Songbirds 3e is one designer's attempt to make their ideal dungeon adventure game, an impulse so common that it has a name: a fantasy heartbreaker. unlike many of these spirited-but-doomed attempts, i think Songbirds 3e genuinely lands on something magical - so i stopped myself early in, and decided to share the whole book as i experience the rest of it. i hope you enjoy tagging along!
Songbirds 3e is a tabletop roleplaying game about undeath, supernatural powers, and the blue dreams of the moon. In the game, you create a strange survivor of the world who was chosen (or cursed) by Death. Spirits aren't able to pass on to the afterlife and grow monstrous with each passing day. You know the songs to send them on. You have the abilities that help you find them. You are the canary in the coal mine. [...] It's everything that I want in a dungeon crawler and what I use to run my home games with.
(cw for drawn gore beneath the readmore)
the above wound up just being coverage of Chapter 1: Creating a Songbird, so today it's time to get back to the book with a read-through of Chapter 2: Adventuring Equipment! i'm very curious to see what kind of gear these undead heroes get to haul around...
to start, a Songbird has the clothes on their back, two trinkets rolled from a (flavorful, quirky) d100 list, a weapon, and a handful of coins. the book suggests letting the trinkets inform who your character is, but also gives you permission to "stuff em in a sack and forget about them" instead.
the next page fits Weapons, Armor, and Vehicles all into two tidy pages, with simple rules for combat (melee has a DC of 12, ranged has a DC of 15, dodging has a DC of 18) stashed away in a sidebar. anything better than a knife is beyond the reach of a starting Songbird financially - which makes sense, since the rest have a decent chance of killing a Songbird (d5 HP, remember?) in a single hit. the OSR roots of this project still shine through.
armor of various sorts either acts as ablative HP or bonuses to dodge rolls, either way eating up precious inventory slots. some brief vehicle and travel rules are given - not more than any game really needs, in my experience. a very fun little sidebar reminds us that we aren't beholden to any sort of Tolkienesque vision of fantasy here:
a handy dandy 'Misc Stuff' section covers all sorts of non-combat items, everything from firefighting gear to useful informational brochures. i quite like the abstraction of Helpful Items, anything that might cost 10c and give you a +1 bonus; it suggests everything from a crowbar or lockpick to perfume and a flower bouquet.
after that are a dozen Freelancers, specific hirelings of varying usefulness and daily cost in Coins to employ. i've never been super drawn to hirelings in the past, usually because they're so damn boring - these being specific weirdos (one not pictured is an isekai protagonist convinced she's already dead) really raises their appeal.
we follow that with Special Sodas, already an auspicious heading even before the d100 list and the note that these are actually magic potions. all 100 get a short description of their effects, usually short-lived boons you'd have to be pretty clever to get a ton of use from... but they pretty much all make for great random surprises.
the chapter closes by ramping up the genre weirdness one step further: Songbirds can go to "the City" and shell out 250c for one cybernetic body mod per each of the four stats, which is awesome. Charisma probably gets my favorite options of the bunch:
a shorter, breezier read today - but still a very exciting one! thanks for being patient with me as i work my way through this awesome book for y'all <3
