Explore Weird Wastelands and Play Great 5E Games in Places Adversely Affected by Magical Forces

Worlds of Web DM: Weird Wastelands launched this morning on Kickstarter and 16 minutes later our YouTube colleagues’ supplement for 5e D&D that gives you everything you need to play great games in places adversely affected by magical forces became funded. Of course the first exclamation to make is congratulations! We know exactly how excited the Web DM team feels after bringing their vision to the crowdfunding world and receiving the support to make it a reality. The heart of the project is Web DM’s passion for exploration, a pillar of 5E play we strongly support ourselves. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to the Worlds of Web DM

Weird Wastelands already smashed through all but one of their stretch goals at the time of this writing. By the time I’m done the remaining $100K goal will almost certainly be reached too. I’ll let you know at the end. If you can’t wait then go check out the Kickstarter page right now. The Web DM team partnered with 2C Gaming to bring their vision to life. The latter’s experience delivering on their promises and critical acclaim for their books’ content and production quality shows in the Kickstarter page’s clarity. Web DM has a strong concept and vision for what they’re adding to the 5E space and a great team to realize those goals in a fantastic way.

“What happens when weaponized magic overwhelms a region? When the gods abandon a planet? When an evil sun burns with the octarine glow of oblivion? When the only power left is that of the mind, who is strong enough to wield it?”

Weird Wastelands follows in the tradition of my favorite 5E supplements by providing a toolkit more than anything else. In fact my favorite part of the whole Kickstarter can be found on the FAQ where a question asks if Weird Wastelands is an adventure. As a fan and advocate of the emergent adventure I feel like I’m on the same page with their answer, which points out how instead Weird Wastelands puts the information to create adventures at your fingertips.

It can become easy to take for granted what experience can teach and what a product like Weird Wastelands reinforces is that it’s how players overcome challenges big and small where the adventuresome 5E experience takes place. Particularly when it comes to exploration, which the book aims to bolster specifically, creating unique and unexpected opportunities fuels the adventure. Many times I’ve shared my belief exploration is actually the most frequent pillar of play because with only three options if you’re not fighting and not talking to NPCs it’s the only one left. To this end I cannot encourage Game Masters more to embrace toolkit products like this.

When players encounter intriguing things you can trust them to spin something from their exploration. The reason comprehensive toolkits like Weird Wastelands are so valuable is because all there’s tools for everyone in the group to use and build the experience together. My own go to post apocalyptic 5E source hits on this same note. Weird Wastelands contains not only a wealth of resources for GMs to plan for (and create on the fly — the best way!) engaging scenarios but also just as much cool ways for the other players to interact with it. In the preview version I especially dig and appreciate the sidebar design in the book. (I’m a layout nerd among other types of nerdiness.) We believe in the same principle of speaking directly to players and GMs in our products

Character options and equipment occupy about a quarter of the book based on the table of contents sample and what’s important to note is all these character resources are designed specifically for the GM content. This doesn’t mean any of it can’t be totally awesome to play in other 5E campaigns but it does mean the most vibrant experience come through engaging the types of challenges the book facilitates. This is the beauty of products like Weird Wastelands because they become their own sort of standalone game. I love this sort of stuff.

Web DM and 2C gaming do such an excellent job showing off what the Kickstarter entails and even what to expect inside the book so I’ll tease only a little to let you know there’s new subclasses for all the core 5E classes and they even undertook the boldest move in 5E design by developing an entirely new class — the Psion!

I’m happy to see these longtime fellow YouTube creators pour their passion into a project I know they believe in and clearly lots of other nerds are too. To answer the question posed at the start, yes. Worlds of Web DM: Weird Wastelands surpassed the $100K mark. I imagine the Web DM team are already spitballing lots of exciting new ones.

Check out the Worlds of Web DM: Weird Wastelands Kickstarter and discover the best pledge level for you and your 5E gaming group here.

The chilling, magic-eating magicore, brought to life by Tina Fulton.