Cloud Empress Interview + Dark and Gritty Public Domain Inspiration
Two Bucking Nightmares, The Murder in the Rue Morgue, and Greenhorns sneak peek.
Good morning everybody!
March has been a busy one over here. I’ve been mostly heads down this month making giant strides with both Greenhorns and Incorporated Vol.1: The Hands That Feed.
Shipping for Outsourced is also right around the corner!! I’ve had a lot of connection with Jarrett and Debbie from Space Penguin Ink while doing my part to make international shipping come in smoothly. A more specific update for Outsourced will be posted to Kickstarter here in about a week when more information is available to me from our shipping partners.
We’ll start The Guac 022 with our Cloud Empress interview, but stay tuned below for a ton of Public Domain highlights/inspiration I stumbled upon at the Public Domain Review including illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imaginiation, the architectural outfits of the Mascarade à la Grecque, early modern blackwork prints, inkblots with accompanied poetry and more. Plus highlights of cool projects and sneak peek of the new cleaned up Greenhorns Character Sheet!
Now onto the meat!
The Guac 022 Docket
Cool Projects
Public Domain Highlights/Inspiration
Greenhorns Snippet + New Character Sheet
Cloud Empress: Life and Death Interview
Hi, Watt!! Thank you for coming back on The Guac for another interview about Cloud Empress. This time we get to learn about the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead!
One incredible task I’ve seen you continue to accomplish is expanding the ecological science fantasy setting of Cloud Empress. You’re coming out with two new setting tomes and I’d like to ask about some of their shining features.
Q: For the Land of Living, what can we expect to experience in the shifting landscape of giant spore towers and endless rifts of time and space?
A: I’m thrilled to expand the world of Cloud Empress. Land of the Living explores the region north of the Breadbasket. Co-author Em Matson and I designed another 100+ hex hex map that contrasts an overgrown fungal jungle with the open blue waters of Lake Michigan in the far far future. A larger number of native/indigenous communities inhabit these regions of whom we’ve previously only seen glimpses in the previous books. Mechanically Land of the Living includes many new spores focused on new ways to traverse spaces.
Q: The Land of the Dead, as the name might suggest, is wildly different. A land masked by the wreckage of a fallen cloud city. What can we expect to experience in the ash?
A: Land of the Dead stands in total contrast to its companion book. Land of Dead includes another 100+ hex hex map centered on the ruins of the fallen Bravo City and a desert of ash surrounding the devastation. Players can expect challenges traversing in an inhospitable environment full of Imago and Twig Witches. Land of the Dead also centers on a mysterious voice calling master Magicians into the ruins of the dead city. The book will contain a ton of new spells the PCs can learn under the tutelage of the world's magical experts.
Q: It’s obvious you don’t waste any space to build upon the lore in Cloud Empress. Even “Funeral for the Anti-Saint”, the new introductory adventure included in Land of the Dead, offers a new Magician tradition at the cusp of change. Can you tell us a bit about the Anti-Saint? And, how you’re approaching tying lore into adventures for Cloud Empress as a whole?
A: I get a real kick out of exploring familiar Cloud Empress NPCs changing over time. The Anti-Saint is a folk hero very much inspired by Ged from the Earthsea books, Gandalf, and likely the author bell hooks? The tradition of the title Anti-Saint harkens back thousands of years to when the world’s saints and religious figures abandoned the Earth to colonize space. With all the new content, I’m trying to balance rewarding players who’ve dove deep into the world by connecting adventures, places, and people together. It’s also very important the world can be quickly understood for folks just picking the game up, whichever book they start on. Like the real world, each of us carry dense histories that aren’t necessary to unravel at a first meeting, but through time and exploration, understanding these personal histories can be extremely rewarding.
Q: Finally, can you tell us why you decided to place these setting books months after the events of Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas? And, will we see more time progressions in future Cloud Empress books?
A: I’ve tried to accommodate multiple styles of play. There’s no single way to play Cloud Empress, nor a definitive timeline needed to understand the world. I think it’s quite easy to mess with the particulars of the Cloud Empress setting. However, writing Cloud (the Cloud Empress NPC) I attempt to explore how the news of royal and famous people travels through society. Cloud moves through the covers of the books as the PCs intentionally or inadvertently follow in her footsteps. All static maps present a snapshot in time. The Summer of the Century Brood, when all the books (so far) take place, is a moment of contrast between natural beauty and an increasing violence. If the Life and Death campaign is successful, folks can expect our view to travel above the clouds into the feudal society ruled by an absent emperor, and beyond.
Cloud Empress: Life & Death is going live on April 2nd and you can sign up to be notified on launch date now.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/watt/cloud-empress-life-and-death
Public Domain Highlights/Inspiration
Public Domain Review [ https://publicdomainreview.org/ ] is a website I stumbled upon when going down the public domain rabbit hole. It’s great and complete with essays and other information around their curated collections. Plus easy links to follow to the source for easy download. I think it has the best “Related Collections” sections I’ve seen in any public domain website. Here are some of my favorite images I’ve found that you might find useful in one way or another.
Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919)
Fearful Symmetry: Inkblot Books (1857–1915)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/inkblot-books/
Paper Gems: Early Modern Blackwork Prints
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/blackwork/
Greek Masquerade (1771)
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/greek-masquerade/
Cool Projects
The Lost Bay is live on Kickstarter! It’s been awesome seeing Iko develop this flavor rich, Suburban Gothic RPG over the past couple of years. It feels unique and is fantastically illustrated by Evangeline Gallagher whose work I adore (illustrator for Outsourced and One Night Strahd). If you missed it last month you can check out The Guac’s Lost Bay interview with Iko here.
Cairn 2e is live on Kickstarter! Cairn is an extremely inspiring book to me. The first hack I started writing was a Cairn hack, and what Yochai has done with the Into the Odd and Knave, among other games’, bones is fantastic. The new backgrounds are fantastic and I’m excited for the final rendition of the second edition.
Firedrop by MeatCastle Gameware is open for preorders. In Firedrop you play as a soldier fighting off hoards of superfleas. Armed with a number of clone backups and high impact firepower you must complete your objective. It’s no surprise I’m a huge fan of Christian. They’ve written on three of our projects, including the introductory adventure for Greenhorns. Firedrop started as a free download from Christian’s newsletter, Missives from the MeatCastle, but has gone through a bit more development and editing for the print edition.
Greenhorns Snippet + Character Sheet
I’m going to keep this update brief, but I am ecstatic with where Greenhorns is at now!! I was lucky enough to get a ton of peer review on the game that brought it back to the core roots of easy to learn and easy to run. This feedback mostly was revolved around the Bounty Hunting and Faction procedures, but I went through and slimmed up the entirety of the ruleset so the flavor and lore is separated from the rules. It reads much more clearly now!
The other major change I made was giving more space for both Planet Layers (now fitting over 2 spreads) and the Character Sheet (Full Letter vs Half Letter).
Planet Layers fitting over 2 spreads doubles the details we can share about !!Bosses!! and Threats, as well as including more Sights and NPCs to work with and adding Locations to add into the dungeons. There’s a huge boost of added flavor and more interesting enemies in Planet Layers! Plus, even more importantly, Planet Layers are way easier to work off of than the original single spread format (which I love for other reasons) but accessibility for GMs that don’t enjoy ad libbing as much has skyrocketed in my opinion! I can’t wait to update the Quickstart Planet Layers so I can share more publicly!!
The Character Sheet won similar benefits. It breathes better and isn’t nearly as confusing. Plus there’s some space for Character Notes which better fits some of the Narrative Tools in the game. This is a very clean and simple Character Sheet, mostly text only, but I will be going in and making more decorative character sheets in the future that I’m excited for! Function first though :)
That’s all for today!! Thank you for being here to read it.
I hope everyone has a beautiful weekend ahead!
Marco
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