Last 48 hours of the Cloud Empress Kickstarter

+ fifty capsules & an interview with Karl Druid

There are just 48 hours left to back Cloud Empress on Kickstarter!

At over 80,000 raised, Cloud Empress is already the third highest-funded Mothership project of all time! 

Back Cloud Empress here.

I've always wanted Cloud Empress to be a shared world of creativity. Sitting down to play a roleplaying game is a shared creative experience after all. Cloud Empress has an open license for creators to make their own games in the same setting. You can read the current Cloud Empress open license here. 

With our last stretch goals, I'll be making a Cloud Empress Community Fund to support the creation of more amazing third-party Cloud Empress creators. 

Fifty Capsules

Now for some Cloud Empress content. Underneath the overgrown beauty in the world of the Hereafter are piles of junk. One common source of scavenged trash is capsules. These pills are somewhat ubiquitous and range from the size of a finger to as large as a watermelon. Well-preserved capsules have their contents marked right on their casings. Hundreds or thousands of years old, most capsule’s markings have completely worn away. When a capsule opens, a handy object forms out of a foaming agent, interior liquid, or by folding the capsule's shell itself. Built for temporary use, whatever is inside will surely turn back into junk in no time.

Here's fifty capsules to spice up your games.

Can you read the label? (roll 1D10)

• 0-3 The capsule's label is clear

• 4-9 The capsule's label is missing

Capsule’s contents (roll 1D100)

• 00-01 Exercise bike

• 02-03 Spoiled food

• 04-05 Four pairs of plastic socks

• 06-07 Folding sword (1d10 breaks after one hit)

• 08-09 Ice cream maker

• 10-11 Uncomfortable camping chair

• 12-13 A week's worth of food pouches

• 14-15 Lurid tablets

• 16-17 A plastisteel cross

• 18-19 Cicada-shaped waffle maker

• 20-21 Solar mini-fridge

• 22-23 Graphing calculator

• 24-25 Walking stick 

• 26-27 Water bear (see companions)

• 28-29 A framed photograph of sitcom actors fighting

• 30-31 A replacement hand 

• 32-33 Surprisingly fresh birthday cake

• 34-35 A single-use peashooter (1d10 DMG)

• 36-37 A printer with a large ink drum

• 38-39 Self-inflating raft

• 40-41 Four children's life-jackets 

• 42-43 An ancient's hamster (living)

• 44-45 two bathtubs worth of soapy water

• 46-47 Skeleton of a horse

• 48-49 A lump of flesh that develops into a perfect clone of the person who opened the capsule in one week

• 50-51 Human-sized pyramid

• 52-53 Tandem bicycle

• 54-55 Single serving of steamy instant ramen

• 56 -57 Seventy-five legal pads

• 58-59 A complicated board game

• 60-61 A large format instant print camera (5 prints)

• 62-63 A tiny office fan

• 64-65 A solar work light 

• 66-67 An unlocked safe

• 68-69 A rock tumbler and eighteen unpolished geodes

• 70-71 A blonde wig

• 72-73 A brown wig

• 74-75 A red wig

• 76-77 A DIY tattoo gun

• 78-79 S'mores supplies and four metal pokers

• 80-81 Dangerous lava lamp

• 82-83 Beekeepers outfit

• 84-85 One field long low gauge electrical cord

• 86-87 Floating television screen (no programs)

• 88-89 Pumpkin carving kit

• 90-91 Cosplay mermaid's trident

• 92-93 Novelty gummy bear the size of a person

• 94-95 Loud screeching noise

• 96-97 Sound of audience laughter, lasts 1 hour, starts each time someone finishes saying something

• 98-99 Personal air-conditioner mask

Interview with Karl Druid

I’m excited to introduce Karl Druid, the designer of Frontier Scum and several Mork Borg supplements. I wanted to talk to Karl because Frontier Scum in particular has had a huge impact on the development of the combat in Cloud Empress. In this interview, we discuss Frontier Scum's success, developing a third-party community for a game, and what it means to hack the rules. 

From an outside looking in, I’ve been seeing an amazing response to Frontier Scum, the book has been repeatedly selling out, and people seem to be loving it. How has the response felt to you? Does the project feel successful in your eyes?

Oh hell yes, I’m continuously blown away by the response! Anytime someone posts about third-party content or recounts one of their FS sessions I’m stoked ‒ it makes my day. I was only making a game that I wanted to play myself, even getting it out the door and onto paper makes it a triumph in my book. I’m super happy with how it turned out and how it’s been received!

In your Weekly Scroll interview, you mentioned you started a lot of the graphic design (which looks amazing btw) as you were writing and designing Frontier Scum. I also tend to mess around with the layout in the early stages of making things. What are the benefits and drawbacks of starting graphic design so early in your process?

So the one glaring drawback is that as soon as one spread is done you want to go back and redo the last one. Always. But I come from a background in software development and the agile mindset is firmly rooted in my subconscious; making something “potentially releasable” and then just going over it again and again is just how I do. It does help me creatively also to have something to look at while writing, and the limitations of writing into a set layout really forces me to be efficient with the words I use. However, I am trying to move away from it ‒ at least for projects that aren’t just my own ‒ because it makes editing and proofreading more work than it already is.

I understand Frontier Scum started/is a hack of Mork Borg. Unlike my game Cloud Empress (which is a hack, but still compatible with and branded as a Mothership 1E product), it seems like at a certain point you dropped the Mork Borg name/direct connection with Frontier Scum. At what point did you decide to make Frontier Scum its own thing separate from Mork Borg. What were your reasons?

As playtesting went on and as I found out more and more about what I wanted Frontier Scum to be, I also found that both the tone and the way it played became more and more different. Eventually, the game just didn’t feel like what it had started out as: Mörk Borg with hats and guns. The character creation was all different, the equipment, the skill system, the Aces, eventually it just sort of made sense that it should be its own thing. That said, some things are still extremely similar to where it came from; the GM facing rules are almost identical, so as to have easy access to all the fantastic third-party Mörk Borg adventures out there.

My favorite thing about Frontier Scum is how you handle guns. Ruleswise, guns automatically roll for damage unless someone is taking a tough shot (I liked this combat system so much I’m using it in Cloud Empress). Can you tell me where the idea came from? Did you have any concerns or fears about developing the system?

There was a while where all attacks required rolling, then a short while where all attacks automatically hit, inspired by stuff like Into the Odd. But I wanted guns to feel… different from all the other weapons. I wanted the scum (and their players) to feel powerful for having their guns, and I wanted them to feel properly disarmed when they lost them. The auto-hit mechanic makes every character love their gun, to feel brave rushing into a dungeon and just start blasting. And then they run out of bullets and have to face the boss with only their knives and a broken table leg. Those are the moments you remember.

I feel like I’ve noticed a trend with more designers and players interested in removing ‘misses/dead turns’ in combat. I see more and more people talking about dropping roll to hit in one way or another. Are you noticing more people talking about removing roll-to-hit? To speculate wildly, what do you think is the future of roll-to-hit as a mechanism?

In my opinion, every dice rolled should affect the narrative in some way. Rolling-to-hit is not a bad thing, as long as the roll changes the narrative regardless of the outcome. Failing an attack roll is an opportunity to have people trip and move about, to have things go flying, to introduce chaos into the scene! Every mechanic present ‒ and otherwise ‒ says something about what you want your game to be, how you want your game to feel. I think we’ll continue to see more and more people experimenting and innovating with all sorts of mechanical additions, revisions, and reductions going forward.

Finally, on Twitter, I recently saw a fishing module Ply the Murky Depths for Frontier Scum pop-up from what appeared to be a third-party designer. What does the third-party Frontier Scum scene look like? How are you thinking about the third-party Frontier Scum content?

There’s a steady stream of stuff being released, I’m stoked to see it. I got the first third-party zine in print right before Christmas, the Abhorrent Six, and it felt just about as cool as when I held the first FS book in my hands. There’s already too many awesome things to mention here but like I mentioned every release makes my day, in fact just the other day Chalkdown made my day by releasing Borrowed Time. If this keeps up I’ll have every day made! And it would be amiss to not mention the online character generator over at  https://frontier-scum.maletta.space/.Excited to see what the future holds 🤠

You can find Karl Druid on Twitter at: @makedatanotlore and more about Frontier Scum at https://frontierscum.com/