Wildsea and Brancalonihack

So Wildsea is… wild. It’s essentially a FitD game but with the multi-playbook character building of Spire. The setting is bonkers, the character types are bewildering and fun, and the best thing is that the mechanics are flexible enough to accommodate all types of characters.

For example, my character is a gau “char.” In normal people language, that means it is a fungus-humanoid and the ship’s cook. A lot of my character’s personal contribution to the game is cooking, and its personal quest is to be a kind of Darwin-meets-Julia Child, wandering the world and documenting recipes and cooking methods for all the ingredients one can imagine. So far, this character has hit a few personal milestones, taking one step toward proving itself a capable crewmember during a battle, documenting a new recipe for mushrooms learned in a small settlement named Three Masks. Since our ship is essentially a hollowed-out giant centipede that’s kind of still alive, the contributions during battle were culinary: my character fed it certain herbs to trigger certain reactions, and fed it halluciongenic spores (my character’s sweat, essentially) to trigger other reactions.

Cooking is not typically a major action in an RPG. It’s something that’s typically handwaved. But the rules in Wildsea, and the equipment/assets system, are built to accommodate it mechanically and even to allow it occasional spotlight. This is very cool. We’re only a couple of sessions in, so we’re getting the hang of it, but so far I’m enjoying it. For this game, I’m tracking our group’s adventures on a kind of map I’m making and editing in Wonderdraft. It’s not an in-world chart, since the setting actually morphs and changes continually, but it’s sort of a pictorial record of our travels. So far, this is the tiny bit of the map that’s been filled in:

My other game group is playing a Black Hack game inspired by thespaghetti-fantasy Brancalonia setting. It’s not exactly Brancalonia, I don’t think, but it draws heavily upon aspects of it. It’s a picaresque, and our characters are definitely picaros. In this one, I’m playing the normal human type, whose companions include a demon who fled hell and an animated marionette with a bad attitude. Our characters are on a quest to uncover [?riches] in a lost vineyard somewhere, though my goofy inventor character’s main quest is to avoid getting re-conscripted into the Imperial army or forced to do any form of work. Oh, and he definitely wants to catch Tall Hat Man, a rogue who picked his pocket of card game winnings in session 2. Three sessions in, there’s already a cast of NPCs, including a few whom we absolutely love to hate and others that we’re starting to realize are best avoided whenever possible. 

Also, there’s a social resource management aspect to the game. We have a laundry score, for how clean or filthy our clothing is, and the score needs to be refreshed sometimes with clothes-washing… which requires soap, which isn’t free. One can go about dirty, of course, but it affects reaction and social rolls. It’s not quite social Torchbearer, but it is an amusing stat to have to track and manage. One PC in our group bought soap and has been renting out the use of it to the other PCs. (Yes, our game has spontaneously developed “soaplord”-ism.) 

For this game, I’m not making maps, because our GM has already made lovely region maps for us, but I have been writing the session logs on Discord. 

The Brancalonihack game is supposed to run for a limited number of sessions. There’s a set quest, and we’re on it, and it will end at some point specific.

(I’m not sure if it’ll be my turn to run something again then, or someone else’s, but I am starting to think about what I want to run when my turn comes up.)

FILED UNDER: RPG

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *