Lady Blackbird
Contributor: John Harper
Publication date: 2016
Free!
System/Genre: Steampunk, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Drama
Link: https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blackbird
I bounced off Lady Blackbird the first time I tried reading it. In general, I'm not a fan of ttrpgs that lock you in to a specific place, a specific scene, a specific conflict the moment you open it up.
That's not to say that they don't have value, but that my preferred playstyle is to be given inspiration. I already have an imagination that can run wild at the drop of a hat. Give me your rules, your seeds, and I'll run a 20 session Väsen mystery with about three lines of prep and a long walk to think.
But it was the designated TTRPG for my inaugural book club, so I dutifully dusted off my copy and took another look at this 2016 classic.
And Lady Blackbird is... good. Clever. Odd.
Lady Blackbird doesn't bother to explain itself. It gives over one page to explaining who you are, expecting you to pull the context from the writing style, the font, the illustrations, and the steampunk names to signal that you are about to play a high-drama fantasy action adventure (in space! Kind of.). It gives over another half page to a quick explanation of the world you are in, and then it immediately hits you with the character sheets.
Which leads to the first major critique of Lady Blackbird. The character sheets are a hot mess. This is totally forgivable. The game is 10 years old at this point. The Forge was still at the forefront of the discourse and 5e was still referred to as Next.
It's trying to put everything a player needs to play the game onto one sheet. Which is laudable. But it mostly just overwhelms the player, who feels honour-bound to read the tiny writing. It's just too many words. A shame for such an otherwise slick game. Mothership does this concept really well, if you want to compare). https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0022/2727/3817/files/Mothership-Character-Sheet.pdf?v=1713672550
Lady Blackbird is a forgiving Dice Pool. You can throw extra dice from your pool towards passing a roll and if you fail, you get them back. Which build for a game where you might have some set-backs, but you'll eventually prevail. This isn't a game about carefully managing resources, it's pulpy nonsense, flying through almost space, casting spells and falling in love and/or fighting with a pirate king.
You can see why it has it's place as a game to pick up and play. Or as a game to drag D&D kids into the indie scene. It serves a roll. And it does it well.
The book clubs opinion on Lady Blackbird were really varied, and it's been spinning around in my head a bit, asking why. Why does such a tiny game invoke such a broad span of opinion. And I guess the reason is simple.
To seasoned gamers, they have certain expectations of what a game should contain. A rule page, a setting page, a scenario etc. Lady Blackbird is a cool experiment in smooshing that all together, mixing it up and pouring it out as an RPG smoothie. For instance: it contains stats for the Owl. Your own little space ship. But it doesn't tell you what any of those stats mean. That could infuriate a veteran GM wanting everything in it's box. But it's excellent environmental storytelling, and full of seeds.
A final note on the GM advice. Harper devotes a couple of paragraphs to telling the GM what to do. Which is basically to ask annoying questions and try and get the players arguing. He wants high drama, he wants players rolling against one another, shouting and screaming and acting out that drama. In an ideal world, I'm not sure Harper ever really expects you to get to the Pirate King. This is... lovely, refreshing, and nothing like how trad games work. And in 2016 no less.
I'm glad I reread Lady Blackbird. And I'm glad I took the time to critically analyse it. It turned out to have a lot more going for it than I initially saw.