🧠 Greetings from Migraine Land

Dear friends,

The past month or so has been absolutely brutal for my noodle.

I get chronic migraines, and they’ve recently been getting worse and more frequent. I’m writing to you from the other side of the longest stretch of migraine I’ve had to date: one whole week. It was totally miserable.

I don’t normally do a lot of creative work when I’m feeling ‘grainey — I tend to be laying down and trying to stay off the computer — but after making it through that bad week, I couldn’t shake the idea that I wanted to somehow turn my migraines into a game.

The game is done. It’s called Psychonaut, and it’s a supplement for my true eldritch fantasy love Songbirds 3e.

Let me tell you a little more about it.

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. On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is my pain? 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 barometric pressure going to be like this week, and how much will that hurt me? How many months 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, I couldn’t stop thinking about plugging them into an RPG.

I started with a little research — surely I’m not the first game designer to get migraines. I found 14 Days, a 2-player game about managing daily life with unpredictable migraines, and Chronic Migraine Mechanics to use with Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t think I wanted to focus a whole game around migraines, but I wanted something with a little more flexibility than D&D.

(I collected these games plus lots of others into this list focused on chronic illness, disability, and neurodivergence. Always looking for more to add!)

I was looking through my copy of Songbirds when it clicked: I should make a Songbirds class. In this game, “classes” are called “gifts/curses,” and I do actually 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.

Psychic powers in Songbirds are very cool and also very hard to get. In Songbirds Blue, if you take massive damage, you have a 1% chance of surviving and developing psychic powers. In Songbirds Red, you can choose the Experiment X09 gift/curse to get them. In either case, you can do small psychic feats at no cost — but if you try anything big, you need to roll for potential backlash.

I added the Brain Pain effects to my gift/curse to make it high risk, high reward. Each morning, you roll a die to see what kind of migraine day you’re going to have: worst (horrible pain), bad (pretty bad pain), good (no pain), or best (no pain!). On a best day, you can do any psychic feat, big or small, without getting any backlash.

It’s not easy to get a best day, but it is possible.

From there, I extrapolated what kinds of things you could use in-game to manage your brain pain. There’s all the stuff I use IRL: coffee, really good coffee, food, really good food, a cane, ice packs, painkillers, eletrolytes, and water. There are also “psychic meds,” a fantasy version of my medication Rizatriptan. (These are the pills I have to manage; as mentioned above, I’m only supposed to take 9 every 30 days, or risk medication overuse headaches.)

There’s a brief mention of doctors, which you can go to in the City in Songbirds for healing or body modifications:

The Empire experiments on kidnapped children to “unlock” their psychic powers, and their doctors are not safe for you to see. Before you see a doctor for an appointment or body mod, make sure you can trust them.

There are rumors of body mods that can soothe psychic pain. Are you brave enough to find out if they’re true?

Going to the doctor is…not my favorite activity. The best tips I’ve gotten for migraine management have come from other people who get them, not from any of the doctors I’ve seen. But since my symptoms have been worsening, I’ve decided I should see a migraine specialist; from the time I started scheduling the appointment to the time it’ll actually happen, it’ll have taken six months and about fifteen phone calls. The appointment itself is only a half hour, conducted via video.

Now, that experience is not comparable to Experiment X09’s experience, but I wanted to express my frustration with our healthcare system in a Songbirds-appropriate way.

With that real bummer out of the way, onto the fun stuff!

Potions in Songbirds are called “special sodas,” and they do come in soda cans. I designed a random table of sodas that all count as migraine treatments, even if they have strange effects. Got a migraine? Would seeing the spiritual vibrations of rocks or having handwriting that looks ̵̦̞̿̕l̵͓̊̈́ỉ̵̛̜k̶̨͔̊͐ë̷͙͜ ̴͕͉́t̷͉͆̽h̵̝̩̃͑i̶̦̠̋̚ś̷̱͎ ̴͓͙̾̓help? (These are also loosely inspired by Rizatriptan, which nulls the migraine pain while also making me feel like a pile of wet spaghetti.)

Then we have a few magic items that adventurers can find in dungeons. There’s the Cane of Sudden Sword, which projects the illusion of a sword anytime someone asks you if your cane is a sword cane. (This is not a subtweet; I love when friends ask me this.) There’s also the Service Serpent, an actual snake that can regulate your temperature, warn you about upcoming bad days, and squeeze your head in a soothing manner. My magic items may vary in usefulness, but they all have style.

That’s Psychonaut! I’m really proud of it. I feel like I was able to explain the logistical nightmare that is chronic migraines while still making something playable. Evoking the simultaneous “powerfully dramatic” and “deeply silly” tones of Songbirds was a lot of fun, and I’m hoping this is entertaining for both people that get migraines and people that don’t. It was definitely cathartic for me to write.

If you ever play a Psychonaut, I’d really love to hear about them.

Special Announcements

• ICYMI: my new project Psychonaut is available for free download!
• In the Somerville area? We have one ticket left for the Solo RPG Design Workshop I’m running at Side Quest Books & Games! We’ll talk about solo RPGs, and then design our own. Last ticket here!
• I’m running a new game jam from April - June: Finish Your Project! This is a super casual, low-key jam designed to help you finally finish that cool thing that’s been languishing in your drafts folder. Come join us!
• Finally, I’d like to shoutout the rest of the amazing entries from the Your Friend in Witchcraft game jam.

Things I Worked On This Month

• The Sword & Kettle shop is now open! It’s bigger and more beautiful than ever before, and features handmade print copies of our New Cosmologies mini-chapbook series.
• Amateur fiber arts project of the month: hand quilting! I need 616 little hexagons to make a nice throw blanket, and I currently have 51. Every hex counts!
• I have 3? 4? other Songbirds projects in the works.

Things I Loved This Month

• Reading Sword Catcher, Cassandra Clare’s first adult and non-Shadowhunters book. Yes, I know Cassie Clare is basic. Yes, I read this absolute brick in one weekend because I couldn’t put it down.
• Re-reading Tehanu, Ursula LeGuin’s fourth Earthsea book. It’s kind of the opposite of Sword Catcher: it’s short, slow-moving, and concerned with small parts of ordinary lives. If you’ve never read Earthsea, I’d recommend reading the first three just to get the most out of this one.
• Listening to botanical studies of internet magic, a new podcast about creativity by kening zhu, who has an extremely soothing voice
• Making (& eating) these shortbread cookies! I made one batch of lemon thyme and one batch of cherry blossom vanilla.
• Playing Balatro, a new roguelike deckbuilder that I’ve already sunk too much time into
• Drinking iced coffee. It is once again time.

Thanks for hanging with me today. See you next time!