In January 2026 we presented the all-new Painted Wastelands Bundle featuring The Painted Wastelands, a prismatic pastel realm from Agamemnon Press for use with Old-School Essentials and other fantasy retroclones. Many paths might have sent you to this desert fever-dreamland on the Endless Plains: an eldritch misfire, perhaps, or a failed attempt to dethrone a god (it happens!), or you just made a desperate jump through a screaming archway. Now, stuck here in the Lower Ethereal Hierarchy, you must survive the Bleeding Eye Preachers, enormous Sky Jellies, the Laughing Spider, acolytes of the Void cult, and Fungal Canyons. Become an Oneiromancer, master of dreams, or a Cat, master of looking cute. Navigate warring factions, rescue a village of avian alchemists from the Floating Mausoleum of the Sky Ghouls, search for mummified demigods in the Violet Ruins of the Aeon Dwellers, get cursed and undertake the Pilgrimage of Yaldabythos to get cured, seek treasure and glory, and – if you’re lucky – find a way out.
Created by artist Tim Molloy (Mr. Unpronounceable) and Chris Willett, The Painted Wastelands conjures a surreal sherbet-colored landscape filled with wonders inspired by Moebius and HP Lovecraft. With its vibrant palettes and bizarre visuals, this continually uncanny yet coherent hexcrawl world of avian alchemists, desert weirdos, ravenous ghouls, and teeth-stealing nightmares appeals to fans of The Ultraviolet Grasslands, Yoon-Suin, and Troika. And did we mention you can play a cat?
With old-school directness the 154-page Painted Wastelands setting guide spends barely a page giving you 1d10 reasons why you wound up here (“4. You ate a piece of a shrooman’s flesh”) and a bullet list of campaign premises to propel you on your path. After a few pages of factions, environmental hazards, and the effects of smoking ectoplasm, the bulk of the book is a 90-page hexcrawl, followed by a succinct bestiary, magic items, Oneiromantic spells, and “Tomes Filled With Unspeakable Knowledge.” And the cat. Just as players wander through the Wastelands, adventurers may drift through these pages, discovering new details and secrets. The “Appendix N” bibliography lists influences like Zothique, Gormenghast, Philip K. Dick, China Mieville, The Dark Tower, Moebius’s The Incal and Arzach, Junji Ito’s horror manga Uzumaki, and Little Nemo in Slumberland.
The 45-page Player’s Guide includes the class material from the corebook and adds several new cultures (Dreamer, Desert Weirdo, Onieri, Transdimensional Tourist) and a new class, Nightmare Slayer. Strange Tales of the Painted Wastelands presents a new “aberrant tome of unspeakable things,” a guide to the tourist trap/grave of the Conqueror Wyrm, and hitherto unmentioned weird objects and items. The Quest Unpronounceable is a 50-page haunted-house dungeon crawl with a strong flavor of interdimensional bleed. The behaviorally challenged Mr. Unpronounceable invites the player characters to become cleaners/adventurers at the Crimson Manse. He gives them a simple mission: Prop all the doors open. But the Manse, most liminal of all liminal architecture, contains floating heads, necrophones, predatory sea turtles, and many, many Mr Unpronounceables. Think Adventure Time meets House of Leaves.
There were five titles in this offer’s Painted Collection (retail value $71) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Painted Wastelands campaign guide, along with its Player’s Guide and Referee Screen; the gazetteer Strange Tales of the Painted Wastelands; and the full-length adventure The Quest Unpronounceable.
And this is not all of the Wastelands. This offer also promoted the Painted Wastelands Kickstarter campaign, Empire of Bones, which plunges adventurers into the darkest parts of this realm. Visit the Unholy City of Zeb, a stinking and polluted metropolis ruled by necromancers, then skip town to explore the ghoul-ridden ash-dunes of the Lands of Dust.
