Cubicle 7 Revisiting Victoriana RPG Using 5th Edition
July 16, 2021 by brennon
Cubicle 7 are going to be revisiting a roleplaying game that they produced back way back in the annuls of time (well, for tabletop gaming anyway). Victoriana is returning to the tabletop with a 5th Edition version later this year.
Victoriana // Cubicle 7
Victoriana is a game dripping with a period feel but one mixed with Gothic Fantasy magic and of course, a big dose of Steampunk engineering and wizardry.
"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…"
Leading the way will be a Victoriana Player's Guide that will give you everything that you need to start making characters for this world. Additional books will then follow in its wake full of adventures, mysteries, plus a bestiary of bizarre creatures and vile villains.
The Big Smoke is waiting and your adventurers and investigators are going to have a lot of fun exploring this new world. I am all for more Steampunk and it will be very accessible thanks to the 5th Edition rules. I am intrigued to see what else they add to the game to give it that unique twist.
Do you remember playing the original Victoriana?
"Additional books will then follow in its wake full of adventures, mysteries, plus a bestiary of bizarre creatures and vile villains..."
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I don’t really understand why everyone does a 5e ruleset for their setting. 5e is at best an adequate system with no flair, poorly designed archetypes and a dated system using levels.
It’s also the most popular system on the market, for good or ill, and a handy jumping-off point for people familiar with JUST D&D to try and explore a different world.
All for bespoke systems and I do like when they are tailored to the theme of a game but 5e is a pretty handy dandy way to get people playing in your world.
5e is fine as a beginner game with the simplistic choice of backgrounds and to be the classes always lacked something.
But there’s so much more to discover and a different rules set can drastically alter the experience you get from gaming. And when the game already exists with a rule set of it’s own, why waste effort rebuilding from scratch?
Would you buy a computer game multiple times if all they did was change the graphics?
For the same reasons that lots of people play 40k which has a terrible rules system.
Because it ain’t selling many copies. Same reason they converted The One Ring to 5E. Same reason Symbaroum now has a 5E version. It makes money, lots of money, to make a 5E version. Not sure why you call it a ‘beginner’ game system…what exactly are the serious systems people progress too when they get gud? Call of Cthulhu (chuck d10’s) or Vaesen (check d6’s) or Symbaroum (chuck dice in a meaningless attempt to make anyone care about combat that sucks)? Ah, it has to be Traveller (where you die in character creation) or maybe Twiglet 2000 (the salty snack… Read more »
Because something makes money does not make it good.
The quality of a system is not defined by the dice you throw, the dice are irrelevant.
One of the biggest problems with 5e (and all level based games) is that most campaign books take you close to max level and then your character retires so you can start again.
The character is not just numbers, not if your doing it right, it’s a personality that becomes a part of you. Why throw that away?
Level progression is easy to control. If you find the sweet spot at level 5 for example it is simple to just play at that level. It is after all just an abstraction of improved competency. Stats and character personality go hand in hand. No point in playing the gunslinger if you cannot hit a barn door at 10ft.
The d20/5E system has been used for such a wide variety of settings at this point that the complaints about it not working are hard to back up. It ain’t perfect, but no system is.
Jeremy Clarkson said he once fired an AK47 at a barn… emptied the clip… and missed…
Which proves how much of a tool JC is.
Sounds interesting with a touch of Hellboy II golden army with the steampunk edition.
Victoriana is fun but I always preferred Castle Falkenstein (by far the best game Mike Pondsmith ever produced).