What an exciting time we find ourselves in. The Painted Wastelands has once again been nominated for an ENnie award. The Painted Wastelands Player's Guide has been nominated for Best Supplement.
Development of my Beautiful Boy
Last year I was deep in the trenches writing Empire of Bones. It has consumed a lot of my time and energy. I decided I wanted to produce a small project, just a little something on the side. I also wanted to support my friend John Leibee, so I hired him to write Strange Tales of the Painted Wastelands. Strange Tales is a beautiful zine and the fact that it wasn't nominated is wild to me.
The Player's Guide was developed because I needed to solve a problem. While The Painted Wastelands is predominately a Referee facing product, it still has a lot of player info in it. This is a problem when you're trying to run the game and players need to keep borrowing your book to look up their Oneiromancer spells. I decided to pause writing Empire of Bones so that I could do a little side project.
The Painted Wastelands assumes out the gate your players are fish out of water who have no clue what's going on. It's designed to throw them into the deep end with no safety net. You can easily run it as a side jaunt in the middle of your home campaign before throwing them back to wherever they were originally. The Player's Guide presents information on playing a character that's actually from The Painted Wastelands.
The Cover I had a pretty clear vision of what the cover would look like. The Laughing Spider is one of the monsters Tim came up with on his own and I gave it monster stats. It was a pure horror straight from his subconscious. For the cover I pitched him slapping the guy up front and center. The characters are facing away from us so that player's can visualize themselves in the roles.
New Races and Classes I created 4 new races: The Desert Weirdo, The Oneiri, The Transdimensional Tourist, and The Dreamer. I decided to reprint the Oneiromancer and the Cat class, while adding the Nightmare Slayer. The Nightmare Slayer is a classic Tim idea. You can find lots of paintings on his Instagram of sexy ladies holding the heads of dead nightmares.
Voting We have some tough competition in this race. I am counting on all of you to vote for The Painted Wastelands when you get a chance. I also want you to vote for Severed Books Sickest Witch. We have formed an evil alliance. Justin Sirois is a really cool person and I've gotten to know him over the past year through the internet. He's just a guy making stuff just like I'm making stuff. Neither of us are part of large corporations or big youtubers with massive follower counts. These nominations mean the world to us and we'd love to see your support when voting opens.
