5MW Rokaner Report #3, with watt
RR#3, The Web, Mar 2024
Hello spacefolk!
The equinox has come and gone, so no matter your hemisphere, the axial tilt has a new plan for your solar exposure! Ha, this wouldn’t be a 5 Million Worlds newsletter without some weird reflection on how strange space is, haha.
First up, The Lost Bay Suburban Gothic RPG is live on Kickstarter! Written by Iko, the designer behind The Lost Bay Studio bundles like Outer Rim Uprising and host of The Lost Bay Podcast, this campaign offers two books: The Lost Bay game & setting book and Urban Legends an adventure collection featuring work by Samantha Leigh, Alfred Valley, David Kenny, and this month’s 5MW Rokaner Report guest, watt! The campaign has hit over half its stretch goals, so there’s lots of extra goodies already to check out on the campaign page!
Worlds by watt, creator of Cloud Empress and game writer extraordinaire, is joining us for an interview and a lil bit of world-building. Their new expansion, Cloud Empress: The Lands of Life & Death hits Kickstarter on April 2nd, so be sure to follow the launch!
Interview with watt
Chris: Hi watt! Thanks for joining me here on the Rokaner Report for a Worlds by watt meets 5 Million Worlds chat. So, when you appeared on the scene, I felt this energy about Hot Stuff on Shore Leave, a hurt-yet-heartfelt approach to healing between Mothership horrors that, to me, shook with potential energy like a seed. What came after was the acclaimed Cloud Empress.
Before we get to creating a world, I’d like to talk about your next project, The Lands of Life & Death. I think 5MW readers know Cloud Empress from my work on The Unseen City, so what’s new in The Lands of Life & Death?
watt: Hey Chris, thanks for having me! In Land of the Dead players explore a landscape defined by the impact of a massive cloud city falling from the sky. The book thematically and mechanically explores how trauma and grief shape places. Gameplay centers around increased challenges surviving such a damaged landscape and the strange voice calling master Magicians to the center of the impact site. Folks can expect lots of new spells, new foes, and to finally uncover the mystery of Prince Bug.
Chris: For the first Cloud Empress KS campaign, you listed sf lit masterpieces like Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, and Le Guin’s Earthsea series as inspirations. These, among other great sf novels, were listed on the itch page alongside one I didn’t yet know, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (what a riot, eh?). What works have may have had some inspiration for this new setting book?
watt: Land of the Dead leans into images of apocalypse and my love of Bloodborne, Fallout, Angel’s Egg, and the writing of Cormac McCarthy. The universe of Cloud Empress is defined by contrasts. Moments of tender beauty and compassion challenged by violence and danger. Whereas Land of the Living (Land of the Dead’s companion book) presents a vibrant world of growth and abundance, the Deadlands are frozen in time.
Chris: Hmm, so players exploring the Deadlands see a vision of their planet’s past, crumbling in ruin. That’s exciting. Another exciting bit I’ve heard about is the new murder mystery adventure, Funeral for the Anti-Saint. I love a good spooky manor. How did this Deadlands adventure come about?
watt: Funeral for the Anti-Saint is a new introductory adventure now bundled in the Land of the Dead hardcover. The adventure has been a long time in the making. Backers of the first campaign may remember I originally intended the Deadlands biome to be included in the Land of Cicadas setting book, but had to cut it for space. I’ve been working on Funeral then for about two years.
While Cloud Empress’ other introductory adventure Last Voyage of the Bean Barge acts as a thrill ride full of external conflict, I tried something new with Funeral. In the adventure, the PCs intrude upon a secret memorial service meant to honor the passing of the Anti-Saint and name the Anti-Saint’s successor. Each of the four prominent NPCs carry their own agendas, schemes, and personal connections to the former Anti-Saint.
With all my adventures, I try to present a world in motion – one that does not wait for the PCs to play heroes. The tricky part of design in this adventure has been balancing a feeling that the PCs are not the center of adventure (how realistic would it feel to crash a funeral and have everyone fawn all over you?), while also giving them plenty of agency to impact the outcomes. For instance, there’s a whole alternate reality I’ve designed that only some players will see. I really appreciate my playtesters and editors on these more complex adventures who’ve helped me identify moments of railroading that take away too much player agency. There’s an abundance of worldbuilding and things to do in a highly social setting.
Chris: Brilliant. As a frequent GM, I enjoy the push-and-pull when players get wrapped up in faction’s plans that are already in motion. You never know how that ends! I’m very much looking forward to reading those NPC agendas. Is there anything else about this campaign you’d like to share with the readers?
watt: The other big news will be most of the Cloud Empress line will soon be printed in hardcover. Both the Land of the Dead and the Land of the Living will be printed in high quality hardcover, but I’ll also be reprinting the Cloud Empress Rulebook and Land of Cicadas in hardcover as well. The move to hardcover came about because of the many requests I’ve received to create a storage solution for folks’ Cloud Empress content–folks want a box! Whether grabbing some of the reprints or pledging for new content only, all physical backers will receive a two piece storage box for their book bundles.
I didn’t think I would be able to produce a hardcover print run when I ran the last campaign, so I’ll be offering a discount to all previous backers. It’s exciting to learn more about the industry, and develop my skills each campaign and I feel ready to take on the increased complexity involved with one large and successful Cloud Empress campaign behind me.
Chris: After your efficiency on top of amazing writing and artwork for the last campaign, I’m sure this is going to be a stellar showing. Good luck, and I know I’ll be there on Day One!
Graveyard of the Armored Hearts
When I provided watt with the simple “Place, People, Peculiarity” prompts for this collaborative design exercise, their thoughts raced into a whole, exciting adventure setup based on mecha anime. I’ve taken these bones to a zoomed-in location within the larger setting of an artificial world: The Web.
This space-based megastructure is an interconnected lattice of asteroid mines, factories and failed mecha prototypes called Bipedal Armored Heart Units, or BAHUs. Despite consistent failures, the big corps rush headlong into their sunken cost fallacy. The system at large has invested their whole society into this project, paranoid of an existential alien threat (which the PCs are liable to be mistaken for). This double-spread focuses on one section of the Web, the mecha graveyard.
Click here to download Graveyard of Armored Hearts!
The zip contains a pdf, print-friendly, and plaintext file.
5MW Avatar Forms
5 Million Worlds RPG is a deep future science fiction adventure game, and what would that be without transhuman character options? This is the newest character addition in the generation procedure: choosing (or rolling) a Form. This body could be an Avatar’s original or an adopted Form, and each comes with boons and banes.
The Trad is your baseline human Form, Emulants are variations on the Android, so your typical Mothership PCs. But which of these three other Forms would you like a deep dive on in the next Rokaner Report?
Thanks for sticking around and reading, and see you next month!
-ChrisAir