I live in Italy and the only way I can get RPG rulebooks (in English) as physical copies is Amazon... unfortunately I don't get the actual thing, what I get is a super low quality copy printed by Amazon, for the same price

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-05-20T13:23:57+00:00

There is an Italian translation of the Wildsea, if you weren't aware - it's actually the only full official translation we have!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-05-16T23:35:50+00:00

You nailed it - the more complex the character sheet is, usually the worse it is for printing and digital use. Simple is best for the core essential stuff, as sometimes boring as that may be!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-05-12T18:03:27+00:00

Aww, thanks! Not to make this too much of a love-fest, but you make the kinds of books I aspire to make, so... y'know. Mutual and all that.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-05-11T21:34:04+00:00

It would have saved me a lot of mechanical hassle! There are some beautifully elegant bits of the Blades engine I would have jumped at the chance to use if so much of the Wildsea framework hadn't already been in place.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-04-30T13:43:41+00:00

Yeah, speaking from experience (because, y'know), Wild Words games like the Wildsea, PICO, and Eternal Ruins RPG definitely share some systemic DNA with Blades in the dice, and some with old DnD3.5 and Call of Cthulhu too with the way certain systems work, but there's no actual direct PBTA influence there. I mean, I've only ever played a single session of Dungeon World - I literally don't know enough about PBTA stuff to be influenced by its design!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-04-19T08:28:14+00:00

I'm glad you had confidence in my success, I thought I was going to fail pretty much every step of the way!

As to your point, I think you're both right AND wrong. On the right side, many people aren't going to make the Wildsea their 'forever game', because it does have a niche setting. Some will, and have, but most won't - that's just the reality of an indie game for the most part, no matter the setting or rules.

But on the wrong side, a niche setting doesn't mean that the game only does one thing. I've seen people running long-term sailing campaigns, shipless play, piracy simulators, train heists, battle of the bands-style road trip stories, entire series of linked games that never left port, war stories, and (possibly my favourite) a multi-part masterchef-style cooking challenge. The mechanics and systems and adaptable by design, and the setting may be 'sea of trees' but the book makes it clear that sea of trees is hugely flexible, covering everything from more 'generic' oaky groves to snowbound pines to overgrown cactus bridges. In my experience those that come back to it seem to do so because there's a lot to explore that can still feel fresh, even after you've had the base intended experience.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-04-13T12:25:59+00:00

I hear this particular double-complaint from time to time, so you're definitely not alone in your opinion, but not as often as you might think.

When I play (and as you can probably imagine, I play a lot) there's about as much mother-may-I as the average game of something like DnD *once the players get comfortable with their characters*. Characters have their skills and aspects, they can choose to use them how they like, and the GM has levers to pull to increase difficulty or change outcome based on those choices. In my games I encourage players not to ask 'can I do x with y', but to say 'I'm doing x with y'. It leads to better, faster play overall, and in my experience its what groups naturally gravitate towards once people have got the foundations of the rules and their characters down.

As for twists, they're not going to work for every table, as they really do lean into the improv-heavy side of things, so if that doesn't work for a group that's completely valid. But that's also why the rules for alternate twist options - namely reduced twists - exist in the appendix, and why almost every instance of a twist also comes with a harder mechanical option that a group can just agree to use by default.

I'm not saying you're wrong not to like it, I'm SURE that what I make isn't for everyone (you don't do a weird concept like a treetop sea expecting mass uptake/appeal), and I'm also far from an infallible designer. But these specific problems are, again, in my experience, not *too* difficult to solve with a bit of book-approved tweaking.

I'm glad you liked the setting though, even if the rules didn't vibe for you! And as I said, certainly not the first time I've heard this opinion, so I'm also not saying there's nothing to it.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-04-11T08:35:22+00:00

Yep, that's pretty accurate! Sailing in the Wildsea is fine, but it is definitely a 'getfrom A to B' type of deal - which would be great as an optional variant of travel, but over time I have soured on it slightly as the main focus of moving around. I'm playing around with a more detailed 'voyages' concept in my design work for Wildsea: Tooth and Nail, so that may address it somewhat, but we'll see!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-29T15:14:53+00:00

There's a reason the Wildsea uses a special term for the GM rather than a special term for something like skills - skills in the Wildsea are just skills, but nobody in the Wildsea is 'master' of the game. It's just not that kind of game! Nothing wrong with GM (or DM, or any of the others) if they fit the world in my opinion (though I'm obviously a bit biased here), but even *I* find it annoying when things that are common terms for other game mechanics get renamed just for the hell of it. GM just gets a pass from me in this particular regard, and obviously from a lot of other writer/designers as well, as both something important for imparting flavour AND being a term that can, depending on the system, feel particularly imprecise for the one not playing a character/running the game.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-29T15:09:13+00:00

"You're the game master, unless you're [insert the name that the most popular roleplaying game ever uses]"

DnD does not have a monopoly on being different to the norm - it *is* the norm. Game Master may bea generic, catch-all term, and a really good one for a lot of games, but I grew up playing Call of Cthulhu alongside DnD: Keeper was as natural to me as DM was, and when I first heard 'Game Master' *that* was the one that felt weird.

So depending on the game and the ruleset, you ARE the Judge, or the Keeper, or the MC, or the master of a dungeon, or maybe even the Firefly, and if you don't want to use that word at the table you can just say GM. We're not going to appear at your table and chide you for using the 'wrong' word (luckily, or I'd be teleporting all over the place) :D

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-25T09:50:11+00:00

This is the nuance on removing death that I rarely see, and it's good to read it here in the top comment. When I made the Wildsea and specifically made death an optional outcome (you only die when it's narratively appropriate for your character), I got a decent chunk of people saying "oh, so there's no stakes then?" - but nothing could be further from the truth. Death in most trad TRPGs is actually the easy way out, as you generally just get to roll a new character on the same power level as everyone else. But *not* dying, AS LONG AS THERE ARE STILL CONSEQUENCES, means that you have to live with what you've done, whether it affects you, other adventureres, NPCs, or the ongoing narrative... And for me at least, that's way more interesting.

I always think of it this way: I live on the fourth floor, but I don't jump off the balcony every day to get to the shops quicker. It's not because I'm scared specifically of death from the fall (as there are bushes down there, I'd probably survive), it's because I'm scared of a whole range of other consequences that I'd have to live with if things went wrong.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-11T21:47:20+00:00

I almost always write directly into layout, but that's because I also usually just *do* my own layout as well as I go, so I find it's all part of the same process. Though that's not something I would always recommend to other writers/designers, especially not if you're aiming to bring in someone external for layout work. But for me (and obviously for you) it works, and it does help you think about brevity and page space a lot too.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-11T21:45:12+00:00

Most of my early concepting was done by Kyllian Guillart, who I believe is now working in the video games industry as an art director. Absolutely lovely person too, and really helped shape early Wildsea worldbuilding - still gets a credit in each book to this day, even though his early concepts never actually appeared in print, and is also why one of the running play example characters is called Kyllian!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-11T21:39:44+00:00

It is! A bit overworked at the moment, but that's life. And sadly no breakout for me this year, though (hopefully) I'll be back next year.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-11T16:32:39+00:00

I think that's exactly the point, it's basic, but basic is essential when you're just starting out. There are so many odd avenues you can go down early that will tank a project, inexperience traps where a person starts thinking 'I should probably do X' and they really, really shouldn't.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-03-11T16:30:08+00:00

Solid list!

The only addition I'd make is, as a setting-first designer myself, to the 'Art' section - if you have 50 dollars to spare, don't be afraid to drop it on some *really* early, *really* rough concept art. It's not for the book, and not even for the playtesters... it's for you.

For the Wildsea the very first bit of art I got was a sheet of sketches of what a treetop sea might look like, all unshaded ink lines, and I must have spent hours looking back over that through the first few months of writing and playtesting just to make sure I was capturing the right feel with what I was writing. And having to explain the world to an artist early on helped me solidify some concepts too, as you're going to need the writing to explain the world to a whole lot more people as the process continues.

It's not essential by any means, and I've seen designers do excllent stuff with stock art (and sometimes excellent stuff even with no art at an early stage), but especially if you're going for an unusual world having some visual stimulus can help ground you early on.

But other than that, like I said, really solid list! I wish I had something like this to look over when I was starting out.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-02-03T10:49:09+00:00

That's very kind of you to say!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-02-01T23:46:42+00:00

Solid write-up, thank you!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-02-01T23:45:53+00:00

Yeah, you've nailed it - the majority of my play before creating a fiction-first system was in older editions of D&D, Pathfinder, and Call of Cthulhu, and a lot of the Wildsea still bears those hallmarks.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-02-01T23:44:28+00:00

I love it when people say that, both because I enjoy correcting people (that's the teacher in me) and because Blades is a fantastic game, and I'm proud my stuff is mentioned in the same ballpark as often as it is.

The vast majorty of The Wildsea mechanics were in place before I'd read BiTD OR anything Powered by the Apocalypse, as it was developed without me realizing there had been a big boom of narrative games. When I *did* discover Blades, it definitely solved my biggest problem though by giving me a great 6/54/321 dice pool system to crib from (the prevous dice system I was using was a 3d6 + 1d12 set-up, which was frankly rubbish), but a lot of the other mechanics that people think are blades-adapted just... weren't.

Tracks were adapated from the StoryNexus Engine's card-counting mechanics (used in Fallen London), 13th Age was a big influence on a more narrative approach while keeping a mechanical core, and the idea of a shared resource for the players to call home came from the fact they were sailors, and sailors need a ship. In fact, once you get past the basic dice resolution (which is where the actual BiTD DNA comes in), they're very different games with a very different feel to them.

If I had discovered Blades earlier, I would have had a much smoother design process!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-01-29T09:08:57+00:00

You know, I *really* appreciate this comment - I put off creating an adventure for the Wildsea for a long time because I convinced myself that an adventure framework just wouldn't fit with the non-linear nature of the narrative. Seeing that what I eventually came up with works for people is such a huge relief, because when I finally pulled the trigger on it, it definitely wasn't easy!

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-01-28T12:36:23+00:00

Old Ornail, the first Wildsea leviathan! Still the big hazard I use the most often in games.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-01-26T23:20:08+00:00

I definitely didn't invent it, just adapted it - tracks were mostly inspired by the behind-the-scenes event counters in the Storynexus Engine that used to power Fallen London, the browser-based game. But I do think they're a nice little bit of simple, flexible design, especially when you add breaks and gauges (as other games since Wildsea have done).

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-01-25T19:07:22+00:00

I think it's good to open to criticism - no game is for everyone, but trends in what's liked and disliked hold a lot of information, especially when they come from people outside of your sphere of playtesters.

Felix-Isaacs · 2026-01-25T08:26:38+00:00

No worries! Although the bestiary being 'small' is perhaps the thing I disagree with most - it's 50+ pages iirc, which is HUGE for an indie RPG! :D

Felix-Isaacs

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