Studio Agate Takes Over 7th Sea From Chaosium

French publisher Studio Agate is taking over the development and creation of 7th Sea from Chaosium. The news was announced today by Chaosium, alongside a survey to help shape the future of the swashbuckling game. Per the press release, Studio Agate will launch a Patreon page that will give free access to developer insights and progress on future progress. A Kickstarter is also in the works to launch the "next chapter" of the game line.

7th Sea is a swashbuckling-themed game with a core mechanic involving a dice pool of d10s. Players determine the number of d10s they roll based on their trait and skill scores and then add the results together to create scores of 10 or more to make successes that can be spent over a round to influence the narrative or succeed in certain actions.

Studio Agate is best known for developing French language translations of RPGs, including 7th Sea. Last year, Agate successfully launched an English language 7th Sea product - The Price of Arrogance - via a Kickstarter that raised over $190,000.

Ownership of 7th Sea passed from AEG to Chaosium back in 2019. The ownership status of 7th Sea was not addressed in the press release, so it appears that deal involves publication rights and not outright ownership of the IP.

 

[DEFCON 1]

They just needed to fix the broken stuff. You could exploit a bunch of stuff like Pommel Strike and if you built your character optimally you could do like 10K10+100 damage, that sort of stuff. Plus, there were a bunch of swordsman schools that were terrible and never worth taking, that sort of thing.

Agree 100% on the Swordsman School issue. Always got the sense that they wanted to get the Nation books out as quickly as possible in order to not alienate players who had PCs for those nations... but as a result they came up with potentially interesting schools thematically but could never create and test the mechanics of them well enough to make them ultimately worthwhile.

Every nation had two to three schools that were wonderful, which was pretty much enough... but it just meant that half of all the schools were ultimately unusable by comparison.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Yeah, I liked the 1e rules and felt they did the setting justice. Nothing about 2e felt right. I just bought into the KS for the 1e backlog.

Heck... backing the KS just to get Pirate Nations alone would have been enough for me. That book you couldn't find anywhere without it being hiked up into the hundreds of dollars for it, LOL!

 

[GrimCo]

Some fencing schools were underwhelming. Some where outright brokenly powerful. Magic was interesting and unique. Was it perfectly balanced and playtested? Not really. Was system good for what it advertised? Hell yeah it was. Also, brute squads, henchman and villain combo was interesting. You could do pretty big fight without running into problem with pacing. And if memory serves me, mass combat rules were decent, with one of schools focused explicitly on that.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

And then he wrote Orkworld...

Don't forget - Orkworld started out as a four-thousand word essay so that his boss would let him play an ork in the AEG company D&D game.

It does have some cool concepts I enjoy in there, like the blank map that players and GM place locations on or building a party out of the same pool of points

 

[DEFCON 1]

Also, brute squads, henchman and villain combo was interesting. You could do pretty big fight without running into problem with pacing.

I also really liked their method for Brute Squads. Unlike say 'Swarms' in D&D where the swarm is basically not different mechanically than any other creature and it's only "flavored" like a mass of creatures together... 7th Sea Brute Squads had a mechanical base that was different than henchmen and villains, thus making fights against them different as well. I thought it was so cool that you could have a squad of six brutes that had a power level anywhere between 1 and 5 and that power level would create the TN needed to knock one member out... but you could call Raises against that TN to attack more members of the squad at once with a single attack. And if you succeeded, then the ones you attacked got knocked out of the squad and thus then reduced the power of the squad's remaining members.

That was the true power of the 'calling Raises' system in 7th Sea... you got to gamble on yourself. Did you think your stats were high enough that you would be able to voluntarily raise the TN by 5 (or 10 or 15) in order to be daring and try and knock out multiple enemies in a single turn... running the risk of not hitting any of them if you ended up failing the roll.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I also really liked their method for Brute Squads. Unlike say 'Swarms' in D&D where the swarm is basically not different mechanically than any other creature and it's only "flavored" like a mass of creatures together... 7th Sea Brute Squads had a mechanical base that was different than henchmen and villains, thus making fights against them different as well. I thought it was so cool that you could have a squad of six brutes that had a power level anywhere between 1 and 5 and that power level would create the TN needed to knock one member out... but you could call Raises against that TN to attack more members of the squad at once with a single attack. And if you succeeded, then the ones you attacked got knocked out of the squad and thus then reduced the power of the squad's remaining members.

That was the true power of the 'calling Raises' system in 7th Sea... you got to gamble on yourself. Did you think your stats were high enough that you would be able to voluntarily raise the TN by 5 (or 10 or 15) in order to be daring and try and knock out multiple enemies in a single turn... running the risk of not hitting any of them if you ended up failing the roll.

They did the same thing in every AEG version of L5R. Very cool!

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I never was interested into to learn its game system.

Only I wanted 7th Sea may be one of the best examples of how author's predjudices about real world and historical nations could be showed in fictional worlds. I don't want to spend my money to feel after I am reading propaganda against my own point of view.

 

[GrimCo]

@DEFCON 1

Best thing about brute squads, as opposed to swarms in D&D, is that you see them drop in effectiveness with each brute defeated. While six man brute squad does 6k6 damage, if you drop two of them, next round they do 4k4. 5 flesh wounds=1 less brute, so, as you said, do you try to go for raises and eliminate as much as you can as fast as you can and risk it, or play it safe, but risk taking more damage.

They make cinematic fights between heroes and bunch of mooks fast and easy to run, but you can scale challenge by giving brute squads different traits ( Armed with guns is nasty one).

 

[Aldarc]

I never was interested into to learn its game system.

Only I wanted 7th Sea may be one of the best examples of how author's predjudices about real world and historical nations could be showed in fictional worlds. I don't want to spend my money to feel after I am reading propaganda against my own point of view.

You only want pro-Spain propaganda then?

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

You only want pro-Spain propaganda then?

Yes, you have catched me. And why not? I am sick and tired because I am listened only the "official version". I didn't know who was Blas de Lezo until internet. I feel like an orphan character from a romantasy novel or a soap-opera who discovers not only his biological parents were a married couple but they had got noble blood. I am angry because the History has been used to tell about the sins by a group but nothing when others did worse things. Some stereotypes are not only annoying but potentially dangerous because they are too close to hate-speech.

How can I explain in a soft way? Let's remember the old far-west movies where the brave cowboys faced Geronimo's fierce apache hordes. Today if you search the testomony by Geronimo's great-grandson in internet you may find this telling a radically different version of the story. Now it has to be done in a different way.

The History is written by the winners... and after rewritten by the new rulers. If certain books tell "the world was a hell until we current leaders arrived and they fixed everything" then you have to stop and wonder where the real History ends and the propaganda starts.

When the publishers worry about to be "politically correct" and "ideological neutral" then "7th Sea" may be one of the best examples of how a franchise can be tainted by author's ideological prejudices about History.