"The ropes creaking, ship's leaking, sails are on fire,
and this whole bloody ship could go up like a pyre.
We've got smiles on our faces, but we've seen this before
No telling just now what we have in store."
-- Abney Park, "Aether Shanties"

So, I've never reviewed an RPG before. Which is amusing considering how many I've played - and even more amusing considering how many I've read (I'll drop you a hint: way too many).

So, I'm starting with the recent release by Cubicle 7, written by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton, and based upon the works by that infamous time-traveling, steam-punk mad-man, Captain Robert Brown: Abney Park's Airship Pirates.

Appearance: The first thing you can't help but notice is that the book is beautiful. Well-bound, with a nice parchment-look for the pages, crisp layout, and loads of inspiring artwork, Airship Pirates is among one of the nicest looking non-collector RPG books in my collection. If you've seen the beautiful Warhammer 40K RPG tomes (Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy, and Deathwatch), Airship Pirates comes fairly close to those extremely high-production-value examples.

Setting: Those that are familiar with Abney Park's music and the tales of Captain Robert may already know what to expect. But for the rest of you benighted souls, it is basically (at the risk of under-selling it) post-apocalyptic steampunk.

An evil empire rules the large Change Cage Cities full of Neo-Victorians, Automatons, and Mutants, while the remainder of the world is overgrown and inhabited by prehistoric megafauna. Living in the wilds are the nomadic Neobedouin, wandering caravans that travel from place to place on mammoths and indricotheres (imagine if the inhabitants of your local Maker's Faire were also gypsies, rangers, and gatherers - that's the Neobedouin). And in floating cities, tied to mountain-tops or wandering the tradewinds, dwell the Skyfolk. Gadgeteers and adventurers, the Skyfolk cities are bound in a loose alliance that ties them together against the Neo-Victorian empire - but otherwise has little influence on their habits of piratical raiding.

Ultimately, your PCs are drawn from all of these cultures (aye, even Neo-Victorian outcasts), to form the core officers of a crew of cunning pirates out for adventure, booty, and maybe even a bit of revolution. But the crew are mutinous cretins hungry for plunder... so you best watch your back.

Sections: Airship Pirates is broken down into three "books": 1) Rules and Systems; 2) Encyclopaedia; and 3) Game Master.

1) Rules and Systems - explains character creation, skills, combat, dramatic systems, vehicles (including Airships) and beasts, and equipment. This is where you create your Neobedouin Beast-Dancer or Automaton Love-doll or Skyfolk Air Captain. It's also where you decide your crew's "schtick" - their professional cover to hide their piratical activities in other venues (whether they're a band - like Abney Park themselves - or an acting troupe, a circus, or a number of other options).

2) Encyclopaedia - contains almost all the straight "setting fluff", laying out the setting's history, the geography of North America, and a section on each of the cultures of the North American portion of the setting (supposedly, further cultures will be covered in future supplements). Some of the setting seems a little goofy if you think about it too hard; but, recognizing that it's intended to be fueled mostly by "awesome" in order to hang further "awesome" from it, I think it works well enough.

3) Game Master - this final section contains chapters on running the game, playing around with time travel (which, if you're familiar with Abney Park, you'll understand how central this aspect is to the game), a bestiary, and a sample adventure.

While later supplements may come forth with interesting additions in the way of character options, toys, monsters, and, most importantly, more ships, the core book does an excellent job of being self-contained - covering all the core conceits of the setting with rules and stats.

Systems: The core system of Airship Pirates is something known as the Heresy Engine, which also powers games like Victoriana, 2nd Edition, and Dark Harvest.

The basics are as follows -

A) When you need to roll to resolve some action, you add a relevant attribute to the relevant skill and roll that many 6-sided dice. Each 1 and 6 that come up are successes, and 6's can be rolled again to try for further extra successes.

B) If the Game Master thinks that the task is difficult, he inflicts "Black Dice" (they can be any color, really, so long as you can tell the difference) on you. Every 1 or 6 rolled on a Black Die subtracts one from the total successes from your other dice. Unlike regular dice, Black Dice don't get a re-roll on a 6. If you end up with more successes on your Black Dice than on your regular dice? Then you end up with a critical failure/botch.

C) If you end up with even a single net success, you succeed... though maybe only barely. More net successes mean better, more complete, faster, or just plain more stylish-looking success on the action.

There's a stunt mechanic called Awesome Dice that add more dice to your roll and wounds will subtract dice from your dice pool (instead of adding Black Dice).

Other than that, that's pretty much it. Every other aspect of the game pretty much runs off of this base system - whether you're trying to out-drink your friends, command an airship-to-airship battle, or cross swords and fists with a rival captain.

Simple. Elegant. And, it seems from my reading (I haven't managed to play it quite yet), that it is very conducive to creating the action and the fast pace necessary to keep the game flowing.

As far as I'm concerned, Abney Park's Airship Pirates scores high on both style and substance. So if steampunk, post-apocalyptic derring-do, airships, pirates, or Abney Park (or any combination of them) inspire you with excitement - this is likely to be a perfect choice.

-- Mr. M.

So, this is much later than I intended for this post to get written and go up. I know - I shouldn't let silly things like life get in the way of my virtual endeavors.

Priorities, man!!

So... Black Beard's Ball.

Overall Analysis: All-round, I had a fairly good time. Band was good. Drinks were decent. Venue was kind of cool.

Venue: The Oakland Metro Operahouse.

Kind of a cool place. Basically a warehouse just a few blocks off the Broadway strip in Oakland. There are two bars (one in the main room and one in a room all to itself) and drinks weren't terribly expensive (about $4 for mixers and scotch) though the selection left a bit to be desired. The main room is basically a big black-box theater.

The Crowd: Meh. There were some solid goth folk among them. And a lot of steampunks and a smattering of pirates, of course. And a lot of non-scene folk, too. Anyplace else, I'd call them tourists, but I suspect that their presence may have something to do with Abney Park's fairly wide fan-base itself.

It was also a little thick with people. There wasn't a whole lot of room for dancing and most of that was taken up by the fairly frantic swing-gothers.

Ultimately, though, they certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves and were polite enough when they inevitably bumped into you.

Vendor Room: The entry room was mostly for socializing and a couple of (rather over-priced) vendors. I wasn't terribly impressed by the selection and, though I expected vendoring with the steampunk theme, I was sort of disappointed in the lack of actual steampunk stuff they were selling. The whole selection was a couple artists and a clothing seller that seemed to specialize mostly in extremely expensive (though admittedly nice-looking) gothic, punk, and steampunk-ish belts.

The Mid-Show Variety Performance: In between sets by Abney Park, there were a couple of variety-show mini-performances.

The fire-juggler/breather and an extremely skilled hula-hoop dancer were both fairly awesome

But the set that stood out to me was The Standfire Collective - Two extremely lovely belly-dancers (Lisa Hyde and Unsinkable Molly), dancing to mixed goth-pop and techno-swing. Now, I've had the misfortune to see a lot of really bad bellydancing over the years (seriously, between being a pagan and an ex-Renaissance-Faire monkey, we're talking A LOT). These ladies, though, were not among that ill-favored crowd. Their movements were synchronized, elegant, and their hips moved without their upper torsos being shimmied to distract from bad footwork.

In other words, they danced like professionals.

Also... let's be honest: they were both really hot.

The Unsinkable Molly, later joined Abney Park on stage for parts of their second act.

If you get a chance to see the Standfire Collective, or either of the two lovely ladies that make it up,

The Headline Performance: Abney Park

Never having heard the band before, myself, I wasn't sure what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised at what I heard.

Imagine old 19th Century sea-shanties of loss, public drunkenness, adventure, and life on the ocean (or, in this case, the sky), with a slightly industrial beat, synth instead of pipe-organs (though the latter might be more apropos), and just a faint touch of what I'd call Tom Waits-ishness (a lot of their songs remind me of the slightly surreal themes of pieces like "Singapore" and "Cemetery Polka" from the Rain Dogs album)... And you probably still can't exactly imagine what I'm describing.

Their music, whether properly called steampunk or not (for they are neither steam nor all that punk), is charmingly idiosyncratic and defiant of classification. And this is not a bad thing.

Using a variety of instruments (synthesizer and guitars, of course, but also accordion, mandolin, violin, hand-drums, and, hell, even a banjo), they manage to come off feeling a little like folk music but with a lot of metal and industrial sensibilities. Actually... come to think of it, a lot like Jethro Tull's combination of folk and hard rock in Crest of a Knave.

But their sound isn't the only part of their charm. Oh no! They have the steampunk aesthetic to play with... though, in their case, it feels a lot more like steampunk's version of the cybergoth. Steamer-goth, maybe? Or perhaps more accurately, Babbage-goth?

I'm getting a sense of a lot of cross-genre bending-blending-and-pollination in every aspect of who they are.

All that said - I bought their two latest albumsÆther Shanties and The End of Days after the show and have played the ever-loving shit out of them in the days since.

I think we can count that as an endorsement on my behalf.

For those of you not yet in the know, Abney Park, former goth-band turned steampunk (yeah, that's right, you heard me correctly: steampunk) will be playing tomorrow night (Saturday, May 7th) at Black Beard's Ball which is happening at the Oakland Metro Opera House.

Brought to us by the lovely people at Swing Goth!

I hope to see some of my little darklings there.

I'll be the one with the goggles.

-- Mr. M.