The Tide Comes for Barnacle Bay
A crate arrived this cycle wrapped in kelp and smelling of low tide, and from inside came the sound of chanting. The Keeper has catalogued a great many drowned places, but few as gaudy or as gleeful as this one: Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay, a colourful, brutal little fishing village where the otters have grown tentacles, the guard-bears have swollen into shark-things, and a preacher named Elder Bane whispers the names of the Deep Ones to anyone who’ll listen.
What the archive received is a complete voyage — a full Let’s Play carried across five sessions and a single boss, the Wanderers hauled from the flooded tunnels beneath the village up into its haunted streets and down again to face what the darkness has made. Along the way the record captures the whole arc of loving a flawed thing: the delight of branching scenarios and explorable shadows, the running quarrel with a rules book too concise for its own good, one grim night when the dice went stone cold and a hero fell — and one glorious finale when they turned warm again.
The numbering skips a beat or two; the tide took Parts Four and Six before they could be shelved. No matter. The story holds without them.
Exhibit Catalogue — the descent into Barnacle Bay, earliest first:
- Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay - Part 1 — a fishing-village cult of the Deep Ones, and why this is no mere Zombicide.
- Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay - Part 2 — poison-belching boomers, exploding dice, and a fistful of rules walked back.
- Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay - Part 3 — a giant eye in a well, and the exploration deck the Keeper loves most.
- Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay - Part 5 — the cold-dice session: swarmed above ground, a hero goes down.
- Wander: The Cult of Barnacle Bay - Part 7 — the finale: Krex the lobster-crocodile and his own boss AI deck.
- How I deal with FOMO, and why I am not backing the new Cthulhu Death May Die and Wander campaigns — three years on, a fond look back at the village he chose not to revisit.
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– The Keeper
Observes that the archivist loved this drowned town most in the moments it fought him — the cold dice, the fiddly tide, the concise and treacherous rulebook — and concludes that affection, like a good cult, is rarely rational.