I skimmed the rule books to understand how to play the game and then just learned as we went. This isn’t a review, and I could be very wrong about aspects of the game that we either didn’t understand or I didn’t read. These are just my thoughts on an interesting game.
Seven Part Pact Retrospective
We’ve finally finished the 7PP game I made a post about a little while ago. Like I promised then, it’s time to write out my more complete thoughts about the game and see if anything really changed.
But first, here’s a basic overview of how the campaign ended: I, the Mariner, cast a very very large Titanomachy that fused myself with a dragon and decent sized town of human beings, in an attempt to cull Isha of humans and allow nature to prosper. This happened during the last wizard moot, so the warlock summoned 1001 imps (all referred to as “John Imp”) to lead them over to the Orrery, and then we had a big ol’ battle between the remaining wizards (the Necromancer died fighting a foe of death in the previous session, and the Sorcerer sent a homunculi in his place). It’s a battle that leads to the death of the Faustian (after the Warlock left him to die). The aftermath is a bipolar world where the Sorcerer sets up a police state and the Warlock, using the stolen Faustian pact fragment, gains power by repeatedly selling a new Faustian’s soul. The Hierophant decides to stop casting magic as a wizard, and the new Mariner is a child that survived the titanomachy spell, assisted by the former Mariners Gorilla with a tail. Some say that the remaining John Imps still roam the world, doing cool shit and making money.
What I Dug
Basically everything I mentioned in the first post. Isha is a great skeleton of a setting that does a good job of being just enough to build off, but not enough to stifle creativity. There’s so much flavor here!
Of all the domains happening, I think the Warlock’s were the most interesting, mostly because of the events that he spawns in certain months. You get things like the King’s Birthday, which was a pretty big jumping off point for the Sorcerer and Faustian feud that started to take shape during play.
The Beast poems are immaculate.
The game is, overall, pretty well thought and well written. This section is a bit sparse this time around, but I still recommend checking the game out, if for nothing else but how experimental it is.
What I Learned
Important Warning
This game requires commitment. We started with a six wizard game, which didn’t work out too badly, but you start to notice on those days where not everyone can show up. This isn’t a slight against my fellow wizards ( shit, I missed a session due to moving), but it is something to consider before jumping into a 7PP game. When a wizard is missing, their domain is also essentially missing and you can’t really interact with it much. A lot of the early game for us was about doing things in the world and using domain complications to mechanize their consequences. This is a pretty core part of this game in general, and when wizards are out they lose chances to further interact with the world.
The game also demands quite a lot of session time. I mentioned how long weekly actions felt in the first post, and while they got better, they still ate up a considerable chunk of our 3 hour sessions. At some point, we decided to just do all of our busy work at the beginning and do our scenes after, to make time go by quicker. One of the things I think you actually start to lose in a GM-less game is a dedicated pace keeper, to make sure Scenes didn’t outlast their welcome. Also, and I’ll talk about this later, casting a spell is not necessarily a quick process. I would probably recommend 4 hour sessions at the minimum for 7PP, which I think would still have been cutting it close for my group. I also recommend doing a lot of the Visions phase away from the table, which we started doing for some of the more involved domains.
I also think that for the most part, the watcher roles just kind of bled into each other and we all accepted fairly equal responsibility for calling things out or making suggestions. This was a pretty creative group of players, so there was no shortage of great ideas or reasonable rulings. Some groups might find them more useful. I basically forgot what my watcher role was in the last few sessions, and it wasn’t really a huge deal. Also, everyone jumps at the chance to call out a wizard’s lack of masculinity. It is perhaps the funnest wizard rule to uphold. On that note, here are some additional wizard rules that we came up with in play:
- All wizards are creative
- All wizards are strange
- All wizards are colorblind
- All wizards lay it down on old ladies
- All wizards will not be emasculated
- All wizards are kinky
- All wizards are weebs
- All wizards never say no
What I Still Didn’t Like and Some Other Things
Domains never grew on me. A lot of the most interesting bits about our game didn’t really come out of domain play, in my opinion. They definitely weren’t fruitless. The Faustian came to help me with a ravaged Isle and that started a little bit of tension between us as they were not very gentle in commanding the seas. The Faustian sent the devil around a few times towards the end, which created some tension within the pact due to the selling of their soul fragments (actually, the Mariner sold part of his own soul IIRC, or something to that effect to the devil). There was also the foe of death that came out of the Necromancer’s domain and became a problem, as well as some beasts that I winded up pacifying. To me, the juice still wasn’t worth the squeeze here. A lot of these things came up closer towards the end, and a lot of the earlier sessions had pretty uneventful domain play (with the exception of the hierophant getting royally screwed earlier on).
I really enjoy the overall idea here. The game isn’t completely cooperative, as each wizard is their own wizard with their own wizard goals. I do worry, though, that had we not made some decisions early on, a pact of wizards who are mostly responsible probably make for a less interesting game.To be fair, I decided to create big monster and destroy the world fairly early (due to some early prophecies we got and such), so perhaps I jumped the gun a little bit. I just don’t enjoy the mechanism through which these things come to the surface. There were quite a few months where I just kinda… sat there? Move a storm here or there, nest a beast to an Isle, yada yada. I could still have my scene and the moot, but to me it just didn’t feel worth it to go down other avenues or create new story threads that I didn’t think would turn out very important or be closed by the end of the campaign. For example, at some point I had the idea of taking the King’s daughter as an apprentice potentially, knowing full well that I was going to destroy the world. At the Mariner’s heart, he understood that he could be very wrong about the cause of Isha’s destruction, and breaking pact norms might be more viable than destroying all of humanity. I just realized at some point that there wouldn’t be enough time to make that meaningful, and that I was already somewhat taking up a lot of narrative space with the whole titanomachy thing.
Last post, I mentioned that each wizard also had other rules that they’re responsible for. I think the only one we actually got to use were the Warlock’s combat rules in the last two sessions. They were… alright. I wish there was a little bit more on setting proper stakes or creating slightly more useful rules for figuring out the state of each combatant. In the game, you list out assets for each party, which are invoked to make attacks/do things or targeted by the opponent to be destroyed. The big thing I noticed was that the strike mechanic leads itself towards a stasis pretty quickly. I think I played the “npc” for both combats, being both the foe of death and titanomachy mariner dragon. When you strike, you either do damage (which is very much up to fiat/narrative) or the opponent defends with an asset. In the former, the opponent takes back initiative while in the latter it goes back to you. This can basically just loop until the attacker decides to destroy an asset instead, giving initiative back. It just felt… kinda pointless? I pretty quickly took off my player cap and put on my storyteller cap, and tried to just influence combat in such a way that made for a good narrative experience. For the second combat, with me as the mariner dragon beast, I did mostly strikes as it let the other wizards do their own cool things, until meeting my fated end (also partly because I was not keeping track of 5 other combatants and their assets). I just kinda wish it felt either more inclined towards pure collaborative storytelling or had more meat to engage with as a game.
The other issue I can see with them is that they could take up a lot of time. Combat certainly did, but I think the Journey rules in my own Mariner’s book would also eat up time. There WAS actually a point in the game where I could have invoked the Journey rules, but I didn’t for time related reasons.
There was also a couple of times where we just came up with some resolution mechanics on our own to handle situations quickly. The Faustian sent his wife to steal from the sorcerer, and we handled it after some quick discussion and a few dice rolls. That was quick and easy, letting us figure out what happens (with a hint of randomness), and adjudicate from there. I might have preferred if combat worked more like this.
I do not like spells for two reasons:
- They are cumbersome to cast.
- They lack consistency.
Casting a spell is just an annoying process. The first big, deciding on which elements give you dice here and then which dice to use due to the import of the spell, isn’t bad for most spells. But then you actually roll the freakin’ things and have to consult the spell table for what additional effects (or just effects) the spell does. BUT WAIT! The spells don’t have numbers on their effects table, and instead use the astrological signs. So now I have to consult a completely different table to convert whatever number I rolled into the astrological sign, and THEN put together what my spell is actually doing. It’s just a drag of a process that wouldn’t be too bad on its own. Plenty of great games have weird and cumbersome resolution processes somewhere (looking at you, Whitehack auctions).
But it becomes a bigger issue when you realize just how inconsistent the spells are. Most spells don’t have very defined ‘base’ effects, and what the spell winds up doing is very much up to the roll of the dice. Look at a spell like bombardment, for instance. You create a blast which is sized depending on the import of the spell. But then if you look at the glyphs, you see things like “The strike is deadly to living beings” or “The strike blasts through mundane objects”. So if I don’t roll those… the spell just doesn’t do those things? What if the entire reason I cast the spell was to do those things?
Not all spells are like this, but even for those spells, the glyph effects just leave me with a strange sense of a wizard’s power. All this power and training, but I might accidentally not make a Hand of Power with the right glyphs to do whatever task I like? You do get to spend a week of time to ‘patiently’ cast the spell and roll an extra set of dice, and you usually have the right to refuse a spell. I just don’t think I like the variance of supposedly great and mighty wizards.
I do like 1001 Imps, though. That’s just a banger.
Don’t Forget to Write a Conclusion
I have more thoughts, but I think these are all the ones that really impact my experience with the game. 7PP is ambitious and a TTRPG I can truly say that I’ve never seen before. It’s got a lot going for it.
Would I play it again? I’d play Isha again. I’d play a pact of wizard patriarchs charged with maintaining a status quo that will probably lead to Isha’s destruction. I’d play a game that’s not quite competitive, yet not quite collaborative in nature. I’d play a GM-less game that puts responsibility on every player’s shoulders.
I wouldn’t play Seven Part Pact again, though. The execution is just not for me.