athornton

I'd had my eye on Tim Molloy and Chris Willett's Painted Wastelands for some time.  I'm a huge fan of Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands and this had a similar vibe and art style.  Indeed, I was a little worried it would be suspiciously similar (it isn't).  Sure, there's UVG in it, but there's also Acid Death Fantasy, Isle Of The Unknown or Carcosa, and Lovecraft's Dreamlands.  The visual style is (like Rejec's) quite Moebius-influenced but Molloy goes for a ... well, I guess there's a better word for this, but, a very Oglaf color palette, lots of purples and pinks and blues, not the more muted tones of most of UVG.

The beta PDF arrived, and the same week a friend who runs a UVG group, who didn't want to put in his usual prep because it was his birthday, asked me to do a guest slot.  We had an absolute blast.

I'm not going to explain anything about the following.  If you've got the PDF you will recognize these things, and if you don't, you may be intrigued.

 

I murdered the party in the long hall of Tomb Of Horrors to start (I didn't tell people much about what we were playing, and started them off in a place that, knowing me, they quickly recognized and feared), and then they came to in a canyon where they met The Painted Skull and then were rescued by Gorto, although my Gorto's name was the first seven notes of the Terrapin Station main theme (as with the UVG game I ran for a couple years, I've leaned heavily into the 1970s psychedelic rock aspect; the end of the game included a long discussion of the merits of various eras of Blue Öyster Cult renditions of "The Last Days Of May").

He sent them to get one of the Perpetual Concert tapes, which took them via the Sorcerer's Market to the King Forgotten To The Ages (since it was a one-shot, I montaged most of the actual travel) and eventually the King's treasure room.  The grasping chains turned out to be a tougher fight than I expected, although later on they got very lucky with the Knight and he didn't last long.  Since I'd planned that to be the climactic fight I was slightly disappointed, but the dice were on my players' side.

 

My players are excited to go back sometime and play through some of the other locations and stories.  Prolix The Bleak seemed to be a fan favorite.  We played with Risus rules, and one of my characters needed to heal off some damage to her Eco-Terrorist cliché; Prolix, in his trove of forbidden knowledge, naturally enough had a book on tape of Edward Albee reading The Monkey Wrench Gang.  The Market in general was a very good place for the players to get a feel for the vibe of the world, meet some weirdos, and get some leads on where to go next; having specific merchants made it easy for me to know who was selling what and to not have them be Generic Fantasy Shops.
 

The whole thing riffs really well.  It was very easy to roll with whatever weird-ass direction my players wanted to take things (and with Risus, you tend to get very lateral-thinking solutions to problems).  The Molloy art is delightfully specific.  Not that I don't adore Luka Rejec's art as well as writing, but in UVG it is rare that I can describe something and then just paste a picture of that thing into the group chat.  In this four-hour game, I probably dropped ten pieces of artwork on my players to show them exactly what they were seeing.