Through Monday, March 31 we present the Wildsea Bundle featuring The Wildsea, the narrative weird-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Mythworks set in a world overrun by greenery. Three centuries ago a tide of rampant growth overwhelmed the world’s empires. Now chainsaw-driven ships cut across the Verdancy, a dense forest canopy of toxic iron-rooted trees. You and your fellow wildsailors, humanity’s weathered descendants (and also cactoid gunslingers, centipedal fungi, silk-clothed spiderfolk, and even stranger things) explore the Tangle, hunt pinwolves and thrummingbirds, trade oilfruit and honey, salvage wrecks from the Sink, or seek thrills in the Foxloft, Spitskill Tide, Spearing Fens – even down in the Darkness-Under-Eaves, amid the bones of the old world. As the Wildsea hungers and grows, what will you discover in its depths?
Inspired by video games like Sunless Sea and Bastion, The Wildsea uses a rules-light, fiction-first dice pool system, the Wild Words Engine, inspired by RPGs like Belly of the Beast, Blades in the Dark, Heart: The City Beneath, and 13th Age. The Wildsea rules provide a scaffold on which the players build their own stories. Your character has a Bloodline (ancestral human or one of six strange new groups like Ektus, Gau, and Mothryn), Origin (Amberclad, Anchored, Rootless, Spit-born, and others), and one of many Posts (roles), such as Hunter, Navigator, Alchemist, Dredger, Horizoneer, Rattlehand, Shankling, Slinger, Tempest, or Wordbearer. Your Edges, Skills, Aspects, Resources, Mires (vices), and especially your Drives constantly push the narrative forward. A useful montage mechanic lets the group cover a span of time when the characters are focusing on different things.
In a detailed February 2024 Cannibal Halfling review, Aaron Marks praised the setting assumptions in The Wildsea that help the world feel cohesive despite its weirdness: “In an ocean of wood, fire is catastrophic, so there is a 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 rapidly growing ocean of trees is powered by a substance called crezzerin, which 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. […] 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.”
The Wildsea rules, showing their inspiration, tie many mechanics into Fate-style Aspects and Blades-style clocks and tracks. Aspects, Tracks, and Resources model almost everything a player can try. “This is a rules-light game at heart,” says Marks, “and what it’s doing is showing the player how to make all those nearly identical rolls distinct. That’s why it’s important to have four Resources; that’s why each character has half a dozen Aspects. These are all fruitful voids, places for you to tell interesting stories in an interesting setting. […] 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 weird and wild world that can easily accommodate (and in fact invites) more weirdness and more wildness. […]
“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 themselves, taking what’s on the page and adding to it. […] 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.”
This all-new Wildsea Bundle presents the complete Mythworks Wildsea game line to date for an unbeatable bargain price. Pay just US$19.95 to get all five titles in our Wildsea Collection (retail value $95) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 368-page Wildsea core rulebook, the sourcebooks Storm & Root and Ship Gardens, and two full-length Wildsea adventures: Red Right Hand and One-Armed Scissor.
This Wildsea offer falls prey to Old Ornail the leviathan squirrel and gets dragged down to the Drown Monday, March 31.
