The Blue is Back
SHUT UP SNOW WHO CARES I JUST WANT SONGBIRDS!
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I awoke as I always do: right arm asleep, mouth feeling like the Mummy Returns, body wishing it weren’t 4 in the morning, and the burning desire to remake every game I’ve ever made at the front of my skull. That last part’s not true. It’s not like I always wake up wanting to remake everything I’ve ever made. No. I’ve only done it for The Wizards & the Wastes 2e, Iron & Lies 2e (never released), Blackbirds, Songbirds 2e, .dungeon//remastered, Blackbirds again, Snow Hack, .snow//hack (never released), Songbirds 3e, Blackbirds again, Songbirds several times just in the last year.
Wow. God. What’s wrong with me?
On this particular morning, it was .dungeon again. I awoke feeling that I had both ruined the game long, long ago, and that I now knew how to fix it. This time I would get it right. This time I would finally do it the way I had always wanted to. This time things would be different.
I pulled my phone from its charger and frantically typed words into a google doc. Not a new doc, no, no, no. There are several scattered documents that all bear the name “.dungeon” and each of them are bastards of one another. Body parts from one sewn to another. The head from the original hanging limp from strands of flesh. So I just picked a corpse and started typing.
God, I was such a fool up until this very moment. I had been so bad at everything and failed at all of my goals. Time to fix it!
5 o’clock rolls around and I’m staring at practically the same game as .dungeon//remastered. And, for the first time in my frantic, mid-morning design spurts, lucidity talks, and I question what it is I’m doing.
.dungeon won an Award. It was written about in Polygon. Does my unhappiness with something really matter? And, more importantly...
Is my tinkering really necessary?
In these questions, I experience ego death. Or something. I’m being dramatic for comedic effect, but this little experience made me think about things and this is my blog so strap in.
Clears throat
I didn’t think I’d make it this far.
Like to this point in my life. This point in my career.
For a lot of reasons.
Let’s rewind a bit. In 2022 I was feeling really jaded and unable to imagine my life in TTRPGs extending much longer. 2023 was one of the hardest years of my life. And, before that, I wasn’t much of a future-minded person. I didn’t plan beyond the paycheck. I didn’t have goals and I didn’t know what I was. All I knew is that I wanted to make art and stop wanting to die all the time.
As anyone who has lived like this through their 20’s can tell you, you get to a point where you look back and realize you have no idea how you got where you are, and you run into the mess of problems that comes with not having been fully present for that entire time. Y’know, you’re not supposed to not plan for the future. You’re not supposed to think, “well, I won’t be here in 5 years anyways.” Those aren’t good thoughts! You deserve better for yourself.
It took breaking up my long-term relationship, transitioning, and moving cities for me to find better for myself. But this isn’t about that. This is specifically about tabletop games, I promise.
I think I had a panic when I realized all of this stuff two years ago. I think I looked back at what I had created in my dissociation and felt nothing but dissatisfaction. I immediately wanted to correct it. I believed I should and could correct it. So I did. I’ve spent a lot of time retreading old ground, thinking that I was replanting old crops and making everything more alive. I’m not writing this now to point at that and say “that was wrong” but I am writing this now to point at it and say “I was wrong about what I was doing.”
What do I mean? What’s the difference? Well, the difference is best exemplified by what happened to Songbirds 3e. Songbirds Blue, Red, & Green were a full thing. They are a complete game, whether I want to alter small things or not. When I put together the complete PDF I think I made a misstep by changing some of the stuff that was originally present, because what I changed didn’t refine but replace. It altered aesthetics for the sake of an idea separate from Songbirds.
Y’see, I had the foolish belief that Songbirds was “my” dungeon crawler. But as soon as I hit publish and realized “nope, not my dungeon crawler,” It was time to design another game. A hack, maybe, but another game. It was NOT time to try to redesign the thing that was already done. It was not time to ask for a redo.
A lot of the new dungeon rules in Songbirds Complete came from the google doc for Dungeon Girls. The playtest for which was an experiment with the Songbirds form. It was me trying to make another game. I would call it a hack, maybe, but it does deviate quite a bit from the original formula. Regardless, Dungeon Girls was me looking at the aesthetic trappings of Songbirds and realizing, “no, wait, I want to focus on the city, not the wilderness.”
It isn’t right of me to take the words I wrote but never published for Dungeon Girls and jam them into the vibes of Songbirds. They’re separate games. They’re separate ideas. Perhaps they exist in the same world, but they are different. Songbirds has her own thing going on. Her own aura, her own idea of its setting. Dungeon Girls is something that I had fun working on, but I think it was an experiment that I’m no longer interested in. Just as Blackbirds was before.
God, I’ve done this a lot. I do an edition of Songbirds and then spend a while making a bunch of smaller experiments with its corpse. And I don’t think it’s fine for me to erase what I’ve done in the past because I’m unhappy with it in the present. Sure, that’s fine to do sometimes, but not for the reasons I’ve done it. Not when I’m actually designing a new game. Like, I don’t think it’s fair to the new game to be treated as nothing more than an experiment. It, like Songbirds, deserves to stand on its own and live by its own merits.
Censor Bar is a hack of Songbirds. It’s not an experiment. It’s a hack of Songbirds that focuses on the City. It takes place in the same world, but it doesn’t erase or replace. Do I like it better mechanically? No. It’s just different.
I think the way I’ve done this Whole Thing has been misguided because of the “I didn’t think I’d make it this far” attitude I had. The Wizards & the Wastes was nominated for an award, .dungeon won an award, My Body is a Cage won an award, Songbirds got a good amount of recognition for being a fantasy heartbreaker. And now what? What kind of person am I if I discard my children? I think they deserve better. I shouldn’t just tinker with them forever and ever, hoping to eventually get it right by whatever metric “right” is measured by in my head at any given moment.
If I can wake up frantic with game design ideas, perhaps those ideas can just go into a gdoc and stay there until I’m more awake, had my coffee, and am ready to start my day. Perhaps it’s a new game? Perhaps it’s a hack of the old game? I don’t know but I’ll take it case-by-case.
The first step in this is correcting the misstep I made with Songbirds 3e. I’m bringing back the old cover. I’m bringing back the blue. I’m bringing back settlements instead of neighborhoods. I’m bringing back the old dungeon stuff. I want to give Songbirds a little gift too.
And that’s what I’ve done. You can find it on the itch page.
For the last week I have been in the layout mines, performing surgery on my child. I have put her back together again, bluer than ever. It is, now more than ever, a Complete Game. It is a foundation for me to build upon. The love I’ve shown it over this last week amounts to a 2000+ words changelog.
There are slight rules tweaks, adjustments, but they are nothing more than patch notes. You can read everything I did, including WHY I did it, along with design notes and thoughts by checking out the change log attached as a PDF here.
All future changelogs will be miniscule editing mishaps. The book is done. She is beautiful and wonderful.
All future updates will be in the form of expansions: adventures, dungeons, hexcrawls, character options, etc. I have a few planned. Well, I’ve Had a few planned for a long while, but was never satisfied with the foundations. Now I am. Now I want to Return to the Sun King’s Palace. I want to give this game the support it deserves.
I also want to bring it back to print. I’ve been running pre-orders for a wildly fancy edition of the game over on nerves.store, but that’s been very slow going. I believe what I’m going to do is make this PDF the reprint. Beautiful blue cover, stitched binding, hardcover, full color interior, and so on. I don’t think I’ll be able to do the cloth cover. I don’t think of it as a failure though. I think Songbirds is exactly what it needs to be.
If you haven’t pre-ordered your copy, help me fund this print run by doing so today!
That’s all I have to say this Saturday.
Thanks for reading,
Snow~