I don’t think there is a whole lot I can tell you about The Painted Wastelands (2024) that you won’t get from the cover and the other art reproduction. This is very much an exercise in leading by the visuals and, baseline, if you pick up the book only for Tim Molloy’s art, you’re still getting a bargain.

It’s more than that, though, of course! It’s a hex crawl for Old-School Essentials, an exploration of a small part of a larger dreamworld, where people speak a strange new language and where traveling from one place to the next is as much a matter of will (applied in a new skill called Lucidity) as it is movement. The world is rich and strange. There are dangers (there are always dangers) but much of the interesting stuff emerges from the world and a desire to see it. There is a robust commerce in the Wastelands, many merchants to visit, many vending machines to peruse. At the start, players find a skull that helpfully acts as a tour guide (shades of Planescape’s mimirs) and I think that sets an immediate tone that pushes away from combat as a default pursuit. It’s nice. The fact that one of the two new classes is “cat” also reinforces this (at a high enough level, they can travel to other realities by jumping high enough; the other class is a dream mage, the oneiromancer, and they pale a little compared to the cat, honestly).

A lot of clear inspirations that I see. Clark Ashton Smith looms largest, maybe, especially his Zothique stories. Moebius’ comic work. Maybe the Remnant series of videogames? Luka Rejec’s work, especially how he mixes fantasy, psychedelia and 20th century machinery, is a close cousin.

Molloy’s art is the star, though. It’s colorful and intricate. His line work is bold without becoming overly cartoony. The world he creates is very designed, by which I mean there is an internal consistency in his visual language that reinforces the world. There’s also a curious stillness, like everything is moving in slow motion (like a dream!) but also in a way that prevents me from feeling that I’ve gotten all the details (like a dream!). No matter how many times I look at these images, they seem new.

I bet it feels like that in play, too.