This week, Sam talks with Ryan Khan about Whispers, a player resource from The Wildsea by Felix Isaacs, but really about a whole bunch of mechanics from The Wildsea. Some topics discussed include:
Setting as game design, and open ended lore
Open ended prompts
Twists vs Devil’s Bargains
Player agency
Long skill lists: pros and cons
Games mentioned:
You can find Ryan Khan on Twitter @theOneTrueK and on itch.io at the-one-true-ryan-khan.itch.io
You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io, and by subscribing to the Dice Exploder newsletter.
You can find The Wildsea at thewildsea.co.uk
The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and take it out for an unforgettable night on the town. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co-host today is Ryan Khan.
When I started this show, I knew I wanted to have on a mix of people I know and love and people I know nothing about. So after every episode, I started asking all my co-hosts who else I should have on the show. And this immediately paid off in spades because my first co-host, Ray Chou, recommended Ryan Khan. And Ryan was such a pleasure to talk to.
Like Greg last episode, I've come to think of Ryan as a guy with unmatchable passion for The Wildsea by Felix Isaacs. Ryan's, of course, a designer too, most notably having contributed the dragonfly rules to The Wildsea, AKA rules for solo play in what is otherwise a pretty classic forged in the dark adjacent game.
Now, normally I have one rule for co-hosts when they choose a mechanic to bring on the show, which is that they can't bring in a game that they contributed to. But this week I bent that and encouraged Ryan to bring something in from The Wildsea. It's a game I have a lot of thoughts about, both wildly positive in some regards and quite frustrating in others, and I thought it'd be a lot of fun to talk through all that with someone who just unabashedly loves the game.
He ended up picking a mechanic that I love, whispers, which let us talk about the poetry of language and how the setting of a game is game design in and of itself. But this is really an episode about the game as a whole. We cover at least three different Wildsea mechanics.
So let's get to it. Here is Ryan Kahn with Whispers from The Wildsea.
Ryan, thanks for being here.
Ryan: Well thank you for having me.
Sam: What are we talking about today? What have you brought us?
Ryan: So I have brought what is probably one of my favorite mechanics of all time. It's from the Game The Wildsea, and it is they're called Whispers.
Sam: Very spooky.
Ryan: I mean, I, I can jump into that now if you'd like. Quickly.
Sam: No, let's, let's start with what is the Wild Sea?
Ryan: Yeah.
So The Wildsea is a post-fall solar punk game where the entire world has been taken over by a global forest, and the survivors live on the tops of trees and on the tips of mountains and wild sailors sail the tree, top seas in chainsaw powered ships.
Sam: Yeah,
Ryan: Yeah, it's
Sam: it's cool. It's as cool as it sounds like if there's one thing to be said about this game, it's that you owe it to yourself, listener, to look up the art for how friggin sweet this looks.
Ryan: Oh yeah. The art is just, it's fantastic. The artists capture the feel of the world so well,
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: and there's art on almost every page of the book as well.
Sam: It's, it's a gorgeous looking book.
Ryan: really, really is.
Sam: So, yeah, one of my weekly games loves the world of Wildsea. We sat down, we played a couple of sessions of it. We decided to end up stealing the world and going and playing an Apocalypse World campaign like in the setting.
But one of my players said that the setting, like it, it hasn't been since Star Wars that a setting feels like this big and open-ended to him. And I really think that that's true to me too in a way. Like this, the world of this thing is just so cool and so ripe for pirate adventures that feel weird is kind of the vibe.
Ryan: Yeah. Like it feels like it's perfect weird fantasy. But it also, I feel like it offers us a new kind of sandbox to play in. With, just like it has some kind of core principles that are true about the world, and then some fine details, but the stuff in between is super open-ended.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
So let's get into Whispers. So what are Whispers and how do they fit into this game, both flavorfully and mechanically?
Ryan: Well, in world Whispers are living words that reside in people's minds. And when spoken out loud, they have the ability to tweak reality.
From a mechanical point of view, Whispers are a player resource. You can, you collect them, you can find them, you can trade them away. But you can use them to twist the narrative in subtle ways. So you take the wording of whisper... A Whisper is just a short phrase, something like "sunset through leaves" or um,
Sam: A gathering storm, I think is one of the ones in the book.
Ryan: And you use that as a creative prompt for how the world might change. And then when you use that resource, it actually gives the player a bit of agency to change what's going on in the world. There might be a bit of a back and forth with the GM, but end of the day it is like you get to tweak what's going on in little flavorful or interesting ways.
Sam: Yeah. So why did you bring this mechanic? What makes Whispers your favorite mechanic?
Ryan: It comes from a couple of different places. The first one is, I love this idea of a... Cuz it's kind of a randomizer, this creative prompt, but it's super open-ended. Like unlike when using something like dice or rolling on a table this is intentionally cryptic, which really opens it up to the player. And another aspect of what I enjoy is that it is just like it's fuel for player agency.
Because it is a player driven resource. So the player gets to choose like, when do you want to use it? And they largely have final say over what happens. I mean, everyone, like the, everyone has to agree. But the final say comes from the person who used the Whisper.
Sam: When you're talking about player agency with Whispers I feel as a reader and as someone who hasn't played a lot of Wildsea, like on the one hand this is a mechanic that is very much encouraging players to step up and take that narrative control, but on the other hand is a little bit doing a inscribing of like when and where players are allowed to take narrative control. Is that how it feels? Like, is this a game that is trying to do the, like writer's roomy kind of approach to play? Or is this a game where it is specifically trying to just provide players smaller moments to take up that space?
Ryan: I think actually, like the comparison to the writer's room is, is quite apt. Uh, The Wildsea is inherently a highly collaborative game. There are a lot of other mechanics within the rule set that encourage players to be proactive and not just with what their character does, but like have a role in shaping the world.
Sam: Yeah. tell us about Twists, right?
Ryan: Yeah. So Blades in the Dark, you know, you roll a handful of dice. 1, 2, 3 is a failure. Four and five is a mixed success, and six is a full success. The Wildsea takes that framework, but if you roll doubles, you get a Twist. And a Twist is again, this small, flavorful tweak to the situation.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: It can be good or bad or neutral, but it's another time when players get the final say on what's going on. Twists are often pitched around the table, like the, if you know you have an idea or another player or the GM has idea,
Sam: we did a whole episode on Devil's Bargains.
Ryan: Okay.
Sam: Yeah.
I think most people are familiar with The
uh, hope. Yeah, Yeah.
Yeah. It's sort of like that. But after the roll right?
Ryan: Yeah, like after you see the results of the role. And it's just a chance again to add in a little bit of flavor. So Whispers kind of build off of this twist mechanic where it's easy to describe a whisper as a twist that you can call in whenever you want.
Sam: Yeah, that's actually something I really loved reading the rules is that because twists are such a, like, core mechanic to the game, describing what a Whisper is mechanically is so much easier than it otherwise would be because you can refer back to the mechanic of twists that you've already established.
It just, it's a great way of like adding what might be a, like, fairly complicated idea of a mechanic to another game, but without really adding that much more complexity to the rules. Since
Ryan: Yeah.
you're
Sam: Already doing that thing so much.
Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. It becomes a concept that is familiar, just deployed in a slightly different area. And I found that players largely, like, once you get into the game, players are pretty good at like, getting a feel for it. I mean, much like devil's bargains, once you understand what's going on, it's like, oh yeah, I can come up with some cool stuff for this.
Sam: Yeah, totally. So the, the other thing that you mentioned is that Whispers, are these like short piffy phrases that provide you like a little bit of a jumping off point. And I, I love them as an example of...
There's this old, I first heard Mark Rosewater, the Magic: the Gathering designer say this, but I'm sure it goes back earlier than that: restrictions breed creativity. That it's way easier in a lot of ways to take a sentence like "sun through the leaves" and turn that into a cool thing that would happen here. Then for someone to just say to you, "all right. What's the cool thing that would happen here?"
Like, you can do that, but like having a more precision, having like someone fill in a little bit of the canvas so you're not start starting completely blank, I feel like is is a really great prompt to have. And, and Whispers are clearly really great at that.
Ryan: Yeah, I think it's, it's having the, like knowing where the limits are
Sam: Hmm.
Ryan: and then you can kind of go hard within those limits. Which really ends up helping things like Whispers.
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: And it, it also becomes a fun game of interpretation because there's no right or wrong way to interpret a Whisper.
Sam: Hmm.
Ryan: Like I was playing in a game and the group's ship was about to go over the edge of this giant rift and fall into the depths of the Wildsea. And one of the players said, oh, I have this Whisper, it's called "a risen wreck." Can I use that to have a platform rise up out of the depths and cradle the ship?
It's like, oh yeah, that's super flavorful. That's super cool. And it was this really like fun, exciting moment as they're, you know, careening over the edge of this thing to like have this out.
Sam: I love how visual that is too, that. I, I found like a lot of RPGs, at least in the genre of sort of like swash-buckley action that I Wildsea lives in really do well when you are spending a lot of time, like as a group describing things like it's a movie. Like even going into specific shot descriptions.
Ryan: Oh,
Sam: a, a fun, yeah. You're.
Ryan: I do that all the time. Like the camera opens up on, you know, we zoom in here, like
Sam: " Pan up and away from the smoking wreckage of," yeah. And the way Whispers give you the prompt for that, like, there's such visual little phrases that they conjure a visual description too. They, they, they inspire a visual moment in you, I think, which leans into that style of play in a really effective way.
Ryan: Oh yeah. I definitely, I definitely agree with that. I would describe this as a very visual game as well.
Sam: Hmm.
Ryan: Maybe visuals the wrong word, but just it
Sam: the art, listen, coming back to the art, it's certainly a visual game regardless of what other thing you're about to say.
Ryan: It, it has a very rich aesthetic that is both evocative, but really open. Like, it, it can handle a lot of different things and I found that. Most players I've played with, even if they are brand new to the Wildsea, are brand new to the game, quickly kind of gro the weird that's going on in the world.
Sam: Hmm. That's really cool. Do you wanna take that as a, as a jumping off point forward talking a little bit more about how Whispers fit into the world flavorfully and how there's a few different options for how that works?
Ryan: Oh yeah, for sure. So, you know, as I was saying before, Whispers are literally living words. So the, the game itself, the setting is very much weird fantasy. But there isn't magic in the traditional sense.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Ryan: There's no magic in the sense of these things being completely like arcane and opaque and like, only the wisest or most studied can really understand how it works.
Sam: There's no school where you go to learn how Whispers work.
Ryan: No, no. The, the weird in this world is very much Like it can be learned and understood and it follows presumably some kind of rules, which the rules itself are left totally open-ended for your own table to decide what they are. But it is a weird, weird world.
So Whispers themselves are part of that weird, they're part of the, like they're called arc onautics. And receiving a Whisper, it's like you get this phrase that is essentially alive. And if you whisper it, you know, it can affect the world in subtle ways, but you have a bit of control over it.
Your other option is to scream it out and this, as this big burst, the impact on the world becomes much larger, but your control on it also goes away.
Sam: Oh yeah.
Ryan: And it's just like, It's a small detail, but it can really change it, the flavor of a moment.
Sam: What I love about Whispers and, and what we're talking about here is how this is a mechanic that feels so full of texture from the game world itself. Like scrolls in like Dungeons and Dragons feel like an obvious comparison to Whispers, like a one shot use of magic. Scrolls are another example of a mechanic where what they are mechanically is just like, you one time can use this spell. Cool. But they also exist as a piece of paper or a thing in the book, like in your character's possession.
Whereas a Devil's Bargain or a Twist or something is not in fiction like in the game.
And I think those mechanics that exist in both places like this are just so evocative in this really compelling way.
Ryan: And I think one thing that makes, like I, I agree with you that scrolls feel a little bit like, familiar if nothing else, right? Like I've seen scrolls. And what really makes Whispers feel different is that whispers are inherently open-ended.
When you have scrolls, when you're talking about Vancian magic, you know, it's like this scroll casts this spell. And while of course like you know, you have Fireball Classic, right? While you can get creative with how to use Fireball, To help you out outside of just unanimity, cuz it's fire, you can burn stuff down, it's forceful, you can break stuff, whatever. But it's still that spell.
Whispers on the other hand are just like, the phrasing is what gives it meaning and gives it power. And if your context changes, if your situation changes the way you might go to interpret your Whisper is also likely to change.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's really easy to imagine being in a bar in a tight situation and whispering A risen wreck to learn the information you need to blackmail the person in front of you who's got it out for you. Right?
Ryan: Or if you want like the big bruiser who's passed out and drunk to get back up. Like you could easily
Sam: Go up and just Whisper in their ear, right? Like, Hey buddy, you gotta get back on your feet, dude. You've got the power.
Ryan: Yeah.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan: Like the context suddenly changes and I've seen people, you know, especially during play testing, cuz there were just a, you know, a handful of Whispers that were were available to choose from. Now, Whispers you can just make up by making any kind of pithy phrase. But of course, like when people are making their characters and they're choosing, like they're starting resources, there are certain Whispers that I would see, you know, come up reasonably frequently,
Sam: Hmm.
Ryan: But I never saw them used it the same way.
Sam: Yeah.
I wanna summarize here that the thing I love about both the pithy phrase side of this encouraging you and your table to have a conversation about what happens and the flexibility of that and the like flavor side of things of like clearly Whispers are like an abstract part of the setting that encourages you and your table to have a conversation about what are these exactly, how do they fit into the world.
And whispers are a component of the game in mechanics and in flavor and in both parts of that encouraging this conversation at the table to just talk about your story and where it's going.
It's so cool. It's, it just, this was exactly what we talked about for half an hour on the Devil's Bargain episode, was just how Devil's Bargain are, are basically a play philosophy rather than a mechanic of just talk to each other about what sounds cool.
And this is another great example of a mechanic that's doing that on multiple fronts.
Ryan: I mean, I like, cause I also like, you know, play with design and at one point Felix, the, so like, you know, the author of the Wildsea said to me like, you've only designed GM-less games. And it wasn't until that moment that I realized that. Cuz it wasn't a conscious decision that I'm not going to write something with the GM is just, I really like the space that exists when everybody is contributing. And so I think that's also probably what I love about Whispers is that it's like, it's an invitation to get everybody in on that conversation.
Sam: I just realized that I've only designed GM-less games, by the way. Um, Like as you were saying that. Yeah. For the same reason that Yes. Bringing people in, extending the invitation. That's such a good phrase for it. I love these mechanics that extend the invitation to everyone at the table to get their hands dirty with story.
Ryan: Mm-hmm. And I, I think what works well with the Wildsea is that it's this very, again, that's evocative world, but not a lot is set in stone.
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: Like if you were to read the book, you're not gonna find huge passages of lore. But you'll find kind of like suggestions of it here and there.
Like a name might get dropped or an event might be kind of mentioned in passing without fully going into what it is because that's another invitation of like, you tell us what's it like.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Blades in the Dark obviously is another game that I think is really great at that. I feel like its setting has more touchstones that people understand immediately, but the Wildsea feels a little more out there, but still in this way that, that meets you with its energy really well.
And uh, the Rowan, Rook, and Deckard game like Heart and Spire, I think also are great examples of other games that have such evocative settings that are really come in and fill out the details.
Ryan: Yeah. Heart is also one of my favorite games, and big reason, it's like, it's another just really weird world, and I love that. I think I'm just kind of...
I grew up reading fantasy, playing fantasy games. I love my fantasy. But when it comes to playing games now it's like I kind of know that sandbox, and I'm looking for games that might offer me something a little bit fresh for me.
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: And so when I come across as like a weird setting, I'm almost like, oh yeah, let me uh, let me look more into this.
Sam: Yeah.
Gosh, we might have to have you back to talk about Heart and--
God, I've run two campaigns of heart. I love that setting so much. So much of the rules I really dislike. I really have problems with a lot of the rules, and I feel like we could have a really interesting conversation about that.
And actually that brings me to, if you're open to it, I would love to lay out some friction I have with the Wildsea in terms of everything that I think Whispers does really
Ryan: well.
Yeah, please do.
Sam: So for me, I wanna talk about the action role a little bit here. So when you're building a dice pool in the Wildsea, you get one die from an edge, which is sort of like how you are doing the thing. The edges are grace and iron and instincts... Cool.
And then you get some number of dice from a skill that is relevant. And these are study and sway and hunt and flourish and wavewalk, which is riding the leaves, right?
Ryan: Yeah, it's uh, swimming in a world with no water.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, And. There are a lot of skills in this game. There's 18, is that right?
Ryan: Yes.
Sam: I always had the friction when I was running and playing this game of when you sit down to build the dice pool, I'm like picking an edge and that takes a minute because some of them are very evocative, but a little abstract like sharps and teeth and tides.
And then I'm going and picking a skill. And sometimes that's a little hard too for me because we have study and sense and we have hack and break.
And is this this action or is this that other action and that felt like it bogged things down at my table in a way where so many other mechanics, like the Whispers were doing this incredible, like pushing the story forward.
Ryan: I think now, I don't know if this is just cuz I have more, like I've, I've played a ton of the Wildsea, so I
Sam: yeah,
Ryan: In terms of just like system mastery, I'm really comfortable with edges and skills at this point. And of course, that's gonna just, you know, speed things up for what I'm playing.
But uh, using, so your example like break and hack, I know Felix has said the reason that that is there is to draw the distinction between the natural world and the constructed world.
So hack is used for vegetation. In a world like the Wildsea, you know, Felix's stance is like, yeah, it got, gotta focus on the naturey part. But if someone says, I don't have hack, but I have break and I wanna cut down this vine,
I would say, yeah, go ahead and roll break, but cut one to represent like it's a little bit different.
Sam: And cutting is just dropping the highest die that you rolled, right?
Ryan: Yeah, so it's, yeah, it happens after the roll. You drop the highest die.
Sam: Yeah, that makes sense.
I remember having a big conversation about this in the Discord at one point and Felix having this really interesting argument that was like, you know, there's a lot of skills here because I want all of these things to be important to the game.
I want you to come in and look and see, cook on the skills and understand that cooking could be a big part of your campaign and a big part of this world.
But also then at the table, if I have dots in Cook, like every time my players were like, well, can I make this cook somehow?
Ryan: Oh yeah. I mean there was one player, Rick, and he played a character for a long time that was naturally hallucinogenic.
Sam: Hmm.
Ryan: And had a fishing rod and would basically like fling himself into the mouths of adequately large creatures and make them hallucinate from the inside. So at no point is there like an attack roll or anything like that. He's like, I'm going to roll to try and get myself swallowed. And because he has the aspect naturally hallucinogenic, that's just like he's naturally hallucinogenic.
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: And so I think you would use like vault or something like that to get into things.
Sam: Right.
Ryan: And like from inside it might've been like a concoct roll.
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: Which isn't necessarily what you imagine as a thing that's gonna help you out in a big action scene,
Sam: Right.
Ryan: but it still can. And so like that flexibility of having this like breadth of skills, I think. Maybe that's like kind of the other side of what you're talking about.
I like the hitches that you hit, I've heard like lots of other people mention that as well. So I definitely get where you're coming from.
Sam: Well the, it's clearly also just like a taste thing too. This is not the first game that's had 18 skills and it won't be the last. And clearly there are a lot of people for whom it's not a huge point of friction.
And I really do love and respect the argument that I want all of these skills in the game because each one of these actions being distinct matters to the setting. Having hack and break be different skills says something really important about the world of the Wildsea.
And that adds complexity and friction to me playing the game. But it also conveys that overall vibe we were talking about with so much praise earlier.
And my design sensibilities would be to scale back some of those things. If people have listened to previous episodes, you've heard me talking about how much I love minimalism a lot of times by this point. But if you lose enough of those mechanical things, you are going to diffuse it to some extent. And I would make that compromise, but I, I think the argument that that that is a compromise and it's worth having all the skills to show those distinctions is really interesting.
Ryan: Yeah, like, I mean, if I were designing something like that, we, I would very likely have fewer skills just for my own design sensibilities.
But I like the variety because, because of the inherent flexibility, you can make skills do more. So if you only have like, it's typical for characters that only have maybe like four or five unique skills with more than one rank in them.
Sam: Yeah.
Ryan: But it also allows for a lot of variety across a party as well.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. That's a great point.
Ryan: And so like you could have someone who's like, they have been built just to like find salvage and so they have like a bunch of ranks and break and scavenge and maybe, I don't know, sense or delve or something like that. And they're really good at that one thing. You know, it is the cost of specialization, there's a whole bunch of other things that they can't do nearly as well, but it also opens up the space for other players to have their own niche within the party.
Sam: Yeah, that's interesting.
Alright. So I really love for a lot of the reasons we've talked about what Twists are doing, right? Marking this place in the conversation in gameplay where we should pause as a group and come up with something cool that happens.
But I mentioned in the Devil's Bargain episode that my biggest problem with Devil's Bargains is often you run into a place where someone wants a Devil's Bargain, but no one really has a good idea for one.
Or I, as a GM feel obligated to offer a Devil's Bargain here cuz ah, the pitiful person only has like one die to roll. I, I gotta figure out a way to throw 'em another die, you
Ryan: know?
Yeah, I've had that experience as well.
Sam: And, and that can really kill the conversation. So with Devil's Bargains, eventually I learned the skill to just identify that moment and move on. To just say, if you wanted to push yourself, you can push yourself. That's the devil's bargain right now. Moving on.
But with The Wildsea, with Twists, it feels like that's not an option. Like when a twist is rolled, you do have to figure something out. And it was, you know, 75% of the time sweet and 25% of the time, ah, crap. Like really no one at the table has an idea right now. What are we supposed to do?
Is that something you've seen that's common?
Ryan: The way I mitigate that is saying, Hey, if you've got nothing, you can get a resource. Do you want a
Sam: resource.
Hmm.
Ryan: Do you want some salvage or a specimen? And it's like, yeah, if you've got nothing narrative that feels kind of cool. It's like, yeah, grab a Whisper based on what just happened.
Sam: That that's a great solution.
Ryan: And then the Whisper is kinda like you've stocked that twist for a later time.
Sam: Yeah, that's, oh, that's just another great side effect almost of having Whispers being kind of built around the Twist technology of the game to begin with.
Ryan: Yeah, I found like, cuz definitely there are times where people are like, I don't really have anything right now. And that can absolutely stall the conversation. So yeah, I usually say like, do you want a resource?
Sam: Yeah, and then of course half the time someone's like, oh yeah, well obviously my dead partner should like come back to life here and like make me feel a bunch of emotions about it because that's super cool and like the thing that I'm going on and that's amazing also.
Ryan: Yeah.
Sam: Do you have any, like, final thoughts about whispers? Anything else you wanted to hit that we didn't get to?
Ryan: No, I feel like, like the major things for me is just like it is inviting more active collaboration at the table. It kind of removes the GM player distinction a little bit and makes it more, on even footing in terms of like what you have control over and what you're expect, how you're expected to participate in the conversation, how you're expected to affect the world.
Yeah.
And I love games that have stuff like that.
Sam: Yeah. Well, thanks for being here, Ryan.
Ryan: Yeah, thank you. This is a lot of fun.
Sam: Thank you so much again to Ryan for being here. You can find his games @the-one-true-ryan-khan.itch.io, and you can find him on Twitter @TheOneTrueK.
As for myself, you can find me @sdunnewold on Twitter and dice.camp and itch.io and I guess fucking Bluesky now. I don't know. We're all still figuring this out together. And of course, diceexploder.substack.com.
And our logo was designed by sporgory and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.
Dice Exploder is a production of the Fiction First network, an actual play and podcast production co-op based out of the Blades in the Dark discord. Come on by and join us. We'd love to see you there.
And as always, thanks to you for listening. See you next time.
Whispers (The Wildsea) with Ryan Khan