I loved reading when I was young, but school burned the joy of it away, and I had to find my way back to it as an adult. As you can see from the sidebar, I tend to have a half-dozen things that I’m reading at any given time. If I sit down to read in the morning, it will be with three different books, and I’ll read a few pages or a chapter in one before switching to the next. Predictably, this means it can take me a very long time to read any one thing. Despite this, I’ve managed to finish quite a few things recently.

What follows are impressions and commentary rather than full reviews. An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that I’ll often finish reading an adventure and go, “Huh. I wonder what other people thought about it, and if they have the same quibbles I did.” And it’s usually so, leading me to haughtily believe that I’ve developed a decent sense for critical analysis. This makes something Cloud Empress all the more fascinating to me, when I’m unsure how I feel about it or even what to think. It also makes it easy for me to lazily link to other reviews and say, “I agree with most of this, and here’s my additional bit.”

Acts of Vengeance: Spider-Man & X-Men – various. I assume my relationship with comic books is a bit odd. I’m not an obsessive fan, but I like what I like. My tastes were formed in fourth grade when my class was overcome by a comics craze. Imagine my awkward surprise when I arrived for the first day of fifth grade, ready to recount the summer’s X-Men stories, only to find no one was into them anymore.

The hottest books that were traded around were the original Elfquest Donnington/Starblaze trade paperback anthologies of the original quest. I don’t think I ever got my hands on the fourth volume back then so I didn’t know how the story concluded, but the rest of it left a deep impression on me. Elves riding wolves! It was the best! I’ll dive into that series another time. I came back to it as an adult and it holds up exceptionally well (and explains a thing or two about me).

I have a weird tendency to like underdog culture, the oft-unappreciated things that you have to travel off the beaten path to find. It’s usually interesting at least, as it hasn’t been absorbed into the everyday status quo. I liked oddball European straight edge hardcore in the ‘90s instead of metal-core, and I had subscriptions to Alpha Flight and X-Factor in fourth and fifth grade. Both were sort of “budget X-Men,” literally and figuratively, as they had spun off from the main book. X-Men, at the time, was at the height of its dramatic phase. They spent the whole time having complicated relationships and hardly ever got into fights, what the hell! Of course, now I love it and can’t wait for the Epic Collections to cover that era.

Spider-Man’s portion of the Acts of Vengeance storyline is quite the opposite. Wikipedia tells me that Acts of Vengeance was an Avengers-centered crossover event where all the bad guys got together and hatched the brilliant plan to fight different good guys, because this novelty would surely bring them victory over their longtime foes. Predictably, it did not. Spider-Man spends a dozen issues or so fighting off-brand villains (as an example, he’s punching the grey Hulk in the nuts on the cover of the book). Along the way he gains cosmic powers, is perplexed and annoyed by them, and loses them. I felt a little dumber for having read his half of the book.

Spider-Man had at least three monthly titles at the time, and I get that it would be hard to develop a rich story across that much rapid output. There’s a major tonal switch when the book turns over to the X-Men, Wolverine, X-Factor, and the New Mutants. At the peak of mutant mania, Chris Claremont was writing multiple stories each month across these titles, but he had a broader cast of characters to draw from, and things immediately get more interesting. This book was a random grab from the library, and if it would have only been the Spider-Man portion, I would have felt like I’d wasted my time a bit, but the mutant half was good enough.

That said, I started reading the New Mutants: Renewal Epic Collection afterwards, and it’s much, much better.

Cloud Empress Kickstarter package – Watt et al. Cloud Empress found life as an ambitious Kickstarter project in early 2023, and it fulfilled in the fall of that year (well done!). I agree with the majority of this review on Playful Void. It’s a curious project, and I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

The vibes are strong as it openly emulates Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind through a present-day online American lens. The characters have a variety of pronouns and a sense of eco-political hopelessness pervades. This is a strange contrast with the inspirational material. Nausicaä is essentially hopeful. Spoiler: the prophesied princess realizes that the fungal infestation will lead to a restoration of the natural world and it needs to be permitted to follow its course, and then she ends the ongoing war between the human factions (or at least that’s how I remember it. It’s been a while since I’ve read or watched it).

Cloud Empress is not hopeful, or at least I didn’t get that impression from reading it. It is explicitly anti-violence, and characters accumulate stress and curses for engaging in it, but it doesn’t really provide an alternate gameplay loop. I’m not sure how this will play out at the table. It looks like a series of downbeats. As I understand it, the game started as a magic system for Mothership, but every spell carries a heavy personal cost for casting it. The players will presumably get their asses kicked again and again, spiraling into despair and a general bad time despite the quirky PCs and giant bugs. But maybe I’m underestimating the hex crawl rules and the pastoral aspects of play that reduce stress. That aspect could provide the upbeats, maybe? But again, the setting is largely humorless, and it feels like you would be constantly fighting against it, forced to create your own hope. I’m really not sure and would have to play it to find out.

There is a princess (empress, actually), and there is a way to rebuild the world, but it’s bound up in a single magic item. If you blink, you’ll miss it. There are no rumors of its existence and no one is actively looking for it. Despite the “ecological science fantasy” claim, I don’t see the ecological part. Post-apocalyptic would be a more accurate descriptor, but isn’t that trite and boring these days? If a game is described as ecological, I expect it to embrace the struggle to conserve what remains and restore the world. In Cloud Empress as written, you mostly wander around feeling bad and getting beaten up. It’s odd.

You can usually reliably infer the intended gameplay style of a game (and is this a game? We’ll come back to that) by reading either the introductory adventure or an adventure written by the system creator. Cloud Empress provides both in the Last Voyage of the Bean Barge. The adventure synopsis is that the characters have gotten passage from a floating city down to the ground aboard an airship. There’s a small keyed map of the airship and some NPCs, and the adventure is event driven. Great, I love events! I think event structures are underused but can push a decent adventure into good or great territory. So what are the events we have here? Mayhem and violence. Buckle up, we’re going to have a bad time, kids. Violence is the hammer of the RPG toolbox, and it isn’t even that this adventure’s problems look like nails. It’s that the game tells you not to use the hammer and then throws nails at you. Sure, you can run around this ship and try to do something, anything, while it’s relentlessly assaulted, but good luck with that. Once again, I’m left confused. I like a good open scenario, but I just don’t have a sense of what can be done here. Download it for free and see if you can tell me.

The Kickstarter package included five other mini adventures. They’re all eight pages long and remind me of church pamphlets, but instead of telling you when to sing, sit, stand, and kneel, they have locations, NPCs, and a “timeline if the PCs do nothing.” Again, I love event driven scenarios, and these are used to differing degrees of efficacy in the various adventures. The eight pages are typically gobbled up by the front cover art, the back cover credits, a full page illustration, and a half-to-full page map, leaving the authors with four or five pages to do their thing. Some work better than others. All of them detail a location on the Cloud Empress hex map, and they’re often more setting than adventure. As with the hexes themselves, there’s an inconsistent degree of potential energy present. It’s one thing for something to be weird, but there has to be a purpose, a draw, something for the PCs to engage with, to make it useful at the table. Players aren’t tourists, and no one is likely to go home happy if a session amounts to, “Well, that was weird.” “Yeah, and we got our asses kicked.”

That said, Joel Hines’ contribution, Lord of the Goneaway, is really good. There are multiple factions and a big weirdo that will get released and change the landscape and it matters who is in control. Yeah, adventure! It uses familiar D&D-derived structures, which leads to some questions that probably should have been posed at the start of all this: Is this a game? Or is this a setting that could just as well be run with another system?

First, is this a game: Yes, tentatively? Playful Void is accurate when they describe the rule book as being strangely organized. Beyond that, it relies on a general knowledge of tabletop role playing game play and probably familiarity with Mothership specifically, the game on which it’s based. The essential gameplay dialogue is barely described. If you gave this to someone who had never played a TTRPG before, they would have to invent the play style in a manner akin to someone who found the original D&D box in 1974. I don’t think every single RPG needs to include explanations of, “What is an RPG?” and, “What are these funny dice?”, but you need something to go on, especially if you’re game is anti-violence but pretty much only gives you rules for violence in the main rule book

There are rules for hex crawling, but they’re in the setting book which doubles as a sort of game master manual. They seem fine, and I imagine they’re really what the core gameplay loop is, and that’s why I’m having trouble imagining how Cloud Empress would actually play. The strength of the game, then, is in the setting, which means you could use other systems to play in it, although the magic system does tie the rules to the setting well. The game justifies its self as a standalone entity there.

If you’ve read this far, you should really read this conversation between Sean McCoy (Mothership/Tuesday Knight Games) and Watt (Cloud Empress). The decision to give Cloud Empress the Mothership branding rather than use their open license Panic System branding wasn’t merely one of commercial interest. Cloud Empress is meant to be an alternate setting for Mothership, and I find that illuminating. I love the idea of having your Mothership characters crash-land on the hex map, or go there on a chalk gathering mission. You could get really weird with that crossover, and it would give the gameplay more purpose than the books themselves provide. That said, the solo gameplay rules were created as a late stretch goal, but they provide a focus and purpose to play that the other books generally do not.

So yeah, Cloud Empress. It’s an ambitious project, and despite my misgivings and confusion, it’s really strong in some areas. The art is outstanding throughout. The theme is clear and consistently reinforced. The hex map gives you lots of room to run around and make your own fun, as long as you’re ok drawing a lot of owls along the way. I’m not convinced the right balance was struck between upbeats and downbeats, and maybe that was an attempt to hew to the Mothership horror vibe? I showed my son Alien for the first time this past weekend, and we both laughed when the chest-burster skittered off the table. You need levity to feel gravity, and vice versa. The one thing I did think was funny was the content warning for sexual content. The sexual content? “While resting in a safe location, the PCs can eat and drink good food, have sex and get good sleep, etc. to lower their Stress…” Won’t someone please think of the children?? Sex in RPGs is a topic for another time, but this is an otherwise entirely sexless, unsexy game, so I was amused by that.

There’s a follow-up Kickstarter coming in April. I’m not sure if I’ll back it or not. It will probably come down to the price, although from that interview, I think there’s some real potential in the setting and I’m curious to see it developed further. I think Cloud Empress succeeds more than it stumbles, and that’s particularly impressive given its scope. It feels like a real place, and I want to know more about it. I’m still perplexed by aspects of it, and I’m enjoying the way that feels. It’s nice to walk away from reading a game really thinking about it.