 7th Sea Sourcebooks
Books
Movies
Music
Other Games
Miscellaneous

These titles are suggested by various members of the group, so they reflect multiple tastes.  Also, if people want to write summaries and/or reviews of some of their favourite entries, that would be great!
 

AEG 7th Sea Sourcebooks

Well, the GM's a collector and a member of Novus Ordum Mundi, so we have all the original sourcebooks as far as I know: Player's Guide, Gamemaster's Guide, Compendium (thank you AEG! that was cool!), the Villain's Kit, the Erebus Cross trilogy, all nine nations sourcebooks including Pirate Nations and The Crescent Empire, all the secret society sourcebooks, the Freiburg box set,  Mightier than the Sword, Church of the Prophets, Waves of Blood, Tangled Strands, The Montaigne Revolution, and The Swordsmen's Guild.  Thankfully for our budget, he became more cautious when 7th Sea switched to dual-stat books.

Until he takes the time to review some of these books, I (the Webnag) will put in my own quick assessments.  Here they are, roughly in descending order of "Sophie Approval":

7th Sea Player's Guide: Awesome book.  This game has the sturdiest character creation system I have ever seen, foiling minimaxers and munchkins.  Better yet, the experience system pretty much keeps up, so characters have to be balanced or suffer.  Some of the civil skills and knacks are somewhat redundant and most have no game mechanics attached, a minor flaw that is compounded by the additional skills and knacks supplied in other sourcebooks, but this has not reached a critical level in our campaign.

7th Sea Gamemaster's Guide: Good book, not as striking as the Player's Guide but solid material.  We have the first printing of both the Player's and the GM's guides, so they are not representative of what most people will find (there was a lot of material reordered by the second printing), but both are a little confusing in the way they are organized.  This is especially true in the 1st printing of the GM's guide.  A portion of this material would seem to fit better in the Player's Guide, I think.  Still, a good book.

7th Sea Compendium: A wonderful initiative from AEG, this book wasfree to anyone who had purchase a first printing of either the Player's Guide or the GM's Guide!  It gave the corrections, additional material, and improvements that had been made in the second printings of both books.

[Interestingly, we tried to get ours from the main Weasels of the Coast store in Seattle, but they adamantly refused to give a book for free; instead, after we explained the story and showed them AEG's explanation, they decided to bundle and shrink-wrap the Compendium with the other guides – but by then they were selling the 2nd printing, thus making the Compendium useless!  AEG had a close business deal with WotC at the time, you'd think the Weasels would have been more helpful.  We eventually got the Compendium (and most of the rest of our 7th Sea books) from Golden Age Collectables.  So they deserve a plug here!]

Nations Sourcebooks: I do like the Castille sourcebook a lot (it's the one I use most, for obvious reasons), and the other ones seem generally pretty good.  Pirate Nations is the weakest, probably because it was the first; it is not nearly as useful to a player as it may be to a GM.  Main criticism of these sourcebooks overall: GM-only material is in in the same book as the players' material (and, in the case of Pirate Nations, not even delimited).  I would have preferred to see all the "GM only" sections into one supplement clearly destined to GMs.  I would recommend getting the sourcebook for your PC's nation, but that does mean it's hard for a GM to keep any secrets in his game.  Oh well, s/he'll just have to change some of that "GM only" material!

Secret Society Sourcebooks: Same flaw regarding "GM only" material.  In addition, not all societies are created equal.  Some seem to be there almost to fill in the blanks.  Some give you cool extras, but the first one published, the Explorers' Society, which ended up in theErebus Cross trilogy and in the 2nd printing of the GM's Guide, gets no bonuses.  The Invisible College, in which I was very interested based on the Player's Guide, left me cold when I looked at the sourcebook; I might use it if I ever run Castle Falkenstein again, but it didn't feel right for me in 7th Sea.  Sophia's Daughters feel pretty hoaky to me too.  The Knights of the Rose and Cross and Die Kreuzritter seem cool, though I keep getting them confused because they have almost the same name!  ("Kreuzritter" means "Knight of the Cross".)  Edmund says the Los Vagos sourcebook is very good, but I have not read it.

Adventure Supplements: Well, in theory AEG tries to publish adventures that have a few "hard points" and many movable or optional scenes, so that they don't force a linear approach.  But the Erebus Cross adventures seem to decline as you go through the set.  By the time we get toThe Arrow of Heaven, there are relatively few optional scenes, and they're definitely not all that movable anymore since they can only fit in certain locations in the script.  We did have a lot of fun playing it, though. "Drake Footprints", the adventure in the Villain's Kit, is very linear and has no optional scenes, perhaps because it is smaller in scope.  When Edmund ran it he did considerable modifications, and the scenes that I remembered best were all from his original material.  I haven't read the two adventures in Mightier than the Sword although Edmund did run "Music of the Spheres" with the rest of the group, and says he likes the second adventure, "The Golden Head Of Korlak ur-Nagath" and plans on running it.  Tangled Strands looks extremely linear to me; Edmund described it as an excuse to get into four fights; we're currently halfway through it and this description has proven very accurate so far.

Freiburg Box Set: Not nearly as good as the superb Ryoko Owari box set AEG published for Legends of the Five Rings.  The city doesn't feel very consistent or credible, the map supplied covers about one percent of the territory that is "Greater Freiburg", the plots and NPCs are not nearly as catchy as the City of Lies cast and schemes.  Oh well.  The main adventure, "Hammer & Tongs", is a bit frustrating because it is interesting and fun but has serious potential to wreck a campaign.

Church of the Prophets: Some interesting material, but also disappointing in many respects.  There is not much on Objectionists and the Ussuran Church, and I can hardly figure out what the Objectionists got so worked up about.   Elements like the Patron Saints are a fun idea, but some are completely useless (0-point balance and no effect in game play), and I wish more information had been supplied on the saints themselves.  There is way too much "history" and not enough useful information or crunchy bits.  Frankly, you'll get much more use, for free, from issue #121 of the Roleplaying Tips fanzine on roleplayingtips.com.  And Bley Ingley's and Dan "Smurf" Smith's art just doesn't work with the genre.

The Swordsman's Guild: OK.  Has some useful material, such as the by-laws of the guild, and reprints knacks found in various books.  Also includes a bunch of new but not very interesting schools.  I like the info on weapons and how to customize them (hilt, blade, balance, etc.)  Does not provide very interesting or useful new characters, nor useful advice on how to take advantage of the various schools and knacks.  The art is abysmal.  No offense, but you can hear this giant sucking sound when you open the book – it's the art you're hearing.  And what little art didn't suck (mainly Cris Dornaus') was recycled from other books.

Waves of Blood: I hate it.  There's no other word for it.  It's a book intended to tie the collectible card game with the role-playing game, so I suppose it had low odds of pleasing me, see my rant on the topic.  But I am also extremely miffed that, aside from the considerable material dedicated to unifying the timelines, what little there is about game mechanics and hard numbers is either very inconsistent with material published elsewhere (e.g., ship stats), or repeated "as is" from other books, often without even a mention that this is only a reprint (e.g., "new" Backgrounds, Skills, and Items.)

The Montaigne Revolution: I haven't read it and, frankly, I'm afraid to.  After seeing Waves of Blood, my personal inclination was to burn the next "timeline" sourcebook.  Edmund read and commented some of the timeline for me and I had a good laugh – and I don't mean that in a good way, Mr. Simpson 1.

Dual-Stat Books:  My criterion here is whether the books are useful to someone who plays the original roll and keep system.  In that light, the following books are pretty much useless because they are redundant with previously published material: Swashbuckling Adventures, Heroes, Villains & Monsters, Swashbuckling Arcana, Explorer's Society, and Ships and Sea Battles.  The following books are moderately useful; they contain mostly new material and may be of interest if the topic is important to your campaign: Islands of Gold: The Midnight Archipelago, Strongholds and Hideouts, and The Sidhe Book of Nightmares.  On the other hand, Knights and Musketeers is poorly written and is not recommended.  The only unqualifiedly useful book is Cathay: Jewel of the East.

Overall, a big failing is consistency between various books, and sometimes within a single book between the "fluff" text and the actual numbers or game mechanics.  This is not unusual for role-playing games with lots of published supplements, but it does irritate me and make me itch to do the editing for AEG! Let's not forget "The Straits of Blood - Lying 600 miles to the southeast of Buché..."  Hmm, let's see, that would put it about in San Cristobal, no? 

Another flaw, also common to many RPGs, is the lack of even basic research of real-world counterparts to make elements of Thean culture, history, and geography believable.  You know, things like "rivers flow from uphill to downhill, not the other way around"?  The languages and nations of Théah are based on real languages and nations, but the bits borrowed are often so maimed that it would have been much preferable to either do a bit of homework and proofreading, or to just use a "made up" culture.

One puzzling exception is the Crescent Empire sourcebook.  Interestingly, it does largely do justice to its vast theme, within the context of role-playing game.  On the other hand, it does so good a job compared to the other nation sourcebooks that it almost fails through its success: it's so much more detailed and complex than the others that it seems out of place.  To put it another way, if I've got a fantasy Europe made up of Duplo Lego blocks, then the fantasy Ottoman Empire made up of finely carved wood seems a bit jarring.  Once a campaign has settled into a certain level of complexity, it's very difficult to throw in a much more complex element.  This means that a lot of the information in the book may remain the GM's secret, not because it inherently needs to be hidden, but because the players wouldn't have a context for it. Unless of course you're starting a brand-new campaign and want to set it at the higher level.

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Books

Books are divided into nonfiction, fiction, and graphic novels, and listed in alphabetical order of main author's last name.  When available, book titles are given for the English version, with original title in parenthesis.

Nonfiction

  • Horace Beck:  Folklore and the Sea
  • David Cordingly:  Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates
  • Edward William Cooke:  Sailing Vessels in Authentic Early Nineteen-Century Illustrations ("Sixty Five Plates of Shipping and Craft")
  • Henry B. Culver:  The Book of Old Ships: From Egyptian Galleys to Clipper Ships
  • Miles Harvey:  The Island of Lost Maps
  • Captain Charles Johnson:  (frequently attributed to Daniel Defoe) A General History of Pyrates
  • Dean King:  The companion books for Patrick O'Brian's novels: A Sea of Words, the lexicon, and Harbors and High Seas, the atlas.
  • Ludmila Kybalova, Olga Herbenova, and Milena Lamarova:  The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Fashion
  • Marine Research Society:  The Pirates Own Book: Authentic Narrative of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers
  • Nathan Miller:  Broadsides: The Age of Fighting Sail, 1775-1815
  • Patrick O'Brian:  A useful overview of ships of the Nelson-era Navy, Men-of-War
  • Jan Rogozinski:  The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pirates (previously published as Pirates!  An A-Z Encyclopedia)
  • Dana Sobel:  Longitude
  • Tre Tryckare Company:  Historic Sailing Ships Coloring Book
  • Roger Tritton (ed.):  The Visual Dictionary of Ships and Sailing
  • John Noble Wilford:  The Mapmakers

    • Fiction

  • Steven Brust: The Khaavren Romances: The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black.  (Looking very much forward to the next installment, Sethra Lavode!)
  • Lois McMaster Bujold: The Spirit Ring
  • Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos: Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses)
  • Pierre Corneille: El Cid (Le Cid); his other plays too (more fun to see them than read them)
  • Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
  • Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers (Les Trois mousquetaires), Twenty Years After (Vingt ans après), The Viscount of Bragelonne(Le Vicomte de Bragelonne), The Man in the Iron Mask (L'Homme au masque de fer), The Black Tulip (La Tulipe noire), The Count of Monte-Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo), Joseph Balsamo, Queen Margot (La Reine Margot) and literally hundreds more.
  • Dave Duncan: The King's Daggers series (beginning with Sir Stalwart); the King's Blades series
  • Umberto Eco: The Island of the Day Before (L'isola del giorno prima), Baudolino
  • Paul Féval: Le Bossu
  • C. S. Forester: The Horatio Hornblower series (eleven books)
  • J. Gregory Keyes: The Age of Unreason series
  • George MacDonald Fraser: The Pyrates (as well as writing credits for several genre movies including The Three Musketeers,The Four Musketeers, Crossed Swords, The Return of the Musketeers, Casanova, and Red Sonja!)
  • Théophile Gautier: Captain Fracasse (Le Capitaine Fracasse)
  • William Goldman: The Princess Bride – S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure: The 'Good Parts' Version, Abridged (yes, that's the title of ONE book)
  • Johnston McCulley: The original Zorro series, starting with The Curse of Capistrano.  Good inspiration for members of Los Vagos
  • Vonda McIntyre: The Sun and The Moon
  • Herman Melville: Moby Dick; Billy Budd, Foretopman & Other Stories
  • Molière: all his plays!  Very funny to read, but especially to see.
  • Patrick O'Brian: The Jack Aubray and Stephen Mathurin series (twenty wonderful books)
  • Baroness Emmuska Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel series (ten novels in the series, plus one collection of short stories)
  • Iain Pears:  An Instance of the Fingerpost
  • Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac
  • Rafael Sabatini: Captain Blood, etc.  To be honest, we don't like Sabatini nearly as much as we might, because he was a racist pig.  As in "slavery is so horrible, no man deserves this fate -- unless they're black, in which case who cares."  Neither Sophie nor Edmund were able to get past the first few chapters of Captain Blood or The Sea Hawk because of that, but he's still a a major source for the genre so we'll kindly mention him here.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped
  • Patrick Süskind:  Perfume: The Story of A Murderer (Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders).
  • Michel Zévaco: Many, many fun swashbuckling novels.  Start with the Pardaillan series (ten volumes), someone on the mailing list just reminded me of these books.

    • Graphic Novels

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    Movies

    Movies are listed in chronological order of release.  English release title is given in parenthesis for films produced in other languages, unless that title remained the same (e.g., "Cyrano de Bergerac".)

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    Music

    For musical inspiration, we have a lot of leeway (so to speak) since 7th Sea does not follow our real-life timeline closely; anything classical in the periods of Renaissance, Baroque, early Classic and even later is likely to fit, as well as religious music of the same periods such as gregorian chant.  Classical Spanish guitar, of course for the Castillans; sea shanties for sailors; and soundtracks from movies such as the ones suggested above also works well.  Here are some of the albums we use:

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    Other Games

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    Miscellaneous

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    		 Cartoon from Dave Barry's column

     

    Notes:

    1"I don't mean that in a good way, Mr. Simpson" is a popular quote in our group, taken from "The Simpsons".  But one day we had the surprise of receiving a perplexed note from Les Simpson, co-author of Church of the Prophets and The Montaigne Revolution, asking:

    "I'm amused and scratching my head on why, exactly, you singled me out? I wrote the Vodacce section of the Revolution book and made sure that all the things I incorporated from the other books, adventures, and so on jived. If I made a mistake, I'd be grateful if you'd point it out to me. I'm sure that it's something really simple that's going to make me groan."

    Sure enough, he did groan but he was very nice about it.  To set the record straight, we are not singling Mr. Simpson out.  We just hadn't made the connection with his name!  We're just incorrigible nerds who have to quote movies and TV shows every other sentence.  Inconceivable!  Return.

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