Looking good! I love the last bit of artwork; never have I imagined I'd feel sorry for a purple worm.
Regarding the BFG, I can see CharOps types to comb through the rules to get around its inherent limitations. "No, you see, this class feature's teleportation ability only references size, not weight, so I can use it to safely flip the cannon right-side up!"
I am a bit curious if the writers already have a "solution" in mind, or if making it a puzzle even they don't know the answer to is meant to encourage creativity.
The use of a decreasing dice to represent gradual loss of ammunition is interesting; I feel that I'd have to test it in actual play, but it seems a reasonable balance between counting individual bolts and bullets vs making them a non-issue. I do still feel that this can end up making casters, particularly warlocks, a more attractive option in that cantrips don't run out...unless it turns out the sourcebook has something for that as well.
Yay! Iz fren!!! How ya doing, man?
As to the BFG, this text may prove illuminative: "Most arcanotech wonders are enormous, immobile, and built on sites of magical power necessary to fuel their effects. Since wonders are nearly impossible to transport, creatures must travel to them to use their powers, and entire communities have developed around the most well-known wasteland wonders."
The author's intent is clearly that if you mess with these things, you will break them. Instead, you bring enemies to the BFG, or use it to crack otherwise insoluble problems (like a box that won't open and for which you have accidentally destroyed the key, as an example). In short, these are items with limited utility that require ingenuity to use effectively.
As to the ammo / cantrip issue, that's not really something the book addresses. Remember that cantrips don't add an ability modifier to the damage, so in base 5E, that's part of the balance between a cantrip and a weapon attack (yes,
agonizing blast exists, but that's a hefty cost for resourceless damage). In short, the designers aren't trying to necessarily fix base 5E issues, but rather to hack 5E to allow a different mode of play. That necessitates fixing some base 5E issues with things like
tiny hut, but the designers limited their scope to problems with this mode of play.
Alright, kids, now we're going to look at Chapter 5: Wastelands Locations! This is the beefiest chapter in the book, clocking in at 115 pages. It contains eight adventure locations in the wastelands that the PCs can visit. Three of them are Tier 1, three are Tier 2, and one each for Tiers 3 and 4. Because doing an in-depth review would stretch out my already-cramping hands, I'm going to be giving you a 30,000 foot overview of each location, along with the central tension and my thoughts.
Before we get into that, though, this section is the meat of the book. It's about 50% of the book's value prop, and a make-or-break chapter for the text. So I will be examining it with a critical eye - if you think I'm missing or misinterpreting anything, please let me know.
Tier 1 Locations:
The Last City of MAN - MAN stands for Mage's Alliance Network, a pre-apocalyptic magic group who built a city out here to take advantage of ley lines. Structurally, this is a procedurally generated dungeon-crawl that resets every time there's a sandstorm. See, the city got swallowed up by the desert, so every time the sands blow around, new stuff gets buried and new stuff gets unearthed. So each time the PCs come back, you generate a brand-new Lost City via some really interesting die drop mechanics. Even more interestingly, because this is a known place in the world, there are other scavengers, wastelanders, etc., traveling around, so you have a decent chance of built-in social and trading play between groups, as well as a great way to introduce a rival adventuring party. It comes with its own treasure tables, factions, monster lairs, random encounters, ruins, tricks, traps, rumor tables, etc. Also, it's crawling with psionic ghouls (thools), who practice life-draining psycho-cannibalism. This is outstanding work and I love it. Great job!
Toxic Alchemical Sump - This is the site of a Eberron-style airship that crashed and now has its reactor leaking into the surrounding countryside. The Sump is full of these toxic chemical pools. You can dredge the pools to find cool gear in there, or try to siphon off the sludge for alchemists elsewhere, but doing so is dangerous. You might acquire the
arcane paroxysm (a parasitic spell - this is really freaking cool), or an explosive elemental imbalance, which is what I thought my sister-in-law had before her BPD diagnosis came through. These are all awesome. For example, here's the text on the explosive elemental imbalance:
YEAH. God, I want to run that so bad - that's a fantastic problem to put on your players. The rest of this location has a magicore (not a manticore, mind you, a magicore), and some of the best art I've seen:
There's so much to love here. Great job
again!
Tradetown - A decent starting town, Tradetown becomes an adventure location as the pressures within it come to a boiling point. Multiple factions start fighting over Tradetown, and the people in charge change what goods are available, what the rules are, and even parts of the terrain. There are a bunch of great shops and NPCs included, like the Colossal Repository of Arcanotech Paraphernalia (or CRAP), and one tiefling who follows the PCs around her store with "a very obvious customer service voice."
Full suggested encounters are provided with links to other locations, a full-page NPC generator that lets you create a bunch of different options for new NPCs, new shops, arena events, and a really neat monster called a "Feast Beast."
This is pretty solid. It's not as tight as the previous two, but there's plenty of material here for essentially reinventing Tradetown as several different towns across the Wastelands. Good.
Tier 2 Locations:
Deep Green - Our first Tier 2 location! This is set up as a giant alchemical sinkhole turned into a resort and spa run by (I kid you not) techno-otters.
If you can't make this thing adorable, WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING??
Unfortunately, the techno-otter spa is built over an aboleth trapped in the sinkhole, and it's been steadily enslaving the otters with it's aboleth nonsense over time. As the party spends time here, it comes into contact with things that seem weird, but that most of the otters insist are not, in any way, weird. I think this is going to throw some parties, and I think this is the weakest dungeon in the book. While the techno-otters are a nice touch, there are too many elements of whimsy for the horrific elements to fully come off. Note that
weakest does not mean
bad. Deep Green is a solid attempt, and worth your time, but ultimately not quite what I'm looking for.
Derbytown - The second-largest settlement in the Wastelands, Derbytown is all about vehicles. It is situated in the massive ribcage of some long-dead beast, creating a huge arena where all manner of
Mad Max antics take place. There are details around the town's leadership and assets, including a sentient car named Vectro-3000, full rules for betting on the demolition derby, a squamous magnedon (flightless electromagnetic dragon that eats scrap), full rules for various types of racing (along with examples of play! POINTS!), and several interesting encounters (like where the sentient car gets worried that its owner will replace it). This is interesting and fun to read, as well as being pretty on-point for the genre. Good job!
Rust Wastes - Hoo boy. So the Rust Wastes are like if the
Transformers franchise was set in WWI. It's a massive robot battle between the AutoForged and MimiCons. I'm not making those names up; they're in the book. This seems weirdly disconnected from the rest of the world? You'd need to do some work to plug this into the wider world, probably more than you needed to do with Deep Green. The main draw here is that there's a lot of arcanotech scrap lying around waiting to be pillaged, but it's incredibly dangerous to do so. There's rules for technovirus (machine sickness that turns you into a MimiCon) and tetanus, as well as a solid dozen fun locations and NPCs scattered amidst the pages.
And the puns continue:
If you get all of these references, pat yourself on the back.
The Rust Wastes are ultimately not a terribly strong addition to the area, but can at least serve as a source of Tier 2 - 3 loot with an ongoing storyline. It's fairly decent, but will require some work to avoid jarring the world and tone.
The Basalt Palace - Our only Tier 3 location. This used to be a pleasure house for rich magi - not just sex, but literally anything you could want, since it basically created an illusion of anything you could imagine. Structurally, this functions as a depth crawl. If you don't know what that is, you should check out
Gardens of Ynn and
Stygian Library by Emmy "Cavegirl" Allen, a fantastic creator. If you don't want to lay money down, see this Alexandrian article:
Pointcrawl Addendum: Depthcrawls. The short of it is that they are a procedurally generated way of creating a location that you dynamically explore. Very fun, very interesting. This one clearly is drawing inspiration from
Gardens of Ynn and aiming for a melancholic, tragic vibe.
It succeeds, but for me, that's not really what I'm looking for in a postapocalyptic wastelands vibe? This is essentially a Chernobyl situation, where the party is trying to keep the spell reactor from fully melting down. Doing so, unfortunately, requires a bunch of other things to be destroyed (including the Feast Beast who keeps Tradetown from dying out, and parts from Vectro-3000). So we have a significant promise of bringing back something from the Old World, but at the cost of sacrificing something they care about. That matters, and it should land, but for me it kind of misses the mark.
I want to be clear that this is not a failing on the author's part; it's a very taste-based critique. For you, this may be
exactly what you're looking for. But for me, this goes hard on tragedy and sacrifice, and I'm here for gonzo weirdness. Good stuff, well executed material, just not my bag.
The Gates of the Afterlife - The lone Tier 4 location. This is where the gods sealed themselves off from the apocalypse, and sealed shut the gates to prevent spirits from leaving the material plane. So there are a ton of ghosts here, along with all kinds of extraplanar beings. Occasionally, the ghosts form into a ghost storm, a cyclone of angry undead ripping up the landscape. The Gates remain shut because the gods' remaining servants defend the guardian gate, and because the Infernal Recruiters faction also want the Gates to stay closed. So if the PCs are going to punch through, they're going to need a
lot of firepower. Like the demonic living artillery that's bound here. Or the three lich-bros who are each running a mutually exclusive con on each other and the PCs at the same time. Or the xenobactrian ("alien frog" apparently) warlord just hanging out in the soulfurous fumes. Not sulfurous fumes, "soulfurous fumes." It's well done and solidly built. Good job!
This is meant to be a capstone, with a lot of things the PCs can interact with and use. It's toyetic as all Hell, and interacting with it has massive implications for the campaign writ large. Want your postapocalypse to get started getting better? Well, I hope your PCs hang in there to level 20!
So all in - how are these locations? Well, out of eight, we have two that are great, four that are good, and two that are decent. None of these are bad, and all of them have something to offer. So on a 4.0 scale, (4.0 = great, 3.0 = good, 2.0 = decent), this gives us a GPA of 3.0. If Sturgeon's Law applies ("90% of everything is crap") that's batting well above replacement.
Or, if we're saying that this chapter is the meat of the product, then it ain't prime rib, but it's a damn good sirloin!
