Explore Weird Wastelands in Dungeons & Dragons

A new Kickstarter promises to bring a full set of tools for exploring a post-apocalyptic wasteland setting in Dungeons & Dragons. Earlier this month, the makers of the Web DM YouTube channel launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for Weird Wastelands, a new supplement designed to help DMs build a post-apocalyptic setting for their players to explore and survive. The book is inspired at least in part by the classic Dark Sun campaign setting that has appeared in multiple D&D editions, to the point that the book features its own psion class. However, while Weird Wastelands wears its influences on its sleeve, the makers of Weird Wastelands describe the book as a "campaign toolkit" with less focus on lore and more emphasis on providing additional tools and mechanics to enhance play at the table.

"There's an implied setting that will come out through monster lists and encounter tables and other features in the book," said Weird Wastelands designer Jim Davis during a video interview with ComicBook.com. "But we really want to put forth a book that's very DM centric in that, it allows them to create a setting that they want and gives them the tools to run adventures in that place, whether that setting is a little bitty corner of their world or an entire post-apocalyptic setting."

Included in the book are 12 post-apocalyptic themed subclasses, along with a brand new class - the psion. Designer Jonathan Pruitt about the challenges of building a psion for Weird Wastelands that felt different than just a variant version of a spellcaster. "I've been working on the psion for quite a while," Pruitt said. "It's been a difficult process. I tried to look through the past editions - Second Edition, the 3.5 Edition psion, even the Mystic class Wizards of the Coast tested for Fifth Edition. The Mystic, we play in campaigns that use those rules and so, I'm familiar with them and I understand why they scrap it completely. It's too awesome. It's too good. And so, I kind of went with the opposite approach."

"I looked to various iterations of psions in media, whether it's Jedi or the deserts of Dune, and to me, they are refined down to a smaller skillset then what's been offered in D&D," Pruitt continued. "In D&D, psions are always basically just a different version of spellcaster. Instead of going down that path, we tried to find the spirit of what a psion discipline means in general. So it doesn't look like spellcasting - we wanted something that was more utilitarian." There are some mechanics that should still be familiar to longtime D&D fans, such as the use of psi-points to boost powers, but the aim was to give players something that their psion could do at any time.

Another area that Weird Wastelands aims to flesh out is the concept of exploration in D&D, even outside of the post-apocalyptic setting. Exploration is often under-utilized in 5E. Pruitt joked that, by 5E standards, Lord of the Rings would have just featured the Fellowship hopping onto the Eagles and dropping the One Ring into Mount Doom. "Weird Wastelands wants to make exploration feel alive and dangerous," Pruitt said. "We want players to take risks, because there is reward on the other side of it."

Davis noted that a common criticism he's heard from Dungeons & Dragons players is that they feel that the journey between locations is meaningless, especially as Fifth Edition restores hit points and abilities immediately after a long rest. "We want to provide mechanical options that reinforce consequences and stakes of a place," said Davis. "A system that really heightens how hard the environment is, the fact that it's unnatural, that you're not just dealing with hot temperatures and sand storms, but with magic weather and things like that." That system is paired with a more fleshed out encounter toolkit that deals with travel hazards in addition to the threat of monsters. Davis provided examples of more mundane dangers, such as losing a critical piece of gear or discovering a hole in a water skin that the players may need to figure out a solution to.

Ultimately, Davis noted that they wanted to provide a system that emphasized the stakes of traveling through a dangerous world. "The mechanics that we've made, we want to present a style of play that says the stakes out here are real," Davis said. "You could lose a character, or they could be changed by the journey. We want them to take the harsh environment seriously, but not make exploration and the danger more involved than just trying to make a saving throw or lose their character."

"One of the things that I find so compelling is that we decided to do a post-apocalyptic book at the end of COVID," added co-author Emma Lambert. "A lot of post-apocalyptic tropes are that the worlds are always about preventable things that should have been no big deal. But now, we have a chance to touch on the reformative art of post-apocalypse. If everything is different, what do you do with it now?"

The Kickstarter campaign for Weird Wastelands is underway now. The campaign has already raised over $234,000 and runs until July 15th. You can find more information about the Kickstarter here.