Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The Cloud Empress

 There's a crowdfunding underway for Cloud Empress, an RPG that hits all my buttons: ecological science fantasy with a bingo card of inspirations that has Miyazaki's Nausicaä, Samuel R. Delany's queer post-apocalytic fever dream Dhalgren, Frank Herbert's Dune, LeGuin's Earthsea, Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem and the art of Moebius on it:


 

The art on the project website is crazy great. The covers of the books look like the world's greatest 70s science fiction novels. The preview edition of the rules doesn't have a lot of meat on its bones (Cloud Empress is based on Mothership, a system that I've been wanting to try for a while), but it's soooo evocative, in a similar way to Troika!, but a lot more focused. For example, the Chalk is some kind of ubiquitous substance that poisons the people living on this post-apocalyptic earth; it can also be used to wield magic, but because it's so poisonous, magic-wielders never get old. There's the Imago, giant insects that leave their hives every summer to feast on the Chalk-saturated bones of humans, so people make great bone-hills from their dead to feed the Imago and keep them away from the living.

Cloud Empress will come in two 54-page chapbooks (rules and setting, partly presented as a hexcrawl), along with about half a dozen of pamphlet scenarios. Just the little that can be gleaned from the playtest edition has a lot more substance and consistency than, say, Numenera (which, while fun, remains my biggest disappointment as a science-fantasy setting yet).

If any of this sounds remotely as great to you as it does to me, I humbly suggest backing Cloud Empress.

No comments:

Post a Comment