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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

You're welcome! Hope you fall so big in love and find out how phenomenal you are! 💜

Reposted by War Birds / Unruly Designs

War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Need a joyful four hours with friends where the war feels far far away and you can fall in love, and choose a future that you're excited about? Then I have the game for you! Find Lumberjills at IPR's Booth 1203 at Origins Game Fair June 19-22 in Columbus, OH - or at IPR right now!

An unboxed copy of Lumberjills on a wooden table. A brightly coloured deck, book and cards are layed out and adorned with pictures of joyfully working Lumberjills from the Women's Timber Corps of WWII. Be Loved! Play to find out how phenomenal you are.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

I'm not exaggerating when I say it made my whole day.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

For other people's context, this is a postcard sent to my home address because I live at the enlistment address of a soldier (airman) killed at Juno Beach.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

@junobeach.bsky.social This is a *phenomenal* campaign. I was deeply moved by this spontaneous gift & am grateful to know about Frank & how we're connected. We make historical games about women serving in WW2! If you're ever looking for a connection in immersive experience design, pls ping us!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Eee! So glad it has safely arrived in your hands! Will you play it at your party?

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Thank you for sharing! I hope your first run makes you feel mad loved! 💜

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Very important message, and you do great work for your peers - #1 hypebro! 💜

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Ahhhhhhhhhhh! So happy it arrived safe and sound! 😍

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Whether you want to stick it to the man (or just to your ex) hire the Old the Cold and the Bold today!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Check out the Holiday Heist bundle! In Our Last Meal, players co-create a community that has just lost a central member, and then come together to share one last meal with them. An easy-access big feels dinner party larp for 3-8 people.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Our Last Meal, Mo's home larp about food, love and complicated grief is available in the Holiday Heist bundle - it's such a steal of a deal that it's CRIMINAL! itch.io/b/2798/holid...

itch.io

Holiday Heist Game Potluck by ManOfNottingham and 13 others

Holiday Heist Game Potluck: 23 items for $5.99

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 01/10/2024

Thanks to our generous Lumberjill Benefactor @jenkatwrites.bsky.social a War Birds Kiva Loan has been sent to Amal - a sewist and Syrian refugee sheltering in Jordan. Because of good timing we were able to get a Kiva partner to double the impact of Jen's generosity! www.kiva.org/lend/2857503

kiva.org

Can you help support Amal?

Kiva is a loan, not a donation. With Kiva you can lend as little as $25 and make a big change in someone's life.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 15/05/2024

Today is the end of the campaign! Lumberjills closes at noon EST. Last chance to be a backer! www.kickstarter.com/projects/unr...

kickstarter.com

Lumberjills, a War Birds game

Find out how phenomenal you are!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 13/05/2024

With 48 hours left, Lumberjills is funded and $1,812 away from reaching the first stretch goal! Because Lumberjills in the woods is extra magical, it lets us hire someone to make the dance card generator work while offline. www.kickstarter.com/projects/unr...

kickstarter.com

Lumberjills, a War Birds game

Find out how phenomenal you are!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And so once again I've proven that I'm too verbose for social media, so I'll end it here. But please check out this game! I have put so much thought, work and rigour into making it accessible & blooming, and I really want it to live in the world.❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 www.kickstarter.com/projects/unr...

kickstarter.com

Lumberjills, a War Birds game

Find out how phenomenal you are!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And the game includes a Director's support section "On Queer Romance" that includes a bunch of what I have said here, and direction on how to navigate it effectively in play.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And all of these desires and decisions are supported and actualized by the community of players, and the framework of the game.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Jills might be considered women by the WTC, but the game's characters are set up mindfully to be slightly askew with their relationship to the demands of femininity. There has been once or twice where playtesters have decided to choose a future of transitioning.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And of course, besides just women loving women, there is other queer capacity in the game. Wooing might be a core action in the game, but choosing what your want for life is too. And that includes deciding that maybe you want *none* of this love or sex business in your life!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And there is a selection of non-male suitors if the other PCs aren't interesting or interested. The game includes exactly enough possibility so that everybody who wants to could find queer love, AND ALSO find a tangible sense of what queer history was like in the past.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

But this game is a historical game. It assumes that queer romance is possible, but that it's also a little around the corner. A little harder to find, a little more triumphant to secure. So PCs can of course find each other (and have, with frequency)...

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

A queer historical fantasy might intentionally overlook this. It might decide that all of the jills were lesbian because woodwork and flannel, obviously! Or create a full alternative cornucopia of female suitors. That queer historical fantasy would be fun to play, sign me up!

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And that effort and that success was part of their lived history, not just a part of their struggle, but a testament to determination, resilience and success.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

But we also know that while queer pain was aplenty, queer people found each other, made their own joy, and forged lives together. They just had to work around the corners to do it.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Indeed. And this is where we get to the history game part. Queer lives are interwoven through all of history, but are rarely documented outside of the places where they intersect with prurience, punishment or violence. Queer margender histories especially so.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Lumberjills is a practice of acceptance. It creates a community of commitment to the joy and kind of love you've declared you want to pursue both in and out of character. But Mo! - you say, "the players aren't the characters and you can't tell queer stories with het histories."

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And before we get to the actual fiction we enact, this as an act of play has a delightful queering effect. Every gender and sexuality present in every different run will romance you - on your own terms -with everything they've got. And you, in turn, do the same for them.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Because of this, Lumberjills takes a unique approach in player-driven storytelling. Fellow players follow your lead: they tempt your character as wooing suitors, they celebrate you as friends, they help you decide what (and who) you want for your future.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

It aimed to invite players to *steep* in the same kind of historical joy. To go to the woods, make friends, find love, forge a future and find out phenomenal you are.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Lumberjills was inspired to replicate the beating heart of these women and they way they described their own experiences: surprised at their own capacity, delighted with the friendships and romances that bloomed, discovering their futures differently afterwards.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

And in those 60 years, girls grew up never knowing of the intrepid, amazing women who went to the woods to serve their county, and learned to fell ten tonne trees as well as any man. History never tells us how capable and resilient women have always been.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

So back to Lumberjills. The majority of the women who served in the WTC died before they were recognized. 15K of them gave years of their lives to war work. It took more than 60 years and a fight from their descendants to even award those still living a service pin.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

But War Birds was created with a very specific mission: to shine a spotlight on the history of people who's contributions to it have been systemically forgotten, obscured, or buried. And to invite players to experience a history that has been denied them.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Historical fantasies are extremely popular in gaming spaces. Heck, given the difference in the outcome (25K vs 325K) of both Kickstarters, historical fantasy games are far more popular among gamers than historical games.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

It invites players to gleefully engage as "dashing, violent, bloodthirsty antiheroes" in an ultraviolent rampage of carnage against fascism. It provides an opportunity to save the world through violent, bloody, revenge power fantasy.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

In Eat the Reich, you play a vampire commando that is "coffin-dropped into occupied Paris and must cut a bloody swathe through nazi forces en-route to your ultimate goal: drinking all of Adolf Hitler's blood."

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

Real people coping with overwhelming adversity and state violence via historical events: when your character stands up to confront the Reich you resonate with the courage of the Rosenstrasse women & are invited to understand that resistance to fascism has always been possible.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

A pair of games from recent years that neatly illustrates the difference is Rosenstrasse/Eat the Reich. Rosenstrasse puts players into carefully constructed characters in real events to deeply contextualize what the erosion of civil liberties looks like under the rise of fascism.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

A history game invites players to explore history as it existed - it gives them the opportunity to step into the past, live there for a bit, & learn something about it. A historical fantasy game gives players access to the past & invites them to recreate it or remake it.

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War Birds / Unruly Designs @warbirds.bsky.social · 07/05/2024

So yesterday I talked about racial diversity in Lumberjills, and today I'm doing a thread on telling queer stories with the game. First we need to talk about history games vs. historical fantasy games. A very long 🧵...

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