Ponderings on Games

In the last few years, seemingly any time favorite RPG campaigns are brought up, someone mentions Impossible Landscapes. It’s a huge campaign book for Delta Green written by Dennis Detwiller, “of wonder, horror and conspiracy”, “a pursuit of the terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow”. I’ve just finished running it, and boy do I have opinions. I’ll spoil the entire thing, only read this if you’re definitely not going to play the campaign but are considering running it.

The story

First, an overview of the campaign itself. It consists of 4 major chapters and several “side” locations that could be visited at various points of the game. It all starts in 1995 with Night Floors, previously published as a stand-alone adventure. Abigail Wright is missing, and agents are called in to investigate a possible occult connection. Turns out, Abigail got her hands on a copy of the poisonous play, the King in Yellow, and passed it around the Macallister building she resided in, “infecting” everyone there and ultimately connecting the building to Carcosa.

The “Night Floors” are what’s nowadays called a liminal space, impossible extra floors of a 4-storey building, full of strange rooms, branching repeating passages, and people coming out of nowhere and disappearing in empty rooms. The agents stumble into these Night Floors and wander around experiencing the many inventive creepy scenes they have to offer, until they find their way back to reality. They do not find Abigail – she’s gone further than they could. The assignment ends in failure, all the agents can do is decide what to do with other residents of the Macallister building as well as the building itself.

20 years later, when the strangeness of Carcosa is safely out of their minds, the surviving agents are called on another mission: some friendlies committed to a mental hospital are missing. Thus begins A Volume of Secret Faces, the most sandbox-like part of the campaign. It’s a tough one to prepare for, as there’re so many things for the agents to investigate, so many threads to pull on. The friendlies never existed. The curator for this mission is compromised. Should they find out about this unsanctioned mission, Delta Green may try to eliminate the agents. The mental hospital is touched by the madness of the King in Yellow, and all of its staff have their own strangeness going on. Also, demons. It’s a lot.

Sooner or later, the agents spend the night in the hospital, getting drawn into the Night World yet again: they find themselves in a nightmarish reflection of the mental hospital, where they are the patients. The only way out is to trust a strangely helpful demon, attend a dance performance, and escape a murderous clown by drinking red goop called patzu. When in Carcosa, do as carcosans do.

Third chapter, Like a Map Made of Skin, is basically a chance to “clear” some of the locations from the previous chapter. The agents are back in the real world, only to find it’s no longer all that real. They’re hunted by the authorities, as well as spectres of an old Delta Green clean-up crew, STATIC. They’ve received an invitation from Abigail asking them to come to a hotel that definitely doesn’t exist, and may never have existed. Once the final pursuit of STATIC begins, they’ll end up there anyway.

Part four, The End of the World of the End, is the shortest and is mostly an adventure rather than an investigation. The agents find the way to the labyrinth underneath the hotel, find the spirit bottle of one Jaycy Lynz that Abigail asked them to find, then come to Carcosa proper. Through the war-torn city they go, arriving at a masquarade ball, where they deliver the bottle to Jaycy, enabling him to write the play that will cause all of this and thus fulfilling their part of the play. Their final fate depends on their corruption – how much their thinking has been warped by Carcosa, how close they are to it.

The madness of Carcosa

The core premise of the campaign is that everything and everyone touched by the King in Yellow is not only corrupted, but spreads this corruption further, all in service of the play. Delta Green’s STATIC protocol, mandating the extermination of anyone remotely connected to the play, is not only justified and correct but also hopelessly insufficient.

For player characters, this is reflected by a hidden attribute, their Corruption. It’s so hidden, the players are not supposed to know they have it. In many ways, it functions like a secondary Sanity attribute: it’s a horror game, everyone knows not to read cursed tomes (and reads them anyway). Read the play, and you’ll both lose Sanity and gain Corruption. However, Corruption also often grows when characters’ thinking simply aligns with that of Carcosa. Point out a name is an anagram from the play, be rewarded with a point of Corruption.

The higher their Corruption, the more they will see, understand, and even control in the Night World. But also, the more the forces of the King will single them out, and the more likely a bad end as they’re judged at the masquarade.

Madness in Carcosa

Sanity gets drained bit by bit throughout the campaign as the agents experience a myriad of impossible coincidences, doors that lead to wrong places, etc. There’s probably no other way to handle it in long-form play if you want to have a chance of a character surviving from the start till the very end. However, both me and my players ended up disliking the way it worked.

The players outright rebelled against the idea that their characters would keep being shocked at reality warping while they weren’t looking (or even when they were looking) in Night World. They felt that, after the first expedition into the Night Floors, they knew what to expect. The door they just walked through is now painted onto the wall? Just another day at the (night) office. One could argue that expecting corridors and rooms to appear and disappear at whim is not exactly sane behaviour, and the rules do explicitly forbid adapting to unnatural events, but you don’t really want to hear groans when asking for a sanity check.

As for me, any time such micro scare came up and the book suggested the agents could lose 1, or even 1d4 sanity, going through all the steps felt like a chore. That’s partially due to the DG ruleset, as not only do you roll to see if a character loses sanity, they then get an option to resist 1d4 of it by spending that much willpower (which we never ran out of, so this part was just an exercise in adjusting numbers) and reducing a bond by the same amount. In theory, that represents agents projecting trauma onto their loved ones, gradually alienating them all. In practice, bonds become unreachable and thus irrelevant by chapter 3, and the entire process was a couple of minutes of distraction any time something spooky happened, draining all tension from the scene.

Death in Carcosa

Every now and then, it felt like, the adventure remembers it is not only surreal horror but also a Delta Green campaign, and so should have a body count. The agents could be doing just fine, facing reasonable dangers and challenges, then BAM, deathly peril. This happens a number of times throughout the campaign. What’s worse (to me), is these moments are rarely telegraphed or even offer a chance to do anything but roll dice to overcome them.

The mall ambush, when DG may try to eliminate the agents it considered corrupted, can perhaps be seen coming, and can be approached in a dozen different ways. The mechanical lion in the apartment of Dr. Barbas can be avoided. But then the clown at the end of chapter 2 is just a roll-off with death. So is the conclusion of chapter 3, the race against STATIC. In the run up to chapter 4, in hotel Broadalbin, the agents stumble upon a thing that sends them into some kind of parallel reality, and they have to succeed on one of three sanity rolls to get out, with a huge penalty if they don’t reject it outright or fail the first one. Chapter 4 has several opportunities to die during, most likely, the final session of the campaign, including having to run across open courtyard under machinegun fire.

In a lot of these cases, the scare is greater than the actual danger. That hardly helps when dice do decide to kill you.

Despite what you might think, I’m not opposed to character death in principle. I do find it odd when a campaign where “look, see, the thing you last saw 20 years ago was just inexplicably created here before your eyes, don’t you feel trapped by the unseen forces of the King” is one of the major sources of horror, starts killing characters off for no reason other than to show it’s a DG campaign. The replacement agent is not going to have a visceral reaction to half of these revelations – that’s not theoretical, that’s how it played out for us.

Moreover, most of these deadly threats don’t feel earned. Not just because there’re sudden and unavoidable, but also because there’s no choice in facing them. The agents are in danger not because they’re trying to be brave or poking where they shouldn’t. They’re in danger because now there’s a clown chasing them and if it catches them they die.

Life in Carcosa

The Night World functions by a few very simple rules. If you want to achieve anything or go anywhere in the Night World, you have to a) fail a sanity roll; b) have high enough Corruption; and c) be at the appropriate part of the campaign/be allowed by the King. If you don’t satisfy these conditions, you’re going to have a bad time, likely reducing your Sanity and thus gradually improving your odds.

These rules are so simple, in fact, that my players kept overthinking it, coming up with much more involved and interesting explanations – partially because they didn’t know about Corruption. As one of the agents ended up with higher Corruption than the rest, he was more succesful at navigating the Night World while doing exactly the same things as his less Corrupt colleagues, and with more events targeting him directly, the party felt I was treating him as the main character.

The simplicity of these hidden rules, in turn, means that time and again the only meaningful thing the agents can do is to keep going forward. Everything that happens on the way is a distraction or an obstacle. Actually engaging with the scene is typically unnecessary, and often outright harmful.

Which is a shame, because by themselves these random encounters are good, creepy and strange. There are a whole lot of them offered in the Night Floors, and then some more in the Bookshop. But then at several more points in the adventure we’re told to use those encounters or come up with our own, so it would have been better if they had a separate dedicated chapter. And since the adventure relies on them so much, by the end the players realise they’re better off sprinting through – chapter 4 was a breeze for us.

This reaches its apogee in the Whisper Labyrinth near the end of the campaign. Not only do the agents have to phrase their “we go forward” action in a particular way, they have to get extra lucky even if they do. They also have no way of learning if they’re doing it wrong, or just need to roll better. And every time they don’t get extra lucky, they have a chance to have a (meaningless, draining) encounter. The place is meant to be a maddening slog unfortunate souls get stuck in, but actually running it that way just isn’t fun.

The actual story

The world exists to create the play that creates the world that will create the play.

IL is a very strange campaign. It’s full of great stuff. There’s almost too much: there’s no chance the players will see all of it, whole chapters of the book they simply won’t bother to uncover. It presents itself as an intricate puzzle. Any tiny bit of information can lead down a massive rabbit hole, and that rabbit hole will only leave you with more disparate pieces of info that may only become relevant in a future chapter. Some names, events, places, even faces, keep coming up. The players must feel like they’re trapped in a sprawling conspiracy.

They’re not. Here’s what’s actually happening: a dozen or so people, infected by the madness of Carcosa, are running around the atemporal backstage of reality, spreading the play. There’s no cause and effect, because linear passage of time doesn’t affect them. They don’t have a goal they could articulate either, they’re all too affected to have one.

For example, the agents could learn the Red Book edition of The King in Yellow play that damned Abigail Wright in 1995 and started their entire adventure is produced by Dr. Elias Barbas in the year 2015. He prints them and shoves them into the (atemporal, omnipresent, Pratchett-esque) Bookshop. That’s an “aha” moment, a piece of the puzzle sliding into place. But… so what? There’s nothing that they can do with this revelation.

Speaking of revelations, and this one is more subjective, but it didn’t feel like there was enough escalation in the campaign. For all the richness of the text, it feels like the main plot of the entire campaign is just repeating the Night Floors, louder and louder. Somewhere in the middle of the first chapter, my players came upon a marionette room in the Night Floors. Dozens of human-sized dolls, moving around in complex patterns, dressed like the agents and people they know. “Oh,” said one of the players, “That’s us, isn’t it. We’ve always been this.” And that was that, the entirety of the campaign, its mind-shattering revelation. The remaining campaign of 20 or so sessions was just going through the motions.

Our role in the story

The first chapter ends once the players decide to give up their search for Abigail. They probably do something with the Macallister building and its tenants, but that doesn’t affect much. The second chapter, for all its sprawling sandbox, ends with a predetermined scripted sequence that is entirely independent of what you’ve done to get there. So does the third one, except there the agents don’t even have to try and achieve anything, they’ll get herded into the last chapter when the GM decides its time. And the final chapter is about getting to the masquarade where the characters’ fate is entirely out of their hands.

Helplessness is a big part of horror. In a game where mere mortals come up against a reality-bending god-like force, it makes sense they wouldn’t be able to do much about it. It’s common for such adventures to focus on thwarting the equally mortal adepts of the eldritch gods, on delaying the inevitable apocalypse by another year.

In IL, the mortal adepts are actually immortal, the poisonous play can be dropped off from the future, and the entire world is marionettes on a stage anyway. At no point during this adventure can the PCs change the outcome. They only thing they can achieve is surviving to see the end. This quote from the campaign author’s twitter offers some insight:

If you think every Delta Green op should be resolvable by Agents, you should reread it. Most of the time, the Agents have no idea what they’re facing or whether they defeated it or not. In the end, it is a game about futility. In other words, what it means to be human.

Many people, it seems, are drawn to the game, but fail to grasp that this futility is not a problem to correct. It’s the game’s CORE. Play as you like, of course, but without this essential ingredient of ambiguity and lack of “victory” it’s something else, not Delta Green.

Impossible Landscapes takes the ultimate futility of human existence in the face of (pre-)cosmic horror of the King in Yellow and multiplies it by the fact that the play is already written and all anyone can do is take their part in it. In other words, it’s a very fancy rollercoaster of a railroad, and you’re welcome to contemplate your insignificance while you ride it.

The secret stories

While I ended up disappointed with the overall structure of the campaign, I still love its tangents and side-stories, the actual things the agents investigate and uncover along the way. They are well-written, imaginative, and unsettling.

It’s a shame many of these plotlines are almost impossible for the players to discover. The demon summoning ritual stands out here. By the start of chapter 3 at the latest, the agents get a functional copy of Hygromanteia (itself a precursor to Ars Goetia), a demon summoning book. There’s an appendix providing a description for each of the 72 demons that could be summoned, and what their powers are. It’s cool.

Too bad that as written, the summoning ritual is almost impossible to achieve: after an hour-long ritual, the caster must make a reverse-sanity roll, with a -20 penalty for every other character present (nothing in the text hints having others present is a bad idea). Meaning that at best it’s a coinflip if anything happens, and if the entire party is involved it’s all but guaranteed to fail. Failure means the caster can never successfully perform the ritual. Success means you’ll get a response within a day.

So a party would try it once or twice, get no response, and conclude the ritual is a dud. At the point in the campaign they’re likely to gain access to it, they no longer have the luxury of messing about. It is, I’ll grant, a properly arcane ritual. But it’s meant to be a power the party gains, not an obscure easter egg (which takes up 13 pages of the book).

It’s even more of a shame that even seemingly important (and interesting!) plot lines lack meaningful resolution. Maybe it’s written that way to hint at the larger, unknowable picture, but as a GM I’d rather have the answers and watch the players fail to grasp at them, than feel like I’m not getting it myself and thus can only offer vague hints to the players.

The most egregious example of this is the patzu. It is introduced in chapter 2 as a big deal: patzu is condensed Corruption that can be extracted from individuals exposed to the play, it is what the King consumes, the entire point of the play and the world. Drinking it takes one back to the “real” world, which is instrumental in escaping the chapter.

Reading that part of the campaign I felt like this was it, we were getting somewhere, with this information the agents would gain some measure of agency in the campaign. And then we barely hear about it again. It’s not a major new tool in the agents’ arsenal, nor a part of a larger scheme to uncover, nothing. It might be a component in the creation of the spirit bottles which contain the answer to a person’s innermost question, but that connection is unclear, and not actionable.

Patzu is, apparently, a part of the DG/CoC mythos, originally mentioned in the Sense of the Slight-of-Hand Man campaign for CoC, also written by Detwiller. Which is meaningless within the context of IL, but revealing of a larger, perhaps more inisidious truth.

But before we get to it, another example: the inciting incident, the disappearance of Abigail Wright. We’re told she has moved in with an “encyclopedia salesman”, whose identity is strangely obscured, and not just from the players. We know virtually nothing about him, only a brief description of what he looks like if the agents catch a glimpse (but they can never chase him down), not even a name. And that’s in a book that goes on page-long detailed backstory tangents full of information players would never uncover for every other NPC they meet. Was this a hint at the King or the Author in the original adventure? It’s probably not anymore, just a dropped tangent, because the Author is definitively named as Jaycy Linz.

Who is Jaycy Linz? A character from a short story by John Tynes, itself a part of King in Yellow “mythos”. Why is he here? Why did Abigail ask us to fetch his spirit bottle to make him the Author? As a reference. Realising this actually made me a bit angry. This was the easiest, most obvious way to tie the entire Abigail sub-plot together, to have the would-be Author be the salesman from the Night Floors, explaining her role in the story. Offering one of the agents a chance to always have been the Author would have worked, too. Instead, we get a reference to an out-of-print book or a webarchive page.

How many other characters and places in this campaign are references, not just to the original stories but the expanded body of work? My guess is a lot of them. The ones who are not are references to the demons of Ars Goetia instead. Does it matter if something is a reference if you don’t recognize it? Maybe not, but what if the “supplemental material” helps make sense of some of these characters and plot lines? And why does a 363 page campaign book need supplemental material?

The roleplaying hobby is full of references to fanfics to homages to reimaginings, that’s the entirety of D&D and Call of Cthulhu (and by extension Delta Green). But the reference itself should not be the point. Impossible Landscapes, I feel, sometimes forgets this.

Reimagining the story

The campaign is so vast and detailed, you can only fully examine it in hindsight. Now that it has been played all the way through, the curtain has fallen only to rise again. Despite all my criticisms, I don’t regret running it. So what have I learned, what should I have done differently – and maybe you’d wish to consider?

While reading the book, some parts of it immediately stood out as troublesome: abrupt opportunities for character death, keep-rolling-till-you-get-it sections. I set the doubts aside, the campaign gets rave reviews, maybe I just don’t get it and should embrace the artistic vision of the author. “Plus,” a tiny voice in the back of my head said, “how can you write a review if you change it too much?”

None of the things I’ve outlined may cause any issues for you, but I knew they would for me, and plunged head on into them anyway. Lesson learned: I have enough experience to know what will and will not work for me and my group, and should rely on that experience over any adventure’s authority. So sanding off these rough edges to taste would be a start.

I’d also ease up on alternate realities, though that might be tricky to do. The entire point of chapter 3 is to drive home that there’s no “real” world, but I’m pretty sure my players concluded they were simply wandering around warped splinter realities since leaving chapter 2, with the real actual world safely behind all the madness.

A bigger change would be to adjust the entire premise of the campaign. Instead of the inevitability of the play being guaranteed by the atemporal backstage shenanigans, I would try and represent it as malignant destiny, arising incidentally but no less inevitably from the actions of those infected by the play.

Which would in turn mean the key NPCs actually need something to strive for. As is, they’re all stuck and insane. Many want to find their spirit bottle, but they’re not even doing that – they have a role in producing the play, after all. Even the demons Bael and Guison (Mr Wilde), who seem to be actively doing something, don’t actually have an objective, or even an implication of one. My players were certain the demons were another faction in the cosmic conflict – so let them be. Carcosa is perpetually beseiged by an unknown force, the Black Wind army – let it be the demonic army, with King Bael trying to take over the role of the King.

For that matter, and this is something I’ve actually done, replace the final judgement at the masquarade with the award of masks for the next performance. The masquarade is the afterparty, and once you make it there and take off the mask you didn’t know you wore, you learn that’s what it’s all about: who gets to play which part when the world is recreated to recreate the play. And of course one of those attending doesn’t wear a mask…

An even bigger change would be to ditch the campaign’s structure. Turn the game into an actual sandbox: the agents are caught in the periphery of the play, but they don’t have a role in it unless they take one up. Keep the actual content of the book, but don’t mandate the chapters and transitions between them. Instead, let the agents use the Night World to go to any other place and time touched by the King that they’re aware of. Macallister building, Dorchester house, the Bookshop, Broadalbin, etc. – all are fair game. Expand the list to include Chateau Castaigne in the 15th century, some place in Paris in 1895 when the play was first performed, and so on, let players explore the tangents they want to pursue.

Time travel is an issue, of course. The STATIC killer(s) would be repurposed from guarding the approaches to Carcosa (they aren’t very good at it anyway – everyone who’s anyone just wanders into Broadalbin through the Night Floors) to hunting down agents trying to change history, stay in the past, etc.. Plus the malignant destiny of Carcosa gets to play a part: change one thing, and watch it be the cause of the outcome you tried to prevent.

No mater which path they take, the agents would eventually find their way to Carcosa, arriving just in time, always, for the masquarade at the end of the world.

Wildsea is a roleplaying game written by Felix Isaacs about a crew of (wild)sailors cutting through the branches of impossibly tall trees on a chainsaw ship or something just as bizarre, in a world taken over by verdant greenery. Among the games that inspired it, it lists Belly of the Beast, Blades in the Dark, Heart: The City Beneath, and 13th Age, though I see a lot of Fate there too. Fiction-wise, Bastion, Bas-Lag trilogy and Sunless Sea are listed. The fact that I wrote about most of the inspirations for Wildsea would imply it is a game for me. And it is!

The Setting

The world of Wildsea has experienced an unusual apocalypse 300 years ago, the Verdancy. Its civilizations were crushed by the roots of trees rapidly growing to truly titanic sizes. Living within the tangle of the trees wasn’t really an option: not only is everything ever-growing, not only are many animals and insects also of immense size now, but the trees themselves are full of highly mutagenic and acidic sap likely to blame for all the growth. All that survived found themselves sheltering on broken bits of the old world carried upwards by the massive branches, or trapped atop of mountains or otherwise isolated from one another.

With trees as the sea and survivor settlements as islands, ships capable of traversing between them were inevitable. That’s what your characters will be: wildsailors with their own ship, sailing the wildsea in search of glory, adventure, or maybe new culinary experiences. Each character is defined by three major elements: their bloodline, origin, and post. And what character elements they are.

While humans (“ardents”) are present, the rest of the bloodlines get weird – the promised influence of Bas-Lag books. Cactus people, mushroom people, swarms of spiders in human-shaped hives (my favourite), animated detritus, mutated jellyfish people with replaceable bones, and moth people that pupate and get reborn every twenty years.

Most of the origins are simply kinds of settlements your character might come from, but they start off, in alphabetical order, with amberclad and anchored. The former were trapped in amber during the Verdancy, only now waking up to a world irrevocably changed. The latter are ghosts anchored to some object. This really sets the mood: you can get wild with character concepts.

Posts feature various crew positions one might expect to find, such as corsair, navigator, or hunter; several not-magic users (arconauts, who’ve learned to wield the weirdness of the world in some way); as well as many variaitons of crafters (oh yes, there’s crafting), and stranger professions still. Would you like to be a postman? I’ve never had to describe or imagine so many different ways food is cooked in different communites as I had to in this game due to having a char (cook) on board. Now the entire party gets excited about trying local food every time they visit a new place.

The rampant weirdness of the world doesn’t stop with characters. The things you encounter vary greatly, from amusing, like tinker-monkeys that just want to disassemble your engine out of curiosity, to terrifying, like the bone disease that makes its sufferers “skeletal golems still clothed in the unwilling flesh of their erstwhile owners” or a plant that blooms on people and induces religious fervor in its hosts. As can be expected of a game with gigantic flora and fauna, there are leviathans as well. While these include “merely” titanic creatures, there are also a bewildering variety of living storms and a mobile reality distortion vibe of the Spirit of Industry.

While I appreciate the many kinds of beasties found in the Hazards chapter, large and small animals, insects, plants, constructs, I love the single paragraph descriptions of stuff that didn’t warrant a full write-up. It’s a cacophony of ideas: hydreese (hydra-geese!), hermit-hull crabs, skyward roots reaching the clouds, punchcard thinking engines.

Although there is no canonical map of the Wildsea, and majority of the book is dedicated to the general Wildsea experience, the Reaches chapter describes several geographic regions with distinct personalities. You are free to include or ignore them in your game, arranging these reaches as you see fit – a great approach to worldbuildng. You could easily base the entire campaign in one reach, or visit it for a few sessions just to see the sights.

The Rules

When I originally backed the game on Kickstarter, it was the art that caught my eye. Just look at it! The setting sounded interesting and unique as well. I didn’t expect too much from the rules, to be honest. New designer, custom system to go along with the world? Hopefully it’s functional, I thought. Oh boy was I wrong to underestimate them. Mostly.

I really like the rules. They’re evocative and flexible. I think the second edition of the game can be truly special, and this isn’t meant to be a backhanded compliment. But for the one we got, you may have to do a little bit of trimming and a little bit of bending. It seems that the rules grew even as they were being written down, more ideas appeared up until the very appendix. While this may have resulted in a disaster for other systems, it’s barely a problem here. The core rules are solid, and everything else is flexible and up for interpretation by design, so you’ll naturally settle on your own version of the mechanics that makes sense to your group. As I explain the rules here, I’ll also mention some of the house rules and interpretations we’ve ended up with – which may not be for you.

Mechanically, each character element, bloodline, post, and origin, offers a pool of aspects to choose from, and it’s up to you to spread out your choices or focus on one element. It’s also perfectly acceptable to “steal” an aspect or two from a different bloodline/origin/post, or make up your own.

Aspects are a mix of Fate’s aspects and stunts. These represent character traits, gear, and companions. Each has a descriptive name, a “health” track 2 to 5 long, and often a special ability they grant. The shorter the track, the better the ability: a purely descriptive aspect like Towering is 5 long, while a Strong Stomach that reduces the impact of poisons, diseases, and sickness is 3 long. Some abilities granted by aspects are active: you mark the track to use them.

Characters don’t have health as a separate parameter. Instead, whenever they take damage they mark one of their aspects’ tracks, provided it makes sense. A fully marked aspect ceases to function. That’s where being Towering comes in handy: you’re large and tall, so you can endure more. Instead of marking an aspect, you can take an injury – add a temporary track that will take some effort to heal. The rules don’t actually define how long this track should be, but it made sense to us to set it equal to the damage you were about to take. We’ll revisit healing in a bit, take note.

In addition to aspects, characters get edges, skills, drives, and mires. Edges are binary, you either have them or you don’t, and each character gets 3 out of 6. They describe possible approaches to doing things, e.g. Iron is the edge of force, determination, and willpower, whereas Tides is the edge of exploration, learning, and lore. Edges encourage you to describe your character’s actions in a way that fits the edges you have.

Skills are straightforward: you have 0 to 3 points in all of them. In addition to regular skills, there also are languages, which cover not just the ability to speak and understand a given language, but also familiarity with the culture in which it is used. While there is a “common” language, Low Sour, this latter application makes language skills very handy in a game likely centered on travel between various communities.

Drives are used for character advancement: by working towards one of your drives, you can claim a milestone once per session. If you’ve completely satisfied a drive, you can replace it and claim a major milestone as a reward. You also get one “free” milestone once per session, and one “free” major milestone once per story arc. Each milestone is a brief phrase you write down at the end of each session to note the personally significant events that happened during it.

Later on, you can spend milestones during a montage/downtime action (hello Blades in the Dark) to gain a new skill point or an aspect, provided they somewhat fit. Maybe you’ve Survived a Pin-Wolf Ambush, Drank Pirates Under the Table, and Held Her Steady during a storm, and now you can use those experiences to gain another rank of the Brace skill. There’s also a whole system for modifying and combining aspects, as you only get 7 slots for them, but we won’t get into it here.

I love the way milestones work in this game. You create an ongoing record of important character moments, then find ways to channel them into character advancement. It feels like the next step in the evolution of the “mark xp if you’ve done something appropriate for your playbook” approach. I will seriously consider using it for any future games I run.

In addition to milestones, satisfying a drive can give you a whisper (a kind of a resource) or clear a mark of mire. Mires are your character’s insecurities, weird habits, phobias, all the things that drag them down. You get 3, each with a 2-long track. These are marked when you experience something terrible, with first mark resulting in only minor changes to a character’s behavior, and second causing the mire to dominate their scenes. They can be compared to ongoing negative compels in Fate, only without a reward for indulging in them, which I think is a missed opportunity. And given how sparse clearing marks can be, you run the risk of drowning in your mires for lengthy periods of time. So the house rule we’ve implemented was to treat twice marked mires as drives: once you act out based on them, you get a reward that will probably be clearing a mark of mire.

The core mechanic of Wildsea is very simple. Whenever you do something risky, assemble your die pool: 1 die if your action matches one of your edges, 0-3 dice from an appropriate skill, and up to 2 dice for advantage. Advantage comes from fictional positioning, having relevant aspects (the name and description of the aspect matter here, rather than the ability it provides), or risking resources – if the roll fails, the resource is likely to be lost or otherwise negatively affected. The highest die in the roll determines its outcome: 6 is a success, 4-5 is mixed, and 1-3 is a disaster.

Doubles add a Twist to the by now familiar formula: something unexpected happens during the action, not necessarily directly connected to it and often suggested by another player. Some kinds of action have default twists, like dealing extra damage in combat. While it sounds simple, it doesn’t quite work, as there are two competing mechanics hiding within the Twist: chaos and critical success. As characters’ dice pools grow with their experience, more twists suddenly occur around them. Which is fine if they signify a critical success, but gets exhausting quick when every other roll brings something unexpected. We’ve introduced the following house rule: for “regular” action rolls which don’t have critical successes, use one die of a different colour, with a twist occuring on a roll of 1 on this special die.

Another core mechanic are tracks – a lot of things get a track, not just aspects and mires. These are basically progress clocks of BitD, with a slight modificaiton: you can have multi-part tracks, with each completed part signifying some shift in circumstance. Working on a personal project during a downtime montage? That’s a track. Journeying across the waves? That’s a track for the trip, another if you’re making a map on the way, and perhaps a third if there’s some ongoing danger. With a proper setup, a few tracks can take care of an entire adventure for you.

Tracks are how the game handles combat, too. While it features a full-on bestiary in the Hazards chapter, none of the creatures there have stats in the usual sense. As Wildsea is a player-facing game where only players roll dice, all of its enemies simply get aspects and optional quirks, many of them purely descriptive. They also get a detailed description of their sensory presence, which often includes taste.

When setting up a dangerous encounter, the GM decides on the total length of its hazard tracks based on how deadly it’s supposed to be, and possibly on how good the crew’s strategy is. These tracks can be spread among the aspects the creatures have (in which case fully marking an aspect deprives the creature of it), represent the situation as a whole, or be a mixture of the two.

While this works well overall, I would have preferred to have some suggested track length for each creature to signify its danger level at a glance. Likewise, I’m a bit unsatisfied with the way monster damage is handled: the game simply suggests you deal low amounts of 1-2 with occasional larger hits of 3-4 and a rare 5+ in case of bad tacics and rolls. And, again, that works, but is a bit too loose for my tastes. Mostly because this approach lacks symmetry with player capabilities – they deal 1 damage by default, plus 1 in case of a twist, and can voluntarily cut (increasing the difficulty of the roll by removing the best die) for more.

Speaking of damage, there are simply too many types in this game: 12! Various elemental types make sense, but the fine distinction between keen, hewing, and serrated damage doesn’t seem that interesting to me. Many aspects grant resistance to several damage types, meaning you reduce damage taken by 2. A player being resistant means they can ignore random bad roll outcomes, but enemies will occasionally get through. A monster being resistant means you’d better bring a different weapon – you’d have to not only succeed at an attack (1 damage) but also roll a twist (+1) and cut for impact (+1) to leave a dent. That’s a bit much as it makes such attacks extremely unlikely to do anything while exposing the character to increased damage due to the cut. Leviathans are resistant to everything individual-scale by default.

A lot of action revolves around resources. Unlike Heart, another game featuring gaining and spending resources on the way from A to B, Wildsea’s resources don’t have a rating measuring their value, they simply are. Each resource has a name and possibly a tag giving it simple extra properties. A larger volume of a resource is called cargo, and is used for ship-scale operations, like trade and ship upgrades. Resources come in 4 types, and while Salvage and Specimen are what you’d expect them to be, Whispers and Charts deserve further explanation.

Whispers are words of power, lodging themselves in people’s minds. They can be traded, passed from one to another. They can also be said quietly, introducing a Twist-level change that fits the whisper and is under the character’s control, or shouted, changing the surroundings in a signficant but uncontrollable way. If you’re familiar with Fate, you’ll see some similiarities to boosts – if boosts had tangible in-universe presence.

Charts are conceptually complex – they are maps, but maps of something not yet found. When setting out from a port, you can utilise local knowledge (gained from, well, locals) and a chart you have to plot the course, matching the chart to the local area and making the journey significantly safer. A chart can also be used in conjunction with a whisper to make a discovery along the way, finding some landmark that thematically matches them by possibly conjuring it out of conjecture into reality. In theory I really like this, as it allows players to opt into creative agency during the game, but I’ve struggled to come up with interesting landmarks along the way, and doubly so have my players, so we have barely engaged with this chart mechanic. Both uses consume the chart – it goes from abstract to concrete, and no longer has value to you afterwards. It kinda makes sense, so long as you keep moving forward, but it’s probably best not to overthink this mechanic.

Journeys themselves are handled in a procedural way: everyone gets to do something, whether that’s being on watch and rolling to see if something happens on the way, deciding how fast you travel, or manning the engine just in case that becomes relevant. These decisions are typically made by the group, but it’s nice to have everyone engaged. The most important part of a journey are the random encounter rolls. The character on watch rolls a die to determine the type of the encounter: 1-3 is nature; 4-5 is order, that is, something to do with people – another ship passing by, an outpost, a wreck, etc.; and 6 is peace, that is, nothing significant happening, just some slice of life aboard the ship.

The rules are slightly self-contradictory here, as the GM also rolls a die in secret to determine how dangerous this encounter is, with 1-3 being an immediate danger, 4-5 a risky opportunity, and 6 a freebie. So you easily could get a “peace” result that’s also an immediate danger. To reconcile these, I’ve been interpreting “peace” as “on board the ship” and “order” as “outside the ship” – an internal danger could be a crew conflict or a sickness, for instance.

Speaking of ships, the party builds their ship together by spending “stakes” – you get 6 to share, and 3 per sailor. These individual stakes can be pooled together, but ultimately it’s up to each player how to spend theirs. There are many inventive options to choose from, not just chainsaws & sails. In addition to parts that each ship needs to have, such as a hull and an engine, you can add various fittings and undercrew. Fittings encompass all sorts of things: specialized rooms, armaments, devices, while undercrew include officers as well as gangs of less skilled sailros and even packs of trained animals. Our crew decided their ship had to be infested by scorpions in a collective fit of madness, and keep insisting it was a wise choice because they’re “used to the stings, and any invaders wouldn’t be”.

After the initial creation, ships can be upgraded at a dock at a rate of 1 cargo per 1 stake (this is quite hard to find in the rules). Ship creation rules specifically say they place no limit on how much cargo can fit into a ship, or how many fittings can fit onto a ship, leaving it up for the group. And while that’s fine, it would probably have been easy to have these rules mirror the aspect limit characters get – something I may do next time we create a ship. It’s fun to deal within limitations sometimes!

The weakest area of the rules, I find, is healing. Damage is easy to dish out: marking an aspect on a mixed success doesn’t take too much brain power. Healing, however, requires a montage (downtime) action and a resource. Where do you get resources? Other just stumbling on one along the way, you can go hunting/foraging/salvaging/introspecting for one – another montage action. Both require a roll. So now you have 2 PCs spending their montage actions for a chance to clear 1 or 2 segments of a track.

It gets better with higher skills, not only because you’re much more likely to succeed, but also because a twist on the healing roll means the resource is not expended – an extremely important rule only present in the rule summary appendix! Some aspects also let the healer treat more characters at once or make their healing more powerful, but most of them come from the Surgeon’s post, and not everyone’s going to have one aboard the ship.

One the one hand, you’re not typically limited by the number of montages you take. On the other, you don’t actually want to just sit there and do personal stuff the entire session either. And there are so many more interesting things you could do during montages, like spend milestones for character advancement or work on a project. What ended up happening at my table was players adding more aspects to their characters in part to get more tracks instead of spending time on healing old wounds, as it was a more efficient and more fun way to keep the character going. Funnily enough, aspect marks are meant to be transient damage, bruises and the like, while the more serious injuries get their own temporary tracks that (explicity by the rules) can be marked as time passes. Not so regular damage! Which had made me wary to actually dish it out once I realised what was happening.

Conceptually similar stress in Fate gets cleared every session, but that would seriously impact the resource economy of the game and make some aspects worthless, so I don’t have a good solution here. Healing a track at the end of each journey would be a good start. When I’ve tried asking about other GMs’ experience on the game’s discord, I found out with some surprise this wasn’t a problem those present there at the time had encountered, but mostly because they’ve been running shorter adventures where damage just doesn’t have the time to accumulate. Which makes me think our group is one of the few in the world to have a lengthy Wildsea campaign, currently 28 sessions and going.

The Game

At its core, Wildsea is a travelogue game, which is probably my favourite style of campaign. The party moves from place to place, seeing how the people there live and getting into all kinds of trouble along the way. I love localised worldbuilding of figuring out how people would adjust to live in various fantastic circumstances. While the overall premise of Wildsea, that of overwhelming vegetation, has a very strong influence, the book offers plenty of variations on it. Couple that with really different people that inhabit the world, and you’ll have a vast space to exercise your imagination as you explore it together with your players.

Our Wildsea campaign follows on the heels of Mothership, which followed Trail of Cthulhu. After 2 horror campaigns, everyone wanted something a bit more lighthearted, so that’s how we’ve been playing it. Very few people are outright villainous (I think the party has killed 2 so far), we focus on adventure, sight-seeing, non-hostile encounters with nature & rampant weirdness, and leave plenty of space for slice of life scenes aboard the ship. Which isn’t to say you can’t run a more action-oriented, or even horror-tinged version of Wildsea. But after (uhhhhh) a couple of decades of running games, I’ve come to really value the different experiences they can offer, and Wildsea has been a breath of fresh air.

Wildly imaginative, evocative, with flexible mechanics (which, to be fair, may require some adjustment for your table), Wildsea has been a joy. Whether you’re looking to move away from dungeons and dragons, or simply long to dive into a new world, I heartily recommend it. Embark on a voyage over the endless treetops, who knows what wonders you may discover.

P.S.: I’d like to give an honourary mention to “unsetting questions”. There are many games nowadays where players are invited to participate in creatings parts of the world, and Wildsea is no exception. Unsetting questions are a slightly different technique introduced in the book, where the GM asks players for rumours and tall tales they’ve heard on a particular topic at the start of each session to set the mood. There is no obligation for them to be factual, which removes all pressure from players and frees the GM to modify or ignore their answers as fits the game. While it may be tricky to do so all the time, it’s a fun way to start a session in any game.