Assassin’s Creed Roleplaying Game Preview

I am shocked to report to you that the Assassin’s Creed RPG by Cool Mini or Not is actually really interesting.

Yeah, the board game company who keep putting out excessively miniature-heavy games and the video game publisher known for covering up a history of physical and sexual abuses whose prolific release schedule of complex busywork and climbing towers. Those guys, they released a game which is actually good.

A brief rant on licensed roleplaying games

Let’s start from the start though. Licensed games. They can be a mixed back. Sometimes you get a classic like the old Marvel RPG, or surprises like Dallas or Rocky & Bullwinkle. Then there are the lazy games. The d20 boom and bust gave us so many and there’s been a slurry of lazy 5E adaptations like Batman, Hellboy and Dark Souls. Like a lot of people, I was disappointed with the promising Adventure Time ‘yes and’ system being benched for the easy sales guaranteed by a 5E version. I get it, you can sell those people anything, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The Assassin’s Creed RPG Quickstart

Cool Mini or Not have a history of ‘plastic crack’ games and I’ve not been immune to their charms, mainly with Marvel United. When they dropped a preview of an Assassin’s Creed RPG, the morbid part of me was excited. The preorder page had miniatures and funny dice, exactly as you’d expect from them. It wasn’t a 5E game, but how bad was it going to be?

Then I read it, and was surprised.

The book’s 131 pages long, with a lot of evocative, Assassin’s Creed art spread through some sparsely spaced-out rules. The amount of white empty space calls forth the Animus loading screen and the UI of the Assassin’s Creed games. 

The main body of the game is set in the grim dystopian cyberpunk future of 2016. Yeah, the bad bit of the Assassin’s Creed games, that we all endure as the framing device between historical murders. An order of Assassin’s has existed throughout history in a hidden war with an order of Templars who now control a lot of the world using a company called Abstergo. The science fiction conceit of the games is that a weird VR ‘Animus’ taps into the genetic memory of the descendants of assassins in order for them to train up as members of the resistance and experience the past in order to learn more about the war. Strange artefacts from a precursor people are hidden away and often found by tracing their passage in history.

So you’re all playing people who have assassination in their blood, in their DNA. You have four Approaches: Action, Stealth, Wits and Social, each of which are pretty much as they sound and are rolled when you’re taking that approach. You roll six funny dice and need to get an amount of matching symbols equal to your rank in that approach. In you have two in Stealth, you need two stealth symbols to pass, if you have one, you only need one. This means a low stat is best.

If you fail, you ‘snag’ which checks the Approach you rolled or any if it’s already been snagged. Any stat you’ve got snagged can get worse failure results, as the dice have an Abstergo symbol on them. 

Luckily there’s a Creed symbol on the dice as well, and if you use any signature gear or Traits, you can count one Creed symbol as a match. You can also get extra effects for succeeding beyond the difficulty. Or the GM can say you need to hit an extra success.

Given the four stats and a few extra elements, it’s all fairly simple and interesting. Also the character sheets go into the elements you can use for extra dice, which really helps.

But this is Assassin’s Creed, you’re murdering your way through history, so what’s up with that? Well, the Animus has a multiplayer mode now! You’ll have missions which take you into a VR version of your ancestor, while other players are ‘Echoes’, who inhabit people connected to the assassin. The expectation for a campaign is that you’ll all take turns in the driving seat and inhabiting Echoes. These historical assassins and their friends are vastly more competent than the present day characters, but that’s part of the reason why you’re doing this.

Adventures will be split between the past and present, with some connection between the two types of characters via Sync and Bleed. You Sync with your past characters, unlocking bonus dice and abilities when you hit mission objectives or embody the negative traits. This also acts as your health as certain things may cause you to lose Sync and possibly even get kicked from the simulation. The present day characters gain Bleed, which acts similarly, giving bonus dice, special abilities but also potentially giving hallucinations as your experiences in the past bleed into the present.

The Adventure

The preview contains an adventure, and I’m going to get into it, so spoilers if you’re going to be a player at some point.

Again, grimdark cyberpunk future of 2016. The group are on their way to the closed Stardust Theatre to meet someone called “Ziggy”, because of course they’re calling themselves that.

My group played:

Mark played Philip J Gallagher, a vet whose ancestor was Major Gallagher, a World War II assassin.

Lee played Victor Flores, a session musician whose ancestor was Connor from Assassin’s Creed III

Arthur played Jackie O’Connell, a research assistant whose ancestor was Evie Frye, the good protagonist from Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

The game looked like it would be pretty short, so I decided to create an opening scene to show off the mechanics in a ‘safe’ environment. I was mistaken. The group needed to get into the Stardust without alerting Abstergo security who were nearby. They needed to either climb the high fences, speak to the buskers outside or distract Absertgo. The group took a while surveying the place, using a flying drone, barely avoiding one of Ziggy’s traps and eventually getting in. It was at this point I realised the difference in ability between the modern characters and their past selves.

Once they were all inside, Ziggy put the kettle on and showed them the multiplayer Animus device he had. There was a piece of Precursor technology linked to Major Gallagher, so the group needed to go back into his past, in Nazi-occupied Paris. The others would take on the roles of other people who were working with Gallagher.

They woke in the car park of Folies Bergère, already at 55% synchronisation with their objectives laid out. Infiltrate the party and get the intel. There were patrols, a doorman and an officer having a cigarette by the back door, trying to seduce a dancer.

Our players were now playing characters playing characters. The historical assassins were:

Major Gallagher, played by Philip Gallagher

Reboante, a guerilla played by Victor Flores

Josephine Boulanger, a burlesque dancer, played by Jackie O’Connell

Josephine rescued the flapper and got inside that way, the others snuck in by following their Assassin’s Creed instincts and climbing the building. Josephine ended up on the stage, keeping an eye out for relevant points of interest, the others snuck up some back stairs and murdered a Nazi in a box seat pretty high up. They crept down to the office where there might be information and when some more people walked up to where the corpses were, they again, followed the Assassin’s Creed instinct, killing them both in a dark staircase. 

The intelligence was found and not before time, as Ziggy had to pull them out. Abstergo security had found the hideout and were storming the place. Jackie’s drone managed to interfere with them, and the group repurposed Ziggy’s traps to help harass the security while he downloaded the data. The group fled and the session was over.

That was… fun.. There are some systems where I look at the rules and they’re interesting, but I need to feel them out at the table. Trophy Gold was one like that, where I was pretty sure it was an amazing game, but it was actually running it that had me bitten by the bug. See also Blades in the Dark, Outgunned and this.

What the Game Consists of and Inevitable Criticisms

So this all sounds good and you want Assassin’s Creed as an RPG? There are a few options, and some stings in the tail.

If you want to play the game, you’ll need sets of the funny d6’s, or to get used to referencing a table. I made reference sheets for my players to help with this. You will also need cards for the abilities and ancestors. I assume you will be able to access PDF copies when you buy the game and print them out. Still, that’s a bit, prop-wise and while it can be mitigated, I can see the faff of it as a barrier.

There are three levels you can buy the game at, which mercifully don’t have one of those massive Ubisoft charts of what’s included or not.

The Apprentice Assassin is the core Animus Handbook and PDFs of each of the books.

The Master Assassin is the three core books: the Animus Handbook, the Forging History Campaign and Legacy of the Brotherhood sourcebook which looks to go into greater depth about the games.

Finally the Legendary Assassin is all of the above, a slipcase & GM screen, 13 miniatures based on the Assassin’s Creed games, the cards and the dice.

Oh, and handily there is an app for the dice, so you don’t all need physical versions of them. That’s good, as even the highest level has only 12 dice and you’ll want a set each to roll and a set to put into your sync/bleed boxes.

From what I’ve experienced in the preview, the Assassin’s Creed RPG looks really interesting, I had a fun time and I’m incredibly curious about what a campaign would look like. I became a fan of the games back around the Ezio era and fell off when it began to all feel a bit like empty calories, but this had me returning to Assassin’s Creed II on the Switch. It’s evocative of the games in some fantastic ways and even makes the modern side of it interesting.

There are still the excesses of both Ubisoft and Cool Mini or Not despite this, but if you can overlook them, have the budget or a printer for the resources, it looks like you’ll have a great time with it. And handily you can just download the preview version and check it out for yourself if this has made you curious.