Surprise gourds expansion + a new way to play Cloud Empress
Welcome to the worlds by watt newsletter. I’m watt, creator of the ecological science fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Cloud Empress. You can preorder the new Cloud Empress box on Backerkit. You can find worlds by watt digital products at DriveThruRPG. For all things Cloud Empress go to CloudEmpress.com.
TL;DR Summary
🎃 Surprise Gourds CE Expansion
🟦 Follow watt on Bluesky
👨👨👧👦 Running Cloud Empress as a distributed campaign
📖 What I’m reading and playing
🎃 Surprise Gourds expansion
You can download a PDF of all Cloud Empress newsletter expansions here.
Farmerlings speak of surprise gourds with suspicious delight. The oversized pumpkin-like vegetables grow around a slippery item, relic, or object cast out of timespace. The overall shape of the outer pumpkin provides an educated guess to the contents inside. Still, even the most confident Farmerling guessers routinely find gourds filled with egg yolk, rancid milk, or lost letters – defying all expectations. Many villages save surprise gourds for children’s amusement or prestigious guessing games in Fall festivals. No matter the location or ritual, most Farmerlings keep a rifle at hand when opening a surprise gourd in case the cracked flesh reveals something truly disgusting or dangerous.
What’s inside the surprise gourd?
A missing object thought permanently lost (a key, letter, watch, cat, etc.).
Pounds of prewrapped sugar candy marked in an undecipherable language.
Cogulated liquids that stink horribly.
Loose papers covered in original and exceptional lyrics and melodies.
A smaller gourd (roll again on this table).
An infant or toddler that strongly resembles a nearby adult who is currently
trying to conceive.
The preserved corpse of someone murdered, but never found. The murder victim
may or may not be familiar to the people who open the gourd.
A flock of migratory birds or butterflies, who quickly begin their journey south.
A random relic.
A naked human with a foggy mind. They struggle to walk and violently flee the
gourd in confusion.
🟦 Follow watt on Bluesky
Are you moving over to Bluesky from the X dumpster fire? The site seems to be hitting a critical mass of cool artists and ttrpg creators. I post weekly previews of new artwork for worlds by watt games on Bluesky.
Follow me at bsky.app/profile/worldsbywatt.bsky.social.
👨👨👧👦 Running Cloud Empress as a distributed campaign
Today I wanted to ask Peter about the sessions of Cloud Empress he has been running. Peter is an RPG designer and host of the RPG Night Utrecht in the Netherlands. Since the start of this summer, the group has run a distributed campaign in the Land of Cicadas - where multiple gamemasters run a shared world for multiple groups of player characters.
Hello Peter, thanks so much for talking in the newsletter. Can you tell us more about the distributed campaign of Cloud Empress you’ve been running?
Absolutely! We’ve been playing Cloud Empress at a public RPG night since the start of summer. It’s at a nice local cafe and hosted by Subcultures, a board game store that has done so much to support gaming culture in Utrecht, from boardgaming to LARPing. Please drop by if you ever get the chance!
I look forward to the Cloud Empress games every week. We have multiple tables each night, all going on expeditions within the same setting. Lately we’ve had about 3 GMs and 12 players per night. GMs can be a player one night and a GM the other, and we make sure to give each GM their own domain, which they and they alone control. Mine is the Breadbasket. A month ago a player became Master of the Thickwood. And just tonight another GM joined, whose domain might become the out-of-control cursed millennium forest that players have created.
We synchronized the calendar of the Hereafter to that of the real world. So it’s autumn now, and it’s going to be winter before long. We’re already excitedly thinking about what we would like a winter campaign season to look like in the harsh conditions of the Lowland Wastes.
How did you find out about Cloud Empress and get players interested in exploring the world?
I ran Mothership 1e before this and probably first heard of Cloud Empress through that community. I didn’t need to get players excited at all. Lately I’ve come to think the best quality a game can have is to attract and nurture a fantastic group of players. If you look at all the wonderful people who’ve been coming to our games and go home excited for more, Cloud Empress has been a great success.
Have you tried using this distributed GM model before? When and how did you decide to run the tables this way?
Two years ago I started running public games at the RPG Night Utrecht with Mausritter. I wanted anyone to be able to drop in and out at any time to just try new games and meet people. But I also wanted to give returning players the keys to the car and drive the campaign wherever they wanted. Probably straight into a ditch. I needed a rules light, flavor heavy game that gets players ready and excited in a heartbeat. Mausritter and Cloud Empress are both great examples. I took inspiration from the West Marches campaign style to make the campaign player-driven and easy to jump in and out of.
Early last year, the game became too big for one table when a wonderful group of players started returning regularly. One session, there was no more space for the one player who had been there with me from the very start. But they joined anyway. I realized then and there that I was delighted that they did, and that I did not want to turn down any of them. So I asked the players if anyone wanted to GM with me. I came to realize that the RPG Night wasn’t only a great way to introduce people to playing new RPGs, but also to GMing them.
The style kept growing from there as we played and learned together. It is still changing today. Last week we started buddying up each newcomer with a returning player to make their new character together, and decide how the two characters know each other. It’s great.
What advice would you give to folks interested in trying out a distributed model like the one you’ve described?
Keep it simple. GMing together is so much fun, as long as you keep it simple. Most of our tweaks to the campaign-style have been about making it even simpler. Seeing how events from different tables bleed into each other is absolutely amazing, but don’t let it get in the way of GMs doing what they do best; running a fun game. Increasingly, the style has been growing to support that.
What advice would you give new Cloud Empress players to get the most out of their sessions?
Find any excuse to show players what the Hereafter has to offer. Don’t worry about running out of mysteries and surprises; you won’t. The world is seeped in wonder and questions begging to be explored. Also, amongst all the excitement, don’t shy away from giving more serious subject matter the space it deserves. Cloud Empress does a fantastic job of showing the players that their characters are only human, even if they’re magical ghosts or hamster hybrids. For example, its use of Mothership Panic Engine doesn’t feel like it is meant to create horror, but to keep the characters emotionally vulnerable. This helps the players share moments that feel genuine, even in a world that can get crazy weird.
I also wanted to ask you about Featherrail Falls, your adventure collection for Mausritter. Can you give folks the high-level pitch for the book?
Of course! Feathertail Falls started as a region for our Mausritter distributed campaign with the goal to publish it as an adventure collection inspired by The Estate. You explore an old forest that was once ruled by mice that could fly. But one day they mysteriously fell into a magical sleep. Since then, other, stranger creatures have made the forest their home.
In Cloud Empress, I try to balance a sense of wonder with ever-present danger. You write, “Feathertail Falls zooms in on some awe-inspiring treasures of nature. It will be filled with magic, but mostly of a kind that exists in the real world if you look closely enough.” how do you draw eyes to nature’s beauty in a system like Mausritter than can also be quite dangerous?
I wanted all sorts of different parts of nature to feel like characters in their own right, at least in little ways. The tides, tree roots, meadows and canopies of the forest all seem to have a mind of their own. These things are inspired by my own follies as a backpacker. I’ve hurt myself over tree roots, fallen victim to rising tides and found myself far from shelter in the forest at night. Each adventure site is also based loosely on a real place I’ve found on my travels, and I try to express the magic I felt at the time in a more tangible and gameable way through the adventures.
Thanks so much for your time and the experiences you’ve shared today Peter. You can find more of Peter’s work at:
silly-whirly.itch.io (follow to get notified when Feathertail Falls becomes available).
sirlywhirly.blogspot.com, where Peter posts about distributed campaigns and other things.
📖 What I’m reading and playing
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Vermintide 2
Salvage Union by Leyline Press
The Bloodborne Board Game by CMON
Down the Drain by Julia Fox
Sleep No More
The Sacrifice (4K in theaters) by Andrei Tarkovsky
Thanks for subscribing to the worlds by watt newsletter!
For all things Cloud Empress go to CloudEmpress.com.
-watt
Oh and I should mention I borrowed a lot of this month's formatting from the wonderful https://substack.com/@exeuntpress
That distributed campaign sounds like a dream.
How are you liking Ancillary Justice?