I put out a poll last week to see which systems my followers were interested in statblock conversions. The results were very surprising to me! The most voted for system is Cloud Empress. I have to say: damn, my followers have good taste! Everything else on the list got one vote (except for 5E lol). I really put that on there as a way to catch the normies at smaller conventions and fests but I am genuinely kind of shocked it got zero votes.

This really got me thinking about the hunger for supplements of newer cutting edge TTRPGs. What's the real demand for creators like me to make supplements specifically for games like Cloud Empress? With the market so sickeningly saturated with the slop slathered on the top crust of the big fish in this little pond, it is difficult to tell. There's a good deal of digital ink spilled trying to convey just how freakin' hard it is to get inside the mind of the gamer as they are and not how the see themselves or how they tell you they see themselves. I've seen a lot of data and pontification from game designers (admittedly mostly in the vidya industry) about how what a gamer tells you they want and what they'll actually *buy* has an insane disparity.

At the end of the day, an artist should only make stuff they're genuinely excited about, and I'm lucky that the game voted for was something as good as Cloud Empress. I don't know if people were able to intuit that it was the best choice for Doors of Dimensia, but in hindsight, I can see that it's true. The Depth Crawl in DoD matches really well with Cloud Empress' core assumption of being a road trip adventure and its stance on violence. Its dangerous and scary, but in a way that feels unique against most OSR-adjacent games and retroclones. Being build on Mothership, the game naturally focuses a lot more on the mental state of its heroes. All the strange effects to the Mind, Body, and Spirit in DoD (referred to as Dimenisas) pair like a charcuterie board of delicious pain and tragedy.

CE is one of those games that I would not expect a large swathe of the gamer base to jump for first simply because of how sicko it is. Part of me suspects it has star power because it is a Mothership hack, but it'd be really nice to believe that there are people out there actually clamoring to play it in new and weird settings. Because Doors of Dimensia is such an out-there concept as an adventure toolbox, my intent was to make it sYsTEm AgNOsTiC with easily hackable rules for other systems. Looking back on the development cycle, I can see why (though I definitely don't agree) there are dudes out there that will review bomb your release simply for it being so. It promotes kinda half hearted design decisions where you could make impactful ones that interact with the intended system the adventure is for. I tried to account for this by making subsystems that can sit on top of the mechanics for a few popular TTRPGs out there, but only the folks getting the book can decide if that was successful or not.

If you made it this far down my post, ayyy thanks for reading! If we pass this stretch goal, I have kind of a wild idea for a second stretch goal inspired by reading Mythic Bastionland's examples of play section.