I particularly like Dying-Earth-style far future science fantasy settings, and this one happens to be based off of my favorite story in that vein: Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. So I was hugely predisposed to like the setting.
And watt delivers so well on making the flavor so close to Nausicaa while still making this world entirely their own. The magic system is chef's kiss, and feels fully integrated with the world and it's economies, politics, etc. The tables that determine character's gear and immediate previous occupations are so juicy. Everything comes together to paint a unified and rich whole world.
Numenera, the main science fantasy system designed for this kind of game, often leaves me cold because there's not enough coherent world vibes / flavor. It makes it open for the GM to insert more of their own, but I think the GM can always do that. I prefer settings / games that come with a good, viable, unique flavor of their own, which I can always remix as needed. Something like Ultraviolet Grasslands is the gold standard for this, to my mind (though it's mechanic underpinnings are severely lacking). Cloud Empress doesn't quite match something like UVG, being perhaps the silver to its gold medal, but damn, it's still really good. An Olympic silver medalist is still the second best athlete in a sport in the world.
My only complaint is that the system is a direct and often unchanged hack of Mothership. Although the lethality and puzzling darkness of the setting do fit somewhat fit the rules of Mothership, other pieces of Mothership that were specifically designed for horror do not. I think if a few more independent mechanical design decisions were made the rules would match the setting much better. Dark and gritty but not explicitly and always horror, per se. Make it "inspired by Mothership" rather than "a hack of Mothership", and some of the rules systems would have just flowed better (and I think the openness of the Mothership 3rd party license would have still been app, which is almost certainly part of why it is a hack of Mothership). But that minor quibble is not enough to knock it down from 5 to 4 stars.
I wholeheartedly recommend this game.
Wertung: | | [5 von 5 Sternen!] |
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