Unveiling the Ecological Heart of Sci-Fi: A Deep Dive into Cloud Empress
Creator watt discusses themes, mechanics, and inspiration behind the unique tabletop experience that's like Nausicaa the RPG.
Note: The current Kickstarter expansion for Cloud Empress can be found here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/watt/cloud-empress-life-and-death
Hi watt, can you introduce yourself and tell us your relationship with tabletop RPGs?
Hey Dave, it’s great to chat. I’m watt, an indie tabletop RPG creator best known for the Cloud Empress RPG. I focus on worldbuilding, creating settings that explore philosophical, existential and political questions I grapple with in my day to day life. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs on and off for years, but particularly gravitate towards streamlined and rules-light systems nowadays.
Can you describe Cloud Empress and list the modules or supplements that have been published for it so far?
Cloud Empress is an ecological science fantasy roleplaying game compatible with Mothership 1E. Players take the role of travelers exploring a pastoral landscape dominated by the pattern of giant magical cicadas. I tried to combine my deep love of Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind, Dune, and Fullmetal Alchemist blended with the sense of freedom and exploration found in the ttrpg adventure genre. The first Cloud Empress release consists of a stand-alone rulebook (free on Drivethru RPG with an introductory adventure), a hexcrawl setting book called Land of Cicadas, and a bundle of five mini adventures from five different creators. I also release a free Cloud Empress mini-expansion every month on my newsletter.
There’s a Kickstarter expanding the Cloud Empress world even more. Can you tell us everything about Land of the Living and Land of the Dead?
Cloud Empress is a setting full of contrasts, there’s beauty and destruction in equal measure. The two new setting books push these contrast to the forefront expanding the settings’ hex map to lands more strange and extreme than those previously featured. In Land of the Living, coauthor Em Matson and I explore areas bent by tears in timespace and overgrown with spore spires. We imagine the lives of midwest Indigenous folks in the far far future and how a variety of Native communities attempt to maintain balance with this warped environment. Land of the Dead interrogates the aftermath of tragedy. Some fifty years prior a cloud city fell from the sky scourging the Earth below with fire and metal. Now the lands warble with ghostly apparitions, ashen Imago, and the heavily armed survivors of the crash. Both books add quite a lot of new gameplay tools like spells, spores, and tools of violence that create new avenues of play at the table.
Cloud Empress is prominently billed as compatible with Mothership rules by Sean McCoy, but thematically, aesthetical and spiritually has nothing to do with dark blue collar sci-fi survival horror. How did you arrive at the decision to pair (at risk of sounding reductionist here) a reimagined Nausicaä setting with the rules of Mothership?
Pairing Cloud Empress with Mothership feels obvious to me, but I understand why there might feel like an initial mismatch between the Alien-inspired setting of Mothership and my science fantasy world. A successful, long-living ttrpg system allows for multiple types of play. For a few years now, Mothership creators have pushed the boundaries of what a Mothership title might look like. For example, Joel Hine’s space western take on Mothership, Desert Moon of Karth, demonstrated an amazing exploration of the system outside a strictly horror application.
In Cloud Empress, I’m also exploring my questions and feelings about power fantasies, violence and gun violence more specifically. Mothership’s Panic System feels uniquely qualified to address the impact of violence. In Cloud Empress, when you draw your weapon you take 1 stress. When someone else draws their weapon on you, you take 1 stress. When you kill something you don’t need to eat or inflict a horrific wound you take 1 stress. Accumulating stress causes PCs to Panic leading to unexpected, adverse consequences, and can even result in that character leaving the traveling party.
Finally, my favorite of Hayao Miyazaki’s works Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle capture both the joy of community contrasted with the horrors of violence. While the viewer isn’t always terrified, many of the characters we watch are! The joys and connections players make in Cloud Empress’ shine brighter because they’re contrasted by the world’s darkness and pain.
The first thing that grabs you with Cloud Empress is the artwork, with its two-color motif and halftone shading as if it were from a classic but forgotten manga from the 1980s. How did you and the artists you worked with arrive at this extremely magnetic aesthetic?
I think of myself as a “visuals” first creator. After all, tabletop roleplaying game books are the summation of game design, writing, layout and artwork. I think about the overall experience someone will have holding or flipping through the pages of Cloud Empress from the very start. So many games are produced each year, it takes a bit of a miracle to grab folks' attention.
My goal with art direction is simple but difficult. With every single image, I try to convey the heart of what a game is about. For Cloud Empress, every image tries to convey the phrase, “ecological science fantasy.” A great art team, as you mentioned, is essential too. I have a list of projects I’d like to explore, but they don’t move forward without an art team/art approach that both stylistically match the themes and create something I haven’t seen in ttrpg’s recently. I consider myself blessed to work with the artists pbbeta and Garin, from the art group Kattapulka. Our partnership made me confident we could pursue Cloud Empress. They work in a black and white format, so the orange treatment you mentioned was another step I took to differentiate Cloud Empress from other games with black and white line artwork.
I’m still a fledgling graphic designer and art director. I draw on the brilliance of others, and the orange color itself comes from a 1970’s series of Penguin Classics paperbacks. Colors, ideas, shapes, and fonts live in our collective subconscious often associated with very specific meanings, and graphic design can pull at those strings.
The setting of the game is so evocative of Miyazaki’s world in Nausicaä, but you also mentioned Dune and Fullmetal Alchemist. What elements did you borrow from those two?
I don’t get to talk about Fullmetal Alchemist (FMA) enough, so let’s start there! In Cloud Empress, Magicians use sticks of chalk to cast their spells – this element visually references the chalk used by alchemists in the Fullmetal Alchemist series. Fullmetal Alchemist’s magic system also centers around the idea of equivalent exchange, or a price being paid in order to start the alchemical process. In Cloud Empress, each spell carries a physical or psychological consequence that can last for weeks or months. Take the spell “Animate Vegetables,” which brings to life 1-3 vegetables in the nearby space – the caster of the spell becomes unable to willingly eat vegetables for 5 weeks.
Some of Dune’s inspiration came in the form of a feudal power structure above the clouds in the form of a Cloudling Empire full of squabbling Lorldings. Also, like Frank Herbert’s construction of Arrakis, I spent considerable time conceptualizing Cloud Empress’ ecosystem. For instance, the world’s magical chalk substance acts as a pollutant that becomes magnified up the food chain. The giant cicadas (called the Imago) consume great quantities of chalk, but humans also carve the refined chalk residue from the Imago’s giant husks.
Given your approach to addressing violence and its consequences within Cloud Empress, how do you balance creating challenges and conflicts for players that encourage alternative solutions to violence, and how does this influence the overall gameplay experience?
Most ttrpg’s model physical health, but far fewer games explore the spiritual and mental impacts of violence. In my experience playing Cloud Empress, creating real mechanical consequences for violence (for both victor and victim), creates a game where players use more of their creative tools to solve problems.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m probably most proud that in Cloud Empress, the first time a PC draws their weapon in an encounter they take 1 stress. It creates a cost to even the escalation of conflict. Suddenly, readying my PC’s weapon becomes a decision rather than a rewarded impulse on a combat roll.
Help me out here: the name of the game is called “Cloud Empress,” and there’s the allusion in the core rulebook to a cloudling empress noble who lives in one of these floating barges, running away from her cloistered life down into the Lowland Wastes. And then there’s the setting book that contains a hexcrawl adventure called “Land of Cicadas.” And that hexcrawl deals with this runaway cloudling empress. Is the game named after this runaway NPC from the hexcrawl? Can the game be played without any connection to the Cloud Empress herself?
Cloud Empress started with the name Motherloaf. Midway through development, I was directed to change the name to comply with Mothership’s revised 3rd party publishing rules. I went with Cloud Empress instead. At the time, I felt the name Cloud Empress evoked mystery, feudal structures, a powerful female character, and complimented the existing cover artwork. During the writing process though, I continued to expand and incorporate the NPC Cloud Empress as both mythic figure and real person within the setting. The first setting book, Land of Cicadas, takes place during the summer when the Cloud Empress disappears and thousands of unexpected Imago emerge from under the Earth. Players and readers are told that the Cloud Empress can grant wishes and would gladly reward those who save her. For the hexcrawl, I wanted to provide an obvious starting direction for GMs and players looking for a clear direction on a big map — okay, we should find the Cloud Empress. The Cloud Empress also replicates reality in some interesting ways. We hear news about celebrities all the time – people we never personally interact with. The PC’s traveling party is not intended to be a group of renowned heroes or celebrities. Most games I play in CE, the Cloud Empress’ disappearance becomes a kind of background noise and a contextualizing event to inform the players rather than a central narrative thread.
One of the dominant features of the 60-page Land of Cicadas is the fact that it’s a hexcrawl. How did you derive the hexcrawl mechanics for this adventure and Cloud Empress generally?
I wanted to keep the hexcrawl procedure fairly simple. There are three actions: Travel, Hunt and Gather, and Rest. I wanted each of these group overland actions to feel necessary and important. They start to become a triangle where each one relies on the other two. Travel moves the PCs through the physical world, but does not alleviate stress and hunger. When a party Hunts & Gathers, they pinpoint their position on the map and can find provisions, good food, and safe places to Rest. Rest consumes provisions and especially tasty foods to reduce stress. Combined these three actions cover the basis of travel while supporting stories in each hex and unexpected random encounters. Ultimately, the goal was to help create the tensions of travel with as little rules overhead as possible.
What draws you to hexcrawls? What makes them so fun and enticing from a design perspective?
Hexmaps show worlds in action. I’m a student of the FromSoftware game’s (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Sekiro) ability to showcase complex world histories through environmental design. I’m not particularly interested in some book’s eight thousand year timelines that chronologically extoll a fantasy world’s history. I much prefer history's impact on the present day people who live in its wake. In Cloud Empress, I try to showcase the ruins of several civilizations through the world’s landscapes.
Hex crawls also create profound opportunities for emergent storytelling. I like how the features presented on a big map mostly removes the need for prescriptive narrative hooks and constraints often found in more contained adventures. An open world further invites the Warden/GM to exercise their creativity side by side with my writing/design.
Land of Cicadas makes it clear that the setting has several competing forces: the aristocratic Cloudlings, the agrarian and humble Lowland Dwellers, and Nature itself which comes in the form of the environment and the creatures, including the imago. At least that’s my impression. How do you see the contours of the world in terms of its forces?
One aspect that makes Cloud Empress somewhat unique – the setting takes place in the Summer of the Century Brood (at least as written). When writing/designing Cloud Empress I’m investigating opposing forces interacting in a moment of heightened conflict. As you mention, the 29th Expedition, a coalition force of imperial forces from the cloud cities, descend to conquer the Lowland Wastes in an act of unprovoked aggression and an attempt to regain their missing Cloud Empress. Not so coincidentally, Prince Bug and the Century Brood arise years early to meet them in battle. Farmerlings sit in the middle of the conflict, fighting as guerilla militants or altogether trying to avoid the bloodshed.
Most of my worldbuilding starts through the exploration of themes and existential questions. Cloud Empress is particularly concerned with balance and cycles of violence. I also tried to avoid some of the trends I’ve noticed in many ttrpg’s presentations of factions. Often when I read about factions in other books, these groups feel very singular, neat, and unified in their pursuit of one or more goals. Writing neat factions likely presents these groups in an easier to grasp concept to players, but it erodes much of the messiness I feel in real life. Most real life groups are coalitions of smaller groups. There aren’t really factions in Cloud Empress. Each nation/group/organization is complicated with competing agendas, fuzzy membership, and individual NPCs. My hope is to create conflicts that feel multifaceted, human, and difficult to resolve by any one group or individual alone.
It’s mentioned in Land of Cicadas that this is the 29th expedition to the ground by the Cloudlings, and that previous expeditions have been attempted over the past 1,000 years. Do you ever see yourself trying to create adventures set in previous eras within that history, or even before it?
Yes! I made many aspects of Cloud Empress open ended for exploration. My hope is to write in the world of Cloud Empress for years or decades to come so I have quite a few ideas for other time periods to explore. Most of the books planned look forward in time, exploring the fleeing Cloud Empress’ fate, but I think it would be particularly neat to explore the previous Empresses and Emperors. I also have some notes on a more Princess Mononoke-inspired time period in the Hereafter’s history called Worm Princess, but there’s so much more to write about Cloud before I could overturn that rock to find the worm underneath!
There’s another module for Cloud Empress called “Last Voyage of the Bean Barge,” and it runs 10 pages. And five of the other official modules published for the game run only 6 pages each. What is the optimal length that you have found in your play experience as a GM? How much detail do you need in order to prep an adventure?
A lot of the books’ layout and conception came from print size restrictions. There is a 60-page limit on staplebound zines and the Year One Adventure Bundle mini zines were written as pamphlets (later expanded to include more art and negative space).
With these constraints in mind, most of the adventures, and more detailed mapped locations on the hex map are designed to be played in one-shot 2-3 hour sessions. I wanted Cloud Empress to be a modular experience that could accommodate a variety of playstyles. I think running a one-shot or two session experience is the best way to start a campaign to see if you like the game and the group before committing.
I write with brevity in the books. At a certain point in development, I decided I must trust the Warden to run Cloud Empress rather than fill in all the edge cases, examples of play, and detailed descriptions. My design philosophy centers around my books first creating an evocative reading experience. I don’t think rulebooks need to read like instruction manuals and still create effective gameplay experiences. I treat every sentence as an opportunity to convey beauty, theme, and meaning. I also generally don’t enjoy reading long RPG books. I LOVE reading a ttrpg in one or two sittings. A shorter readthrough gives me time to digest what I’ve read or go back and savor more. Working through a 200+ ttrpg book front to back feels very demoralizing to me (but many rpg books seem constructed to be read in this fashion).
I know the Cloud Empress’ books brevity likely means there may be unanswered questions within an adventure. I shoot for concise and memorable. If I can stir an emotional response in the reader, it’s much more likely they’ll convey those same feelings to their playgroup. By omitting certain descriptions and setting elements, I also think these books force the GM to take an active role in worldbuilding from the start.
When considering what to include or not include in an adventure or the setting book, we tried to fill in things that are difficult, time consuming, or boring to create on the fly during a session. I personally run Cloud Empress sessions with minimal prep leaning into player agency, using the hex map and encounter tables to generate what happens. I do recommend spending extra time reading and taking notes on the half-page NPCs – they’re written to feel more like conflicted living beings than easy to summarize caricatures. I’m very interested in connecting players to the world around them through nuanced NPCs, but I find playing these characters as the Warden can be (enjoyably) challenging.
You published a “Solo Protocol” for Cloud Empress that empowers GMs to run a game by themselves. What kind of stories have you ended up telling when running a game of Cloud Empress in solo mode?
Using the Solo Protocol pamphlet with Cloud Empress creates very unique experiences. Unlike most solo games, the solo-player does not take the role of a single character, rather guides an entire party of characters through the world of Cloud Empress. I designed Solo Protocol with The Sims in mind. During character creation, you generate multiple characters, each with a list of responses, a response's likelihood of occurring, and an outlook for each character in the traveling party. The responses themselves have a conflict rating that can increase or lower the overall tension in an encounter. As the tension increases, so does the likelihood of physical violence. I experience a lot of anticipatory joy when I’m rolling to see if a particularly aggressive character will act on those impulses and kick-off a violent encounter. It feels like the joy of GM’ing a game of human players, wondering whether their characters will do something disastrous. At the same time, Solo Protocol’s mechanisms are simple and gameplay is fast and easy to start.
I’ll be honest with you here... although I think the Cloud Empress zines are the most beautiful in my collection in terms of their covers, their content and their paper quality, I just don’t like how stapled zines generally look on my bookshelf. (I ended up 3D printing a quick-and-dirty zine holder for my Cloud Empress collection, just to lend it a bit more dignity.) What are your thoughts on the look of zines on a bookshelf? How are people supposed to properly flex their growing Cloud Empress collections? Are there any plans to publish a bound book omnibus of Cloud Empress stuff?
The new Cloud Empress kickstarter campaign includes a box set and new hardcover versions of the first print run with two new hardcover setting books. Staplebound zines definitely present storage challenges. I love the beautiful holder you have for your books! I have a few wooden buckets from Target that make rifling through my zines easier.
My big push designing the new crowdfunding campaign was to produce a new storage solution for both new and existing content. I’m making two new collector’s boxes that can hold four hardcover Cloud Empress books or two hardcover copies and the previously printed zines. Moving to hardcover was a recent decision prompted by some international manufacturer’s lower zine page limits. Reprinting in hardcover also provides an opportunity to combine the introductory adventure into the Rulebook and some of the mini adventures into Land of Cicadas for example. That being said, I want to make sure previous backers and retail buyers don’t feel obligated to repurchase previous content. There’s a pledge level called the Life & Death box that only includes new content with a box to store all previous content with the two new books. I’m also offering $5 to $8 discounts for anyone who has previously purchased Cloud Empress in print and wants to buy hardcover copies of those books as a way of thanking them for their previous support.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced so far in adopting the traditional book form for your publications?
Space! Staplebound/saddle stitched bindings can only hold so many pages. In the first Kickstarter the introductory adventure had to be removed from the rulebook, and an entire biome/setting area had to be removed from the Land of Cicadas setting book due to space. With the new hardcovers, I still want to adhere to a judicious somewhat minimalist style, but we have so much more flexibility in page counts.
Funeral for the Anti-Saint is this incredible sort of mystery one-shot filled with NPCs harboring complex feelings and ulterior motives, and yet you are able to frame the entire thing in about 12 pages of writing. Do you face any difficulty in keeping a scenario short? And on that note, by moving to the traditional book format for your publications, do you think you’ll start moving towards longer-form adventures?
Keeping adventures succinct is difficult for me. I tend to overwrite most of what I publish. Some of my early manuscripts are twice as long as the published product. I write shorter adventures because I struggle to create longer ones that don’t railroad player agency in favor of prescribed story development. “Why are the PCs still here?” is probably the most relevant question to answer in any adventure. I don’t like hand waving away the options and motivations of the PCs involved, or usurping the players agency to keep them within a specific area. I generally say, if the PCs want to run away, let them. I also use my shorter single location adventures to make Cloud Empress modular and accessible to folks who’d like to play in a single session. That being said, I would like to create a Cloud Empress megadungeon in the next few years — I think I have a compelling reason why the PCs would stay inside the megadungeon too.
Have you run Funeral for the Anti-Saint for anyone? If so, how have players surprised you in terms of their following the story beats?
So far I’ve played Funeral for the Anti-Saint with two different playtest groups. The first playthrough of the adventure was a bit too prescriptive in what events would happen when. There was a big ceremony that almost always unfolded in a specific way no matter what the players did. The second play though proved much more successful by setting conflicts in motion with many more emergent outcomes possible. The revised/final version means there’s some really amazing stuff many groups will miss, but the more the designer (or Warden) lets go of hopes for a specific outcome – often the more fun the group has. The second group who played Funeral for the Anti-Saint murdered Gaspar the Hungry while trying to take his blood next to a donkey crab, so that was a surprise!
The Cloud Empress Almanac is a relatively short but charming collection of bric-a-brac from the setting: items, enemies, tidbits about local culture and law. How do you plan to integrate the Almanac into the Cloud Empress product line?
I intend for the 2024 Cloud Empress Almanac to be a curiosity. The Almanac combines about a year’s worth of fan-voted newsletter expansions so the content varies by subject considerably. It’s being released as a physical stretch goal in the new campaign, but will live long term as a free download on DriveThruRPG. I want very little of Cloud Empress’ lore to feel essential for both Warden player understanding. The Almanac may prompt some interesting encounters, details that texture the world, and NPCs to spice up existing maps and adventures. There’s nothing essential here, but hopefully a lot of fun for existing players.
As time goes on and you eventually write more details that expand the setting, how will you keep all these crazy details in your head and maintain cohesiveness?
That’s a great question! For bigger aspects of lore, it felt essential that I develop the underlying framework for the whole world even if we don’t see those details present for years to come. I’ve been burned by J.J. Abrams “mystery box” style storytelling before and wanted to make sure Cloud Empress larger mysteries had sufficient payoffs for fans and readers alike. I’m probably most concerned about accidentally rewriting the same hexes or NPCs on accident. It takes quite a bit of energy and imagination creating so many different spaces, so it’s altogether likely I’ll pull the same ideas out of my head sooner or later. My hope is to build a relatively consistent project team who have time to internalize previous materials who can catch me when I use the same name twice or NPCs feel too familiar. Then again, each biome and region looks so different that they present very unique settings that prompt equally unique NPCs, locations, and conflicts.
Note: The current CE Kickstarter expansion, Cloud Empress: Life and Death, can be found here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/watt/cloud-empress-life-and-death