The Games I Played at Breakout Con 2026: The Wildsea
Playing 8 new (to me) games over 4 days at Breakout Con 2026 was a rewarding but tiring experience. Now that I'm back I'm writing a little bit about each one. Here's what I thought about Brindlewood Bay. Next is my favourite session of the con, which was...
The Wildsea
I travelled to Breakout with my good friend Carson, who runs SSTO Press. On the drive back he told me about playing the LotR RPG The One Ring. A particular point he raised was that he quickly felt at home because the game was set in a world with such well-known lore. Lord of the Rings is the lore in many cases. It is the most familiar fantasy format and tropes found there make their ways into almost all fantasy media.
The Wildsea is the opposite of that. Every aspect of the setting is novel. The world is a sea of trees that the players traverse on ships that are also giant chainsaws, cutting their way across the canopy. There are humans, but they're joined by cacti, funguses, moths, and sentient colonies of spiders(!) as playable character types.
One downside of this is that there is a fair bit of terminology to learn up front. Ektus, Char, Tallshank, The Thrash. It was a little overwhelming looking at my pre-generated character sheet. Standard RPG terms are also thrown out for the most part. You don't have attributes, you have Edges. Injuries become Mires. Rather than an inventory you have Salvage, Specimens, Whispers, and Charts. I still don't understand all of those.
Our Firefly (that's what Wildsea calls the GM) was fantastic. She had all the information we needed about our characters and the world at hand and did a wonderful job of introducing us to the game. Ektus? Cactus person. Char? A ship's cook. I learned afterwards that she writes games too, so check out Mint-Rabbit over on Itch.
Once over the initial terminology hurdle, the novel setting of The Wildsea means that there's a lot of space for the players to add their own details. Being a narrative-focussed game we spent a lot of time asking and answering questions about the situations we found ourselves in. We made many decisions about the world that would already have been answered had we been in a well-known setting. What we built over the three hour session was ours, and I enjoyed that a lot.
My Wildsea session was definitely a high point of the convention. If the opportunity to play again comes up I'll definitely take it.