#land of cicadas

[christiansorrell]

Play-By-Blog #0: Cloud Empress

My first Play-By-Blog (of Luke Gearing's The Isle) just recently wrapped up, and now, we are getting the next one going with Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas! If you missed our run through The Isle, you can find all of the entries here.

Recently, I ran a poll to see what folks were interested in for this second Play-By-Blog and the voting was an exact tie between Cloud Empress and Mausritter, but since I'm the one doing all the writing, I was the tiebreaker and chose Cloud Empress and its hexcrawl, Land of Cicadas, as a new twist on the Play-By-Blog format and because the game has a set of solo rules in which you create and play as an entire party, not just a single character.

If you aren't familiar with Cloud Empress, here's a quick description straight from the game's product page:

Cloud Empress is an expansive, Nausicaa-inspired fantasy campaign setting for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. Cloud Empress places you in a world ruled by the patterns of giant magical 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.

The full rulebook for the game is FREE over at DriveThruRPG.

Land of the Cicadas takes this world and opens it up across a large hexmap, allowing us to explore the Lowland Wastes (Cloud Empress's take on a farflung future American Midwest) during the summer of the Century Brood and 29th Expedition (an ongoing military incursion from the Cloudling cities).

If you missed the last Play-By-Blog, here's an idea of how it works:

I write up the situation, NPCs, and more, just like a DM/GM.

You vote in the poll to help decide the party's next course of action.

I roll the dice, resolve actions, and write them up in the next entry.

So on and so forth for the rest of the adventure!

With all that said, let's get into Party Creation, vote on our first decisions, and get this whole thing started! Thanks for coming along for the ride.

We'll be generating 3 characters for our starting party. For the sake of our first poll and the number of base Jobs available in Cloud Empress, I'll take the top 3 most popular results and roll up a character for each (unless the All Random option wins the entire poll, in which case all characters will then be randomly rolled). So if Sellsword gets 8 votes, Lordling gets 4, Magician gets 3, and Courier gets 2, I'll roll up a Sellsword, a Lordling, and a Magician.

For variety's sake, we won't double up on Jobs (unless All Random is chosen, in which case it would be possible to get doubles of a Job within the party).

In Cloud Empress, there are 4 different Jobs available to characters:

Sellswords can handle themselves in a fight, but long to find a home. The long lost fighters and gritty mercs of the Wastes.

Lordlings are groomed to lead and strike fear into those around them. Strange and privileged, they stand out among the Wastes.

Magicians sacrifice their bodies to cast dangerous spells. Esoteric but powerful. There are no old Magicians.

Couriers are scrappy travelers who’ve witnessed the best and worst of the world. The salt of the chalk-covered Earth.

After we have our characters, we'll get our starting location and our initial job - the focus of our travels across the Land of Cicadas - from the Solo Procedure tables. Then, we'll be off!

#meatcastle pbb #ttrpg #indie ttrpg #ttrpgs #rpg #fantasy #science fantasy #science fiction #worlds by watt #cloud empress #play by blog #play by post #land of cicadas #polls #choose your own adventure

[bug-maniac]

I see a lot of definitions of what exactly constitutes a bug, so I want to know what you guys think makes a bug.

So if you think that earthworms are bugs but spiders aren't, you'd click "An above definition + land worms" and then say "insects only" in the tags.

I wish I had one more option so I could just have a "see results" button but I won't. 😭 Please reblog so the rest of bugblr can see it!

#tumblr polls #bugblr #insectblr #invertblr #is that a thing? #please reblog for containment breach #everything on this list is a bug (to me) #cicada? bug #butterflies? bug #argiope my beloved? bug #millipede? bug #crab? wet bug #giant african land snail? slimy bug #sea slug? wet AND slimy bug #earthworm? wiggly bug #nematodes? wet AND wiggly bug

[teknikolor-walters]

THEY'RE SO GAY

#cicada liveblogs hnk #<- fuck it #also yeah ill maintag my liveblog whatever i need hnk mutuals #houseki no kuni #land of the lustrous

[laudogen]

Darkness and light Nothing to choose Follow them all until it soothes Land on your back and flap my wings It's not for the sleeping that I sing

#inspired by going through anji's +r story #title is from cicada (land on your back) by the joy formidable #this song is very anji... #nature‚ motion‚ choices‚ confidence‚ reflection‚ theatrics #anji mito #guilty gear #my art

[chibiko]

job interview at 9am tomorrow btw send me some good vibes or whatever

#cicada buzzing #its not for anything huge its just a gas station so i'm confident i'll land it but still #wish me luck

[ivory--raven]

my mission this summer is to teach the little one that bugs aren't scary

#especially because of the cicadas #he's scared of the cicadas #we will work on that #land crabs. might be my angle

[hskin-spriting]

wuold it be possible to get a land drawing for a Land of Binary and Flies for a sollux descendant-?

AUGH rip u guys i was sick and Dead but I Live Again how's this (EYESTRAIN WARNING)

i hated this at first because i doubt my abilities but this is actually cool as fuck to look at

#EYESTRAIN TW #EYESTRAIN WARNING #asks #answered #cicada-days-of-summer #how tag this... #land drawings #homestuck lands #captor descendant #sollux descendant #homestuck kin

[roseseafoam]

It’s funny to me when people describe edge-of-suburban to rural living as quiet. There’s an entire symphony of amphibians and insects behind my house every night in the summer…

#like. you thought cicadas were bad?? #TREE FROGS belovèd… try sleeping through THAT #like if it’s quiet and void of all animal noises… run. that land is cursed…

[ultimateanna]

Land of the Lustrous (Houseki no Kuni) Volume 8 - Extended volume art

Characters on volume art

Phosphophyllite

Watermelon Tourmaline

Benitoite

Hemimorphite

Neptunite

Cicada

Cinnabar

#land of the lustrous #houseki no kuni #manga #haruko ichikawa #phosphophyllite #watermelon tourmaline #benitoite #hemimorphite #neptunite #cicada #cinnabar

[arventixx]

Woah!?

HI TUMBLR IT’S BEEN AGES! I know I have like zero following on here but like hello omg where are the hnk tumblr fans!? WOAHHHH!! Hi I’m Phos (yeah like, actually) and I enjoy Cicada x Phos and AntaPhos and BortzPhos and woah!!??! Btw fuck off if you like cinna//phos or stan cinnabar mkay mk BYEEE!!!

#phosphophyllite #houseki no kuni #land of the lustrous #haruko ichikawa #phos #bortzphos #phosbort #antaphos #antarcphos #cicaphos #cicada houseki #woah!?? #arventixx tumblr postings real!?!?!? #arventixx speaks

[holliano]

02.01.2023

#landed on by a cicada and followed by a bumblebee #I see the insects think I’m a flower again

[crystalkitty1220]

I woke up at like four-thirty to being bitten by what was apparently an ant because even though it was rounder than ant-shaped, I walked down the hall to another room and saw like five more ants and I'm wondering why the fuck are these things only moving at night to the point where I (having been woken up at four-thirty in the morning) genuinely thought they might've been the motherfuckin' animorphs, but then my dad woke up and told me that somebody probably disturbed their nest or something. But there's still so many goddamn ants that I don't think I can go back to sleep and now I am hiding on the couch that most likely stole echos' phone. Anyways how have my mutuals been?

#cw bugs #i hate bugs so much #actually i think bugs are pretty cool in pictures and in media and i'd probably let a moth land on my hand because moths are poggers #but all the bugs that have been near me recently are the cicadas that keeps flying into me whenever i try to go outside and bigass ants #and wasps #and spiders! we've found like five daddy long legses around the house #every bug which people hate. they've all decided to surround Me Specifically.

[celepeace]

I grew up holding a lot of bugs, I've held probably thousands of insects and spiders in my lifetime

But i was only a few years ago that at bird sat on my hand for the first time. It was just a cockatiel and idk what I was expecting bc birds have little dinosaur feet with claws but my first reaction was "this is UNCANNILY similar to having a large spider or cicada on my arm"

#small bird feet feel rly similar to large bug feet. especially when they're moving #specifically it was really similar to the periodical cicadas that come out every 13 & 17 years #so much so that when one landed on me and walked up my arm i had flashbacks to being a kid and holding cicadas

[sunbeamsandmoonrays]

Live footage of me dodging cicadas walking to and from my car

#if you're in cicada land #be safe out there #the tales of sunny

[redplanetroswell]

hyper realistic cicada hairclips

#cicada posting #inspired by when a cicada landed on my hair and hitchhiked into my house

[lurkiestvoid]

> sits outside

> gets covered in bugs

> gritting my teeth This is fine. This is their home and I am in it. Bugs are good. Bugs are a sign of a healthy diverse ecosystem. Bugs are important. I love bugs. I appreciate bugs. Bugs are great. Please please please do not let spiders get On Me though

#bugs #like. i am much better than i used to be #always been fine with caterpillars and ants and such #but. the FAST crawlies. #those are... difficult #and i have even progressed to the point that i can have a midsized jumping spider on me #without immediate panic! #they're even kind of cute! ish! #but PLEEEEEEEASE do NOT touch me!! #i will usually use a leaf or something to transfer them to the ground and Away From Me #but Big spiders? wolf spiders? orbweavers? #my fight or flight kicks in and i cannot control myself. i will yeet it #and hope that it lands safely very far but oh god please not the spiders #literally anything but that #ive had cicadas in my hair and been like awwe :) buddye :))) #but. i just cannot (yet) handle spiders On Me #they can exist. they can even exist near me #but not On Me.