Six of you with fourteen-foot wingspans just broke out of the facility that built them. The alarms are still ringing. The fence is torn. Erasers — wolf-men grown in tanks by the same people who made you — are already loose on the grounds.
You are the Flock. You have no food, no water, no IDs, no plan. What you have is the sky, and each other, and a place called the School that will never, ever stop looking for you.
That's the game. This book tells you how to play it.
What kind of game this is
Avian Flock runs on a custom narrative d20. That means:
- When you try something with a real chance of failure, you roll a d20, add a modifier from one of your six ability scores, and compare it to a number the GM sets. The dice chapter explains every part of this.
- The story comes first. The dice decide outcomes, not pacing. You'll roll a few times an hour, not five times a minute.
- Survival is the win condition. There's no gold to collect and no dungeon to clear. You keep the Flock fed, hidden, together, and free. If everyone's alive at the end of the session, you won.
- You are not superheroes. You are enhanced — faster, stronger, sharper than baseline humans — but you are running from an institution with helicopters. Play desperate, not invincible.
What you do first
Pick a starting point. There are two ways into the story:
- Escape from the School — Night one. Alarms, searchlights, a torn fence, and ninety seconds of head start. You'll create the Flock's opening together in the first ten minutes of play.
- On the Run — Six months later. The Flock is hole up in an abandoned Cleveland mall, low on everything, when a burner phone buzzes with coordinates and three words: I can help.
Either way, you'll play a named member of the Flock — Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, or Angel. There's no character sheet to build from scratch; the Flock is pre-made, and the making-your-bird chapter walks you through who they are and what each one is for.
How a session breathes
A session runs in a rhythm you'll feel within the first hour:
- Opening — where you are, what you have, what's coming.
- Crisis — Erasers, exposure, exhaustion, or a choice that has no clean answer.
- Decision — fight, flee, talk, or hide. The Flock decides together.
- Consequence — you live with what you chose. The world changes around it.
- Downtime — a meal, a fire, an hour of real sleep. These moments are not filler. They are the whole point of surviving.
- Cliffhanger — something new on the horizon.
The quiet parts are where your character lives. The loud parts are where they get tested. A good session has both.
Three rules worth reading twice
You can always fly. Your wings are your trump card — but they cost you, they're loud, and they can be damaged. The flight chapter covers when to spread them and when to keep them folded.
Hunger is a clock. Your body burns three to five times what a normal human's does. Food, water, and sleep are tracked, and running low on any of them changes how you play. The survival chapter has the numbers.
The dice don't protect you from choices. A roll can save you from a bad plan's worst outcome. It can't make a bad plan good. Talk to your Flock before you commit — that's what they're for.
The rest of this book is short on purpose. Read the dice chapter before your first session and skim the rest. Everything else, the story will teach you.
