I’m not going to hide that I have a dim view of games made using D&D Fifth Edition as their base system. D&D has always been a more specific game than Wizards of the Coast makes it out to be; even TSR made separate games instead of a unified ruleset. When I see a game made for 5e my first question is always if the designers had any thought to what rules would best suit the game they’re making rather than what rules more people are already playing.

If there’s a company that has a chance to make me eat my words, though, it’s Cubicle 7. My review of Doctors and Daleks detailed how impressed I was at what they did to make a good Doctor Who RPG out of 5e, including some massive changes to how the game works. Cubicle 7 is now campaigning another 5e game on Kickstarter, the fourth edition to their Steampunk game Victoriana. Victoriana has already seen some ruleset changes over the years; the game started out using Fuzion, a revision of the rules to Cyberpunk 2020 co-developed by R. Talsorian and Hero Games. By the third edition, though, Victoriana is built out using a d6 dice pool system and a wholly custom ruleset.

My questions about 5e Victoriana run rampant. Beyond my ruleset partisanship, this version of the game has been limping along for years, first announced in 2021, re-announced in 2023 using a custom 5e modification that was being called C7d20, and finally making it to Kickstarter earlier this month with the C7d20 nomenclature absent, simply called “Victoriana for 5th Edition”. The campaign is ongoing, and though it’s met its funding goal it’s currently sitting below $75k, a tough number to swallow for a campaign that has stretch goals out to the $200k mark.

What is this new edition of Victoriana going to get us? To attempt to answer that question, I’m going to crack open my copy of Victoriana third edition. Released in 2013, the game has the polish of a title both released by a major design house as well as one from late in the ‘big book’ era of trad games. The question is, given the sort of game Victoriana is, will it work using 5e rules? And in the pantheon of Steampunk RPGs, is it one worth saving, 5e or not?

The Setting of Victoriana

The setting conceit of Victoriana is clear: This game takes place in an alternate history 1856. An interesting amount of worldbuilding ‘reverse engineering’ was done to make a world of magic and advanced technology end up enmeshed in social constructs as we’d recognize them from 19th century Europe. First, the ‘races’ of the game are intended to be human subspecies, and they’re simply woven into history as if they’ve always existed. It also brings up the admittedly torturous line the game tries to walk about the issues with race and gender in the 19th century; while I appreciate that the game is not written in a way to just pretend there weren’t any problems (see Deadlands and how slavery mysteriously just never happened), trying to add speciesism to racism and then stir it in with all the classism the game ‘does’ want to highlight is just a mess. It’s less problematic than some 19th century settings but more than others; I’d venture that someone who truly refuses to engage with the messiness of this stuff is better off just not playing any 19th century setting, let alone this one.

The ‘reverse engineering’ does get weirder. In order to have a recognizable European template to hang the principles of the ‘Celestial Engine’ off of (more about that later), the designers reverse-engineered the Abrahamic religions. Not kidding nor exaggerating there: Christianity is now the Aluminat, the new religion of Order based on the teachings of eight messengers (think of it like Distributed Jesus and you get the idea). Judaism is now the Sons of David, and they managed to leave in all the anti-Semitism associated with Christianity if not make it worse (hardly a bold choice, normalizing anti-Semitism). Islam is now the Followers of the Word, and seemingly exist to ensure that there is continued religious tension across the Mediterranean. There are also three Pagan religions identified, which makes sense for a world with magic; they serve as the religions of ‘Entropy’ to counter the Abrahamic religions of ‘Order’, which is almost certainly intended to foment in-universe religious conflict.

Much of the rest of the ‘Encyclopaedia Victoriana’ chapter in the book is taken to explaining how many of the technological Marvels came about, either earlier than they did in the real world or at all. Add to that explanations of British social mobility (or lack thereof) and you have yourself a setting, centering (as Steampunk often does) Imperial Britain as a breeding ground for conflicts between rich and poor, monarchist and anarchist, Order and Entropy. 

It is worth noting that the new 5e edition will move the timeline forward to 1887 and narrow the focus to social upheaval, casting player characters as “Irregulars” who are fighting against the established social order. It moves the game’s focus from a sandbox to a very specific plot conceit, and will likely be used to structure (read: significantly reduce) character options. Given that the timeline was already pulled back in Third Edition to 1856 from the 1860s, it’s unlikely the actual year serves much purpose other than a fixing point for how the game’s characters interact with magic, technology, and the social order.

Mechanics and Character Options

The mechanics of the Victoriana 3e ‘Heresy Engine’ are rather neat. Although the game is stuffed with options (as we’ll get into), they’re mostly adjudicated via a unified mechanic which manages to be both relatively intuitive but also have some levers to play with. As noted above, the game uses a d6 dice pool system. Dice success is tuned rather low, with only two faces per die coming up success. Also, the two sides which indicate success are the ‘1’ and the ‘6’; an interesting choice which may confuse players coming from just about any dice pool game. All 6s explode, so for each 6 you roll in the pool you can roll again for an additional success. Difficulty in the game is modified by adding Black Dice to the pool. Each Black Die operates using the same rules as your normal dice, except 1s and 6s on Black Dice take away successes and 6s on Black Dice don’t explode.

The dice pool for most tasks is built by adding the attribute and skill ratings for the task at hand, much like how the Storyteller system works. As an additional option, you can forgo rolling three of your dice in exchange for one automatic success. This is an interesting tradeoff because the probability density function of a pool of three dice where success comes up on two out of six sides is equal to one…this basically means you can choose to give up the chance to roll additional successes on sixes in exchange for not having to roll at all. The inverse mechanic, where you can choose to not roll Black Dice in exchange for automatically taking the penalty, is not a baseline option but is used in some specific circumstances; for example, if you’re in combat and take Black Dice because you’re fighting an armed opponent while unarmed, you can take a flat amount of damage instead of adding Black Dice to your roll.

The attributes you use to build these dice pools are simple enough, while the skill list is long enough to be of an age gone by. The attributes are Strength, Dexterity, Fortitude, Presence, Wits, and Resolve…the D&D attributes renamed. Each attribute has a rating that centers on 0, with most playable races having positive starting attributes and only a few attributes across the races starting with negative values. As far as skills go there are over 80…this sounds like a lot (and it is), but there are a few mechanics that help cut down on fractal specialization issues. First, about 10% of the skill list are magic skills, which represent access to a much broader underlying mechanic. Second, more than a quarter of the skills are what are called ‘Common Skills’. This means that you can make untrained attempts at a skill roll, which isn’t particularly novel, but it also means you have the option to add one or two extra dice to your roll in exchange for adding the same number of Black Dice. This doesn’t affect the raw probability but does make the roll more swingy; it also makes it possible to attempt a roll with an attribute rating of 0 or -1.

Character creation is mostly point-buy, mixing some elements that are quite forward-thinking (the Association) with others that may have best been reconsidered (Assets and Complications, or Merits and Flaws by another name). Association is the first item you choose and it’s a group choice, an organization that the whole party belongs to. There are nine example Associations in the book and they all provide a strong reason for the party to work together as well as some good constraints to keep everyone pointed in the right direction. After Association are a couple of frameworks to help define your character, though in reality they’re quite vague. Both Vocation and Childhood Experience give a couple points which could imply a lifepath, but with one exception they’re guidelines, not rules. That exception is social class. The game divides characters into Upper, Middle, and Lower Class, which not only defines possible careers but also starting money, some small stat adjustments, and what race you can start as. While the book has a lengthy sidebar about the races being subspecies, the game still sticks with the familiar nomenclature. These are classic fantasy races (with a few vocabulary changes), although the integration is very much inspired by the Shadowrun notion of ‘metahumans’. In this case, though, there’s no 2012 moment where everyone switches over, so you get little weird setting tidbits like Scottish nobility containing many dwarves.

From there, attributes and skills are essentially point-buy. Assets and Complications are a run of the mill merits/flaws system, not great looking back with the benefit of hindsight but this one isn’t any worse than the many that were released from roughly 1995 to 2015. The most significant mechanical distinctions, including magic, all fall under another very Shadowrun-like device: Order and Entropy. Order and Entropy are the two broad universal forces in the setting of Victoriana, and are represented first by ‘cogs’ moving in opposite directions. Characters can move along this continuum by spending Fate Points (a standard although poorly written metacurrency), and in exchange they get bonuses and penalties when dealing across the ‘Celestial Engine’. This is most applicable when dealing with either magic or Marvels, an extensive collection of weapons, constructs, implants, and other gadgets in which the ‘Steampunk’ elements of the setting are concentrated. The magic skills vary widely, ranging from some bog-standard spellcasting to necromancy and demon summoning; my personal favorite is ‘Sigil Magic’, where the caster writes a sigil from one of several provided alphabets and can apply a bonus on anything that sits within that particular sigil’s domain. With eight different magic skills, there are many ways to build a caster in this setting. Marvels may seem more limited, but when you remember that firearms in this setting also sit within the ‘Marvel’ category, it makes the choice of direction in the ‘Celestial Engine’ a bit more limiting and challenging.

Applicability to Fifth Edition

On one hand, Cubicle 7 could do a lot worse when choosing a game to convert to Fifth Edition. Victoriana 3e is already built on the D&D six stats, builds up characters based on race, background, and career, and is primarily built around a combat system, expanding just a bit beyond a typical five-mechanic game by adding subsystems and complexity around both magic and Marvels. On the other hand, like most games with street-level settings, Victoriana is going to make adapting two of D&D’s core character frameworks, classes and levels, quite difficult. Changing the character archetypes into classes with specific level advancements will eliminate the flexibility and versatility inherent in point-buy character creation, and that could be a problem for a game with as many different options as Victoriana has. There are at least three completely different ways of performing magic in this game, and classic D&D spell slots only apply to one of them. Add in Marvels and you’re looking at at least a 50% increase in the number of classes over typical D&D to even come close to the same breadth as Victoriana 3e. A more general problem but a problem nonetheless is that level-based systems do a poor job at keeping advancement constrained; given that Victoriana is built around giving out 1-3 XP per session and keeping attributes at a ceiling given at character creation, we’re not talking about a game that has 20 (or even ten) levels of differentiated character capability baked in. To further drive that home, Assets and Marvels, which also are purchased with XP, represent things that D&D has no worthwhile mechanics for.

The other issue converting Victoriana to 5e is simply a loss of fidelity. The Heresy Dice system isn’t hugely complicated, but it’s interesting. Characters have more choices with their dice, and there are more levers to pull for different situations. Marvels and magic interact with the dice mechanics in different ways, and characters choosing to side with either Order or Entropy will find their dice benefits doled out in manners befitting their choice (e.g. Order gives more fixed successes, Entropy gives extra dice). It’s not that a d20 system won’t work, and I’m aware of that. However, replacing the dice pool system with a d20 does the same thing as replacing the freeform character generation and advancement system with classes and levels: It makes everything a bit worse and a bit less interesting. Add to that the degree of abridgment that will come from trying to cram everything in Victoriana into a new, less flexible system, and it’s hard to imagine 5e Victoriana could be much better than ‘a little worse than what came before’.

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I’m not going to claim Victoriana is a perfect game, either in its third edition or any earlier one. The setting is full of, well, interesting choices. There are certainly bits that need to be cleaned up, and the game does suffer a little from trying to do everything. At the same time, it ends up reading like a pretty smart ‘greatest hits’ design. Some of the old mechanics from Fuzion (and therefore Cyberpunk 2020) still come through, but a dice pool system isn’t catastrophically swingy like a d10 system is. The game wants to give the same range of character options as Shadowrun, but luckily steps back from the ledge before falling into the same crunch trap. And while the social mechanics and class mechanics are certainly a choice, they succeed in aligning with the setting and making players think about who their characters are and where they fit in alternate London.

When it came out, Victoriana got fairly positive reviews but was a secondary release in a year which also saw 13th Age and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. Still, the game did well enough for Cubicle 7 to want to reintroduce the IP, although the manner in which they’re doing so does likely reveal that their management is also clear-eyed about how much the game sold originally. Cubicle 7 has all but ceased any game design work, instead releasing ‘Vault 5e’ products like this new version of Victoriana and licensed Warhammer and Warhammer 40k RPGs. The only other product still in print in their line-up is the Doctor Who RPG, and further development on that one seems constrained to the Vault 5e category with Doctors and Daleks. This likely reveals a slightly different story about Victoriana’s Kickstarter; Cubicle 7 appears to be a company that, instead of choosing not to develop a new system, can’t actually afford to develop a new system. That’s a shame, though perhaps a rational business choice. Still, Mongoose Publishing, arguably a similar sized company and also based in the UK, is managing to be the steward of both Paranoia and Traveller, using original systems no less, while also making headlines for how well they treat their employees.

Two things are true every time a game line is shifted to D&D. First, such a shift is likely a sound financial decision, exposing existing IP to a broader player base and costing less than developing or redeveloping an original ruleset. Second, it is almost impossible to make the game better by using 5e, and highly probable that the game will be worse. I will concede that Doctors and Daleks was a very solid adaptation of 5e. I will not and cannot argue that it is better than the Doctor Who RPG. Similarly, as much as the Victoriana of 2013 had some warts, quirks of editing, mechanics, and worldbuilding, it’s not going to be improved by a 5e version.

Victoriana is a solid Steampunk RPG. It mixes the archetypal touchpoints of the genre with emphasis on being a Victorian period piece, even if the worldbuilding goes through some wild decision-making to get to a Victorian setting with airships and orcs. While there are other Steampunk RPGs out there, few if any really do what Victoriana does: Space:1889 is more on the Jules Verne “scientific romance” end of the spectrum, Castle Falkenstein is aimed at high fantasy fights between good and evil, and Blades in the Dark approaches the genre from a grimier ‘gaslamp horror’ angle. As much as it’s a product of its time, with the merits/flaws system and the 80+ entry skill list, Victoriana is worth checking out and worth playing. I’d recommend checking it out soon; everything’s going to be replaced with d20s before you know it.

Victoriana Third Edition is available on DriveThruRPG.

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