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!