Review - Rare Bird
This Guy Knows Swans
Rare Bird is a 40-page adventure for Swyvers by Owen Braekke-Carroll with art and cartography by Alice Carroll. The Swyvers are hired to steal a double-headed black swan, but of course things are far more complicated than they initially seem.
A Brief Aside
As I noted in my previous post, Saipan, the island where I live, was recently struck by Typhoon Sinlaku, which, to put it mildly, was a very bad time. While my family and I are doing as well as we could hope, with running water and a generator and solar panel for power, many people here lost everything and are struggling to get water and food each day. So, I'm organizing a charity bundle to help fund some of the efforts to fill the gap so many people are experiencing right now. Funds will go to Micronesia Climate Change Alliance, who have been doing incredible work shipping in supplies and getting water and food delivered to those in need.
For creators interested in submitting something to the bundle, you can email me at catshavenolordgames@gmail.com or message me on Discord at luke_simonds.
For those interested in purchasing the bundle, keep an eye out here on this blog or on my socials for announcements.
For everyone, check out this amazing painting of the Typhoon that Amanda Lee Franck made to help with our marketing!
Now, back to the review!
What's It About?
A rich glutton is hiring Swyvers to steal a two-headed black swan from a guild of vintners so that he can eat it. Appropriate to the game, everything else here is a set-up for this heist. You've got a multi-level guild house, a bunch of NPCs (both those in or working for the guild and a rival crew trying to get the swan), and a timeline of complications to throw into the scenario. What players can learn over time is that the swan is actually a changeling stuck in swan form because of a piece of golden string held in the vault of the guild and that the swanherd for the guild has fallen in love with it and is trying to help it escape. There's a lot going on here.
What About the Ideas?
I won't claim to be an expert on Swyvers, but this just drips with the themes I expect from that game. It's full of shady gross people you can still work with to get what you want, as well as some truly weird magic stuff--the swan has extra eyes and mouths inside its beaks and can do magic! There's mummified guardians in the vault!
Apart from the peak themes, this is also just well thought out ideas-wise as a heist. There's a lot of moving pieces between the unexpected romance with the swanherd and swan, the rival crew, the mix of potential betrayals or aids among the guild staff, the guild themselves in the midst of a raging party. There's a very good mix of things to form a powderkeg for your players to blow up here in the best way.
What About the Execution?
I have a complaint I'll get to below, but I want to focus first on how good I think this thing is. The writing here is amazing. It's evocative, while also giving you the correct information you need to handle each situation or embody each NPC. It's also incredibly funny in a way I particularly like to see in adventures. While none of the text is dry, persay, a lot of it is purely descriptive, but then you'll get a funny line thrown in there that becomes all the funnier because of the juxtaposition with the rest of it. Let's look at the swans, for example:
The regular, white, and boring swans of the Crown have had their wings clipped, beaks nicked, and are kept nesting in the WALLED GARDEN at Vintner Hall throughout the colder months. Surprisingly strong and sadistic — if they could speak or make any noise at all, they would shout: ‘I WILL BREAK YOUR ARM’ as they chase you from their waterways.
Hilarious. Also, as I noted at the top, this writer has clearly death with swans before.
The information design is also great. There's a good mix of prose text with bullet points both reiterating the key parts of the prose and, in some cases, adding on to it. This goes for the NPCs, who have bulleted lists of their wants and loot at the end of their entries, as well as for locations, which have handy information about lootable items and entries/exits in a sidebar.
As an example, lets look at the bullets for the swans from above, which continue to be funny:
WANTS
• to graze on aquatic plant-life
• to speak as the other birds do
• to break someone’s arm
My one real complaint is that the random encounters come in the form of two timelines of events that will progress independently or at the same time based on your roll. I've got no problem with timelines of events. I use them in plenty of my own adventures and enjoy them when they appear in others. My problem here, is that the adventure feels like its missing some dynamism and excitement by having only the timelines and not also having generic threats (e.g., guild guards or the rival thieves) moving about the guild house. As I commented in a previous review, it can be ok to not have random encounters in a heist if you've got threats spread around the space and a guide to how they move about over the course of a day. But, in this case, the majority of the rooms are empty, and it feels to me like a large part of the space would feel pretty static and non-threatening without the chance of guards or staff showing up at some point. If I were writing this, I'd do it like I did in one of my own adventures and have a timeline but link it to the encounter roll so that you have threats moving around the space while also always having a chance of the timeline ticking forward.
All that said, this thing is still great!
Art?
As someone who's spent a fair amount of time looking at 19th-century engravings and floorplans, Alice Carroll has absolutely nailed the style with the art here. The cover in particular drew me into this one, which you can see part of above, but all of the interior stuff is great too!
Summary!
This one honestly feels like stealing being able to pick it up for free. It's so good! Not much more to say. No reason to get it unless you don't like weird heist scenarios for some reason.