Zine zone: Cloud Empress

 

It's Mothership month, and that's as good a kick in the backside as any to finally get around to reading Cloud Empress. I ramble a bit about zines in general at the start, so if you're not interested in that and just want to get straight into some juicy imago flesh, just skip the next two paragraphs.

Back in early 2023, I came across Cloud Empress  on Kickstarter, and I was quick to back it based on the strength of the art and the pitch. Later that year, impressively close to schedule, I received a little plastic bag full of zines. They ended up on my RPG shelf, squeezed between a bunch of hardbacks, until I later established a Zine Box, where they were equally, if not more hidden.

I was always excited by the concepts presented in the game, but the jury is still out on zines for me. I really want to like them, because they allow for small products taking big swings, and should in theory be much more affordable than the big fancy hardbacks. However, I always hit two snags: the first is that of shipping. This might be a Very European Problem, but in many cases, I am paying as much in shipping as I am for the zine itself, and suddenly the little $15-20 zine is not so affordable anymore... The other snag is entirely an issue on my end: storage. While all the bigger books, whether hard or softcover, can be easily picked out from my shelves, the zines would end up squeezed in, almost impossible to identify without pulling them out, and generally looking less enticing. My current solution is one of roughly equal badness: I have put them all in a box. I have seen other people use all sorts of exciting methods to store their zines: magazine/comic book racks, display shelves, clotheslines etc. but these just don't really fit the form factor of my home. Some zinemakers are "solving" this by selling you the zine in a big box along with all sorts of play materials. Of course, the the cheapness of the zine is lost, but some boxsets to it well, recently the most famous example is probably the Mothership box. A cousin of Cloud Empress. A new iteration of Cloud Empress is also forthcoming, overcoming this issue by just making it a hardback instead of a zine. Time will tell what people think of it (I might have backed the Kickstarter, I tell myself that having two copies of the rules will be useful at the table).

Anyway, it's time to dive into the juicy bits: the Cloud Empress Rulebook. A gorgeous little 58 page zine, the first thing I want to mention is the art. If you have visited the Kickstarter page or the game's website, it is exactly what they lead to to expect: nicely lined manga-style drawings using a very limited colour palette. Almost every spread has art, making leafing through the zine a joy. Two art pieces stand out from the rest, credited to imogen in the zine, and pondcell on the Kickstarter page, these exhibit a much more painterly style with more colour, and are selected to accompany important setting elements. They are both gorgeous, and serve their purpose well, but I can't help but think if art pieces more in tune with the rest of the art could have done an equally good job and made the zine feel a tiny bit more consistent? This is the nitpickiest of nitpicks - the zine is gorgeous and well laid out.

The game advertises itself as "For use with the Mothership sci-fi horror RPG", which is a bit of a historical artifact, since this terminology was agreed upon before the underlying system for Mothership was dubbed the Panic Engine. In reality, this is a Mothership hack, not a supplement or adventure, and there is absolutely no need to also have the Mothership base game. Everything is contained within the Cloud Empress Rulebook. An interesting thing about the game is that it jettisons what is arguably Mothership's greatest strength: it's light touch, but extremely recognisable implied setting. The setting of Mothership is every dystopian Sci-fi/horror film you have ever seen. It is a generic setting with a few specific details, but it is incredibly easy for anyone with even a superficial familiarity with the inspirational texts to imagine, and to make additions. Putting on my armchair industry analyst hat, I would imagine this is also part of why the Mothership module scene is flourishing so much: any sci-fi-capitalism-hellscape problem can act as the basis for a module, and it is easy to make them all fit together in a seemingly corehent world. Space is big, and there are room for many evil megacorps.

Not so for Cloud Empress, which instead uses a very specific bespoke setting. It requires a lot more buy-in from potential players to internalise the characteristics of the world, what are imago? Why does the book talk so much about chalk? Are cloudlings and lordlings the same thing? (no, they are not, but I had to read pretty far to be sure of this). If you have watched Alien, Moon, or any other Sci-fi about how corporations are evil, you know the setting of Mothership. That's not to say the Cloud Empress setting isn't good, though. Just like its cousin, I would argue that the setting is the strongest component (and this is not a dig at the bones of the system, when I have played, I did not experience the same issues that some others have discussed, I thought it worked great!).

Inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in particular (though the flying cities seem very Laputa: Castle in the Sky to me), Cloud Empress weaves a post-post apocalyptic world, dominated by ancient flying cities and monstrously large cicadas secreting magical chalk. If that sounds strange to you, that's probably because it is. However, the writing is evocative, and it all seems to make sense when you read it, at least as much sense as you want it to. The reality of the world is breaking down, letting things slip in and out from other worlds. This strangeness pairs well with the small tweaks to the Mothership Panic Engine. Chief of these are an overhaul of the skill system, which is no longer tiered, and each skill offers advantage on rolls rather than a numerical bonus. The Combat and Intellect stats have been replaced with Mind and Heart (giving a more fantastic feel, and making way for magic), while the Sanity save is now Reality (so how well you deal with seeing reality break, essentially).

Stress now starts at 0 and caps out at 10, giving a less oppressive feeling, and we are tracking food. In addition, there are two whole magic system based on consuming chalk, keeping your wisdom teeth, and trying not to break your mind in the process. The special properties of the four available jobs are in fact exactly the same as the base Mothership trauma responses, which is a funny thing to leave unchanged, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it I guess? A very interesting tweak is to the sources of gaining stress, which strongly disincentivise violence by giving stress every time weapons are drawn, as well as when harming or killing others. On the other hand, stress is also easier to get rid of with two levels disappearing with a quiet rest, and an additional two lost by sleeping, eating or having (good) sex. It doesn't seem too difficult to reset your stress every night, rather than the slow build-up in Mothership, where losing it is generally expensive and done between adventures.

The topic of adventures is also interesting: Mothership is incredibly adventure based, the game seems set up for running modules with a bit of downtime in-between, rather than the freeform exploration seen in many other RPGs (though maybe my opinion is coloured by the games I have played in). Rules-as-written, Cloud Empress is the same, as well as judging by the materials included in my little plastic bag: a big setting+hexcrawl zine, as well as six smaller adventure zines. The rulebook says that the four things needed to play are the rulebook, 2d10, character sheets, and an adventure. However, reading the rulebook, I feel that this setting is much more inspiring for freeform play than standard Mothership, of course a pre-written adventure can always be helpful for any RPG, but unlike with Mothership, it doesn't seem as necessary to me as the book implies.

All in all, I find the setting extremely inspiring. I want to play in it. The hacked Panic Engine looks like it will work, but I find myself asking why it was chosen, as it does not seem as crucial to the intended vibes of the setting as in Mothership. I probably need to play it to have a more certain verdict, but right now, it seems like the Panic Engine could be replaced by almost any other rules-light science-fantasy framework and it would not make a big difference.

Please someone run Cloud Empress for me?