Tuesday 27 February 2018

Songbirds RPG "Review" (Read, Rambling Musings Thereon)

"Songbirds" is a kinda OSR-adjacent fantasy game based on Into the Odd.

I hesitate to call this a review, as I haven't played the game (yet). But having read it I wanted to write about my thoughts. Turns out I had a few... this is long. There's a tl;dr at the bottom.

The game is pay-what-you-want so give it a look if you like the sound of it, and pay for it if you enjoy what you find. (Always, always support independent creators.)

Oh and no one asked me or paid me to write this, I guess that's a thing that needs mentioning?

***

Character & Party Creation

The first page of Game Rules is the basics of character creation, which takes up one page. This makes me happy. There's even a list of item prices on the same page - you could just print this bit out and put it on the table in front of your players, it's all the basic stuff they'll need outside of class abilities.

Character creation itself consists of rolling for stats, of which there are 3. You then have a few more story-focused things you need to decide for your character - all of which offer a basic example to use or a table to roll on, instead of making it up yourself.

I should point out here that so far, this is pretty much exactly what I want from a system, and even the stuff I'm less immediately keen on doesn't give me any cause for concern, because it's so brief and easy to use or bypass.

The suggested fluff for your character is: "What you say you are", "What you don’t say about yourself", and "What you actively hide about yourself". Every sample NPC in the GM's section has these questions answered too; they seem quite useful in that context especially.

Next page: your party is a "Gang", and every player has a role. I do something similar for my 5e game - people can be the mapmaker or take notes on story or make diary entries. It's always nice to see this stuff codified in a game, giving players meta roles to latch onto that are obviously and directly important.

There's then some narrative stuff about your gang and what your characters mean to each other, which is... ok? I could take it or leave it. A table or something here might feel more approachable, though potentially restrictive.

Your gang is in 100 gold pieces of debt. This is good.

Classes

Each class has one major ability that gives them some kind of advantage in play. One big ability per class, that's your "thing". No builds, no paths. I really like this kind of design (I'm using it myself for a thing), and it's a strong fit for the OSR feel of the system.

Some of these classes might be more "powerful" than others, but "power levels" in that D&D 3/4 sense aren't something the game concerns itself with greatly, so that's ok.

The flavour of some of the classes is just fantastic. You can be an Immortal, which means you can't die - until you're bested in single combat, then you die and the person who killed you becomes Immortal instead. Another instant fave of mine was the Princess, who sends half of all the money they earn back home to their village, Pokemon Gen 2 style. The village can then grant you gifts of appreciation, and sends care packages every day. It's all kind of on-the-edge-of-narrative-gaming-but-not-quite, and I feel like I could get used to it.

The Class section is also where one of the most interesting sides of the game comes into play, which is the Player/Character separation. Some classes demand actions or information of the Player, not the Character.

For example, if you're the Drunken Master class, you can get combat benefits by you the Player drinking alcohol. The Storm Caller gets a magic power depending on what the weather's like in the real world as you play.

I can absolutely see why this might put some people off the game instantly - we're here for Immersion dammit! For me though, the concept is intriguing. Songbirds successfully does something through its rules that very few games ever do, at least not well. Reading this book, I can picture the game being played at the table, and I can tell how and why these rules might be fun. It might not sound like much, but that's about the highest praise I can offer a game I haven't played yet.

Art

As the book continues, we get a full page art spread with a small text box giving level progression rules. I think now's a good time to talk about the art.

Sara Kipin is an artist whose work I've admired for a short while now, and her work on Songbirds is fantastic. There's a roughness of line and a watercolour feel, combined with an attention to shape and geometry in places that mingle beautifully on the page. The book switches between black and white, full colour and some more muted palettes, but the whole thing feels consistent.

This is very clearly Artwork, not just design or concept art. Some pieces feel more like traditional illustrations, even tapestry or stained glass. These are things which modern, mainstream books like the 5th Edition rules do once or twice but not nearly enough.

It might have been nice to see more of player characters interacting, or doing things together, rather than these single-character images, but I can live without that.

There are also battlemaps by Dyson Logos, which are characteristically clear and practical.

..."OSR-Adjacent"?

It's a term, far too vague to be useful, that I've been using in my head to describe some things I'm working on, and it fits here. I'm not sure of the author's age, but I've found it to be a fairly generational thing - people who like the OSR style of play, but, having not grown up with D&D or even D&D byproducts (coming fresh into the RPG scene in the last few years) feel no compulsion towards some of its legacy elements.

Again, I can't speak for the author as I don't know them or their work prior to this, but Songbirds seems in keeping with this (read, my) approach to the DIY scene. In the same way that the OSR looks at old school gaming and slays a few sacred cows in order to present a fresh, updated and ultimately very new experience, this "OSR-adjacent" thinking (I need a better name), presumes no cow to be sacred, only situationally nutritious.

Songbirds even mixes in narrative elements like referring to parts of sessions as Scenes and Episodes, which for this cow metaphor would be... I dunno... quinoa or something. No Vancian magic, no spell lists. Magic is straightforward and creative, using a system of syllables similar to the indie one-page mech game Newtype. Highlights of OSR play are cherry-picked and used to great effect (we get a Carousing table!), but there's no sense that a List of Things to Put in Your Fantasy RPG is being followed. You get equipment lists with prices, but they're pared down further than even LotFP's brilliant inside cover tables.

Combat

Combat occupies a very specific level of crunch. There's a lot more here than, say, Maze Rats, but it doesn't approach nearly the complexity of 5th. It still feels very 5th, though? More so than anything else in the game. I doubt I'd use everything here if I ran a session, but I suppose it's nice to have it to fall back on.

Fave bits here: The Death rules offer more potential in three simple options than most systems I've run. The entirety of Plane combat (this book has planes!) takes up about 50 words and is both mechanically solid and evocative.

Other Bits

I can feel this beginning to turn into both an in-depth analysis and a lofty-minded piece about the OSR in general, neither of which I would wish upon anyone. So I'll skim over some other parts of the book that stick out to me:

- It is specifically mentioned that you roll to avoid danger, not to just do stuff. Thank the Lawd. Yet another thing that aligns with how I run games and write rules.

- Vices are mentioned a few times, and there's a simple little rule or two you can use for things like drug addiction that seem like they'd work well in play.

- There's a flat cost to living each day in-game. In fact, more than a few mechanics link back to the idea of monetary cost. This is good in many ways (better than 5th Edition's piles of gold) but I feel like not paying enough attention to money might upset some game elements, which is not a situation I want to be in.

- Anyone can start worshipping a thing and be its "Cleric", that's cool.

- There's a whole section for Dream Quests that you can go on while you sleep off the effects of some huge battle or important event. You hunt an animal using random tables to set up the encounter, plus there are strange, real life consequences for succeeding or failing the Dream. That's Good Shit.

- There's a calendar and characters have birthdays, which is something I wrote about on my first post here.

- The GM's section is thorough and gives good material without being prescriptive. The material also does a job of conveying the implied setting, which I'm enjoying.

- This game stats monsters like 5e wishes it could stat monsters. I want to homebrew baddies for this system straight away. The statblocks and accompanying info are a bit more in depth than most OSR statblocks though, so I can see prep being a bit more work.

- Magic Item samples are solid. You get more of the Player/Character separation mechanics here, which are just great. As far as normal items, it's all very classic OSR, all good stuff.

- Just the level and inclusion of Flavour throughout is *chef kisses fingers*

- There's a mechanic for making friends which I almost glossed over but is hugely elegant. I'm not completely sold on how it would work in play, I'd like to try it though.

- There are different types of damage, one for each Stat it would appear. But the Damage section of the rules only lists one, with the other mentioned in passing in some other sections. Are the others highly situational? When are they used?

- One thing I haven't mentioned much are the GM resources. There are a healthy amount of them and they seem useful, but I'll have more to say about them once I've actually run the game.

Stacking?

Ok so I have to put this somewhere. There's a stacking mechanic, kinda like Dread? But with a set of polyhedrals? I think? It's mentioned a few times in passing as a variant resolution option for certain subsystems, but never codified in one place.

Don't know if I'm being dumb, but while that seemed a fun concept, it wasn't presented in a way that made me feel I could understand or make use of it.

Gimme That tl;dr

In short, I like this game a lot. I feel a certain... kinship, almost, to the design and intent. It needs a good proofread, and I suspect some more playtests, but it's professional enough that I wasn't put off by its presentation. It's generic enough that it fits in with other fantasy DIY games as opposed to hyper-specific storygames, but even so the tone and setting are still the big hooks for me.

Obviously these impressions are all very personal. No game is for everyone, but if you like my stuff I have a feeling you could have fun with Songbirds. I'm going to try running it some time soon myself, I'll post results here if I do.

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