Product: Weird Wastelands (PDF)
Author: Web DM (Jim Davis, Emma Lambert, Jonathan Pruitt)
Publisher: 2C Gaming
System: Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e)
Summary: A 311 page campaign guide to the Weird Wastelands. A new class, new subclasses, backgrounds, feats, and spells. New equipment and magic items. A section introducing a simplified exploration/hexcrawl generator and process. A GM toolkit with monster reskinning, factions and some encounters. Over 100 pages describing 8 notable locations containing NPCs, encounters, set pieces, adventure hooks and more. Finally some new monster templates and a handful of new monsters. This is truly a massive book and a fully fledged campaign sandbox. It is a highly focused and well-themed.
Snap Judgement for Busy Wyverns: This is one of the best supplements for 5e we’ve ever read. The setting is so well done, and is incredibly compelling as an adventuring locale. The WebDM team has truly outdone themselves with this one, it’s incredible. If you have need for a post-apocalyptic wasteland campaign – we can’t recommend this enough. There’s more good ideas in here than should be legal. There’s something to appeal to pretty much every kind of player. The flaws are few and minor, and the strengths are absolutely fantastic – and weird.

What is it?
There are 6 chapters detailing everything you need to know about the Weird Wastelands, a campaign setting (though not an entire continent or world, per se) in the vein of a aetherpunk/magicpunk/arcanepunk Mad Max. In the introduction the authors claim the book is “neither a setting book nor an an adventure, though it contains elements of both” – but we think they’re selling the book short. It’s absolutely a setting book, and contains adventures, and it’s really, really good. There’s a TON of ideas and execution in this tome, and this review is going to be a long one because every section deserves a little bit of discussion. Settle in folks, we’ve read this book twice now and have some thoughts to share.

What makes it good?
We’ll cover each section on its own in a moment, but first let’s talk about what makes it good as a whole – the absolute and total commitment to the theme. The WebDM team had a clear vision of what the Weird Wastelands are, and they nailed the execution of it. Every single choice in this book is on-theme and makes sense in the world as they’ve presented it. There’s nothing that feels out of place – maybe because of the “Weird” nature of the setting, but also because they called out their influences up front in the introduction, and then leaned into that and more in the book. We personally aren’t huge fans of mixing tech and fantasy, and don’t love the Mad Max style vehicle parts – but that’s not to say it doesn’t fit, nor to say it’s bad – we can see how others might LOVE it. We are truly astonished by the consistently high level of creativity displayed in this book – it’s off the charts and always on theme. Now let’s dig in…

Foreward/Introduction
A foreward by the venerable Monte Cook sets the stage for this setting – he says he loves the weird (more on that in a future Busy Wyvern review/article) and this book truly leans into that. The Introduction does a great job setting up the book, the postapocalypse (choose your own apocalypse here, the game elements have already begun!) and the basic environment of the Weird Wastelands. Don’t skip the Introduction here!

Chapter One – Character Options
We’re not qualified enough as game designers to comment on things like power balance and parity among classes or subclasses, so we’re not going to talk about that sort of thing here. That’s the sort of thing that can only really and truly be judged during play, and ultimately we don’t feel it’s the kind of thing that needs to be strictly bounded anyway. We have evaluated this chapter on the criteria of “Does this sound fun?” and “Is this on theme?”.

WebDM has thrown their hat into the ring on creating a Psionic class – aptly named here “The Psion”. Many have tried to build this class with 5e rules, and we’re not familiar with all the attempts – but this one seems pretty good. WebDM has reimagined the class powers to make sure it doesn’t just feel like a reskinned wizard or sorcerer. A character will be taking ranks in disciplines (telekinesis, psychoportation, clairsentience, psychometabolism, metacreativity and telepathy) and choosing a path called a modality (structured mind, emotional conduit, strategist). These choices combine into building a unique psion that fits your vision of the character, without being too rigid or too loose. We personally felt that the emotional conduit modality sounded really fun and interesting to play. There’s a ton to evaluate here, but we think it’s a worthy entry into the Psionic class pool.

Next up are subclasses for every class in the PHB. All are directly on theme and extremely good fits for the Weird Wasteland settings. Again, no idea on the balance or power levels, but some do sound better than others to us. The Barbarian (Monster Champion) sounds great and tons of barbarian fun. The Bard (College of Bones) is a bizarre one and would be really interesting to see at the table. The Cleric (Ascetic Domain) is a well executed choice, and makes total sense for the setting. The Druid (Circle of the Broken Land) is – on purpose – sort of an anti-5e druid and a call back to the possibilities for the class in earlier editions of the game. These are not tree-hugging hippie druids, these are angry avengers of a broken land. The Fighter (Reaver) subclass is a must-have if the group is going to engage heavily in the war wagons described in the book. We love the Monk (Way of the Wanderer) subclass, it honestly sounds more like what we think a martial artist should be in this game. The Paladin (Oath of the Pligrimage) subclass must have been a difficult one to come up with but we think they did a pretty good job fitting this class into the setting – since the vanilla versions of the Paladin are all pretty bad fits for the Weird Wastelands. We think the Ranger (Scavenger) is probably the weakest entry….it’s on point for the theme, but feels more suited to rogues than rangers. The Rogue (Enforcer) eschews the typical themes of Rogue play, leaning into brute strength more than stealth and trickery. The Sorcerer (Sun-Hollowed Soul) is another fascinating class that we’d love to play or see played. The Warlock (Apocalypse Otherworldly Patron) seems like most warlocks to us, but we aren’t a fan of the class in general – so feel free to evaluate that one on your own. The Wizard (Technomancy Arcane Tradition) is another must-have in the party for the setting, a true denizen of the Weird Wastelands.

We won’t go into detail on the backgrounds and feats presented, but suffice to say, they’re thematic and do much to better integrate the standard class/subclasses from the PHB into the setting. Same with the spells. We do want to call out the important endnote to chapter one – Alterations to Magic. These are rules changes to Create Food and Water, Create or Destroy Water, Goodberry, Purify Food and Drink and Tiny Hut. If not implemented, many of the survival challenges and dangers of the Wasteland are trivialized by these spells RAW. Take note.

Chapter Two – Equipment, Magic Items & Settlement Interaction
Obviously (we hope) the economics of a Magic-blasted post-apocalyptic area would be vastly skewed from the values printed in the PHB. The WebDM team has gone hard into thinking about this and presenting you with detailed and sweeping changes to the in-game economy to make things work. We have to say it’s an incredible piece of work, and answers a number of questions that you probably hadn’t thought of yet. The war-wagon vehicles are presented in this section too, if that part intrigues you and your players. There’s a number of pages devoted to chassis options and upgrades, all of which have meaningful implications in the game. This isn’t just a bunch of paint jobs on top of nearly identical mechanical stat blocks.

In the magic items portion the “arcanotech” theme is truly presented. All the items are not quite fantasy, not quite sci-fi, but all clearly come from the same universe. Sprinkling these (and their malfunctions!) into your game will help really solidify the theme for your players!

Chapter Three – Exploration & Wasteland Survival
It’s well documented that the Exploration pillar of D&D 5e is woefully unsupported and underdeveloped. “Fixing” exploration is also one of the most common subjects for DM Tip articles, videos and the like. This pillar also happens to be our favorite pillar, and has definitely contributed to 5e always feeling a bit flat for us. The Kickstarter pitch for Weird Wastelands called out and highlighted the inclusion of new Exploration and Survival rules – and that’s actually the number one reason we backed this project in the first place.

The WebDM team must have spent countless hours coming up with this sandbox exploration ruleset, because it is extensive and detailed. It far surpasses our expectations in some ways. It does fall short of our expectations in two ways – we had hoped it would take a little less prep and be a little more generalizable. However, that’s probably more of a problem with our expectations of the rules, not the actual intent.

The biggest problem with hexcrawls, exploration and resource management is often the crushing amount of bookkeeping needed to make it work correctly. Cutting corners on any one part of the process tends to collapse the entire concept like a house of cards. So WebDM had a tall order here – they had to address the entirety of exploration and survival to bring all of it under a unified, simplified, coherent and consistent ruleset. To a large extent, they have succeeded pretty well in doing so! Many annoying things have been abstracted out into some resource die rolls (tracking food, water, ammo, for instance), while inventory and encumbrance has changed from tracking pounds into a slot-based system. There’s still some bookkeeping involved, but there’s FAR less than trying to deal with it using standard rules. The hexmap generation is fairly standard, but the authors do a great job with some inset columns giving step-by-step instructions on how to generate the map and the descriptions of hexes. Each terrain type has unique landmarks and challenges.

Layered on top of this is hex-based weather. Heat, wind and more fantastic weather events all take a severe toll on the inhabitants of the wasteland, and so the weather is very important factor to assign to the hexes. It does increase the work on the DM, but in the end it’s to provide a more thematic experience for the players.

Finally we get to the turn-based exploration rules, which tie all of the other rules together and let the players engage with the map. Leaning into abstraction is encouraged by the authors here, to streamline as much as possible. We worry that the sidenote exists because of how hard this is to do in reality!

After adding up all the simplified bookkeeping there is, unfortunately, still a fairly sizeable amount of it. Relying on checklists and step-by-step guides to the gameplay loop certainly helps, and the work is far more coherent than in the PHB methods…but it’s still a little more complicated than we had hoped to see. This portion of the game – the exploration pillar – does still seem a bit “unsolved” in our minds. A good effort here, but not quite a home run.

Chapter Four – GM Toolkit
The GM toolkit is primarily detailed information about wasteland factions and encounters (both environmental and creature). This is fairly typical fare for a setting book, and is pretty well done here. The factions do need fleshing out if the players are going to interact with them on any sustained basis, but that’s the work of the GM and there are other fine products out there to help (like this one, perhaps?). A few supplemental tables/generators round out the chapter, to help build small settlements or encounters and small motivations and adventures to spawn from them. One extremely important table, “I Search the Body” is also here – this table is referenced in almost every encounter detailed in Chapter Five, so get ready to have that printed out or bookmarked – you’ll be consulting it a lot.

Chapter Five -Weird Wasteland Locations
Don’t let the title fool you – this is much more than just a few locations. This details 8 locations, a few of which are fleshed out into full-fledged adventures/dungeons. They are all marked with Tier ratings too so you know how best to guide your players. Each location is a fascinating place, with some real creativity applied. The Last City of MAN is a full Tier 1 dungeon crawl, the Toxic Alchemical Sump is a place to get all sorts of alchemical knowledge, Deep Green is another dungeon for Tier 2, The Basalt Palace is a very fun sounding dungeon that is presented as a Tier 3 depth crawl, The Rust Wastes is a place for Tier 2 groups to engage with mechanical automatons engaged in a forever war, and The Gates of the Afterlife is a capstone Tier 4 adventure where the players can attempt to change the Weird Wasteland forever. Rounding out the list is the two cities – the civilized Tradetown and the post-apocalyptic thunderdome of Derbytown.

Any of these locations would be legitimate stand-alone supplements, but they’re all here in this book. All of them are incredibly well thought out and dripping with creative choices and features. WebDM outdid themselves with Chapter 5 – every single place is a playground for your players to learn more about the Wasteland and immerse themselves within the setting. Each section has plenty of tips, NPCs, hooks, events and more to help the DM keep the world alive. We can’t stress enough that this section is an incredible display of the creativity and quality of the WebDM team. The ideas in here are often mind-blowingly good – and incredibly weird. We don’t want to spoil too much – this book was so enjoyable we’ve read it twice in the past 6 months – but the Feast Beast is one of the strangest, weirdest, but also most creative and gonzo creatures we’ve ever seen in a D&D setting. Read this book for the Feast Beast. We might use the Feast Beast in a wholly non-wasteland setting, just because we want to see the looks on our players’ faces when they understand what it is…or at least, what it does. These locations rock. They are compelling even when you don’t expect them to be.

Chapter Six – Friends & Foes
Here we have 2 new monster templates to assist in reskinning monsters – arcanavore and spell-warped. They’re well presented and thematically appropriate, and include all the info you need to create new wasteland monsters. And finally is the Wasteland Bestiary, where we get all the info on the incredible and unique Feast Beast, the terrifying Guardian Gate, a nasty manticore variant called the Magicore, a new and weird creation – the Mechaboleth, a Shadow Chamelon and a Squamous Magnedon (a very weird dragon), the Thool, and Trembles.

Art
As a final note – there is a ton of great art in this book too. This review has gone on long enough, but be assured they did not skimp on the art budget, nor the quality. It’s all just perfect for the setting presented.

How do I use it?
While the authors claim, in the introduction, to have written this product with modularity in mind – again, we completely disagree. These creations are so thematically tight, you’re doing a great disservice in breaking it up. They are a whole. Yes, we’ve threatened to forklift the Feast Beast out, but we’d still have to put it somewhere profoundly weird in our campaign world. The best use case for this is if you have a campaign where the Tier 4 characters failed to save the world. Now you can move forward after the apocalypse. Barring that rare scenario – run a post-apocalyptic campaign here, because you can. Get your players to buy into the setting and go forth.

Downsides
The lack of modularity really does mean that you need to run this as a whole, self-contained location, if not a full campaign. There’s enough to explore here that allowing the players to pick and choose, to come and go would be a little bit frustrating. It is going to be hard to integrate the Weird Wastelands into a larger world, unless you just happen to have an apocalypse handy (though we have some ideas on how to try, more on that in a later article). There are quite a few pop culture references in this book, and that might knock some people out of their suspension of disbelief. It often does to us, if we recognize the reference, though we’re just as guilty of doing it at our table.

The only other downside we encountered is that in one location in Chapter 5, the entire text of an encounter was missing. It appeared on the roll table, but just didn’t appear in the encounter descriptions. We’re not sure if there’s an errata document released, but it’s something we’ll have to look for. The encounter in question was titled “It’s HAL is over 9000!” which is the sort of pop culture reference we mentioned above.

Final Thoughts
This book is an amazing work, and all the contributors should be immensely proud of this work. The quality and value within is off the charts. Top tier work, in our opinion. The creativity oozes from every page, and the care and effort the team put into this is clear. Blood, sweat and tears were surely shed in the making of this book. We can’t imagine what it took to write a book with this level of quality – what on earth was cut? How many revisions did it take to get something this thematically tight and consistent? Absolutely awesome work that you should support from 3rd party publishers.

And with that in mind, it seems this project might have broken the spirit of some of the WebDM team. Their social media and YouTube accounts have gone dark (dormant?) and while their podcast still seems to exist, it’s gone private behind a Patreon paywall. We haven’t been able to find any official statements, but the web presence of WebDM has greatly diminished in the wake of this project, and the community is lesser for it. We have only a small voice at this time, minimal reach and influence, but we greatly enjoyed this book and are in awe at the effort and love the WebDM team clearly poured into it. If this project truly wrecked or ruined the clear love the team, or some of the team, had for this game – it would be a tragedy. We hope it’s not the case.

Recommend or Not?
Recommend. With no hesitation – we recommend you pick this up. Even if you don’t intend to run it (and you might change your mind after reading it) this is a worthy purchase. It’s a really good example of how to write and present a campaign setting. There’s some great “behind the scenes” notes on the how and why of certain design decisions. If you derive any enjoyment and/or inspiration from just reading RPG settings and supplements, this one is a must-read. The WebDM team put out something special here, and we think more people should see it. A quick search returns no results for “Weird Wastelands Actual Play” and that’s somewhat shocking to us – many of the aspects of this one seem to be perfect for a talented Actual Play group to pick up and make special. Yes, this book came out 6 months ago – so if you missed it then, get it now. We don’t think you’ll be disappointed.