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.