Review: Feather, Beak + Bone and Claw Atlas

tl:dr; awesome map-labelling game, build a city together, perfect for a collaborative session zero.

So I got Feather, Beak + Bone and the Claw Atlas expansion as part of the 'Details of our Escape' Kickstarter. I picked them up as add-ons but it can also be found on itch.io. I recall it seeing it crop up with people saying "hey yeah this is cool" a fair few times and particularly talking about map making so I thought "sounds like my kind of thing". A slimmer pamphlet than I was expecting, definitely in the zine class of game, really punchy, with nice presentation.

Cover by Austin Breed

So all told this is a nice straightforward game with the usual zine high content to weight ratio in here. Fully self-contained with good line art that gets the whole feel across. Good stuff.

It comes bundled with three blank maps and you get another example of the map inside the front and back covers of the book - so strictly five blanks of the map come with it and then you could photocopy for further versions.

Cover by Austin Breed, maps by Jonathan Yee

So what do you actually get in it?

There's a couple of sections:
1. Intro
2. What is this and how to play.
3. Ten pages of the various factions that you could run with.
4. Three pages of the actual crunch
5. Edge cases and explanations.
6. Four pages of play example, which is good.
7. Four pages of Lore
8. Two pages on how to role play as a race of Ravenfolk / Tengu / Kenku that effectively can't speak
9. A page on alternative ways to play, which is instead of being the factions, you're one person and encountering all of this.
10. Closing with quick bios of the creators.

Going into a touch more detail - the core gameplay loop here is taking on the role of a community group or faction and taking turns deciding what different locations are on the map. This is driven by cards you draw from a standard deck of playing cards. There are ten community roles (or factions) that you can choose or randomise, then you draw cards and colour in buildings to match your fraction and write up details about them on a notecard using the 'beak, feather, bone' structure - beak for what is commonly known, feather for appearance and bone for what happens there.

After a number of cycles - they suggest 5 per player - you tot up the values of the cards you drew and the highest gets to claim and decide the nature of the city's seat of power.

You can add wrinkles like a single player taking on multiple roles or playing the game from the perspective of a single wanderer comes to town and all this is from their perspective.

Also within the book you get some lore for the world - three pages on the people, these ravenfolk and a page on language and their troubles with it. This includes tips on how to convey their lack of langauge without it becoming a drag on gameplay.

You have multiple instances of the same map but you could use this engine on one generated by any sufficiently detailed map generation piece of software. Watabou Fantasy City Generator would probably mesh very well with this.

I also picked up the expansion - Claw Atlas - that introduces two more factions, two more variant rules that can be added to the game and a bunch of additional maps.

Cover by Austin Breed, maps by Jonathan Yee

I really like both the variant rules - one about the highest total of single suite cards in your hand being a type of monster that plagues the city that all the other players get to define, the other about generating maps from whole cloth through collage as opposed to colouring in existing maps. Both of these are helpful to make your finished city a fuller entity - adding adversaries or making the map itself a work of the players.

The additional maps are neat to - if you liked the original this is more of that with an expansion of genre; some look modern, some futuristic. Good to expand the useability of the game.

Overall I like this a lot - perfect for a session zero or maybe a session point-five for caqmpaign set up. This would be quick enough to run that you could get your table rules squared away and do this as a collaborative building of your starter city for an urban campaign to get everyone on the same page and give you the DM a solid sense of what kind of stuff they like. Building characters after that and launching them into this city would be great because they will have a high level of organic understanding because you all built it together and it will feel much more known and deep.

I definitely want to take this to table. I think it's got huge potential.

For other reviews see Bell of Lost Souls, The TTRPG Factory or Rolling Boxcars.