The Good
Art is amazing. Consistent style, evocative dreamlike chapter art. The style is similar to the Dragon Prince animated TV show, and it is colourful and crisp. Some of the concepts for the setting are quite unusual, and the art really helps to bring the setting to life.
Improvisational tools. The game structures allow and encourage low prep. Many tables are provided for the GM to roll on to help spark creativity. For example, during a journey we rolled a random event, and found an old shipwreck. We went down to explore it. We made a few rolls to avoid notice by some sentient vines, and got into the captain's quarters. We found the log book which had some intel that would help future rolls. This whole scene, fully evocative, was easy to improvise because the reward (logbook) does not need to be spelled out, it is just an idea (similar to a Fate Aspect) which can be used in a future scene to give a bonus.
Tracks for everything. Similar to Tracks in Ironsworn, or Clocks from Blades in the Dark, many objectives and story beats use boxes which are ticked off as you make progress.These set the difficulty of projects or scenes and are also used to track the expenditure of your skills and gear. I love this. It is elegant and intuitive. It is also another tool that encourages improvisation. In our game, our journey to find the enemy ship was a track. Our battle with the enemy captain was also a track. As we rolled skill checks and concluded scenes, we filled in dots on the track. I enjoy this kind of mechanism. It is very flexible, and intuitive to use. It feels like a movie and works well.
Incredible setting. Every now and then I read something that opens my mind and triggers my imagination. I am humbled when I realise (again) how rich some people's imaginations are! This is a setting that is weird and wonderful. It's fantasy, but thankfully without elves and dwarves. Rather there are moth-people and spider-people and fungus-people, riding weird-science ships around a sea of plants. We search the darker depths for salvage, and meet strange towns on islands which might be enclaves of a cult or pirates. There is a lot of freedom, and concepts are loose, which allows a lot of freedom. Intentionally, a map is not provided, because they want a lot of white space for each game table to make the setting their own.
Great website for tracking your campaign. We used the wildsea.charsmith.com website, which guided the players through creating their characters and also provided tools like a dice roller and random table roller for us to use in game. The rolls were visible to all players in the game, and we did not need to use a VTT.
Focus tracking. The GM chapter of the book gives good guidelines to help manage spotlight time between players. It is suggested that the GM has the names of the characters on a piece of paper in front of them. As players fluidly take focus in a scene, the GM marks "A" for action or "R" for reaction next to their names. By glancing at this list, the GM can easily see which players are hogging the scene, and which need to be invited to contribute. This is a great simple tool, and I hope to use it in other games. The online character sheet we used incorporated this tool on the GM's tab.
Actionable, specific, excellent guides in the GM chapter. There are guidelines on how to run a scene, how to set up tracks, how to present the world, how to hand out resources. Sometimes GM chapters can be full of waffle and loose suggestions, but the chapter in Wildsea is very specific. There are bullet lists of ideas, and each short paragraph has a bold one-liner summary. It is readable and a very good tool.
