Hello! It’s been a heck of a week—only 222 copies of Stories from the Slip remain! Thanks so much for you support and making this campaign a success. It’s never clear how crowdfunding will go and feels a bit like dressing in a pitch black room before opening the door to your own surprise birthday party.

For our second update, I’ll dive into the origins of Stories From the Slip, Vol. I.

To tell you the story of how I developed the Ballad of the Blooming Blade and Bodyhopping in Polite Society, I need to tell you about the Cloud Empress Discord. If you weren’t aware, Cloud Empress has a positive and vibrant Discord community (you can join using the link on my website). During the first Cloud Empress crowdfunding campaign, I received repeated requests to start a Discord for the newly forming Cloud Empress community. I had seen other indie ttrpg communities flourish and implode and felt wary of starting my own. The concession I made at the time would be that the Cloud Empress Discord would be for playtesting and game development. About two years later the Discord is thriving and will soon stretch into conversations about other worlds by watt settings.

Each Friday, the Discord moderators and I post a discussion topic to spark conversations and explore ttrpg topics (both CE related and otherwise). If I recall correctly, sometime in the first year of the Discord I asked about potential Cloud Empress expansion content. I was already thinking about a set of four zines that could build on the lore established in the Rulebook for the Sellsword, Lordling, Magician, and Courier. The group started talking about in-universe manuals and texts. Discord user Jaws Lightning ideated the name “The Discerning Bodyhopper’s Corpse Catalog,” and, wow, I was sold on the idea. While I worked on other projects, a Bodyhopper guide simmered. Checking to with Jaws Lightning to make sure they weren’t pursuing the idea themselves, I expanded the scope of what I imagined a Bodyhopping zine to be about to also include social etiquette, freaky unwanted memories, and further explanation of Bodyhopper tattoo markings.

Ballad of the Blooming Blade will be the first book in the job expansion series, focusing on enriching the Sellsword job. Instead of making a linearly coherent manual for tricking out your Sellsword,  I decided to experiment with the narrative form by weaving together a fireside tale/song with how Sellswords can cast spells by coating their blades with chalk. Ballad of the Blooming Blade became a further opportunity to expand the Frog-dogs—a Sellsword mercenary company known for impropriety and taking on the worst work in the Wastes.

So that’s the spark the ignited the creative ideas behind crowdfunding campaign (more or less). I can’t say it enough about how happy I am with the development of the Cloud Empress community—and you reading this play a big part too.

If you have any questions about the books, the world of Cloud Empress, or the campaign, post a comment in the chat and I’ll get it answered!