The "Bright Horror" of The Wildsea

With my back(b)logged posts out of the way, it's time for a Cartoika of Curiosities original, and what better game to start with than the one this blog owes its name to, The Wildsea by Felix Isaacs, Mythworks, et al.!

I've been one of the foremost fans of The Wildsea since its early days in 2020 (before its original Kickstarter campaign, and years before the likes of Quinns Quest covered it), and in the years since, it's garnered renown for many things: a wildly imaginative setting, stunning artwork, and a pretty great narrative ruleset, to name a few (it even won an ENNIE for writing!).

 

Genre-wise, it's quite the mishmash, what with its oddball take on nautical fiction and New Weird-style fantasy and various other influences; people have called it everything from post-apocalyptic to (ugh) leafpunk, but here I want to focus on a particular way of looking at it that I think often goes under-discussed, despite how richly it features in the game, and that is the particular form of horror the game embodies: bright horror, to use the designer's own terminology. 

In this post, I hope to shine a spotlight on some of these darker aspects of the game and setting, and hopefully convey some advice on how to actionably make them manifest in your game! 

6* Things I Love About Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics (as a non-tactics gamer)

  This was originally written on my Tumblr blog in December 2025, brought here for posterity; I've not edited it otherwise.

Trespasser: Dark Fantasy Tactics is a tabletop RPG created by Tundalus (of Haven Games), describing itself as a d20-based roleplaying game about common folk becoming adventurers amid the ruins of their fallen land [...] designed for player-driven, sandbox-style campaigns of base building, survival, dungeon crawling, and perilous tactical combat.

Being a game of tactical combat and with such listed inspirations as Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition or 13th Age, you might think it as another game in the somewhat nameless 4e renaissance, akin to something like Lancer, Draw Steel, or Pathfinder 2e, but I’m largely not a fan of those games - I don’t think of myself as a tactics person when it comes to TTRPGs (though I've played my fair share of PF2 and 5e); I’m much more of a storygamer these days, having run and played quite a lot of Forged in the Dark things primarily, plenty of GMless things like Microscope or Orbital, and with a mild interest in some NSR games like Mausritter.

For the most part, that’s all quite distant from Trespasser, and yet it is a game that has had me absolutely spell-bound all year long, while daydreaming for months on end about running a full campaign of it for my friends (haven’t yet had the opportunity to actually play or run the game for various reasons). 

That’s important context, I think - if I was simply a pre-existing tactics sicko who’s found yet another crunchy game to fiddle with and optimize character builds or craft devious encounters to challenge said builds with and preaching to my fellow tactics nerds, it’d be one thing, but something else is surely going on here if this game has charmed someone who fell off the Pathfinder hype train as much as I have, or who’s never quite gotten fully onboard with Lancer.

While I can’t guarantee I will make anyone else as obsessed with this game as I myself have become, I hope I can at least point at some of the unique design highlights that made me pay attention to a game one could understandably dismiss at first if you’ve kind of sworn off fantasy d20 games like a lot of those escaping grand old D&D’s gravity well might have.

So here it goes, six (with an asterisk) things I enjoy about Trespasser - not yet but hopefully eventually from actual play experience, but still enough to have kept me glued to the game’s burgeoning community for nearly a year so far.

Tangibility, Modules, and Minimalism; or how Mausritter makes me excited about TTRPG loot

 This was originally written on my Tumblr blog in November 2024, brought here for posterity. I've not edited it beyond some formatting.

When it comes to tabletop RPGs, I've never been particularly motivated by the prospect of Loot™ (a term I know might have some baggage, but that's not the discourse I'm trying to tackle here with this post) - gold and other valuables worth a bunch of cash, magic items like enchanted swords or spellbooks, and other such rewards.

Whether that's because I was more interested in the character roleplay, exploring the world, or telling a particular kind of story, the bits and pieces picked up along the way have never really been the thing on my mind when I sit down and join the voice chat for the session, whether as a player embarking on an adventure, or the GM who's had to prep it - whenever I get a new Pathfinder 2e rulebook or adventure from a friend (at this point basically not for playing anymore), I completely glaze over the obligatory 4-6 pages dedicated to new items included therein (for a few reasons that later parts of this post will contrast this with), and a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark games that I pay most of my TTRPG attention to these days don't feature this style of reward almost at all.

However, the figuratively and literally little roleplaying game Mausritter (which reimagines old-school fantasy adventuring through the lens of tiny mice in a big dangerous world, in the style of Mouse Guard or The Secret of NIMH) has been doing a few things that have had me coming around on the concept somewhat, and I wanna talk about them in this probably long and rambly post today. 

A Water(b)logged Introduction

 Blog check blog check—

Hi, River here, and welcome to the Cartoika of Curiosities, our new blog on all things tabletop, borne from a desire to talk about TTRPGs in a space that isn't an ephemeral Discord server, fun and useful as those might be in this day and age.

Here you might find everything from musings on RPGs we do (or don't) like, game design thoughts, actual play reports from campaigns we might run or play, and whatever else we might think of.

There are a few TTRPG-related posts we hope to bring over to here from our general-purpose Tumblr blog, but we intend to write some Cartoika-original stuff soon as well! Lord knows the TTRPG space can use more blogs that aren't strictly OSR- or D&D-oriented - we might not have quite the knack for writing insightful essays into weird indies as A.A. Voigt (a great YouTuber whom you should check out), but it is the sort of thing we hope to cultivate here.

Lastly: You might ask, what's a 'cartoika' anyway? Well, to quote The Wildsea...

This is not meant to be a purely Wildsea blog, but with it being one of our all-time favorite TTRPGs both mechanically and narratively, it only makes sense to honor it this way.