The Wildsea: Free Basic Rules

Some three hundred years ago the empires of the world were toppled by a wave of fast-growing greenery, a tide of rampant growth spilling from the West. This event, the Verdancy, gave rise to the world you’ll explore as you play - a titanic expanse of rustling waves and sturdy boughs known as the Wildsea.

Now chainsaw-driven ships cut their way across dense treetop waves, their engines powered by oilfruit, ropegolems, honey, and pride. Their crews are a motley, humanity’s weathered descendants rubbing shoulders with cactoid gunslingers, animated wrecks and silkclothed spider-colonies, humanesque slugs with driftwood bones and other, stranger things. Each has a role and a reason to be out on the Wildsea, and it’s their stories - your stories - that this game is designed to tell.

Playing a Game on the Rustling Waves

Your character is a wildsailor, part of a crew cutting their way across the island-studded wilderness of the treetop sea on a vessel of your very own. You’ll clash with survivor cultures and wild beasts, scavenge and salvage for wreckage and trade-goods, chase rumours, and uncover secrets. The focus of this game is on exploration, progress, and change - you’ll define the world of the Wildsea as you sail it.

Adventures on the Wildsea start as hooks, elements of the setting or of a character’s history with the potential to blossom into an arc - a story for you and your crew to experience. While playing through an arc you roleplay scenes, montages, and journeys to make decisions, take actions, and resist your baser impulses. Completed arcs, and the triumphs and disasters within them, will allow you to develop your character as you play.

Decisions are made through the conversation, a collaborative process that keeps all players at the table involved in the outcome of an event. The Wildsea's GM figure, the Firefly, is there to ask the right questions to keep the conversation flowing, as well as to bring the rules into play when necessary.

The Wild Words Engine

Rolls are made using d6 dice pools, quickly assembled from the information you have on your character sheet and the situations your characters find themselves in. Dice rolled in this way help to direct the conversation toward outcomes of triumph, conflict, or disaster. Whatever the result, the story moves forward.

Tracks are used as a visual reference for many aspects of your character, their relationships with various factions and developments in the wider story. Their boxes are marked or cleared by your actions.

You’ll also collect resources, anything from salvage and charts to living secrets and forbidden spices. These resources are tracked on your character sheet, and can be combined or sacrificed for various effects. Their precise uses and qualities are drawn out as your group’s own unique version of the Wildsea develops.

Buying the Game - Digital Copies

If you like what you see in this free version, buying the digital version of the Wildsea gives you access to both the single page and double-page spread versions of the game, as well as links to a set of digital resources (standard and fillable ship/character sheets and a quick reference PDF) .

Additional Content

This bundle has now been updated with a free teaser for Storm & Root, the Wildsea's first expansion.

Updates to the resources and core PDF are free - the current core PDF version, 1.1, was added on the 12th of March 2022.