Nausicaa-inspired, Cloud Empress, returns to Kickstarter with cicadas, spores and skulls
The Cloud Empress Life & Death campaign returns to Kickstarter offering two new setting books, new collector’s boxes, and hardcover versions of reprints.
![Nausicaa-inspired, Cloud Empress, returns to Kickstarter with cicadas, spores and skulls](/content/images/size/w1200/2024/04/Sliplanders_LandoftheLiving.jpg)
The Nausicaa-inspired, Cloud Empress, returns to Kickstarter with new content and lavish reprints.
![](https://www.rascal.news/content/images/2024/04/Cloud_Empress_KickstarterLandingPage_boxset_green.jpg)
This is a world where we are small things, where we are cursed, where reality is slippery, and we survive in beauty and terror. Welcome to the Hereafter. When the Cloud Empress goes missing, glory-hungry soldiers from royal lands above the clouds threaten the balance. The fields below will burn without your help.
The Cloud Empress Life & Death campaign returns to Kickstarter offering two new setting books, new collector’s boxes, and hardcover versions of reprints. Players can now journey into lands of ash and spore with two new setting books, Land of the Living and Land of the Dead, along with the release of some snazzy hardcover box sets.
Cloud Empress streamlines the Ennie-winning rules-lite Mothership 1E tabletop roleplaying system into a stand-alone ecological science fantasy setting. Taking inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki's darkest works, Cloud Empress blends moments of sci-horror with pastoral beauty in equal measure. Rascal news' Chase Carter recently sat down with Co-authors Em Matson and watt to discuss creating vibrant worlds set in the Midwest.
![](https://www.rascal.news/content/images/2024/04/LandoftheDead_item_Bravocityspread-1.jpg)
For watt, Cloud Empress has always been a place to open-mindedly explore big existential questions with both hope and fear.
Cloud Empress explores resilience in the face of catastrophe. What tender moments of connection exist in a world unraveled? There is no apocalypse in Cloud Empress only the resilient Earth and the many things who live upon it. In the world of the “Hereafter,” humankind is no longer the world’s master. Here Farmerlings and Sliplanders have been forced to live in humility and balance with the natural world. Balance is not automatic – it takes work though. There are no easy answers to how humans might come into balance with our environment. -watt
The Cloud Empress Life & Death Kickstarter significantly expands the game's ecological science fantasy setting, making it Mothership 1e's largest third-party series and a wholly unique twist on the game's sci-fi horror formula. Despite compatibility with Mothership, no previous knowledge of Mothership's "Panic System" is needed. Cloud Empress can be played using a free stand-alone rulebook. The Cloud Empress Life & Death campaign runs from April 2nd to April 25th.