Through Wednesday, February 26 we present the new Leagues of Adventure Bundle featuring Leagues of Adventure, the Ubiquity-based Victorian steampunk RPG from Triple Ace Games. In the Age of Exploration, a semi-fictitious 1890s right out of Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne, globetrotting scientists, crazed inventors, and daring explorers equipped with airships, mole machines, and Weird Science gadgets venture across the world and to other planets to uncover forgotten cities and civilizations, map the wilderness, and defeat nefarious villains in bare-knuckled Victorian action. The flexible and cinematic Ubiquity rules (Hollow Earth Expedition, Space: 1889) use an easy dice-pool system that puts your player characters in the spotlight, lets them invent their own gadgets, and keeps the story moving fast. Create your own League of Extraordinary Ladies and Gentlemen!
Published in 2012, Leagues of Adventure is one of the best-supported settings from vastly prolific English designer Paul “Wiggy” Wade-Williams. Starting his long career at Pinnacle Entertainment with Savage Worlds settings like 50 Fathoms, Slipstream, and many supplements for Deadlands Reloaded, Wiggy left in May 2008 to form Triple Ace Games with Robin Elliott. In 2011 Rob proposed Wiggy write Leagues of Adventure from his rough notes for a Savage Worlds setting. Leagues started the long Triple Ace love affair with the Ubiquity system, which debuted in Hollow Earth Expedition (2006) from Exile Game Studio. Wiggy wrote dozens of supplements for the setting, and later extended Leagues with two companion games, Leagues of Gothic Horror and Leagues of Cthulhu (both featured in our Nov 2018 Leagues of Gothic Horror offer), as well as a Musketeer-period historical RPG, All for One: Regime Diabolique. As you’d expect from the name, Ubiquity covers a lot of bases.
In terms of complexity and ease-of-use, Ubiquity is less freeform than Fate Core, but not as crunchy as Savage Worlds. Ubiquity has its own dice (similar to Fate‘s special Fate dice), but you can use any dice at all – d4s, d6s, d20s, whatever. Character creation is streamlined, focusing on heroes with a clear concept and a core strength.Your attributes and skills determine the size of your dice pool (how many dice to roll), and a success is a 50-50 chance on each die. A success can be an even result, or odd, or 1-3 on a d6, or any other method that provides an even chance. Runeslinger’s YouTube Ubiquity playlist discusses the system in depth.
This mix of structure, flexibility, and player control suits the setting of Leagues of Adventure, a mid-Victorian world where the map’s blank spots are slowly shrinking. Beyond the smog-shrouded streets of London, far from the boutiques and cafés of Paris, across the globe from the burgeoning metropolis of New York, there are still trackless deserts, mountains unclimbed, and rivers flowing from sources unknown. Travel between the great population centers has never been so easy, yet travel into the wilderness remains fraught with danger and mystery.
As Wiggy commented on the Triple Ace forums, Leagues of Adventure is about “the great Victorian expeditions to be the first to do something mankind will remember forever: an epic automobile journey across the Sahara (back when 3 MPH was a high speed); traveling the Silk Road on a camel while sending back bulletins for the newspapers to print (avoiding bandits and slavers, and then getting sidetracked to rescue a bone fide princess); hunting missing scientists who have gone looking for dinosaurs; exploring sunken cities in a creaking submersible; and planning a mission to the Moon by being fired from a huge cannon. Don’t think of it as pulp – think of it as Victorian high adventure.” Leagues characters aren’t gum-chewing gun-twirling pulp heroes, but “adventurous men and women of good breeding, who speak in posh tones, stop fighting to take high tea as the hour chimes, and comment on the poor attire and manners of others.” Wiggy compares Leagues to the 2009 Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. The Leagues Age of Exploration became Wiggy’s second-favorite of the many settings he’s created or developed, after the epic fantasy Hellfrost.
Despite its knowing nods to Victorian diction and attitudes, Leagues of Adventure avoids glorifying colonialism. European colonial motives provide the backdrop of some scenarios, but player characters need never further these efforts, and in fact may start to question them. In The Great Campaign (2023), Sarah Newton’s long-delayed completion of her early Leagues investigation Dreaming Spires (2012), the heroic globetrotters uncover a dangerous anarchist group, the “Commonist League,” that believes new technology will usher in a new and better world. The old order must be destroyed before this new world order can commence. In search of the anarchists’ leader, Nikolai Fyodorov, the heroes follow his trail to the Roof of the World, the Pamir mountains. As they learn more about Fyodorov and his tremendous technological breakthroughs, thoughtful heroes may reassess their goals.
“Leagues of Adventure is, for the most part, based on historical fact,” says Wiggy. “Triple Ace doesn’t condone or promote these outdated views, but neither can we deny their existence. The game doesn’t encourage players characters to hold those attitudes or conquer the world. It presents a world of adventure in which the daring and inventive characters of the Leagues live.”
This Leagues of Adventure Bundle gives you the Core Rules and many supplements and adventures – everything you need for Ubiquitous Victorian steampunk action. Pay just US$12.95 to get all four titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $55) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Leagues of Adventure Core Rules, the player-character collection Dramatis Personae, the Weird Science Compendium, and the Globetrotters’ Guide to London.
And if you pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $24.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with fifteen more titles worth an additional $87, including the full-length scenarios The Great Campaign and Tides of War (both in their “Black Editions” with no AI-generated artwork), along with many articles and rules in the four volumes of Letters From the Leagues (Volume 1, V2, V3, V4) and no less than nine more Globetrotters’ Guide mini-supplements: Globetrotters’ Guide to Expeditions, Unusual Places, The Ancient World, The Old World, The New World, Cads & Cultists (plus the Cads & Cultists Appendix), Dramatic Developments, and Miscellanea.
The Leagues of Adventure Core Rules and Weird Science Compendium previously appeared in our December 2015 Ubiquity Bundle, and the Core Rules returned in the October 2018 Leagues of Gothic Horror offer. The total retail value of this offer’s titles new to the Bundle of Holding is $110.
Get this Leagues of Adventure offer before it loses its Ubiquity and vanishes Wednesday, February 26.
