This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

The Painted Wastelands is a 147 page setting guide for Old School Essentials with art and story by Tim Molloy, writing by Christopher Willett and layout by Minerva McJanda. The Painted Wasteland describes one small region, a relatively desolate one, in a huge world: You have ascended the mundane existence you once belonged to and ended up here.

It first introduces you to the four main metaplots — setting-spanning hooks to draw the player characters into the world — as well as a table of ways to ascend from our world to theirs. There is a list of other places in the world of the Painted Wastelands outside the wasteland itself, which is about 35 hexes, with brief descriptions, but I imagine if this is a huge success, we can expect them to be expanded in the future.

There are a lot of very cool mechanics scattered throughout the Painted Wastelands, and I’ll go through the stand outs here: You get to learn dreamtongue as you level up, which means when you start you speak as a toddler and only understand 50% of what you hear. Travelling is willing yourself from place to place, so distance and time is relative to your experience and level — a very flavourful subsystem in my opinion, replacing typical travel with something that feels dreamlike. Sleeping is deadly, and far more deadly than travel, with encounters more common resting than travelling, which is neat but potentially very disruptive to play, but a flavourful addition nonetheless. There are a lot of unique monsters, about 50, which are all fully illustrated and pretty compelling. There are two unique B/X classes, both super iconic dreamlands classes, one is a cat! The other, the oneiromancer, has an entire unique spell list. There are a bunch of very detailed and complex magical items and tomes! Currency is on an ectoplasmic standard, which means you can cash it in to smoke it in order to gain XP directly. You can also sell things worth currency for XP, which implies to me that the author plays without XP for murder, although there is XP in the monster stat blocks.

There are 3 major factions and 7 minor ones. These factions are each unique and interesting, however it would only take a little work to make them more immediately gameable. I love having an NPC or two for each faction, but even just doing a Blades in the Dark style 1-2 goals with a clock size associated with each would make them much easier to run. You can very easily do this — like the description says things like “preachers are trying to expand their operations into the Painted Wastelands by baptizing as many folks as possible” which are very easily converted to concrete goals, but my forever refrain is that if something is easy to design, the designer should design it please so I can just play your game. My favourite of course are the mandrill librarians: “A crack team of Librarian bounty hunters roam the wastelands to reclaim these books no matter the cost.”

The Hexcrawl itself has 30 odd populated here’s, with 6 small dungeons scattered throughout, and a few larger locations max. The hex map that headlines this section is an absolute beauty, with each hex displaying its point of interest, and matching the colour and style of the rest of the module. The “start here” hex, as far as first impressions go, is a hell of one: “An albino bat demon is trying to rip a painted skull out of a nearby pile of rocks. The skull is screaming in Dreamtongue. “Help! Help! Won’t someone grant me aid?” This quote was the last part, the hook. I wanted to quote the entire paragraph. The Painted Skull, if you rescue it, is the Morte of the Painted Wastelands — your guide, but muttering in nonsense you can barely understand. The answers to common questions cover the second half of the page, helping to get players started in this weird and currently directionless world, and throughout the book purple skulls indicate that the Painted Skull has something to say about that location. Very cool touch!

Now, there are a lot of hexes and a lot of locations in this book, but what’s most notable about them is their conceptual density. This is weird, Viriconium-y stuff, an entire region of it. This content doesn’t follow a consistent structure, though, for good or ill. One area is a township and marketplace; another is a dungeon under a melting palace; another is a canyon filled with tourists. The fact that they’re all so different from each other is both befitting of the nature of this weird world, but also means there’s inconsistency which means I’m having to work fairly hard to process it. But, on a location-by-location basis, this is very, very good: A village full of alchemists with advertising, a dungeon where one area is “You have sat in the dream couch and you are now a god”, a solarium floating in the sky. That said, you’re probably also getting a sense for the vibe here: Anachronistic and high-concept weird. This mixes robots and wizards and TV shopping networks in a single location. If you or your table aren’t absolutely signed up for this conceptual melange, I could see you bouncing off it hard. The Painted Wasteland is reminiscent of The Dream Shrine, but writ large, and I could see some people struggling with the Dream Shrine at only 1 or 2 sessions.

That said, every one of these locations is sumptuously illustrated. This is right up there with Ultraviolet Grasslands and Crown of Salt as one of the best illustrated modules I’ve ever seen, and no surprise if you read the story of how this book came to be. The art is as psychedelic as the setting demands, decorations abound in what I suspect is a conlang of the dream speech. The colour choices of Minerva McJanda are bold, port wine and lime green, with a palette of complementary colours, shared with the art palette just enough, but not to the point of redundancy. The choice to exclusively use sans serif and generous spacing stands in contrast to the bright and extreme choices that abound on every page; if the choices has been stronger, it would have rendered a challenging text impossible to read, but it instead grounds it in a simple, modern legibility. I have mountains of admiration for polymaths like Luka Rejec and Tania Herrero, but this shows the strength of a team all dedicated to their individual crafts, working cohesively.

One fascinating and compelling choice that The Painted Wastelands makes is that it’s for Old School Essentials. Luka Rejec attempts for a similar weird, but in bespoke systems. Most of the DIY elfgame weirdness flies down the Troika! funnel, except for the work of Amanda Lee Franck. This takes the approach of lowest common denominator, and to be honest, it works. The thing I like least about Rejec’s work is the Synthetic Dream Machine. Troika! as a system is not for everyone, although there are a few modules for it that deserve to be run. This, anyone can use with no modification. That’s a hell of a selling point. And there are a bunch of modules out there, that you could easily patch into your Painted Wastelands Campaign, like Through Ultan’s Door, and the Dream Shrine, that are often difficult to otherwise incorporate into a broader campaign (at least, until Through Ultan’s Door is complete).

The art, the writing, and the design of the Painted Wastelands is absolutely S-tier, and I recommend it on the grounds of that alone. However, this is not a simple setting, or one easy to run: Gauge your table well, because this is a level of weirdness beyond that of Ultraviolet Grasslands or Troika! It’s an absolute fever-dream, and well outside typical fantasy fare, let alone what is expected of Old School Essentials. And because of the complexity of the locations, this is the kind of book where your players decide where to travel to, and then you call a break while you wrap your head around what to do with a location that’s an alien Bob Dylan at a crossroads. If you want a surrealist acid-trip of a dreamlands setting, that leans harder into dreaminess, the Painted Wastelands is your setting. There’s nowhere better to look than here, and there’s nothing else out there like this at this scale: I can’t imagine you’ll regret having this in your collection, as it’s so beautiful, even if you don’t find the right table to run it.

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