The Wildsea
en
English
Seas of Isk
Homebrew
Roleplay focused
Hey there! I’m looking for 3 additional players for a long term weekly campaign using a homebrewed setting with the Wildsea system! My GF and her brother will be the other two players joining for a total party of 5.
This will be a more folksy, rural, “low magic” setting inspired by the worlds of Earthsea, Stormlight, and Ghibli with elements from the base setting of Wildsea. Here’s a bit about it:
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Far away across a treacherous sea addled by ancient spirits, the islands of Isk rise bright and stark.
There, since time immemorial, those spirits have served the people of Isk as both friend and foe, blessing and hardship. In any object, location, or living creature of significant age or reverence, a spirit makes its home, gaining strength over time. There exist a rare few mediums that can commune with these spirits, forming a nigh-unbreakable bond that endows them with strange abilities tied to the spirit’s vessel or form.
A furnace-spirit might be immobile but bestow its medium with powers of flame and ash. A cove-spirit, ancient and terrible, might allow its medium to sink any crab-galley that makes the mistake of navigating within its waters. An ancient ceramic blade-spirit might confer great warlike abilities to its owner. Above all spirits of sword, stone, root, or rose, four primeval forces are worshipped and feared. They are the eldest spirit of Fire, its child the stoic Earth, the very Sky above as one, and the youngest and most temperamental, the Sea.
So it is that the lands of Isk have always kept to themselves, each island ringed by uncertain waters. Having no metals of any kind within the Earth, Iskish people build and craft with bone, glass, ceramic, cordage, wood, and sometimes stone. War, the rare time it is waged in defiance of local spirits, is done so with bone or ceramic blades. Travel is infrequent and often dangerous, as one can never know when a hostile, powerful medium is the master of any new tree, castle, mountain, or island.
Iskish fauna is strange and buglike. Crustaceans, isopods, and a whole other host of great shelled beasts have been domesticated since before written memory. These are used to traverse the stormy seas, lands, or even skies of the islands, or else used for food or work.
Isk is lastly a kingdom, and its immortal Queen reigns supreme. The royal family has an ancient connection with the Sky spirit, which aided them in a conquest a thousand years ago to unify the islands. In Faratha, the great cliffside capital of Isk, great and terrible deeds are done in the name of the Queen atop spires of shaped glass and carved amber.
You are a villager from an island-state in the far outer isles of Isk named Honnoc. Warm, humid, and picturesque yet ill-regarded by the inner isles, Honnoc has long been the gathering place for a variety of outcasts and rare cultural traditions in Isk.
Very soon, there will be an upheaval that threatens calamity on every island in Isk, and it will happen in Honnoc on the eve of an ancient summer festival. Very soon, you will leave the peace of your home and search for something that was lost in a place very far from home, on seas you do not know.
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So that’s the idea!
I’m 29M (others are 29F and 27M) and have been a DM for around 11 years almost exclusively running 5th edition DnD. This will be my first campaign with another system. Wildsea is a much less crunchy system than DnD, with more theater of the mind action (for example, combat is done in basically the same way as skill checks, which use a d6 pool). There will probably be a lot of sea travel and exploration, since Wildsea has baked in rules for ships and crew.
I’m a very narrative-forward DM and love some good shenanigans, but this system may not be for you if you love tinkering with numbers and optimizing. In general, I don’t do too much overt romance but am not opposed (though anything NSFW will be a fade-to-black or equivalent). I want to cultivate a longer term group that values respect and empathy, so no Red Hats please.
For timing and platform: We’re thinking weekly on Saturday at 3:00PM PST, and we’ll likely use FoundryVTT (there’s not much in the way of crunchy tactics here though).
I do want to note: I’d strongly prefer people who feel comfortable with having their webcams on for the session, which I’ll also be doing. I just find it pretty hard to GM games with audio-only, and video can help people stay engaged.
If anyone is interested, I’ll ask you to please fill out this google form with some information about yourself. I’m super excited about this and I encourage anyone of all skill levels/familiarities to apply, since we’ll all be pretty new at this. Thanks!
https://forms.gle/NaDNpU4KNiuKth2AA