The Wildsea is a Tabletop RPG by Felix Issacs set in a verdant post apocalyptic world. It draws heavily on the New Weird genre as well as more traditional post apocalyptic, Solar Punk, and Science Fantasy themes.
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 a new world covered in 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.
The game and its setting contain examples of following tropes:
- After the End: Although green and verdant, the game is set after a world-altering cataclysm that destroyed society.
- Apocalypse How: The Verdancy was a Class 2 Planetary-scale Societal Collapse. While humans (now Ardent) and the Ektus survived, nothing of the Pre-V societies did.
- Bizarro Apocalypse: Trees filled with mutagenic sap ate the world.
- Cactus Person: The Ektus are a bloodline of cactus people.
- Cool Ship: The game itself is centered on crews of ships that climb over the treetops, frequently with the power of a chainsaw at the bottom of their hull to pull them forwards.
- End of the World as We Know It: A prior (unknown) civilization was completely wiped out when a giant forest sprouted around the world, leaving only those who existed on high ground surviving
- Fish out of Temporal Water: The Amberclad background is essentially this; people incased in amber during the Verdancy who have woken in a new and strange world.
- Made of Incendium: The wood of the Wildsea burns fast and hot, and its quick regrowth allows fire to come around and burn a location again. The Conflagration in the north has been burning for more than two hundred years.
- Mutagenic Goo: Crezzerin, a substance released by many plants, can merely harm someone with brief contact; extended contact can warp both physically and mentally, leading to the source of most of the monsters of the Wildsea.
- Mushroom Man: The Gau are a bloodline of fungus-people.
- Points of Light Setting: The core concept of the setting is there are various types of settlements separated by the vast and often inhospitable Wildsea. Players take on the roles of sailors risking travelling between those points of light.
- Rule of Cool: A lot of the setting runs on this.
- Schizo Tech: A key ingredient of the setting. Tech is either super-advanced and not understood, retro, or Bamboo Technology.
- Winged Humanoid: The Mothryn are humanoid moths that, while winged, have lost their ability to fly.
- The Worm That Walks: A rare heroic version, the Tzelicrae are a bloodline of sentient spider colonies. Each Tzelicrae is a mass of spiders that shares a hivemind and occupies a body made from silk, stolen skin, or random junk.
