First, the awesome Quinn’s Quest video:
To your question:
I’ve played and run it a handful of times and am joining a 2-3-month-long campaign of it in a couple of weeks. Backed the original Kickstarter because a good friend’s son did the soundtrack for the game (go Liam!) and got sucked in by the gorgeous art, fabulous mechanics, and really, really incredible community on the creator, Felix Isaacs’s, Discord server. Got to meet and hang out with Felix and their lead playtester Ric at Gen Con over the last couple of years, as well; they’re genuinely awesome people.
The worldbuilding and just vibes of the game are absolutely spot-on and incredibly up my alley. It’s this sort of broken-yet-hopeful timbre, post-apocalypse-but-not-of-our-world-except-maybe-it-was, high action, high adventure, high emotion, high freedom setting that players are unleashed into that’s great for exploration-heavy campaigns where players drive the narrative by shooting off into the wilds in search of whatever calls to their hearts (and the book is loaded with awesome little narrative hooks to help inspire them initially).
Long story short: 300ish years ago, a great calamity known as the Verdancy occurred, and overnight, all plant life began to grow radically and unstoppably, far larger and more hardy than anything ever seen before, and within days, the entire planet was drowned beneath a sea of trees, their roots grinding up the remnants of whatever civilizations existed before. Life carried on, atop high mountain peaks barely reaching over the canopy of mile-high arboreal insanity, or on unstable “spits” of land or ancient things (e.g., naval vessels, shopping malls) that are occasionally thrust upward by a newly grown tree, or on/inside the massive trees themselves. . . except, of course, all this new plant life tends to secrete a mutagenic sap known as Crezzerin which has also rendered most wildlife unrecognizable, massive, and very, very hungry.
The survivors have mastered the art of wildsailing – building great sailing vessels that ride atop the impossibly strong branches of the trees and use insane propulsion mechanisms, like great grinding chainsaws or creeping living tendrils of metal and ghostly essence, to drive themselves through the foliage, which regrows almost immediately after the ships pass, bolstered by Crezzerin. Those brave or insane enough to take up the lifestyle act as the primary link between those isolated islands of civilization, bringing resources, fighting monsters, carrying messages, ferrying passengers, scavenging wrecks, and plumbing the depths for long-buried mysteries.
There’s this wild assortment of creative, delightful playable ancestries in the game, from human-esque Ardents who are in direct communication with the ghosts of their ancestors; to the fungal Gau who grow and reshape themselves to fit their environment: to the body-horror-rich Tzelicrae, living colonies of thousands of sapient spiders that inhabit marionette bodies woven from silk and cloth and wood; to the haunted Ironbound, hulking automatons self-assembled from the wrecks of wildsea ships that became ensouled and longed for contact after their crews died in some forgotten tragedy.
The character class options are fantastic, too, from classic options like gunslinging rangers to silver-tongued bard-analogues, to more unusual choices like mind-altering-tea-brewing Steeps to those whose minds have been warped by Crezzerin to grant them mystical abilities.
It hits a sweet spot for me, mechanically, and I’m super excited for the full version of the generic system license, Wild Words, to come out soon, as I’m thinking of using it for a couple of projects. The dice pools tend to run a little higher than Blades by default, but the GM is encouraged to “cut” dice to reflect difficulty, strenuous situations, or other environmental penalties. The cut happens after dice are rolled, removing however many of your highest rolls, which feels so painful yet is deeply fun to see a gargantuan leviathan’s armored prowess shrug off what would have been a guaranteed hit against a lesser foe, driving your result down to a more complicated “Conflict” roll (6 is pure success, 4-5 is mixed, and 1-3 is failure-but-with-interesting-forward-momentum). Rolling any doubles in your pool adds a twist to the roll: a small narrative/mechanical “oo, extra!” that other players and the GM are welcomed to suggest. The character building/damage systems are neat (I’ll go into that more in a bit), and the act of creating a ship together is such a fantastic Session 0 exercise to make a thing everyone has a stake in, collectively, to help bind the new crew together.
Oh! And then the resources system is a delight, broken down into four varieties (Specimens – organic bits harvested from plants and animals; Salvage – scrap and parts rummaged from wrecks and fallen foes; Charts – guiding maps to help navigate the ever-shifting waves of the sea; and, most interestingly, Whispers, living clumps of words that worm their way into your head and have potent but unpredictable magical effects on the world when spoken or shouted). Plenty of Skills and character abilities let you try to acquire these as you adventure around, and they can generally be traded at ports for other goods/services, combined to make novel, temporary creations, or spent to do things like aid healing, advance your character, or even assemble more-valuable resources. You’re just constantly finding neat little doodads and gewgaws to play around and experiment with as you adventure.
All that said, there are a minor handful of mechanical issues that Felix et. all are thinking of correcting or at least tweaking somewhat in a possible “starter set” box sometime this year or next, and more fully in a v2 after the third and final book, Tooth & Nail, comes out.
Mind, the current main book is genuinely all anyone would ever need to play; it is absolutely and absurdly loaded with cool, flavorful character options, super intriguing and fun enemies/dangers/diseases, and these wonderful little “Reach” vignettes that sketch out the basics of a cool biome/community but leave lots of spaces to fill in with your own details. The just-released first expansion, Storm & Root, focuses on airships and “submersible” ships meant to dive into the deepest reaches of the mile-high forest that covers the world. Tooth & Nail will focus largely on community-building, affecting the larger environment, longer-term campaign extras, etc., but is still very much in the drawing board stages.
But those little issues are just bits that have cropped up over the years. e.g., initially, Felix wanted every character option (Bloodline, races; Origins, backstories; and Posts, classes) to have a few very basic/simple Aspects for newer players to ease themselves into that system with. Aspects are the core character building blocks apart from ability scores (Edges) and skills (Skills). They represent everything from intrinsic physical traits to cool equipment to loyal companions to mystical “arconautic” powers. Like the system @Telefrog was talking about above, damage is dealt to Aspects first and foremost in the system, with far-more serious hits potentially wiping out an Aspect’s full “track” or even adding a new, debilitating Injury track to the character sheets.
Anyway, tracks are at the true core here, functioning like a wildly expanded version of Blades in the Dark’s clocks. They can track things like chase sequences, raising levels of alarm during an infiltration, or enemy HP, much like BitD, but they are also used to measure character Aspects.
Those super simple Aspects Felix included in 1.0 – stuff like, “Your character is very extremely tall,” are a bit like the mechanics-light skills mentioned above in Crown & Skull – just flavor text to be interpreted in the moment without tons of innate mechanical benefits. Sure, if being big is relevant to the action you’re taking, having that Aspect can grant you an extra die on a roll, but apart from that, it’s just “a thing that is.” Their main upshot is that they have very long tracks, so they can soak tons of damage. There are much, much richer, more complex Aspects included as well, with conditionals, pick-lists, compounding abilities, etc., but these generally have much shorter tracks, reflecting the potency of their benefits.
So, issue A) those long-track, do-not-much-at-all Aspects are just kinda boring, and don’t really ease people into the idea very well, since they’re so vague, so in the almost-certainly forthcoming boxed starter set, he’s writing up new Aspects for the core Bloodlines/Origins/Posts, all of which are the more interesting, shorter-track variety (and are totally cross-compatible with the core book Aspects – when making a character, you can pick from either or both lists).
Then, issue B), one of the core means of character advancement is cashing in your earned milestones to improve or, importantly, combine Aspects. You’re limited to a max of 7 Aspects total on your character, so mushing two of them together during downtime to free up a slot is one of the best ways to go “wide” as a character. The combined Aspects, by default, combine their track lengths, though, you see. . . so maybe one of those super specialized, potent Aspects that, say, marks its own track (ticking down how many times you can use it without healing/downtime) to activate cool powers like being able to levitate and control nearby metal, with only 2-3 boxes available, gets combined with one of those bland “You are strong” Aspects with 5-6 boxes, and suddenly you’ve got a “You are so strong you can even warp reality to fling metal objects around” Aspect with as many as 9 boxes, meaning you can suddenly use that “fling metal shit” power 3x as many times per session off of just one character upgrade (the alternative would be spending milestones to increase the original track length by. . . 1, lol).
Anyway, those little quibbles are genuinely minor, and there’s already much-improved errata-including PDFs of the core book available for those that want to evade typos and unclear rules statements. Both of the main books out now are incredible RPG resources and totally worth the purchase, though!
