The Wildsea RPG Review: A World Worth Your Time
Transcript
Hi everyone, I'm Tally. This is Farrell and we're bored of it. And welcome to our review of The Wild Sea, a postfall fantasy tabletop RPG. In the Wild Sea, you'll most likely play as a crew of a ship not a million miles away from some sort of pirate RPG with the crucial exception that you'll be sailing the trees. And this is because in the world of the wild sea, essentially there was a cataclysmic world ending almost event called the verdency which kind of supercharged plant and greenery growth. Uh so now you have mile high trees, massive plants and kind of mutated large creatures. So people survive by sailing around on top of the treetops in boats and ships. They survive by kind of residing on mountain sides or really any spit of land they can find. And you're going to be playing characters in this world likely with a ship traveling about. So please note before we get into what we think that we were provided this review copy by the publisher
The core of the world sea are your characters and your ship. Ideally, you begin with a session zero where players create their characters and then collaboratively create their ship. This is a terrific start because building the ship together gives you a stake in the world whilst alongside the character creation gives you an introduction into the weirdness of this world. And the creativity on show in terms of those two elements is really astounding. There is so much to dive into make your character or your ship utterly unique and unlike anyone else's or any other groups. For example, there are seven different species of character and these range from normal human boring to fungid or cacttoid humanoids. Or you could even go with a collective hive mind of hundreds of bees or spiders depending on what you prefer, who wear a little costume, eg skin, as the as the same way you would wear a ghost costume at Halloween. Then you have all of these kind of elements that will flesh out your character and be core to the way you interact with the world of the Wild Sea, which are a delight to dive through and pick. There are dozens of occupations. And then you get into the more elements of your character's personality and their skills. You have edges, you have skills, you have aspects, you have languages, and all of these just allow you to
express yourself. This is probably the best time to dive into what these elements are and how the game works. Edges are really the core of your character. Broad aspects that represent how your character might problem solve. So things like grace or instinct. Skills and languages are what you'd expect. Learned specialist elements that your character has worked out. Aspects are the most exciting as they're really what makes your character distinct. They can be things like traits, gear, or companion, and often come with some kind of cool benefit that can be used in the right time. When a player tries to do something that would be challenging, the GM, or in this case, the Firefly will ask them to make a dice roll. And in the wild, you build up your dice pool kind of through descriptive elements. You will use your character and their attributes to build a dice pool. So, you'll describe what you're trying to do to the Firefly. And then you'll say what edge you're using. You'll say what skill or what language you're using. And you'll also maybe try to leverage other elements such as maybe character backstory, maybe items you have, or maybe just the situation as it's already been described to get advantages. Then you're going to total all this up. one dice for your edge, uh, one to three dice for your skill or your language depending on the level you have
of that, and then up to two dice for your advantage. Then you'll build that pool. You'll roll them all, and they'll be d6s. And essentially, a six is a perfect success. Oh, sorry. You'll always take the highest die you roll. And a six, perfect success. Four, a five is a success with a drawback. And one, two, and three is a failure. It's quite a clever dice rolling system because it directly rewards players for their creativity and utilizing their character. The more thought and embellishment they put into an action, the more dice they'll generally get to roll. It's the perfect way to draw more detail out of the scenario or the world into the roleplay and we really love it. Coming back to ship creation, it's a great bonding session and is important because the ship is the nth character and creates a shared connection between the characters. You're collectively given stakes to spend to build your ship from top to bottom, which creates a lot of interesting table talk and debate, and you always have the option to add on more stuff later. Also, the options available are really imaginative and so cool. Our ship is the Capsizi McGee and it has a hole made from a discarded ginormous insect crystalid. The movement comes from a living cluster of tentacles which are powered by kinetic rat energy which comes from our restless rat companions who only ask to be fed and
given the run of the ship in return. Think it illustrates how much fun we had with this. As great as all of that is, the real star of the show in The Wild Seat is the world itself. It's colorful. It's vibrant. It's full of experiences. And Tally's favorite part was actually how real that world felt, how easy it was to imagine and inhabit, and how that led to role playinging. And while I'd love to take credit for that, I actually just have to give it to the core rule book and how much description and detail and imagination is held within it. One element you can't escape from though in the world seat are the tracks. Tracks everywhere. Tracks for travel, tracks for combat, tracks for events. It is a pretty neat system though, as it does provide an easy to interpret sign of progress, and it is weirdly cathartic to fill in the tracks. For example, if you're traveling or fighting in order to complete or defeat, you'll have to complete a track that's created by the Firefly. Different decisions, actions, or roles may have more or less impact.
So, it allows a Firefly to tailor your actions and their outcomes in a simplistic visual manner. Tracks are also used for player health, but with a smart twist. There's no HP and minimal rules around injury. A character can't die unless a player wishes them to. The world is far more focused on the experience than the game element. So instead, you take damage to your aspects which have their own tracks. If you fill out a track, then you lose access to that aspect until you can heal, which is a particularly smart punishment as it's the kind of coolest and most unique thing about your character. I.e. it's the thing that players most care about. What I particularly loved as a Firefly is in terms of designing adventures, that's generally something that's very daunting. But the Wild Sea makes it natural because characters kind of tell you just naturally what type of adventure they like through the way that they create their characters, their occupations, what skills they have, and also how they collaboratively build their ship and the kind of functions that might have. Then you can combine that with the wealth and the bounty of ideas within the core book and create an adventure. And in particular, what I did is I asked my players to come up with some quite personal drives to then sprinkle these into uh the reaches which were my favorite and what I found the most helpful part of the kind of core
book let's say information that is on hand to use. Uh, and reaches are just distinct areas of the Wild Sea. And the core book provides you with all kinds of things, different ports, different factions, different local rumors, and that's not an exhaustive list. There's quite a lot of information there. It should be noted that the Wild Seat is very much a kind of loose campaign game. It's definitely not something that's uh meant to be highly crafted, although I'm sure some people could use it as that. But as I said, I think it works best when you have maybe the details of a region or the kind of bare bones of an adventure or the Firefly will litter some hooks, story hooks into gameplay and basically let the players kind of explore this world. just really just explore and see what's out there and interact and go on these kind of um jaunts and side quests and experience everything that there is to offer rather than having something that's you know like a oneshot scenario. I think that just won't really work here. And I also much preferred it in this kind of free form loose campaign element as I described by having the players give me more personal drives that they wanted to see incorporated. If that seems like a lot of work then we can recommend the one-armed scissor which is available as a free scenario and its purpose is a pre-esigned adventure to help ease
players into the world sea. We will say though, whilst we enjoyed the scenario and appreciated it to help us get started, we preferred the world sea when it's looser and more reactive as our latest sessions were. Final thoughts, the world sea is an RPG that I think we fully recommend. Uh, I have really enjoyed it and as we kind of just alluded to, I think it was a little bit of a slow start with the one arm scissor scenario, but I do think it it really shines when it's more free form. And I can say that actually I'm really looking forward into jumping back in with the group and exploring that more free form style, you could say. Uh, and I really want to play again, which I mean is really the best review I can give. Would play again. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I really have enjoyed the kind of world building that is around it and it makes it quite easy to be imaginative I would say and that's something that's typically a little bit hard for me. I have like zero imagination. So the game does just make it so that you can kind of like you say go free form and think of different things that you could possibly do and yeah it's just very uh enriched and immersive I would say. So yeah recommend as a player as well.
Yeah. So I think last thing to say is that uh a big part of facilitating us playing has been a kind of online resource called Charles Smith and you'll see videos of that kind of throughout I think this review and I just yeah I want to give it a shout out because it allows us it's all for free um with the approval of the uh designer and publisher and it's just a wonderful online resource if you're playing you know long distance or you can't all get together or for whatever reason, it's wonderful. Uh I recommend using it, but also please support the publisher and the fact that uh this core book is wonderful as well. Yeah. So I definitely recommend getting them even though there are some rules resources on this Charmmith website. But that is our review of the Wild Sea, an RPG we have really enjoyed. Uh if you have any questions, please ask us. Please consider subscribing. It would really help our channel and we'll see you next time. Thank you.