D&D 5E Cubicle 7 Announces Victoriana for 5E

Cubicle 7's Victoriana was one of their first games (before them it was published by Heresy Games, back in 2003, using the Fuzion system, before Cubicle 7 bought the company). It mixes the 1800s London with steampunk and magic, with dwarves, ogres, beastfolk, and more living alongside humans. It was described by Shannon Appelcline as "Victorian Shadowrun" in his book Designers & Dragons. And...

Cubicle 7's Victoriana was one of their first games (before them it was published by Heresy Games, back in 2003, using the Fuzion system, before Cubicle 7 bought the company). It mixes the 1800s London with steampunk and magic, with dwarves, ogres, beastfolk, and more living alongside humans. It was described by Shannon Appelcline as "Victorian Shadowrun" in his book Designers & Dragons. And now it's coming to 5th Edition (by which they mean compatible with D&D 5th Edition -- the last Victoriana RPG was its 3rd Edition).

The 2nd Edition, from Cubicle 7, was published in 2009, and the 3rd Edition in 2013. This will be the fourth iteration.

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Cubicle 7 is delighted to share some awesome news: we are currently working on Victoriana for Fifth Edition, which will launch under the Open Gaming License later this year!
Victoriana was one of the first games we published, so we are terrifically excited to be bringing it to a wider gamer audience. Victoriana is a diverse game world deeply imbued with Victorian period feel, gothic fantasy magic, and steampunk engineering.

Victoriana takes place in a fantastic alternate world of 1887, where the old ways of magic and tradition are losing ground to science, revolution, and the cloying smoke of industrialisation. The player characters, or Associates, navigate this dangerous world, solving mysteries, making social connections, and confronting horrors, while uncovering the secret conspiracies that operate in the shadows. Whether the Associates fight them or join them remains to be seen…

A Victoriana Player’s Guide will be the first release, but watch out for incoming telegrams about an accompanying adventure book filled with macabre mysteries, and a bestiary of the bizarre monsters and vile villains that haunt the Big Smoke.
 

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I have owned/played a few Victorian era games. While I have read Victoriana, I have never picked for playing because:
1. Too many tropes with little thought given to the consequences - if you have a high magic setting and industrial revolution, you get Perdido Street Station not a Verne novel.
2. Social strata + multiple races mean you get Calcutta instead of London. Victorian era was dominated by a set of top-of-food-chain people (Victorian era | History, Society, & Culture) who disliked foreigners.
3. Mechanical issues: melee, xp, gunpowder, healing. You don't get clerics a plenty, melee is always an inferior choice in a clash, etc.
4. Educated multiskilled characters should be the driving force of the narration - not a party of niche specialists.

So, it's hard to create a believable setting if the basic premise crumbles under typical D&Disms. It's not impossible, though.

I'll hope for the best.
It is hard to get past one’s biases.
 

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Weiley31

Legend
An update on the Cubicle 7 website in case everybody was going "what's going on" with this.


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It's nice to get an update, but 'it's been delayed because we have to convert it to C7d20' is ... well, a big hairy fib. The announced release date for Victoriana 5e was late last year, well before the OGL fiasco and before C7d20 was even a thing. But some time mid last year it just faded away from their communications and they gave us radio silence while spending all their time talking about Broken Weaves instead. Presumably they had a priority switch in there somewhere.

It's a particularly big deal of course, they can rejig their production schedule however they want. Just a bit annoying for a project i've been looking forward to for a long time.
 

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