Gender Expression in Cloud Empress

Plus an incoming setting book draft and 2024 crowdfunding news

Help Shape the 2024 Campaign

From the start, I’ve intended for Cloud Empress to be more than a single crowdfunding campaign. Cloud Empress is an expansive setting meant to get lost in for years to come. I’m in the early stages of planning a second Cloud Empress crowdfunding campaign and need your help.

Fill out this short survey to tell me what is most important for the 2024 Cloud Empress crowdfunding.

Thanks for your time and consideration, and now onto the main show!

Gender Expression in Cloud Empress

Last month you voted to learn more about gender expression in the Lowland Wastes. Most Farmerlings play with gender like the wind plays with leaves. In a human world tipping between resilience and collapse, jewelry has little value compared to the yearly promise of a potato. New looks, styles, and even facial features are explored using the bounty of strange devices found just under the Earth’s surface.

Even the most humble Farmerlings don ornate plastisteel tokens on earlobes, necks, wrists, belly buttons, noses, and fingers to showcase combinations of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny. Gestures of self-expression are highly personal and vary widely from region to region, place to place.

Across the Lowlands, the lips and ears are often associated with femininity.

The fingers, toes, and nose tend to attract tokens of masculinity. The eyes and the cheeks suggest gender-neutral fashion.

Crawling Comb - A wind-up device used to autonomously arrange a head of hair. Each hairstyle is pre-programmed into the device at its ancient time of creation.

Drop Earring Chimes - Earrings that create melodic pitches, perfect for calling attention to one’s ears.

Fragrance Choker - A heated center worn around the neck infuses the air with a selection of aromatic scents - often flowery sweet or sensuously musky.

Shifting Eyes - A mask that blocks the sun’s rays from the eyes and whose moving parts symbolize the ever-changing expressions of gender over time.

Skinshaper’s Kit - A toolkit used by traveling medical magicians to magically change the shape of the patient’s body. Modest changes are relatively simple, but more complicated procedures require the use of Ancient surgery stations found in larger Farmerling villages.

Draft Setting Book Release this Week!

In a few days, I’ll be sharing the work-in-progress/uncorrected version of the Cloud Empress setting book Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas. Putting together the artwork, writing, and maps to create an expansive, evocative, Nausicaa-inspired world in 60 pages has been a massive lift. I can’t wait to show you the breadth and depth of Cloud Empress.

Pre-order your copy of Cloud Empress now, and start playing in the Land of Cicadas this week.

That’s it for July! What did you think of the single-page format for Gender Expression in the Lowland Wastes? Would you like to see more single-page expansions in future newsletters?