A casual stroll through the Painted Wastelands

Will likely require some extra effort on your part, but it’s a great work and setting if you like weird and dark stuff.

Premise: 3-layered game: 2 players co-op with Knave 2 system, The Painted Wastelands (TPW) setting, Mythic 2 as a procedural DM when needed; in general, we switched the GM role conducting the game based on the scene. (It’s still ongoing as we are playing via Discord, but we visited a few places and lived through enough weird stuff, so I feel I can write this.)

The good stuff: The atmosphere is great, the art is great, you want to be there. There is a ton of content and all of it has a style-coherent visual representation, with a properly unique touch (Tim Molloy). You get addicted to the super rich and savory visual representation of TPW. (Check out in general the cool stuff they are doing at https://www.agamemnonpress.com/shop).

No, I mean, seriously, look at this:

Gorgeous!

If you like the weirdness, you’ll love this. It is extremely refreshing for me to play in a completely new setting. And it’s far from both fantasy and sci-fi tropes, that was something really needed by me personally.

The well, it’s complicated stuff: It’s hard to find purpose in a dream, yet you have to. The different locations are somewhat related to each other, but a lot of heavy lifting is left to the players and GM: If you are not ok just drifting along (maybe because you’ll die! See below), you need to find purpose. So we followed the manual and randomly rolled the reason why we were in TPW; we set up various objectives based on our PC background (vaguely defined), one of which was that we wanted to find a way to eventually leave the place. The scenario per se gives just broad strokes about the world/universe: The connections between TPW and the rest are sketchy at best, and you have to come up with your own lore for that. This makes the game a little hard to GM. For the same reason, it is not clear how this completely anarchic land works in terms of economy, relationship, etc.

Wait! You don’t understand! You are not supposed to fix or understand these details, you mechanistic squared-head nerd! Well, well, ok. Yes, I get it, go with the flow, it’s just a fever dream, and so on; while this complete freedom from reality might work perfectly for a movie or comic (again, Molloy’s ones are super cool), it does not, or not as smoothly, for a game where different people interact with stuff, ask about stuff, expect consequences based on their actions. If the interactions, answers, and consequences are random, the game and story are not enjoyable.

Some encounters/places lack some more rich background and/or connections with the rest of the setting. Adding simple connections with other locations/factions, like who put this thing there, and why? Who built this? Or maybe adding clues with plots and factions would increased immensely the value of each encounter.

If you play it like a dream, like TPW suggests you do, you’ll die. Maybe this depends on the playstyle, maybe this is me, maybe I just don’t get OSR games and that’s it.

But OSR is too dangerous to fuck around, while TPW tends to pull you in the opposite direction. It makes you want to fuck around to explore and touch and disturb weird shit. (Which, by the way, is exactly what Mr. Unpronounceable does in Molloy’s comics.) This would work better with less deadly systems, or a narrative one such as a PbtA, where you can tune and tweak the negative consequences to stay in line with the setting atmosphere. The spirit of the comics from which TPW comes seems to scream story first, details are just secondary!, which is pretty far from OSR.

Furthermore, some aspects of the book, especially some of the tables, are poorly thought through at best. Seems like something cool they came up with but did not playtest [1].

Is it worth my money? For me, yes. Absolutely yes. I could explore both a new and original setting, that was unlike any other. No more half-backed grim low dark fantasy setting. No more borg-style apocalypses. This is new. This is good. TPW has personality, and personality goes a long way! (cit.)

But you spent way more lines in describing the problems than praising this product! Yes. Still, its general coolness and uniqueness makes it worth your money.

What can we do to make it better? Well, Molloy and Willet, if ever read this, first of all, much love to you! Second, here are the simple keys and hacks to make your product better:

1. Review the tables and add variety and less-drastic outcomes; add tables with inspirations about each location — just, say, 1d6 suggestions about possible relations with other places or factions, so to make each encounter less isolated and more consequential
2. Provide a 1 pager with an example of play as intended. Yes, we all do whatever we want for our game, but it would have helped a lot to have a taste of the original vision the authors had for us wanderers in TPW.

[1] Ok, if you want an example, I’ll give you an example. With a spoiler, because fuck you, you asked. Take the table for the consequences of smoking ecto for example. Based on the rules, you are supposed to try smoking ecto sooner or later — it’s exactly one of those weird things the setting serves you on silver plate. Ectoplasm is foundational to the setting and explained at the very beginning of the book; yet the table with the consequences has only a few outputs (10), many with permanent changes to the character, such as “Your feet and hands are slowly replaced with shoddy machine prosthetics”, or “You are now secretly a robot”, or a permanent -2 save vs spells. I mean this is weird, yes, but also quite cheap. Smoking ecto is not portrayed as something this dangerous in the setting. Now, of course you can make your own table and of course you can also find ways to make the effect reversible (want to turn your robot hands back to normal? Find the shrine of the holy howling robot capybara and offer a sacrifice!), but that’s exactly my point. It requires extra work.

Originally posted on Kind of Old Games substack.