CMON’s ‘Assassin’s Creed’ RPG – Is It an Abstergo Plot or an Assassin Scheme?
CMON has an Assassin’s Creed RPG in the works, and it’s about to go up for pre-order. Here’s what we know so far.
Assassin’s Creed, the game where you gallivant through history making friends with and/or killing a who’s who of Wikipedia entries collecting sea shanties, logos, feathers, like, some cups or something, is getting its own tabletop RPG from CMON. CMON has already teased the game with a pretty Cool Mini (leaving the Or Not to someone else), but now we have even more details about the upcoming game.
With info on the dice system, a quick glance at a character sheet, and the surprisingly soon pre-order date, it won’t be long before you’re diving into the Animus from your tabletop.
The Assassin’s Creed RPG – All of History in a Handful of d6s
The RPG hews close to the conceits of the video game series. Players take on the roles of modern-day characters who are all descendants of a long line of Assassins, and in the RPG your characters will go into the Animus and everything:
As a player, you play the role of a modern-day character, the last Descendant of a lineage comprising one or more members of the Assassin Brotherhood. Possibly even one of the iconic assassins from the videogame series! When you enter the Animus, you take part in a Simulation, a three-dimensional virtual reality world reconstructing a significant event in the history of the Brotherhood. In the Simulation, you assume the role of your Ancestor or of another key Witness to the event, a character represented in the game by a card from the Animi Network Card Deck (or by a virtual card on the Assassin’s Creed RPG App).
This feels like a slightly missed opportunity to make the “Animus” tied to the conceit of the people sitting around the table. But, that’s probably for the best, ultimately. Still, it’s good to know that you’ll have sections where you’re going around and checking emails while the metaplot advances.
This might sound like a joke, but I mean it sincerely. The best Assassin’s Creed games manage to make that part sing (except for Black Flag) and the worst ones really make it drag on. So the chance to get to play in that gameplay phase, left to your own devices, with all the freedom of a TTRPG, is actually really enticing. For once, you can be excited to be a Desmond.
The system itself claims to promote “fast-paced, fiction-first gameplay.” This probably means you won’t be worrying about miniatures on a grid. An early glimpse of the rules shows four different “areas of competence”: Action, Stealth, Wits, and Social. And the custom dice with symbols that correspond to these attributes. You’ll try and beat your stat score, so the lower stats are best. And you’ll get special traits, items, and so on to help give you extra dice.
In the character sheet pictured above, you can see a little of that in action. We’ve got Natural Born Fighter which offers a “Free Raise” on an Action check during combat, as well as Cunning, which gives a Free Raise during a “tinkering activity.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Especially since GMs won’t have a “multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs” to help navigate the historical events and characters that will inspire the game.
What do you think about an AC RPG?
