November: Traveling with a...

New trinket table, solo rules preview, and Constant Downpour Remastered interview

Traveling with a... [one cranky relative]

The last missing piece of Cloud Empress character creation has fallen into place. I've been struggling with how to implement Mothership's trinkets, the bits and bobs each player assigns to their character during character creation. The world of the Hereafter is pretty difficult to survive in, so the idea of carrying something extraneous on your person felt odd to me. I then tried creating a system where each character was assigned a rival, but that made the world overly adversarial in my estimation. With a rewording of ‘trinket,’ I landed on "what are you traveling with" which expanded the scope of what could be included beyond small objects and gave these items a greater meaning than a trinket to the character.

Going Alone in Cloud Empress 

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to make Cloud Empress a solo experience as well as a multiplayer one. Getting a playgroup together is the hardest part of roleplaying for me so I want to create an opportunity to explore the world of the Cloud Empress alone.

Probably the most popular approach to solo RPG design (and the approach I used for my last game Hot Stuff on Shore Leave), is a journaling format. The game provides prompts and the player writes about their character's experience within a given situation. 

For the Cloud Empress solo rules, I want to try something different. I've been interested in an approach where a player's mind and character sheet hold the game's story instead of a journal. I'm inspired by how some board games can create rich stories between limited pieces and game mechanisms. That's where the idea for a party-based solo roleplaying developed. 

With something a little akin to the Sims, I've been creating a system where the solo player manages one to three party members instead of a single character. Characters in a party react automatically to the encounters and environments they are in and it's up to the player to make sense of their responses, gently guiding the party towards some form of narrative resolution. In gameplay terms, each character will have a response profile that you’ll roll on during each encounter. The combination of the character's responses, the encounter itself, as well as the results of stat checks and saves will shape the narrative. Supporting the solo system is Cloud Empress’ sandbox procedures for creating encounters, traveling and engaging with a detailed hex map. I should have a more share-able solo version ready in the next two months.

Constant Downpour Remastered Interview

Last but not least, I'm excited to bring you an interview with Marco Serrano from Spicy Tuna RPG discussing the incredible Mothership module Constant Downpour currently on Kickstarter for 8 more days. I think you’ll dig this book because of it’s literary connections, amazing artwork, and sandbox style approach to gameplay.

With Constant Downpour getting a second edition, what has it been like getting a chance to redo the book? What have you decided to change and what has felt important to keep the same? 

Rewriting Constant Downpour has been exciting and challenging! The original was our first module, it was more linear, story driven, and we cut a ton of ideas to fit it in a 48 page scope. I wanted to keep the core of the module the same. The gut-feel, suspense, and hallucinations. I also wanted to move over a lot of what we did with the world descriptors. I’m really happy with the smells, shuffles, and movement of the world we made.

The big change was opening the world up. It’s a hex crawl that offers imperfect information that allow players more agency to direct the narrative. There’s now a rival party and a resistance group for players to befriend, survive, or betray. We’ve imported Venusian lore through key locations and monuments and have given more discovery options to players as they search found bunkers and wrecked sun domes.

What considerations have you made taking Constant Downpour from a system-agnostic module to one specifically compatible with Mothership 1E? 

Constant Downpour has always been a story of dying hope. Mothership mechanics are real easy to marry to the theme of struggling to survive in an environment that slowly whittles away your sanity. I learned about Mothership shortly after I launched the original on Kickstarter and used it as the main touch point in the original “GM Toolkit” section.

The big pivot we made within the last month or so was increasing the number of hallucination encounters and decreasing the likelihood of a violent encounter. Hallucinations deal psychological damage in the form of increased stress or slowly chipping away permanent damage to a character’s save stat on a failed save.

There’s a bit more playtesting to do, but the snowballing risk that travelling forces has provided players with challenging decisions and brings the theme out in a unique way so far.

Your three most recent works Knights of Lazarus, Planet Builder Zine and Planet Design Book, and the Constant Downpour Remastered have all been science fiction titles (albeit with different styles and focuses). What has drawn you to focus on science fiction content in particular?

I’d rather read science fiction short stories than anything else. I love the diversity in the open planes and how you can merge big-time escapism “what ifs” with “wow we’re only 20 years away from this” types of horrors and happenings. 

I also flick through archaeological and scientific articles I come across online and the science fiction genre has been very friendly with combining historical findings with current technologies.

Then there’s retro sci-fi that ignores scientific necessities in various limits, and hard science fiction which explores within the confines of scientific knowledge, and everything in between. All in all, it’s a really fun and exciting playground to hang out in.

Speaking of retro sci-fi, there’s a great piece of art in the original book of some retro rayguns. It’s a pretty unique visual take. Can you tell me how you’ve incorporated a retro aesthetic/theme in Constant Downpour?

Thank you! The art direction was a blast to explore and was largely guided by Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Long Rain” which the module is heavily based off of.

One of my favorite aspects of retro sci-fi, and what Bradbury does in the short story is how the atmosphere of Venus is assumed to sustain life. Uniforms are torn and tattered, rain hitting their skin and pouring from their pores. The planet is still hostile and deadly, but you breathe normally, it feels known. A familiar and nightmarish reality.

So if you’re going to ignore poisonous gases you gotta have ray guns and bubble helmets. I gathered a ton of references and David really did a fantastic job making the spacesuits sleek and reeled in from retro gonzo. 

For the module, there’s a bunch of flavorful old-timey coolness to bring some enjoyment to this disparaging journey.

I think influences can be very important for roleplaying games and something I am exploring in Cloud Empress, that is, pulling in enough cultural touchstones to help players understand the world. Can you tell me a bit more the inspirations and references you took from The Long Rain?

It may be easiest to share a quick quote. “The Long Rain” really is incredible prose.

“...It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes...”

The poor men are lost one by one to the grueling environment and they suffer the vision of safety while reality takes it away from them. At the end you hear the characters questioning why they are on Venus, why is there not enough refuge, and the realization of being expendable.

The environment as a base, tackling the feelings characters experience, and providing alternative reasoning of why players would be sent to Venus were the three pillars of inspiration we expanded on. We used them as guiding posts to make the module coherent. We didn’t directly pull from too much else, although some key adventure touchstones include interacting and progressing key locations and found information that help players make decisions and understand the world better.

For the original soundtrack, Blake Suarez took additional inspiration from Metroid Prime, Stranger Things, and classic side-scrollers to breathe familiar feelings of exploration and danger into the music.

Where can folks find you online and learn more about Constant Downpour Remastered?

• Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marcoserrano/constant-downpour-remastered

• Latest newsletter, The Guac 005: theguac.substack.com/p/the-guac-005-live-pre-launch-page

• More regular snippets:@spicytunarpg Twitter, Instagram, Facebook