(Header image by Alexandr Rusnac on Unsplash)

Everything Everywhere All At Once is my favorite film. The clash of such an explosive, absurd multiverse epic colliding with the commonplace struggle of an immigrant family trying to file their taxes is not an obvious combination. I think it works so well because the absurdism pounds your expectations and preconceived notions. You lose frame of reference and can’t tie yourself to storied tropes. Your mental myelin sheath is worn away and you are left with exposed emotional nerves that are blasted with pure catharsis of a splintering family trying to bind themselves back together.¹

It is the same with Songbirds.

The Text

Snow‘s prose are superb. The character creation section of Songbird’s delivers fifty cc’s of dark souls vibes directly into your eyes. See this excerpt from Songbirds 3e, Blue Edition:²

You awake in a moon pool, an iron coin
tucked into your pocket and the fading
dream of an endless cave behind you.
Love’s fortune sketches your history in
broad strokes. Do what you will with it. It
makes no difference in this life.

It’s just so elegantly vague. It sparks a world into existence, hinting at a deep lore and an expansive world, filled to the brim with depressing scenes for your characters to experience together. Snow gives you a feast of intimation, laying the tone of the game through every description in the game. The text is so sparse but vision is so clear.

You flip custom tarot cards to create your character, spelling out their life before death in a series of often tragic experiences. You were born under a beautiful dancing thunderstorm. As a child you never found home, and were always on the move. As an adolescent your life became deeply entangled with another’s. As an adult you found wealth, covering the holes in yourself, hoping to keep the darkness from seeping out. You were targeted. Killed. Murdered.

Now you are a songbird, born again in pain and suffering and charged to lay other wondering spirits to rest.

This all reads as classic grimdark fantasy, filled with rusty armor and moonless nights. Then snow hits you with this relationship table:³

This was a shock. I thought I had such a good grasp on the world, then snow tipped everything upside down and shot it into space. This reads like it should be in a game about teen relationships, not one about dungeon delving.

And the anachronisms don’t stop there. The equipment tables have a bag of ball bearings, classic dnd item, but also you can roll up a magnet fidget toy. Different kits include both climbing gear and gender care. There are no potions in this game, but there are 100 special sodas, some the give spider climb, and others that make you spit up a chia pet version of the person you love. You can even end up with body mods?

Then snow introduces 9 (?) unique magic systems including demon hand signs and milk magic. You want milk magic? You got it.

For downtime there is your standard cavorting, then tables for going on a date, a tale for a movie night, you can take classes at the local university, you can visit a moon pool, do an orgy,⁴ go on a pub crawl, participate in a live stream, get a tattoo and so much more. It is expansive.

Treasure is similarly eclectic. You have your bog standard immovable rod, but also cartoon bombs, a set of mood rings, and a switchblade of returning. Half of the game seems to be Elden Ring and the other half, Cyberpunk 2077.

Before I ran Songbirds, it was the subject of a month-long book club and I discussed the book itself with around twenty people and this potential dissonance was a sticking point for many of the members. Some bookclubbers referenced classic JRPGs where you have a thousand year old man from space with a scifi gun fighting alongside a steampunk robot and a teen girl with a too-big hammer. In those cases, the breaking, bending, and reforming of genre aesthetic has become an aesthetic unto itself.

But for others, it was just too difficult to picture how the game would actually play. What would the world look like? What would the tone be? So we played it.

The Gameplay

I believe the game itself was originally an Into the Odd hack, though I don’t think I would have guessed that on first read, it is significantly departed from the three stat plus health roll-under heritage. But it retains the procedural bones. Snow gives you the gift of tool after tool for your game, each with its own simple procedure. As long as you can find the table you need, rules and adjudication are dead simple.

Combat is fine. I won’t get too in the weeds in it because the rules were significantly simplified for the definitive edition. In practice it felt very D&D 5e-ish, which is not my favorite style of combat, but the OSR-DNA still pushed the players to make interesting choices, including at one point putting a cerberus to sleep and tunneling into its dreams to find what it desired most and circumventing a fight entirely. Cool.

The rest of the game runs using tests d20 + stat tests, with 4 abilities, each with 5 relevant skills. You have the classic athletics and acrobatics, but there is also drama, passion, vibes and touch. I was worried about how to use these in play, but my players took to them naturally, with the unusual stats pushing them to think outside the box (see the dream tunneling above).

The Absurd

My party included a sad teen wearing army fatigues with a pet wolf, a werewolf, a puppygirl grim reaper, and a necromancer. It was very canine focused. In a desperate attempt to find grounding in this disparate world, my players focused on connection. Relationships. In one short session we threaded a beautiful tapestry of community and were devastated by a tragic, heroic sacrifice.

Whatever the objections might have been in theory, at the table the game ran beautifully. It was the only game I have played where players, strangers before that night, hung around for over an hour post session, even after I had left. We created magic at the table that night, facilitated by a unique and unusual and wonderful game.

Songbirds sang.

The Recommendation

I think this game is going to be polarizing. If you don’t care for the kitchen sink world building, you may not care for this. I personally am a huge fan, and I think it’s worth owning for the prose and the diversity of tables if nothing else. I am absolutely going to port the special sodas and their effects into some future slugblaster campaign.

If I have any reservations it is in some of the usability of the pdf. For instance, character creation uses a unique set of tarot cards with a look up to standard tarot card names. Translating wasn’t that big of a deal, but having to reference back to the table for every step in the process proved annoying. There were also a few editing issues between editions, such as a term from a prior edition being referenced but never defined. It is nothing too egregious, and I suspect the difficulties fall away as you gain more experience with the game.

Snow is worth following and always seems to take massive swings on her games.

Acknowledgments

Songbirds can be purchased here.

Thank you to snow for making this gem of a game. Thank you to Markus for bringing the game to my attention. Thank you to my players Hat!, Wversary, Lachese, and Sparky for trusting the process of the game and diving in in earnest.

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1. Not to go off on a deep tangent about how interesting I think the use of pure madness to set up an emotional pounding, but you should go watch Chris Grace as Scarlett Johansson. It’s worth the $5 for admission if you aren’t already a Dropout subscriber, and it impacted me deeply. Okay, back to shilling for RPGs after that quick commercial break.
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2. The original third edition of this game was split into a red edition and a blue edition, with a special green edition shared only with backers of the first crowdfunding campaign, each with slightly altered systems ala the original Pokemon games (the red book has vampirism, the blue book has psychic powers, very cool concept). Since then, snow has released a definitive edition of 3e, combining all three editions and making some significant changes overall.
   
   This isn’t snow’s fault, but the definitive edition came out just a few weeks before I ran Songbirds, and there were some confusions about what edition we were using. I had prepared using the blue edition, so we continued with that but the differences between books led to a couple stumbles. So cautionary tale, make sure everyone is on the same edition if you run this.
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3. I love relationship tables so much. More of this in every game please. ↩︎
4. This one is true to historic, old-school play. ↩︎