Why do I keep writing the same game over and over?

I released the 3rd edition of my first game and contemplate the meaning of life

I have a confession. An obsession. Some of you who have followed me for long enough may have noticed.

Ever since 2017 I’ve been making the same game. Over and over again.

It started with Songbirds. It was a hack of Into the Odd and was sort of well-received by folks in osr-ish circles. Several people have told me good things about it years past, which blows me away. It was my first Thing. First official release. First try at making a system, even if it was a hack. But something I didn’t know about it at the time was it was more than just a system. It was *my* system. Or, it was me trying to find My System. The thing I wanted to run dungeon crawler adventure games in that wasn’t D&D.

It was the beginning of a journey.

(Ignore the messed up text. This is just what happens when you open a docx file using google sheets and you don’t have the same fonts lmao)

After Songbirds I immediately started work on Blackbirds. Which didn’t end up releasing (and was a completely different game) until 2021. But those fiddlings and workings ended up feeding back into what would become Songbirds 2e. My first original system. And one that I think I dumped a lot of ideas into. Both for good and bad.

I’ve learned a lot since then. Both about myself and game design. But Songbirds 2e was still me trying to figure that stuff out. Figure out what game I wanted to run. It felt like trying to find my game. Like, it was hidden in all of these other games and hacks and my job, as a living person, was to search and plunder and experiment until I stumbled upon the Ark of the Covenant and melted my own face off.

After Songbirds 2e, and after scrapping Blackbirds for a while, I did Vultures. We see a bird theme here.

Vultures was never going to be My Game. But it was me trying to find the bounds of sci-fi that I appreciated and enjoyed. Because My Game was always going to be sci-fantasy. More Final Fantasy and less Game of Thrones (though now those two things are a bit closer than ever). More like Breath of the Wild if created by Kentaro Miura (rest in peace, king).

What I got from Vultures was the idea of “Post-Mecha.” It was something I wrote about in my newsletter back then. The idea basically being that of Hyper Light Drifter or Nausicaä. Big war machines from The Before that were lying dormant now. The world scarred by war. But regrowing.

There were also some mechanical things that I figured out in Vultures that have stuck with me, but it was this idea of post-mecha fantasy that had be thinking about Blackbirds again.

I feel I need to stop here and say that I have no fucking idea what my brain thought was Blackbirds vs. Songbirds vs. Vultures. Vultures was definitely referencing the Cowboy Bebop, space scavenger/bounty hunter thing. But even in my games, Blackbird is just another word for Songbird. It depends on how you feel about these adventurers and weirdos. But maybe the distinction was part of me trying to figure this stuff out, and only when they could come together would it all make sense.

I dove into Blackbirds though. I might shock you to learn that there’s a whole ‘nother Blackbirds (and two adventures) that is fully laid out but that never got released.

This came post-Troika! for me. Troika! was to me what Into the Odd had been before. A new way of looking at games. A new way of looking at what I wanted from a game. I’ve gushed about Troika! plenty of times so I won’t rehash that here.

I don’t remember why I didn’t release all this stuff. But I have an idea.

You see, in the process of uncovering My Game in my head I have these breakthrough moments. These moments involve me getting very hyped and messaging my good friend Emma (who I wrote Aberdeen with) and just yelling with her for a very long time. She is very patient with me. Even when she is not very hyper.

These breakthrough moments are like a super high elation followed by an immediate realization that it’s “not quite right.” I think I have it all figured out but it’s rarely the case and I get a little defeated and have to sit and reorganize everything in my head. Figure out which bits to keep. What to ditch.

And looking at those old Blackbirds pdfs, if I were to take a guess, I ditched them because I leaned very heavily towards the weird. And I think I realized my setting, my world, my game, mostly revolved around humans. Not bug lords or walking tigers. Even if that’s not entirely true anymore, it was part of the process at the time. My Game would feature you as a mostly normal person made strange by the world. Not a strange person navigating a strange world. If that makes sense.

That’s okay though cause I played Disco Elysium like 50 times and everything changed again!

Sam’s really amazing isn’t he?

Disco Elysium was (and still is) what Troika! and Into the Odd were to me back then. I wrote a post on my tumblr a while ago about how DE helped me realize why I love d20, why I love skills, and why I love rolling dice. DE recontextualized the importance of a skill list for me. I had always believed that a skill list was world building, but what DE says is that a skill list is Your Job. It is what you do. It is, in essense, what a cop (in DE’s case) does. And choosing your skills determines what kind of cop you’ll be.

So I sat about thinking “well, what’s an adventurer then?” And that took me a few years to figure out.

But while I was figuring it out, I wrote Blackbirds. The one that actually got released. The one that was self-described as post-mecha. The one with sam’s amazing cover art. The one so heavily influenced by Disco Elysium that I look at it as a mess now.

That’s being an artist though. That’s part of growth. It’s part of uncovering Your Game. Not that everyone is on this same journey with me, but being an artist is a lot about assimilating things into yourself, rejecting others, and coming out of the process a little more You. Or, at least, a changed you. One that you can be proud of.

We add to that canon by creating. We add to this communication. We become assimilated. Parts of us, at least.

***

Sometime last year, early on, I read Red Giant. Afterward I immediately messaged Cory Burns of Rookie Jet Studio and was like, “yo, this is amazing.” Some talking ensued and I eventually said, “I’m going to make a hack of it.”

I opened a new Google Doc and named it Blue Moon and started futzing for a few hours. It had been a year since Blackbirds. Several years since Songbirds 2e. I had dong .dungeon, The Wizards & the Wastes, My Body is a Cage. Arguably all the games that I’m known for. There was a large gap of learning, experimenting, and playing with the form.

Even though that distance though, I thought shot to the front of my brain as I fiddled with Blue Moon. “What else started as a hack? When’s that last time you wrote a hack? This isn’t a coincidence. You’re just writing the same thing again.”

I renamed the doc.

Songbirds 3e.

And if you look at the original Songbirds 3e doc it was very much inspired by Red Giant in the way the OG Songbirds was inspired by ItO.

I worked on it for several months straight, writing a lot of what would end up in Songbirds 3e. Stuff like the Exploration rules and the Time section. Plus a lot of the lore that I was able to solidify thanks to Red Giant’s inspiration and the years of letting my setting just kind of sit in the back of my mind, or only exist when I ran games.

It only got shelved because Lilancholy jumped into my head and demanded my attention. And I’m happy for that. Because, even if the Red Giant hack would have been fun and good, the dough wasn’t quite ready to come out of the oven yet.

While working on Lilancholy I also started talking about a reprint of .dungeon. I told my layout person, “Let’s just redo the layout for a more traditional orientation, black and white, and make the book super cheap for people to buy. BUT, before you do that, lemme just go through and edit up some of the text with the stuff I’ve wanted to fix for a while.”

Which was a mistake.

It wasn’t long looking at the OG google doc for .dungeon that I had another gdoc opened next to it titled .dungeon 2e. I started editing the early text and realized I was just rewriting the whole damn book. Then I thought about how .dungeon was a hack of Songbirds 2e and I had spent a lot of time on Songbirds 3e, so I went and looked at it to figure out what I’d do differently for .dungeon 2e and all of this stuff was just circling my head like a tornado. Editions, remasters, google docs. It was a mess.

.dungeon//remastered helped me refine my ideas on Songbirds though. It broke me away from Red-Giant-hack and pushed me in the right direction.

It’s interesting to look back and follow the trajectory of all of this. See what influenced what. See how my ideas on what a game is and what is my ideal game haven’t really changed? More so they just become more clear. It truly feels like I was digging down and uncovering things, not creating from nothing. But like I had it in my head and just needed to find the right tools, the right language, the right inspiration to pull it up in one piece.

Stephen King talks about writing a story much the same way. He says that it’s like a house buried in the ground. And your job is to be an archaeologist and unearth it. Slowly. Without breaking it too much.

I used to want to be an archaeologist a long time ago.

This tangled web.

Snow Hack came about because I was about to run a new game for new people I never played with before and I wanted to finally write down all the rules for my own game. It was a moment of frustration that led to clarity. “Just write the shit down,” I thought. And so I did. I referenced other books flippantly. I straight up copy/pasted text from other stuff. It was for my home game. I didn’t care.

And let me tell you, it made it all so clear. But it wouldn’t have been possible without all the other stuff. All the other fiddling around. Fucking around and finding out.

The response to it was great too, which I didn’t expect. It was that response that made me think, “oh yeah, I did it. I made songbirds 3e.”

And that brings us to today.

Songbirds 3e is out. The pdf is free on itch and drivethru. Pre-orders are going for the next few weeks. I’m only printing 100 copies (which will be numbered). So grab one while you can. I’m still fiddling with the text. I literally just got inspired for some light rules yesterday. So, the next few weeks will be taking feedback, editing, and adding the last finishing touches. But, idk, I’m really proud of this.

Go download it. Go preorder it. Let me know what you think on the discord or on the community board.

I can’t wait to talk to you about it. Thanks for reading.

snow