This has been my conversion of The Bureau by Goblin Archives, a megadungeon module for Liminal Horror. I have been converting it into robins, Coffee Johnson's (@ahcoffeebeans) hack of songbirds 3e by Snow. This chost is my reward for that work, the opportunity to sort through the challenges and victories and put them onto cohost. This will be a long chost.
What I see in Robins.
I wanted to run Robins because I believe in the game's vision. I believe in Coffee's work as an author and as a game designer and even though robins is one of those games that exists as a rough impression of what it wants to communicate right now, I know that Coffee will get it there if enough people start engaging with it. That's just how it works with us much smaller ttrpg writers. That vision is, quite succinctly, modern urban fromsoft.
And listen. Nobody has cracked the dark souls ttrpg yet. The audience is too cleft between the pulse-pounding combat fiends who want to study an opponent like it's fgc or cheese it through a wiki for their diabolical, clever satisfaction and the people who come to fromsoft because the melancholy is just so poignant and so expansive through it's dripfed worldbuilding. Fromsoft knows how to deliver that in a video game as evident by their serial success. Has steamforged delivered that? Rune has the combat and Bleak Spirit has the melancholy, but who will give me the tools to do both at the same time for a group of players? This herein be the riddle my liege.
I followed a series of play-reports once in a discord from a GM who was running a dark souls game in dungeon world. Dungeon World doesn't tell you how to do that. The group has to feel out what they want and make it happen as a conscious, perhaps even critical effort. Right now, Robins has the pieces for that. It has the world state, it has dungeon delving through the leftover dream pockets of the dead god-king Albion as it's main task (which you do to make rent btw). Does it have the execution? No. But that's fine. I knew what I was getting into. I wanted to convince cohost that experimenting at the table to find that execution was worth it.
What is going on in Robins?
There are a few central ideas to Robins that you can pick up by reading the books. You are queer people in a city that hates you. There are 10 kinds for you to roll in character creation. You could be a Hatchback who after getting isekai'd via car can now turn into one. You could be a Twistbone, always dancing with horns. You could be so much more. Each is an emanation of the Last Frequency, a kind of TES tonal architecture that undergirds the world and that Albion was never able to conquer.
Dungeon crawling to dismantle the dreams of a dead god who's institution still stands is quite an interesting prospect. As the game master, I felt my task was to introduce those dreams for the players to dismantle. It wasn't until I made the connection between an enemy called The Brut and a module I had been meaning to run, The Bureau, that I had a good idea of what I wanted those violent dreams to be.
Converting the Brut
I will never convert a megadungeon again. I used to be so fascinated with megadungeons as a game artifact that invoke in me a sense of space that felt so grand it would rival Blam! or Manifold Garden or Echo. The actual play of a megadungeon leaves a lot to be desired in that one respect but for what it is, I now respect what megadungeons do. You see, I thought that megadungeons could offer me a sense of space to enchant the experience, but what it actually has to offer is choice. With so many rooms, you could choose any of them, maybe mix and match the contents. Play it in different orders from group to group and get a different experience all the time. It's obviously a lot of work to make one too. I really got a sense for how much work it takes to make a megadungeon because whenever the players did something impactful in there, I would review the entire thing to see where I felt obligated to modify to respect that change. The scope of the megadungeon was the taxing experience of reading all the rooms over and over again to analyze them. I imagine that the curatorial director NPc may have felt the same way.
It wasn't too difficult to convert all the NPCs into Robins rules thought. I had a table set up that compared different aspects of how NPCs were built in Liminal Horror, Songbirds 3e, and Robins and had that handled pretty quickly. The Bureau has pretty simply standard enemies that I was able to throw into anything. Even though fights are short or deadly in Robins, I didn't feel the need to include a fight every session. The game was more about exploring The Brut and understanding the ideology behind each floor of the facility.
Floor by Floor
The first floor was handled in the one-shot session in December of 2023, or was it January 2024? Either way, that first floor, Administration, was about how Administrator Hillux was in control of that floor and the Director was missing. Weird magic shit was going on, and the elevated platform that the shadow-possessed Hillux resided in stood above the cube-farm room like a lighthouse or prison guard tower. This was how regular people who worked in The Brut were treated. The players psychonaut'd into his mind and rifled through his memories, eventually going deep enough to defeat him.
The next floor was maintenance, where they found a traitorous robin, a locust, cycling through various kinds of robins until they put them into the reactor that then restored power to the facility. That poor robin had been lead astray, been made fundamental to an evil institution, and felt trapped within that sin.
Third was research. I had looked at the 10 kinds of robin and thought, "Which of these could be made useful to Albion?" The Hatchback could be modified in a workshop to become a Patrol Car. The Anti-song robin could become a caged fabrication worker. Could wintersbloom flowers be cultivated to give us Albion's power? What if you saw someone like you taken into the hierarchy? That was the character moment I wanted the players to explore. They did explore it! They were quite horrified by this: the relationship between a research institution and what is deemed acceptable if not useful. Especially when we also learned
on the fourth floor, containment, what was unacceptable to The Brut. A prison filled with Robins, like the Jersey Devil, Clyde (bigfoot), and dear dear Holio (anthropomorphic hole). People that The Brut did not put to use and instead imprisoned. The players had a field day freeing them, but were a little upset with me when i told them that generally, people who are stuck in prison do not want to gang up and return to the prison. Maybe that ain't true but can you blame me for not wanting to work with that? Also on containment was some horrible shit. A researcher who cut robins up to graft them to her with sorcery, so that she might also escape imprisonment. The inception-ass top that the Brut used to keep himself anchored when gazing, and then exploring the Last Frequency; though it did possess everyone in the facility to become the shadowy monsters when something happened to the Brut on his journey. Alas, the Shadow Blader, the jet-black knight that possesses the totem, was a worthy opponent for the Robins.
Now, the Robins have geared up for their last few sessions. We are going to run an errand then kill the Brut. We've seen what the ideology of the Brut had to say, how it treated Robins, and just as we thought when we went in it's been horrible. now we have to find and kill the bastard, no matter how hard that will be.
If you are one of my robins, thank you for sticking with me. I hope that we can play another game a little longer until life happens and we drift apart.
Why I encourage you to read, then play Robins.
Do you want to play with social analysis? Like a mad social scientist? Could you imagine, for prep, reading a news article about how people are being marginalized then sending people with wacky powers to deal with that? There is no other game I have encountered that lets me do that. Everything else is trying to be something else. Robins is stripped down to the point where, all we have to do is have the conversation, to engage with the issue we are playing with. The lore of Robins will only accrete from here, become more fantastic, but at it's core the rules-lite design approach means that Robins doesn't mediate the material for you. There is no safety net to catch you, only each other at the table. There is no machine that you can plug an input into. You have to speak up.
