Thoughts on The 7th Sea RPG

[Apollonian]

I played first edition back in the very early oughts, and I did not enjoy it much. To be fair, the game group I played with didn't click with me, so it may not entirely be the game's fault, but here are my beefs with it:

It's a pirate game that completely ignores the preconditions for piracy: seafaring trade, a surplus of desperate seafarers, and weak law enforcement. Snapped my suspenders of disbelief a bit. It does rather avoid this by, as having been mentioned, set most action on the mainland.

It keeps secrets from the players. The worst example (spoiler)

Spoiler:  

is that the cool PC powers are in fact corrupt bargains that make the world worse in exactly the way that PCs are set up to fight, with the exception of the ersatz-Russian power. It's very much a John Wick "gotcha, suckas" moment.

In a lot of ways, it feels like the last gasp of meta-plot driven '90s game design. 2nd edition may have changed this, but I haven't cared to find out.

The game mechanics IIRC were cute and somewhat interesting, but not enough to stick in my mind after twenty years...

In short, I can't recommend it based on my limited, and dated experience. If I were doing a "fantasy pirate swashbuckling game", I would Start With Earth and just run with the historical Caribbean and go wild with it. System wise I would almost certainly use GURPS, but Savage Worlds also does a dandy job for swashbuckling action.