Paper birds are falling out of the summer sky.
Whoever catches one sees a moment of a stranger’s life.
Three days before the Festival of Kites, the city wants to know whose.
The Paper Birds of Vellanoor is a complete narrative adventure set in a sunlit city of canals and bell towers, and it is a mystery about memory. Streets are waking up fifty years in the past. Blank white holes are opening in the world. People wake having lost one precious thing: a husband’s face, how to whistle, the way home.
The trail leads to a crooked tower where the greatest enchanter the city has ever known is losing his mind. His husband of fifty years is hiding it from everyone. And their daughter, who hasn’t been home in fifteen years, has just been sent to find out what’s wrong.
It is warm, quick, and often very funny: a manticore that shrinks when you tell it the truth, a crook who sells bottled afternoons, a dinner party nobody wants to leave. Underneath, it asks what happens to love when one person can no longer remember it, and it ends on two words your players will carry home.
- 66pages
- 16scenes
- 4conversations
- 5set pieces
- 7characters
- 4endings
What makes it different
Memory is not truth
The monsters here are made of an old man’s memories, exactly as he remembers them. Find out how things really were, say it to their faces, and they change. Clever truth beats brute force.
Played like a film
Players earn Birds, the adventure’s rewards, for vivid, honest and funny play, including a Recall power that lets characters remember what the story needs. Rolls land in four tiers, and players narrate their own triumphs.
Conversation as play
Four structured scenes, each a small game: a dinner where everyone tells how they met, a game played in a gondola until dawn, an old teacher’s last lesson, and a city telling a man his own life.
Characters protecting each other with lies
Every major character has a surface, a subtext and a breaking point, with the exact words they say when the truth finally comes out. Most of them are hiding something out of love.
Nothing is wasted
A joke at dinner in the first session becomes the last line of the book. A one-page map traces every planted detail to the moment it pays off.
Any table, handled with care
Companions scale the story from one player to four. Six open backstory Threads let players write themselves in. This is a story about dementia, and it treats every character with dignity, with guidance for tables close to it.
Moments your table will carry home
- A paper bird falling into your hand out of a clear blue sky, with a stranger’s happiest night inside it.
- A manticore that gets smaller every time someone tells it the truth.
- A host telling how he met his husband for the third time in one evening, as if for the first.
- A grown woman kneeling on a kitchen floor so her father can see the six-year-old he’s looking for.
- A cabinet of a hundred small drawers, each one glowing faintly.
- Every kite in a city lifting into the dusk at once.
“Good morning, little bird,” he says. “Did you sleep? Did the bad dream come?”
Act Two · Good Morning, Little Bird
Look inside
Pages from the free preview. Click any page to see it larger.
What’s in the free preview
The opening chapter, the rules for story-first play, the backstory Threads, the city of Vellanoor with its table of twenty memories to catch, and all of Act One, ending on a doorstep. Every page carries its page number from the full edition. It ends with three short glimpses of later scenes, chosen to show the heart of the story without giving away its secrets. Read the preview.
