In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve often thrown shade on the archetypal ‘dungeon fantasy’ setting. Cemented by Tolkien, popularized by Dungeons and Dragons, copied by everyone, the typical western medieval pastiche with dwarves and elves (and sometimes orcs and halflings) has so permeated fantasy fiction that we often give it a pass; it’s transcended cliché to become a trope. I’m still sick of it. That said, my experiences with settings that try to be aggressively ‘not’ the norm often fall into the trap of painting a new overlay on old tropes, falling into fantasy same-old same-old because there wasn’t enough worldbuilding done. I have, though, found a game with a setting so intensely its own thing (and so intensely weird as a result) that I backed it on Kickstarter, read it, and then made sure to play it before really collecting my thoughts.

The gorgeous book and art catches your eye, but what makes Wildsea unique in its worldbuilding vision is that there’s follow-through. The concept is outlandish: The world has been overrun by a veritable forest of massive trees, and your characters ‘sail’ across it on a ship that’s essentially a giant chainsaw. From this base concept comes many of the underlying setting assumptions, and they help the world feel cohesive even though it, at a high level, works very differently from our world. In an ocean of wood fire is catastrophic, so there is taboo against open flame. That affects how things are cooked, which in turn affects culture around food. The ‘spits’, settlements above the treetops, are threatened by the constantly growing and shifting flora, so impermanence is, once again, reflected through the whole culture. The game sticks the landing on creating something new by thinking through the core concept they present.

The gameplay, for the most part, isn’t anything new. Wildsea has dice mechanics very much like Blades in the Dark, and drives most elements of the game, both GM-facing and player-facing, through Tracks, which are (you guessed it) Clocks by another name. On the other hand, Wildsea aims to move even further away from the playbooks of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark, putting more emphasis on the skill list and allowing players to create characters out of three unique elements, drawing from each a number of modular Aspects. The much broader palette for character creation is a strong choice for a game which sets itself apart by its setting.

Set and Setting

What makes Wildsea work is a strong set of underlying tropes that are plastered over with something completely new. Wildsea is a post-apocalyptic setting, with the cataclysm of massive trees occurring roughly 300 years before the time of the game. It is also a nautical setting which leans into the motif of a ship and its crew (and uses that motif, like other Forged in the Dark games, as a stand-in for the other kind of Crew). These tropes give us some of the underlying mechanical themes: exploration, a world in flux and full of mystery, and the legacy of what came before. These are strong bones on which to build a game, and you need strong bones to hold up an ocean of magically corrosive doom-trees.

The rapidly growing ocean of trees is powered by a substance called Crezzerin, which both stimulates plant growth but is also toxic to humans. Acute exposure can result in acid-like burns, but the compound has other properties that can twist and change those constantly exposed to it. Falling overboard has similarly dire but yet very different implications than it would if the ship was just dealing with water. The toxic nature of the massive plants means that the small plots of land and high treetops on which people can settle are transient; changes in plant growth can spell the end of one of these ‘spits’ in only months, so for the most part people move around. There are some more permanent settlements, and these tend to be port towns; the only method of trade and communication across the tree-splattered world is literally sailing across those trees.

The characters are Wildsailors, taking ships which cut their way across the topmost layer of the trees with giant saw blades. Wildsailing departs from typical nautical tropes in part due to the trees and the Crezzerin, as I noted above, but also because the trees, regrowing as quickly as they do, make navigation more dynamic and challenging than it otherwise would be. This reinforces that Wildsailors are adventurous sorts, and adventurous sorts come from all over the world. 

There are seven species in Wildsea, and they are, like the name suggests, wild. There are two human varieties, the Ardent and the Ketra, baseline humans and those warped from being trapped under the trees. The Ektus are cactus-people, the Gau are mushroom-people, and the Ironbound are living constructs (and ironically, thanks to the Warforged in Eberron, the closest thing to a D&D race outside of humans). Then we have a few insects, the Tzelicrae (spider hive minds) and the Mothryn (take a guess). What makes this work is that when these species are presented as character choices, they offer very different options thanks to the lists of Aspects that each contains (more on Aspects in a bit). In fact, though the ‘aggressively not’ approach was probably a goal of the surface-level worldbuilding, making each of the seven races so different makes designing for them a little easier than your typical elves and dwarves which, outside of Tolkien itself (and a few outliers like Burning Wheel) are rarely investigated further than key stereotypes.

One of the liabilities of ‘aggressively not’ is that it robs the typical GM of some of their tools for writing new game material and expanding the setting that their players are exploring. I bet when I mentioned dwarf and elf stereotypes you could think of at least one, and thanks to games and movies the vast majority of people running games in this hobby could at least sketch an elven or dwarven settlement that matches their players’ expectations or impressions. Harder to do that with a settlement that’s majority sentient cacti. Wildsea comes to the rescue here with Reaches, prebuilt setting elements that nicely split the difference between being expansive and being explicit and gameable. Reaches start with broad ‘need to know’ touchstones, and then drill down into the region’s factions, key locations, and lists of random encounters and resources. These are likely the first place you should read in the book if you’re looking on guidance for running Wildsea in a way that feels as unique as it should.

While the setting of Wildsea has strong touchstones, there’s still a huge undercurrent of ‘draw maps, leave blanks’ in how the setting interacts with the mechanics. One of my favorite bits of this, which we just started to get into in our short game, are the four special Resources. When out on a journey you can discover Salvage, Specimens, Whispers, and Charts, and each have specific mechanical effects. Salvage and Specimens are relatively straightforward; Salvage are physical items which can be used in crafting, while Specimens are flora and fauna that can be crafted into food with special effects. Charts are also logical; they represent maps of the sea which make it easier to navigate and enable you to discover new places. Whispers are magical secrets, ways to engage with the arcane underpinnings of the setting. While the setting is certainly magical there are no ‘wizards’ per se, instead combinations of magical phenomena, ancient technology, and just general sense of mystery around how the world works. Whispers, as opposed to any other magic system, give the most direct route to engaging with the arcane aspects of the setting.

Resources are more rules than setting, and the other primary Resource, Cargo, is more about driving a certain gameplay loop. That said, they’re a great way to illustrate how the setting engages with the rules, or more precisely how the rules give room to engage with the setting. The setting of Wildsea has a lot of strong guideposts to tell you what kind of world you’re in. When you’re playing, though, the game wants you to feel like you’re exploring, and that means giving a lot of leeway to find new things. The resources enable both the finding and the creation of new things, which make them important ties into the setting a given group creates at the table as opposed to the broader setting in the book. Like a lot of mechanics in Wildsea, the underlying mechanic only becomes important and interesting when the players engage with the opportunity to layer narrative detail on top of it.

In Play: Blades in the Treetops

Wildsea is a key example of rules defining what the game is interested in the players spending their time on. The core mechanic is very much like Blades in the Dark, albeit without Position and Effect driving how your rolls go down. I’d argue, in fact, that normalizing core rolls was done somewhat on purpose to draw your attention to the procedures which are designed to drive the game. If you’re not familiar with the core mechanic from Blades in the Dark, it involves assembling a dice pool and looking for the highest value rolled. If you roll a 6, it’s a full success. 4 and 5 are partial successes, and 1, 2, and 3 are a miss, or in Blades parlance a Bad Outcome. The Wildsea dice mechanic is the same with one small change, namely that rolling more than one die with the same value results in a Twist no matter what the value on the die; in Blades only multiple 6s have a denoted effect (a crit). In both games, you’re looking for a pool of 1-4 dice, and in both games the pool is assembled first by appropriate skill and then by key modifiers.

How you build that dice pool, while not being all that different from Blades in the Dark, does begin to show that Wildsea has a bit of a different end goal vis a vis challenging characters. Each character has a few of seven Edges, which are most analogous to something like an Approach from Fate Accelerated. Key examples here would be Grace, an Edge for acting with precision and agility, or Tides, an Edge for curiosity and knowledge. Having an appropriate Edge gives you a 1d6 for your dice pool, and it’s described that characters should be able to use one of their Edges in most situations, save a time when they are completely out of their element. Edges are essentially a free die, but a small narrative tax that requires the player to consider how they’re going about an action and how to describe it in the fiction.

While skills work the same way in Blades in the Dark and Wildsea (save that there are a few more of them in Wildsea), gear and character-defining traits are quite different. I mention both of these here because in Wildsea they’re wrapped up into one mechanical element called Aspects. Aspects are intended to be a broad catch-all in Wildsea, albeit not as broad as the identically named mechanic in Fate. When you create a character and choose your species (Bloodline), cultural background (Origin) and class/career (Post), you gain Aspects from all three. When we played Wildsea, I created an Ironbound Navigator with the Rootless origin. Seeing him as a wayward collection of ship parts, I named him Theseus (my character names for short games are often on the nose). Theseus had Aspects that were gear (a shortspear and his spyglass), innate capabilities (‘Structural Integration’, as an Ironbound I had bonuses when repairing ships), and cultural norms (‘Born To Sail’, the ability of the nomadic Rootless to always know True North). These Aspects come together to define the characters’ range of abilities, but also balance against their hardiness. Each Aspect has a track, and while some of them allow you to mark the track for special abilities, for the most part you’re marking the track when absorbing damage. This means that potent Aspects tend to have shorter tracks, while more pedestrian Aspects have longer ones. The actual damage mechanic in combat is a little similar to the Stress/Consequences dichotomy in Fate; you can absorb damage with your Aspects, but if you’re unable to absorb all the damage with a Track you can take an injury, itself a Track that needs to have boxes filled in before the negative effects (often penalties, or ‘cuts’ to dice rolls) are resolved.

Much hay has been made about Clocks or Tracks as mechanics, but they do have this nice side effect of rationalizing many different tasks and properties to a unified statistical element. This is what enables games like Wildsea to add so many ancillary mechanics like the journey system without becoming too confusing. Out of the unique systems we spent the most time with the journey mechanic, and it gives travel flavor as well as gives the GM plenty of opportunities to make the journey more interesting. There are five stations on the ship; two are required while the other three are optional and give a specific mechanical benefit if used. The required ones are At the Helm and On Watch, which are responsible for choosing how fast the ship progresses and rolling to see what is encountered. Should the encounter go sideways, ship handling is mostly the same as any other skill check (or combat should that be the situation), and ships have Ratings which function like Tracks for Aspects but without the range of abilities implied by Aspects. There is an entire shipbuilding system in the game, though for our short game we didn’t engage with it much, opting to use one of the pre-generated ships. Most of the shipbuilding options roll up to the ship’s ratings, though there is some specificity on weapons and who the crew is (the Undercrew, i.e. crewmembers who aren’t PCs).

In Wildsea, the core assumption is that your ship takes the place of the ‘Crew’ in Blades in the Dark; the game doesn’t lean in as hard on faction or downtime mechanics as a result. There is, however, the montage mechanic, which allows you to cover a span of time when the party is all focusing on different things. This can be used in a number of situations and serves as the mechanical underpinning for downtime instead of a dedicated downtime phase like in other Forged in the Dark games. It’s another place where the mechanical uniformity of filling in Tracks makes everything easy; crafting projects, ship repair, healing, and even advancement are all handled roughly the same way within the bounds of the montage mechanic. Compared to the structure of Blades in the Dark Wildsea more resembles the implied freedom of a traditional RPG like D&D, which sets bounds on how directly the game adapts the Forged in the Dark mechanics.

My time playing Wildsea gave a good handle on the core mechanics and a lot of teases into the potential that some of the longer-term elements held. Resources are a key mechanic I want to engage more with, and the Resource mechanics provide a great example of something I observed across the entire game. When it comes to the core mechanics, it doesn’t take a playtest to know that things are going to feel like Blades in the Dark; from a dice perspective this is a Forged in the Dark game regardless of the label put on it. What makes Wildsea different is that in pulling away from the specificity of Moves and Playbooks (which Forged in the Dark already does with respect to Powered by the Apocalypse), this game is trying to give you as many opportunities as possible to make the specifics of your character (ship, weapon, version of the setting, etc etc) your own. This game uses a Drives mechanic, allowing each player to define their character’s goals and then advance against them. Like in Burning Wheel, it’s these drives that are expected to steer the story, albeit contrasted with the short-term needs of continued survival. The reason this is important is that if you don’t engage with the space you’re given, if you don’t treat these rules as a palette with which to paint a colorful picture…the game doesn’t do much. This is an expected consequence given the mechanics; Aspects and Tracks are used to model literally everything that a player can touch outside of their Resources. It is surprising, however, in a game which presents such a vibrant setting. That is what Wildsea is presenting, though: a setting. This is a rules-light game at heart and what it’s doing is showing the player how to make all of those nearly identical rolls distinct. That’s why it’s important to have four Resources, that’s why each character is going to have around half a dozen Aspects. These are all fruitful voids; places for you to tell interesting stories in an interesting setting. That’s important, because the ‘Wild Words’ engine is an uninteresting interpretation of Forged in the Dark. If you’re looking for mechanical depth, the game has basically none; it’s clocks all the way down. What that enables, though, is a game set in a weird and wild world that can easily accommodate (and in fact invites) more weirdness and more wildness.

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I would play more Wildsea, without a doubt. The reason, though, that I’m drawn back to this game is because I am a writer, and there are so many interesting things to do and stories to tell. In a way, this game has some parallels to Wanderhome; I wouldn’t expect the games to play similarly but they’re both built around stories of travel and expecting the players to make them meaningful. As a result, I do understand the choice to step away from calling this game Forged in the Dark in any official sense; Forged in the Dark is more of a ‘game’ game in that the dice are couched in mechanics around preparation, approach, and pushing your luck. Wildsea steers back toward the Powered by the Apocalypse objective of creating interesting dramatic situations, but the rules don’t do that in the same way they do in a game like Apocalypse World. That said, if you like PbtA you’ll probably like this; the rules frame how you create narrative, and that narrative and the resulting story are the most important part. Compared to something like Apocalypse World, though, Wildsea has its best tools in the setting toolbox as opposed to the mechanics toolbox.

Wildsea goes for a very different world than what most fantasy gamers are used to, and that’s the selling point. The mechanics are simple, bordering on simplistic, but they provide a great scaffold for stories if the group is willing to hang many loving details on that scaffold. The key to making Wildsea work is flavor. The setting is flavorful on its own, but for the game to work and be fulfilling the players must be willing to flavor it for themselves, taking what’s on the page and adding to it. There is a ton of great setting material in here, but this game is also begging for the sort of random tables and gameable references that are hallmarks of the OSR; spark tables and generators to make it a little easier to present everything in the way a setting this unique demands. That said, I like it and am looking for opportunities to play more. Wildsea illustrates the challenge of writing a game focused on exploration; if you define everything strictly there isn’t much to explore. You need players to want to explore, though. Ending up with depth on the setting side of the game and breadth on the mechanics side means that the game is most going to appeal to players and groups who will do the work of making every rule and roll meaningful from their own engagement, rather than relying on the mechanics to present any outcomes on their own.

Wildsea is available on DriveThruRPG, itch.io, and direct from Mythworks.

Header art is from the Wildsea core rulebook.

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