Making a Songbird

My magical girl RPG is called Songbirds.

Creating a character works like this:

Everyone gets 1 heart. This represents your life. Lose it and you die.

Everyone gets a dream and a nightmare.

Your dream is how you level up. Doing something in service of your dream, trying to attain it, is how you get xp.

Your nightmare exists because of your dream. Think of it as a meter, with dream on one end and nightmare on the other. Witnessing terrible things, ignoring your dream, or failing, pushes you closer to your nightmare.

Nightmares are all monsters that you fight in the game. The key is to only fight the nightmares of others, but sometimes shit happens.

The goal of the game is to not become a nightmare.

It's a melancholic game. A fight against unstoppable forces. There will always be nightmares because not everyone achieves their dream. You are the people who stop those nightmares. You are Songbirds.

Dreams

Dreams are your wish. The game begins and there is something you want to fix. This is your ticking clock. It can be serious and devastating to small and personal. Losing a loved one, a friend moving away, your father losing his job, a classmate with depression. There is something that you want to fix. This is what makes you special. This is what makes a Songbird choose you and grant you the power to fix it.

Your dream is like hope in this bleak world. It cannot save the world, but it can make it nicer for those close to you.

To get your dream you have to do things for the songbird that grants you these powers. These things range from strange (burying a memento under a certain tree) to cruel (breaking up that popular couple at your school). If you do enough for them before you become a nightmare, your wish comes true.

Nightmares

Nightmares come true. Everyone has a fear and those fears live in the mind and plague your thoughts. Songbirds face Nightmares in battle. This is where the deck building and card battling takes place.

Sessions
Every session is an Episode. Every episode has a nightmare (if a nightmare is not dealt with during an episode, it becomes a 2-part episode, which adds complications).

These work like mysteries, where the players see a problem caused by the nightmare and have to figure out who is having this nightmare before it spreads and becomes a catastrophe (things like hurricanes, tornadoes, horrible, life-altering events).

(These are just thoughts and need more work)