Review - Weird Wastelands - 3rd Party Review

Alright folks, been a week and a half, so here I am with some whiskey in hand and a bunch of exploration rules to review.

So let's DOOOOOO THIIIIIIIIISSSS!!!! (This might not be whiskey, on second thought)

(Nope, definitely not whiskey)

Anywho, Weird Wastelands is trying to spell out exploration rules for folks who've never run exploration-centric games before. This is good, because a zero-base approach is awesome for identifying where holes in your toolkit are. And I have got such holes, you guys. Holes like you wouldn't believe.

The first section in Chapter 3 (Exploration & Wasteland Survival) covers variant survival rules. This is broken down further:

• New conditions
• Item Wear & Tear
• Food & Water Consumption
• Resource Dice
• Slot-Based Encumbrance

Basically, the goal here is to slow player's regeneration of their resources, while letting the wasteland itself be a source of attrition. Let's take a look at those new conditions. There are six (comfortable, dehydrated, encumbered, heavily encumbered, miserable, and sunburned). Comfortable is a new condition you have to have to get a full long rest. You're comfortable automatically in a settlement, but in the wilds you need some kind of shelter, food, and security. If you aren't comfortable, you get anything back from a long rest you ordinarily would, but crucially, you do not recover expended Hit Dice, hit points, or remove any levels of exhaustion. Those can rack up fast as we'll see.

Being dehydrated immediately gives you two levels of exhaustion, and disadvantage on any further saving throws to resist exhaustion. That's...ouch! Being encumbered gives you disadvantage on any further saving throws to resist exhaustion; being heavily encumbered gives you an hourly Con save (DC 10) to avoid gaining exhaustion. Being miserable gives you disadvantage on Wisdom and Charisma checks, and rolls made to resist gaining exhaustion, and two levels of exhaustion.

If you're thinking, "JFC, my players better pack water and good vibes!" you are spot on! Also, this is where the kit we mentioned before comes in handy, with items specifically crafted to help alleviate these problems.

Regardless, this also means that your players are going to treat the wastelands as a serious threat...which is exactly the point.

Item Wear & Tear gives items saving throws to avoid breaking. I don't like this - it's too fiddly for me, even with the light-as-hell implementation here.

Food & Water Consumption is mostly just the rules from the DMG, but hot weather is the norm.

Resource Dice are really interesting. Basically, instead of tracking each individual shot, you assign any expendable resource a die size. So ammunition might start at a d8. After every encounter, you have the person who was carrying that ammunition roll the resource die. On a one or a two, the die drops in size. So if you pick a fight with some gnolls and shoot a couple, you roll the resource die. If it decrements, you now have an ammunition die of d6. You can boost that back up by looting arrows, buying some in a settlement, etc. If you get a 1 or a 2 on a d4, you're out of the item. Now, some of you are already going to say, "This was pioneered by Giffyglyph!" Actually, I think it was pioneered by Savage Worlds. But regardless, I'm super happy about D&D creators using different systems. This is how we get nice things, y'all!

Finally, we have Slot-Based Encumbrance. So basically, the max of your Strength or Constitution determines how much stuff you can carry, and there are some decent rules around how many slots a thing should take. So your PCs aren't adding up the pounds of all the torches they have - they're saying all their torches take up one slot, and moving on. Now personally, I love math, so I think this is weak sauce. I am willing to consider, however, that my position is considered extreme by all you namby-pamby types who don't sing lullabyes to your Excel. So I will concede that for most people...this is an OK compromise.

Ya weirdos.

What these optional rules do, though, is place some hard limits on the party. You can't just loot everything that ain't nailed down - you've got a finite inventory. And if you do slam everything you can into that inventory, you're going to wind up exhausted and out of food and water before long! So you're heavily incentivized to engage with the other systems in the book, especially vehicles, hirelings, etc., to get what you want. This is great! Personally, I think this is a fairly lightweight implementation that cuts down bookkeeping to the bone, and then makes those bones dance.

Next up are the Hex-Based Exploration and Turn-Based Exploration rules. These combined cover 31 pages, so they're a hefty pair of boys.

Notably, they are designed to be used together, but can be used either/or if you need them to. Hex-Based Exploration walks you through, step-by-step, how to make a hex map. It's intuitive, simple, and interesting. Each type of terrain has easily-used landmarks, default DCs, and descriptors. Solid work! After that we get into hex-based weather. This uses a hex-grid system to randomize daily weather events, which is great for when you need to know if the party's getting melted by the hell wind. I would have preferred if the sample hex grid provided was larger and more easily printed, but you can't have everything, I suppose. The weather effects are terrifying, and include everything from a basic sandstorm to heat lightning to the cinder haze (a firestorm, basically).

Nice work!

Turn-Based Exploration chunks up time the way Hex-Based Exploration chunked up space. Every 8 hours, there's a procedure of play:

If this looks like a board game's instructions to you, that's the point
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Presumably, the PCs are not out in the wastes farting around because the wastes are dangerous. Instead, they have a clear goal and a driving urge to get there as fast as they can. So, these rules help you adjudicate what happens when the PCs run into wasteland perils. When do you run into dangerous predators? When that result comes up on the Hunting activity for the current wilderness round! Simple, and seems pretty easy to run - there are literal pages of random tables that detail the kinds of threats you could run into, the mishaps you could have, etc. Just dropping some of these in your players' laps is going to generate drama and consternation. For example, if you screw up finding the campsite, you might camp on a fire ant nest, which means everyone needs to make a Con save to get a decent night's sleep.

These rules borrow a lot from Adventures in Middle Earth, but then expands on and reinvents the source material. It gets inventive about applying postapocalyptic tropes to journey fiction, and then slaps on a more grounded layer of problems so that your players are salivating over Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion. While I don't love everything in this chapter, I think it's a damn good attempt, and I can't wait to implement in my games.

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