Psychonaut: A Songbirds Gift/Curse
A downloadable supplement
This gift/curse is both a playable class for Songbirds 3e and a personal essay about my experience living with chronic migraines.
You might think that the pain would be the worst part of migraines — and you wouldn’t be too far off. But the pain can be taken away with the right meds (at least, mine can).
The worst part for me is the math.
There are so many numbers I have to pay attention to. How many of my monthly allotment of 9 pills have I taken in the past 30 days? When will my insurance cover a refill? What's the barometic pressure going to be like this week? On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is my pain? How long do I have to wait for my neurology appointment? How much money have I spent this month on acupuncture appointments, strength training classes, and therapy, all geared towards reducing migraine frequency?
Once I started noticing all the numbers, plugging them into an rpg seemed inevitable.
In Songbirds, character classes are called Gifts/Curses. I knew this was the perfect place to experiment because I do actually see my disability as both a gift and a curse. A gift, to learn how to be disabled before many of my peers, to learn how to ask for help, to learn how to show vulnerability. A curse, in the obvious ways.
This gift/curse is high risk, high reward. You can harness power beyond your wildest imaginings — and manage logistics like never before.
Good luck out there, songbird.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Yes. Gosh this, so much. A boyfriend I had referred to his migraines as an act of “losing days”, the amount of work his body expends emulating in the middle of his life a full day from after his death, some sick gift to him packaged eith a body he couldn’t want and a name he couldn’t stand.
Changing his name was “easy” — the binary of “easy-or-hard” skewed so terribly far, for him, farther than any binary should try to span. His living with interpuncts of death days/zero-days between all other days where he’s taking me out on dates and his trying to carry a job and practice flow arts and write, eat lots of tacos only to find lots of laying in my lap as i scribble gibberish to escape my language-feedback-addled body and he checks out of his death-feedback-addled body.
Skill sets our curse-flooded bodies crystalize just by being like we’re in some fucked-up final fantasy theme, our bodies people and groups try to mine from our skill sets’ “unique”ness, these others “so lucky to have found” us, have at us, harvest us, what we are capable of matching their “needs”, like, yo, people, need less, use the money you save needing less to pay for my death days, pay for my loved ones’ death days, reduce harm, wait, get us a society where doctors care. While you do, write Luck you only have to experience death once — and that you’ve never had to live through it.
The “back off” sticks in the piece are so real! Thanks Kay! This reflection piece is great. Huge vibe lens. Lots of nodding along. Roll a great day soon 💞
Thanks so much for sharing this with me, Schwa <3 I'm really glad my piece resonated with you.