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(Side note: John Harper is also the author of Agon and Danger Patrol, and a co-author of the 4th edition of Talislanta.)
Contents
The first page outlines the situation, which can be summed up as follows: Lady Blackbird is fleeing from an arranged marriage aboard a smuggler ship, but the ship is captured by an Imperial cruiser. (For "Imperial", think the Alliance from Firefly, not the Empire from Star Wars.) The story begins with the passengers and crew in the brig, and where it goes from there is up to the players.
Next is half a page describing the setting, accompanied by a half-page illustration of the location of the different worlds described. It's fantasy-steampunk-in-space of the breathable aether variety (the fantasy elements lie in the fact that one of the PCs has sorcerous abilities, and two more have limited magical talents). The Imperial worlds are on one side of the system and the free worlds are on the other.
(I have a couple of niggles with the description: for one, the worlds are implied to orbit yet maintain the same relative positions. Not impossible, but why not just make them stationary? Also, there's a "lower depths" full of heavy, corrosive gases, yet one of the worlds has a dark side, which implies gravity oriented towards the world's surface. However, scientific rigor is not the object here, and the cool flavor of the setting makes these little inconsistencies forgivable.)
The next five pages are character sheets -- for Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, the ship's captain, mechanic, and pilot -- with each character's abilities outlined on the top half of the page and the bottom half containing a rules summary. Following these, we get a half-page description of the ship, again with a half-page illustration. The next two pages are rules-related material -- tips for the GM, a few examples of situations the PCs might face and how to apply the rules to them, and examples of additional character abilities for the PCs to pick from as they advance.
The last five pages are more character sheets, but this time the top half consists of blanks for the players to fill in as their PCs gain new traits. The bottom half of each sheet repeats the rules summary from the previous sheets. This seems like rather a waste of space, since it means that players using both sheets -- and the second is really not much use on its own -- will have two identical copies of the rules. Though I'm not sure what I would have put in their place, except maybe blank space for recording equipment and other notes.
Rules
The characters in Lady Blackbird are defined by traits, tags, keys and secrets. Traits are freeform descriptive characteristics, akin to aspects in FATE, qualities in PDQ, or clichés in Risus. Each trait has a variable number of tags listed under it. So, for example, Lady Blackbird herself has the "Imperial Noble" trait, with the tags "Etiquette, Dance, Educated, History, Science, Wealth, Connections, House Blackbird". Traits and tags allow you to add dice to a roll, as described below.
Keys are similar to traits, but serve a different purpose. Each key allows you to either gain an XP or add a die to your pool (see below) when a specific condition is met. For example, Lady Blackbird has "Key of the Impostor: You are in disguise, passing yourself off as commoner. Hit your key when you perform well enough to fool someone with your disguise." Five XP allows you to add a new trait, tag, key or secret to your character sheet, and as I mentioned before, there's a page listing further examples of each.
Secrets are special abilities, such as "Secret of the Bodyguard: Once per session, you can re-roll a failure when protecting someone." Each character begins with four traits, three keys and two secrets (except for Lady Blackbird, who gains a fifth trait from one of her secrets).
The basic rule mechanic is as follows. Whenever you face an obstacle, you get to roll one die, plus one additional die for each trait or tag that applies. (You can't use tags from a trait that doesn't apply, however.) You also have a pool of extra dice, starting at seven, and can add as many as you like to the effort. Each die that comes up 4 or higher is a "hit", and the difficulty level (ranging from 2-5) determines the number of hits you need to succeed. (Since each die has a 50% chance of giving a hit, you could substitute coins for dice to make it LARP-friendly.)
If you fail, you don't lose the pool dice you spent, and you add another die to your pool as compensation. The GM may also impose one or more of the following conditions on you, as appropriate: Injured, (Presumed) Dead, Tired, Angry, Lost, Hunted, or Trapped. The conditions are listed in a row across the middle of the character sheet, with a checkbox next to each. As you can see, Lady Blackbird doesn't use a typical damage track. There are no rules for the exact effects of each condition, so you'll have to rely on common sense.
Aside from hitting a key or failing a roll, you can also replenish your dice pool up to seven by having a "refreshment scene" (which may also allow you to remove conditions or regain the use of a once-per-session secret). What does a refreshment scene consist of? In a word, roleplaying.
Although it isn't spelled out, it seems that players are expected to do all the dice-rolling; at least, there's no mention of opposed rolls, and no NPC writeups. (Which raises the question of what to do if there aren't enough players to run all the PCs.)
Conclusions
My personal taste in game mechanics is for a more structured system, but I can understand the appeal of freeform systems like PDQ and Risus. If you like that sort of game, then Lady Blackbird is the sort of game you'll like. The best feature of the system is its universality -- there's no reason you couldn't use these rules to play in any setting, and indeed it's already been adapted by others to genres including Star Wars, Western and other historical settings, superspy, and Alien-style sci-fi horror. The author's website has a compiled list of these hacks.
Style: I was hesitant to give Lady Blackbird a 5 for style because it's not really on par with a glossy professional product. However, I couldn't think of any justification for docking points because, for what it is, Lady Blackbird comes about as close as possible to flawless style. I didn't spot a single error in spelling or grammar, the fonts are attractive and easy to read, and the layout is clean and attractive, with ornamental borders that enhance the steampunk feel and just the right amount of white space. There are no illustrations apart from the system map and the external view of the smuggling vessel, but both of those are gorgeous. The rules are a little vague in some respects, but that's more of a substance issue resulting from their brevity; the writing style is very clear and easy to understand and the organization (apart from the unfortunate duplication of rules mentioned above) is ideal.
Substance: The low substance score I've given Lady Blackbird shouldn't be taken as a criticism. It's just that "sparse" is the only adjective that accurately describes the amount of material you get. Both the rules and the scenario are very sketchy. The document is only 16 pages long, but even that's misleading, since each character sheet has an identical copy of the rules. The actual content consists of about six-and-a-half pages of unique text, and more than a third of that is the character writeups. The scenario is really only a plot seed rather than a full-fledged adventure outline. (It's a little more detailed than the summary I gave above, but not by much; the entire backplot takes up only three short paragraphs.) There are no descriptions of any of the NPCs, no deck plans for either ship, and only half a page of information on the setting. Anyone running this will need to be very good at improvisation; I know I'd never be up to the task. However, given that this is a minimalistic, freeform system, the sparseness is by design. The lack of background detail is a little harder to excuse, but every published scenario requires the GM to wing it sooner or later. If you like steampunk and freeform systems, there's no reason not to download Lady Blackbird right now. It costs no money and it'll take you all of about 10-15 minutes to read. What have you got to lose?
