Cloud Empress: Rulebook

This is the year of your journey,
the summer of the Century Brood,
the summer of the missing Empress,
the summer of adventure.
Welcome to the Hereafter. 

It all comes back to a beautiful blue sky blanketed with smog. What more really matters? A window to the stars and our ancient kin fogged it with sickle pale clouds. The sky has been covered since anyone can remember, a hundred generations or more. For a while, storms grew strong, crops died weak, and people went hungry. Beauty was erased, and life was strip-mined to feed unstoppable addiction. Many things did not survive. Many others did. 

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Cloud Empress is an ecological science fantasy campaign setting for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG that places you in a world ruled by the patterns of giant psychic cicadas. Cloud Empress creates a new Earth, thousands of years in the future inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Hiromu Arakawa’s Full Metal Alchemist.

Cloud Empress imagines the far future. Find a way to thrive, live, and love in the psychic wreckage of Earth among the junk of the ancient people who abandoned it.

Cloud Empress is a comprehensive setting book supported by a self-contained rulebook focused on story-driven gameplay and evoking a science-fantasy setting.

This is a world where we are small things, where we are cursed, where reality is slippery, and we survive in beauty and in terror. Explore a land governed by the patterns of giant psychic cicadas – the Imago. 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.

Last Voyage of the Bean Barge
Make your way from above the acid clouds through the heart of the Century Brood to the polluted farmland below. Cloud Empress: Last Voyage of the Bean Barge is an introductory adventure to the Cloud Empress science fantasy Mothership sci-fi horror RPG. Navigate competing agendas, hidden murder, and a rampaging brood of giant cicadas.

Game, graphic design, and layout by watt.
Illustrations by pbbeta, Garin, and watt.
Maps by Daniel Hallinan
Editing and development by Roz Leahy
Additional game development by Christian Sorrell
Sensitivity editing by Monroe Soto

RULEBOOK: A5 saddle-stitched zine, 58 color pages.
Bean Barge: A5 saddle-stitched zine, 10 color pages.