Quinns Quest Reviews: Your Favourite New Fantasy RPG

greetings traveler and welcome to Quinn's Quest a new television program about the brand new hobby of tabletop role playing games and then the theme tune Dad's doing will go [Music] here what if I was to tell you that you and your friends could crew a ship together and sail it not across a body of water but across the Treetops of an endless Forest perhaps you'd think I was telling Tall Tales well think again today I want to tell you about a role playing game that's been delighting my table and I think it just might Delight yours let's talk about the wild sea a project led by Felix Isaacs now have I played it you bet your pencils I have that's the Quinn's Quest guarantee my friends and I I cannot stop slamming this book are just now wrapping up a stoning 16 session campaign with this game holding our attention like a vice even though I got a whole shelf of games that are positively squealing to be played players players players play me most of all so the wild seat is first and foremost a game of fantasy exploration the player's crew ship that sails across the tree tops of a world which has suffered something like climate change if nature won trees have become impractically massive and animals have become ungodly weird and your table of players will act as a tight-knit crew or sometimes just drive each other totally mental in the manner of Misfit roommates more on that later but fundamentally what I think this game does is take the genre of fantasy and then rip out all of the tropes so you can experience or and Wonder All Over Again inspired by games of Moody colorful apocalypses like Bastion and sunless Skies as well as by China ml's bass lag Trilogy wild SE is a game of travel and exploration where your players will actually be excited about traveling and exploring as the GM going through all of the encounters and locations in this book is like rifling through a giant duffel bag of Cash Money everything is so evocative and imaginative but most of all unexpected that browsing this book causes Adventures to LEAP unbidden into your imagination o my players would have fun with that o that's wild ooh what is that however while wild seed does feel like a love letter to the fantasy genre it has way more love in it than something like Dungeons and Dragons because the primary verbs your players are going to use to interact with this world are not fight and dominate yes there are tremendously exciting things things to hunt and loot and eat if you dispatch some groy mammal or kaleidoscopic slug this is a game that wants you to use every part of that animal no matter how gross those parts are but at the same time take a look at this the skills that wild sea offers you all do double or triple Duty hunt will help you line up a shot but also locate a rare Beetle break could see you snapping some BEAST's spine but it could just as easily see you dismantling Salvage you're snapping at a friend and your cruise ship could end up looking like something that fell out of the monster hunter universe but it could just as easily be a post office or a traveling bar my players got really excited designing their ship as a group in the sessions area of our campaign and then looked at what they' made and realized they were now driving an ambulance the only thing that matters is that this is a game about sailing and the sailing kind of sucks it's really hard but you're going to get to Ports and the ports are going to be super weird now when I tell you that this game stands like a Mighty Oak Head and Shoulders above other tabletop RPGs you can buy you might rightfully assume that I'm talking about the rules but let's turn this into a teachable moment rules are the second most important part of a tabletop role playing game rules aren't what cause you to pull a game off a shelf start reading it keep reading it call up your friends and say guys there's an emergency and they say what is it and you go we're going to have maybe too much fun the number one thing when it comes to designing an RPG is for want of a better word Vibes I'm talking about the act of reading a book and feeling your imagination start to gather in your head like charged storm clouds I'm talking about the tone that sets you and all your players on the same page as you start to build a story together I'm talking about the sense of potential that has you all showing up at someone's house week after week even when you've had too big of a dinner and the wild sea is a master class in how to make a book seep through your fingers and into your skull where it then lives forever which is what we want I made it sound weird but it's what we want the art in this book isn't just great there is a staggering amount of it and I delighted in printing off whole reams of it for whenever my players encountered a boat or a guy or a funky little animal I'd toss the art at them and it was like feeding time at the zoo they couldn't get enough now to be clear an RPG does not need art to achieve this and for a great case study in this I'd point you towards some of the new Games published by The Gauntlet I'm thinking here about Sil verses and Public Access those are games that get you hyped through nothing more than staggeringly good writing and layout layout is so important just that Wy has great writing and layout as well half of the pages in this book have little slips of in Universe fiction that reference whatever you're reading about on the opposite page and I am so Arch and picky about my fantasy writing I'm such a Critic so no one was more surprised than me when I found myself straightforwardly delighted all of these warm and witty bite-sized vignettes are also demonstrating to wouldbe GMS how they too might capture the voice of this world of course this being an RPG you can run it however you want in fact wildy has a nice page on how you can tweak the world you can throw away this you can keep that you can it more magical more technological more goofy more Saturday morning cartoon however I wanted to run this book exactly how it told me I'm just a big S I'm sing on the seven C's you however are free to become ungovernable on the subject of which while this is a dense book that is filled with law like some kind of Rich milu cake it is the right kind of law like a lot of RPGs will often have pages and pages on who the gods are on the history of this world who's the king all of which players don't need to know because like you know the expression how do you not know this have you been living in a cave yeah players in RPGs spend a lot of time in caves don't be hating wild C knows that what players care about is what they are investigating or hiding from or selling or kissing right now which is why this book has no politics it has no Gods it has no history because all of that was forgotten when trees swallowed the planet and that's great because players didn't care anyway you know what they care about 40 different fed up little animals that they could keep as pets and in the same vein what I care about as a GM isn't law that I have to read to my players before we start playing I care about stuff I can stun my players with while we're playing I want a book to give me all the cool Hooks and ideas and scenes and stuff that is going to make me look like a superstar when I drop it on my group like I'm dropping a microphone and wild see oh boy it's got me covered included in this book is more or less 140 pages of Glorious stuff with precisely the right amount of detail a big city or some villainous Leviathan gets like a whole page all to itself while batshit illnesses or ideas for pirates are 10 to a page now if you're only familiar with Dungeons and Dragons you might be quite surprised with the wild sea taking some of the biggest elements of its well building and reducing them to functionally bullet points but if we're going to talk about that let's talk about this book's most extreme example of it which is the different what this game called Bloodlines which I don't love but basically species that you can play so your character might be a human but you might also choose to be a moth or a fungal Colony that is is constantly reshaping itself according to its needs or you could play a cactus person called an actus I could keep going I will keep going there's a mantis in the expansion that is all about self-improvement that made me almost cry when I read it because it's it touches my trauma vulnerability that might be part of Quinn's Quest let's find out how I feel about it after this video goes up if you're an actus the book talks about how you might eat food by crushing it over your head it talks about the role of spines in ector culture and also out of all the playable species the book mentions the us feel this profound sense of loss for their civilization which has now been swallowed up somewhere deep under the forest canopy you then also get a gorgeous page of powers your actus might have but that's it that's all you get you're expected to roleplay a cactus with like a couple of flash cards for notes that sounds on the face of it like an intimidating role-play proposition right certainly way trickier sounding than for example playing a dwarf where you can draw in all the stereotypes of depictions of dwarves in ever but in Wild SE the game giving you a blank area for you to fill in yourself free of problematic stereotypes is the point rather than me talking about this I'm going to let the designer of the game talk about it in a section that I like to call what were you thinking I just think it's more fun the more flexibility you give players to decide what and who they are the more interesting stuff they will come up with because one of the the basic rules I think of role playing games is that players are always going to come up with cooler stuff than the designer I don't like shutting those ideas down before they've started by going this is specifically this so maybe when you play wild sea you'll just use the different Bloodlines to create a visually wild and wonderful cast but that all basically act human in the manner of a Saturday morning cartoon but maybe you would actually like to play a cactus person as an opportunity to think about life as something fully alien they about the Adrian chaikovsky fans in the audience or maybe you want to use your character's person to tell a story that Echoes some element of your racial experience or gender or sexuality two of my players chose to be an Ironbound which is basically a shipwreck that got so lonely it became sentient and went looking for friends and a celic which is basically a thousand spiders piloting a corpse like a big Mech and if this book had told us what either of those species were my players would have had to have done all this homework before basically getting into an improv straight jacket but instead we were free to Define what those species meant for us which at my table was a lot of stuff about looking for your identity fittingly my actus player chose to be a cactus without spines who was bullied in childhood and then got into body modification and piercing as an adult but then started to question why they were doing it and my Ironbound started to worry in her darkest moments that she wasn't a real person but was just this weird assembly of Parts mimicking personhood which was a really touching story that I'm sure lots of the people watch this can relate to in general I think I just really liked how this game dealt with the deeply problematic thing that we're now trying to unpick in Dungeons and Dragons of how prescriptive you should be about what a race is and also what races you're allowed to kill because they're definitely evil Wy just says here's a cool picture of a moth they're into tattoos and they don't live long you like that no that's cool I mean how about you're not defined by your race at all how about you're defined by being a chef you want to be a chef with a pet octopus yeah you like that sick let's play one final point on World building that's more straightforward I cannot tell you how good it is to have a ship traveling around as your campaign frame here's Felix saying it better than I can one it avoids meeting at a tavn suddenly with a with a a vehicle to crew you have a shared interest you may not like each other you may have different motives and reasons but you have that one thing that you want to preserve or that you want to stay near and the second one is people like owning a thing that the opportunity to start with something that is Bare Bones and slowly improve over time or even start with something that's kind of cool and put your own mark on it it just seemed like a one I didn't want to miss on yeah no no I know that's what I'm saying that's my that's my point exactly and you know what else having your players be the officers of a ship lets them design a whole underc crew of NPCs for them to boss around and make friends with and get in fights with one of the best simple GM tips I know is that it's always better to bring an old NPC back than it is to introduce a new one and a ship means you do that automatically okay I can't put it off any longer it's time for me to talk about the rules of wild sea but first this guy wants to talk to you only only me we've had a lot of you telephone in my house to ask if you can still buy the official Quinn's Quest VHS cassette tape containing the first ever Quinn's Quest reviews we made a thousand of these back when we thought we were going to get picked up by the Discovery Channel before they disgrace themselves by deciding not to sign a contract with the future of gaming anyway for legal reasons this VHS is no longer available but we do apparently have a new way for you to support us we've signed up with a new internet website called patreon if you have a computer at home simply Go to http colon sl/ patreon.com slq Quest you'll be able to join the quins Quest EST internet fan club and for every single video review that we release you'll get access to a whole second video about how to role playay which is how I do it in fact the first secret fan club video is available right now 10 tips on how to roll dice properly that's not a joke it's also not anything so vulgar as a top 10 list it's just 10 tips there happen to be 10 of them or the number two will surprise you but there's more fan club is simply jam packed I will be doing something called vlogging still not sure what that is also you will get access to the full 45 minute interviews that I do with designers to prepare for every Quinn's Quest review there's also apparently you can pay slightly more to talk to me back to wild sea all right we've talked about the brain of wild sea the heart let's talk about the bones Let Me Whip this GM screen around for you let's talk about the rules [Applause] rules the rules are good so wild SE uses the rather good rules from blades in the dark which I heard recently is the second most popular role playing game now after Dungeons and Dragons if that's true that's crazy let me know so when you're doing something that feels like it might have an exciting consequence you take a number of d6s depending on what your character is good at and roll them all if the highest number is a six you did it you're brilliant but most likely your highest number is a four or five which is a success Kinder and if your highest number is a 1 to three it's not just a failure it's a full-on disaster the GM takes their gloves off and everyone groans or grins as things get worse and the reason this works so well is that it's propulsive whatever you roll the next scene flops onto the table whether you leap over the obstacle or things get worse or both side note here a handful of d6es is the most tactile thing to roll that's not an opinion it's a fact grow up this game also has blades's thing of depicting serious challenges as clocks or tracks which you roll dice to fill up which I'm not going to get into here but it basically means that wild sea plays like a movie does whether you're fighting a thousand monkeys or fleeing a big turtle or giving a speech to a city you just imagine the camera on a player character they do a roll you fill in a bit of a clock you go to the next character they roll fill in a bit of a clock and then you can do stuff like have clocks that are ticking away in the background between sessions adding dread or you can do stuff like racing clocks to add tension it's a straightforwardly strong system which I personally have zero complaints about and my players adore that doesn't mean wild he doesn't have crunch let's talk about loot you like finding things taking things having things this game's got you covered there's no money in the world of wild seat there's just this stuff that comes in four categories and then there are these things called Montage phases where players can spend things they've got trying to heal or repair the ship or get Buffs by doing stuff like making an egg for a good friend that's not a joke that's something my players actually did the loot system is also good it's not perfect though my players had conps over one rule in particular which is that to heal you spend a resource then roll some dice but if you get a disaster on the roll you actually injur yourself that had to leave cuz they would have killed me I as a GM also found the rules for taking the different stations to Pilot the ship a little threadbear and restrictive so I just didn't use them that said the rest of wild se's rule set which has nothing in common with blades in the dark I came away much more impressed than I did annoyed in fact here are a whopping five rules that I thought are good and I want to tell you about them first Whispers which are sort of magic spells but better this Terry praner ass idea is that some words in the wild sea are alive and tunnel into your head and live there until you say them think of these as deeply ominous One-Shot magic spells that just consist of the words a second ending or an ominous croaking the book is full of them and that's the spell that's all the details you get a player can then whisper them to get a secret from the GM or you can shout them to change your environment dramatically but what exactly happens is entirely up to the GM I cannot overstate how fun this is my players adored finding Whispers they loved deciding to use them and they particularly loved how when they say they were using them they sort of crashed my GM operating system as I just stared into the middle distance and realized they my story and this was going to be way better than what I had planned number two twists are the idea that if you ever roll doubles in a dice pool something totally unexpected happens now if this was just left up to the GM that would be a truly awful rule about a third of the rules in the game would see the players looking at the GM and going go and then Screen Monkey surprise us come on but twists explicitly let the entire table suggest stuff it's like a writing room people say what about this what about this what about this which is just terrible if it's your character hearing your friends suggest a variety of terrible that could happen to you more seriously though I think having these regular moments where players get to be creative causes players to uh become more invest Ed in scenes that their character might not be involved in and think about the world on a more concrete level just good number three aspects maybe wild se's biggest Innovation so wild sea doesn't have hit points it doesn't have special skills or Powers instead it mashes them together in a way that is absolutely Bodacious and I fully expect other RPGs to steal so when you build your character and as you gain experience you go shopping for all of these cool abilities the book has tons of them and none of them are off limits grab whatever you want from whatever page you want you're not at risk of stepping on the player's toes like oh I was the chef there are simply too many abilities for that to ever happen from grappling hooks to having a therapeutic voice to having a kitten made of storm clouds to having a special spice blend to having a ship's cannon in your chest and when you get hurt you choose what aspect gets damaged and when a track is full that thing can't be used until you find some healing I don't like hit points in General I ended up thinking like what what really makes a character and most of the moments of high tension in in most of the things i' I've enjoyed are when they are denied that thing so instead of having like you know you've lost all your hit points your character is dead have a a system which essentially kind of splits hit points down into tiny tracks for for each of the most important things that make you recognizable and make you definable and I think it adds an element of choice that a lot of games don't have give you an example my Ironbound player had an aspect that she was just massive and at one point a monster in my campaign took a huge bite out of her so she filled the track and then was no longer massive she narrated having those parts of herself disappear into the monsters gullet and it's counterintuitive right because you'd think no player wants to lose their cool Powers but more than that players want cool things to happen to their characters and in Wild SE when somebody loses their aspect through some awful thing you all see it in slow motion but then whenever they get the resources to rebuild themselves and get it back that is also a cool moment restoring your character's hit points is so deathly dull that even the best actual play performers in the world will glaze over it but a scene where you recover an aspect and your crew have you on their side again it's just badass fourth thing I like Meyers the Wy is a grueling and pretty cursed landscape to travel and boats don't offer a lot of comfort or privacy so Myers are basically your character's worst traits that get steadily worse during long voyages one pip means you should start bringing it into your roleplay two Pips means you lose dice every time you act against it now if your group don't like player conflict so not a problem just pick Myers from the game that make you a little awkward little emo but if you like a little friction in your fiction little Spice in your cooking ugly Meyers like you call cause more pain than necessary can Define whole Adventures the Maya system might only be a small part of your character sheet but my table at least it brought out the best of my players not because they didn't hate each other at times but because it let them roleplay being there for each other even when it was hard and finally number five wild se's language system cuz I was surprised when I read this and I was even more surprised at how it played so while all of your PCS speak low sour a kind of sailor PIR right underneath skills are all of the other languages you might know and there's this cute thing in the game where the languages you speak are also the knowledge skills that your character has like speaking the cactus language gives you a much better grasp on botany and speaking the can of merchants is one and the same as your character knowing about trade routes but what I was not expecting is for the languages in this game to lead to maybe the most entertaining role play in my campaign if only one player has the language required to to speak to an NPC it gives that player a really nice bit of focus without excluding other players from the scene or if you're doing a scene in the language of spiders in which two players are fluent but then a third player only knows a few words it's so funny it's so funny it also leads to really good relationship triangles like I read a GM tip once which I think is really good which is it's great for your NPCs to feel differently about at least two different players and languages automatically mean you do that because an NPC might have just straight up immediately a great connection to one player because they share a language and doesn't like the person who they can't communicate with I mean I guess really at the end of the day it's all about just how it instantly makes the relationships in the game more intense you get unexpected bed fellows when two people speak the same language but they learned it for different reasons you might have your brain dead fighter negotiating with the villain of the campaign based on what they speak or you might have your group's negotiator doing the most important parly of the campaign in a language where they know about 100 words it can be strange and unsettling but also weird and wonderful when you know some of a language but not all uh not Everyone likes the language system and some people avoid languages and that's absolutely fine but I think having languages in code cultural information is core to the system and I think it just suits the setting it does suit the setting in that interview Felix described wild SE to me as what if there was an apocalypse but it made the world better I've talked a lot about the different aspects of this book but if there is a theme that runs through it like a shiny ribbon and that theme is community your community of players yep and your crew but also the communities that you visit and that feed you and shelter you even as they each struggle to figure out what life means for them now and the new lives people are forging out here in the wild sea aren't free of danger but they are inarguably more diverse and caring and colorful than they were before and what the centering of language does in wildy is it acknowledges that this is something you have to work really hard at and fight for you have to fight for it just as hard as you fought to survive that big weird plant thing that ambushed you and with its beautiful art and its bold optimism I think this book wants you to reflect on how wonderful the world can be if you do that finally we're going to be ending each review on Quinn's Quest by giving the designer an opportunity to Pay It Forward by talking about a couple of other games that they recommend Spotlight wise I will never not recommend B of the Beast it was the thing I heard on the one podcast Network that maybe start thinking about games in a different way and heart heart is a brilliant game it's a terrifying horror-based game but it well written horror and the book is beautiful well that's it for this episode of quinc as we place this this game Into The Archives join me next episode of Quinn's Quest as I cover a game that is even more action-packed than wild sea and takes place in the furthest reaches of outer space but fear not you'll always be safe here with me on Quinn's [Music] [Music] Quest [Music]

Channel: Quinns Quest

Views: 180,190

Keywords: Games, TTRPGs, Roleplaying Games, The Wildsea, Tabletop RPGs

Id: c29Ecut4K_E

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024