OSSR: Changeling: the Dreaming

[Koumei]

Ahahahaha.

Were I not at work I'd find the review of it on FATAL & Friends (a Goon thing).

[TheFlatline]

Sex is usually not an option for the ten year olds, so if you use your magic to have sex, THEN IT'S YOUR OWN DAMN CHOICE AND STOP BLAMING THE GAME FOR IT.

Here's the thing: the informal social contract people play under is informed by the setting they've agreed to play. Nobody forces any one player to include wizards in D&D, but the option is expressly on the table and so the social contract needs to account for players or gms including wizards. And so it is with Changeling and magical jail bait. Nobody needs to play uninhibited children but it's a listed option and you might run into one in the world, which means that Changeling touches territory that most gamers find so squicky that they don't even want to talk about it long enough to explicitly forbid it.

Even if you don't go that far with the Satyr thing you're still going to frequently find fae that have been boning each other for like 3000 years, 2500 of those in the bodies of adolescents and children.

I tried to approach it without all the squick and shoot for a kind of American McGee's Alice vibe, but even when trying to set the game up and talking about it in theory it became... an issue.

Which is sad, because if you could strip that out, and drop-kick the pookah thing through the uprights, you might have an interesting game on the nature of dreams and shit.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I wasn't aware that carnal had any kind of non-sexual meaning. It's the kind of word that, in common use, only ever means sex. Similar to how a modern work can't describe something as "gay" and expect people to know they mean cheerful and lively.

I've heard "carnal" used to describe the joy of eating good food as well, but I'd pretty much assume most of the time when one uses the word they mean the more common meaning.

[Prak]

Is there any real justification for the whole child bodies thing other than "Child-like Wonder?" I mean, the game really cries for everyone to be playing expies of Delirium, and Gaiman and his artists found a perfectly good way to depict Delirium that did not involve making her look like a 12 year old:

possibly necessary given that Endless seemed to chronically suffer from a severe lack of clothing

I mean, I get the appeal of using childhood tropes in your game about wonder and imagination and dream, I really do, Satanism calls out two classes of true innocents and one of them is children for that precise reason, so even Nietzsche hipster dystopia religions get it, but given how many people can probably point to either being, or wanting to be, sexually involved with someone as their reason for playing WoD, it's just very clear that WoD players' libidos are very much a part of play and so encouraging child characters* just seems like an obviously bad idea.


*I will kind of give Vampire a pass on this one because their heaviest influence is Anne Rice, and thus it should be somewhat possible to play Claudia, but even then, it's a terrible, terrible idea.

Ahahahaha.

Were I not at work I'd find the review of it on FATAL & Friends (a Goon thing).

I will never pass up an opportunity to pimp my own FATAL review: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=209417#209417

I wasn't aware that carnal had any kind of non-sexual meaning. It's the kind of word that, in common use, only ever means sex. Similar to how a modern work can't describe something as "gay" and expect people to know they mean cheerful and lively.

I've heard "carnal" used to describe the joy of eating good food as well, but I'd pretty much assume most of the time when one uses the word they mean the more common meaning.

Strictly, Carnal would seem to have originally have just refered to the body, so carnal desire would mean desires of the body, including sex, food, sleep, etc. In practice, in current usage it almost only ever refers to sex.

[Koumei]

Nonono, I meant the "FATAL and Friends" thread which reviews terrible games (that special kind of terrible, not just us arguing about which D&D is the worst one ever), which had a review of Wraeththu.

AND HERE IT IS

[Prak]

And now I have something to read.

I still pimp my review at every opportunity.

[Starmaker]

I will kind of give Vampire a pass on this one because their heaviest influence is Anne Rice, and thus it should be somewhat possible to play Claudia, but even then, it's a terrible, terrible idea.

Claudia is an educated adult woman who's trapped in the fundamentally unsexy and unalluring body of a child. Her not being full of childlike wonder while having a body completely inappropriate for doing things an adult woman might be interested in is kind of the point of the character. Having sex with Claudia in-universe is not a crime, though it makes for squicky imagery. This is in contrast to loli sex goddesses who are powered by having the minds of children (and thus can't give consent, no matter what they look like) and whose childlike bodies are supposed to be attractive.

[Prak]

Right, I was talking about how WoD games in general shouldn't encourage, or probably even explicitly allow, child characters, with an exception for Vampire because Claudia in that specific game line.

[Lago PARANOIA]

White Wolf... why?

No, you know what, it doesn't matter at this point. RIP, WW.

[Mask_De_H]

I've got some black cherry vodka that tastes like cough medication so I think I'm ready to close this thing out. My scanner's on the fritz and my computer won't recognize my phone so the Koumei pic is left to your imaginations.

It's what White Wolf would have wanted.

Book 3: Grump

We're finally to the part of the book which tells you what your magical powers are. It is Glamour, and it comes from the Dreaming. There's some wishy-washy explanation about how creativity opens channels to the Dreaming but there are also untouched places that collect Glamour and the changelings don't even know what the fuck. Look, I understand wanting to have whimsy in your magic but at least give us an idea of what we're working with here. The MC is told to give you poetic and unhelpful descriptions of what Glamour is because White Wolf.

Whatever it is, it's better than smack, so changelings have to get their fix. You either get it through Ravaging, which is ripping it out forcefully, Reverie, which is inspiring a mortal to create, and Rapture, which is tapping into your own mortal side for Glamour. Two of the three of these are mostly MC fiat, I'll leave which one isn't as an exercise to the reader. There's also Dross, which is crystalized Glamour, much like Tass with oMage. You get this from stuff like magic shrooms and the relics of great people, so there are probably Kithkin bidding on chunks of Joe Strummer's guitar and such. You have to destroy or consume the object to get the sweet, sweet magic inside of it. There are Dream Stones (your magic shrooms), Mementos (Elvis' Guitar), Treasures (which net you Banality because fuck you that's why), Chimera (Titanomachy for fun and profit) and Founts (special places). When you use Dross, you roll a d10: 1 means botch, 10 means benny.

They give you a rap on how Banality and Glamour are opposing forces, then tell you what the Laws of Glamour are. This being White Wolf, they then immediately tell the MC they can ignore these rules if they feel like it. Also the power is fickle and random, so be sure to "liven it up" for the players. Feel the excitement.

So, casting Cantrips. It's a card based system, where you play your Art and your Realm, then you have to jump through some bullshit hoops draw a Bunk. Your success depends on the Bunk (for enchanted creatures) or Banality (for regular mortals and changelings who want to shut you down). You then discard a card unless you pay a point of Glamour. There's an actually pretty neat system of stacking effects within the party off of one casting. Or you can use dice, which makes things work like your standard WoD product. Bunks are drawn from a deck or arbitrarily decided by the MC in this system. The Storyteller advice tells you to shut down your players if they fuck up your story because White Wolf. You've got five dots, as you do, and they do different things depending on which Realm you pick.

First up on the Art list is Chicanery, the art of deceit. Commoners like it, nobles don't. It runs off of Manipulation. Your first dot confuses one thing for another, your second dot allows you to fuck with people's memories, your third dot inspires a powerful emotion of your choice (so everyone can get in on the Loli Sex Goddess action), dot four hides shit and dot five is Dominate Monster. This seems to be the actual mindfuck domain instead of Sovereign.

Next is Legerdemain, which actually covers illusions but really gives you telekinetic powers. It runs off of Dexterity. Dot one is telekinesis, dot two is entanglement and better telekinesis, dot three makes things out of Glamour that have limited effects, dot four allows for translocation (which you can do with the first dot but hey) and dot five is Shadow Conjuration basically. A two-dot school really.

Then we have Primal, which is the druid power set. It runs off of Stamina. First dot lets you talk to and question anything but you have to whisper, second dot is healing that you need to pay Willpower for, third dot grants Health Levels for a month, fourth dot hurts people and breaks stuff, fifth dot is Polymorph with a chance of getting changed back every time an unenchanted person interacts with you. The first and the last power seem good, the rest is chaff.

Up on deck is Soothsay, which is supposed to be the Art of understanding Glamour, but it's basically luck manipulation. Runs off of Intelligence. First dot gives good luck and/or reduces difficulties. Second dot causes bad luck and/or raises difficulties. Dot three is Scry, dot four allows you to dictate plot elements based on your successes and dot five has crazy shit happen due to fate. Crazy powerful.

Next is Sovereign, which is all about nobility and rank. It's only good for kicking around those lower on the totem pole than you, which sucks. Runs off of Charisma. The first dot allows you to demand decorum like you're Bad News Barrett. Second dot is Suggestion. Third dot makes you look so fucking awesome nobody can attack you until they get over how awesome you look. Fourth dot completely locks down a door, entrance or object. Dot five lets you drop Geasa on people like they're Cu Culhainn (or you're Lelouch). Chicanery is better than this, especially since you only need one success to fight off a Geasa.

Finally we have Wayfare, which is all about movement. It runs off of Wits instead of Dex because reasons. First dot lets you leap tall buildings in a single bound, second dot is everyone's favorite, Vampire Celerity, third dot makes portals, fourth dot grants flight, fifth dot is teleportation. This is money solely for Celerity, but the rest of the powers are pretty sweet too.

The Realms scale up from simple to complex within each purview, but each purview requires a different skill to function so have fun with that. Each Art also has its own Bunks and they range from interesting (collect tears in a glass vial and sprinkle them near or on your target) to inane (stick out your tongue and wriggle your fingers) to potentially game-crashing (Burn rare Oriental incense, procure an expensive gemstone, light a small fire of rare woods, and obtain a drop of water from every ocean in the world. Place each of these items at the compass points around you and speak the name of your subject aloud). The number of successes each Bunk caps you at makes no fucking sense. Drinking oolong tea, no sugar, with the leaves still in nets you four successes, as does marking someone with your own blood on your own hand. The latter is a level five effect while the former is a level three effect. These levels don't seem to actually mean anything. There are also Nightmares, which you can take instead of Banality if you fuck up. One of these grants Banality. Yeah.

The Glamour chapter closes out with some magic items, some of them are basically kids stuff while others actually seem like magical faerie artifacts. Of personal note are a gun that shoots gum and a disco ball that makes you trip balls.

We're eight chapters in and we finally get to the Systems chapter. They kick off with Experience, telling the MC that they can't let people spend points for any Trait they want, they have to roleplay it. There are other hoops you have to jump through to get your chapter and story points, so you're not getting XP at any reasonable speed unless you work the shaft and cup the balls. If you have a Mentor, you can learn Arts and Realms faster, so you're a Loli Sex Goddess with a mentor/sugar daddy.

Then they jump into Bedlam, which is the other game over state besides Banality. First you start to get dissociative episodes and/or anxiety, then you get to shit like Don Quixote Syndrome (the character believes everything to be from an ancient time or fantasy realm), which...has nothing to do with Don Quixote. The MC is supposed to take you aside and tell you just how you're tripping balls at this point. Third level Bedlam is infectious like Troglodytes in AS and you basically hand over your sheet to the MC. First level is curable with Banality, second level needs Banality and Primal healing, third level needs a lost MacGuffin or maybe a dragon. They give you a list of signs you might have Bedlam, one of which is having more than one faerie treasure or interacting with the world of faerie to any reasonable extent in a game about interacting with the world of fucking faerie. Also of note, if your Glamour is higher than both your Willpower and your Banality then you might be crazy, so every Loli Sex Goddess starts out on her way to Crazy Town unless she buys up Willpower.

There's a whole section on love: you've got love between changelings, love of side bitches, love of mortals (always tragic), and tru wub (which requires struggle.) The section is mercifully short, but remember we're talking about ancient beings that look like they aren't legal getting into first blood marriages and having consorts and shit. Even when it's trying to be charming, it's worrying.

They then talk about Oaths which work like this: take up a task, swear an oath, maybe spend some Willpower/Glamour; get some Glamour/Willpower. If you fail lose Glamour/Willpower or take Banality. They're decently flavorful and interesting, but I want to get this done in a single post. After Oaths, they introduce for the first time the concept of the Mists, which is sort of an enforced faerie Masquerade. You can bewitch mortals so they can see faeries, but they can also take illusion damage and go into a coma if they take too much of it. They then explain the nature of illusion damage (called Chimerical damage) and the Chimera; objects and creatures made out of dream-stuff. Neuroses are given form as Chimera, as well as monsters of myth and legend and the HEY! LISTEN! kind of faerie. If they get exposed to too much Banality, they go poof.

After a weird aside on fae who have found balance between Glamour and Banality, they finally tell you how the injury rules work. Chimerical damage is Bashing damage, everything else I assume works like every other WoD game. No aggravated damage though, which is odd. There are rules for falling, suffocating and drowning and cold iron, which fucks you up pretty bad. So ends chapter eight.

Chapter Nine is the Drama chapter, but it's really the "how to play the fucking game" chapter. This is where they tell you about scenes, splitting your dice pool for extra actions, initiative (which is declare in reverse order, then adjudicate in initiative order), all sorts of shit. We're damn near at the end of the book and it just now deigns to give us this information. They don't even tell you all of the bloody actions you can take in the action table. They split the actions into Physical, Social and Mental, as you do. All the way in the back they tell you how combat works, as well as giving you a bunch of fiddly little Melee and Brawl tricks you can pull. I'd say Firearms can go fuck themselves, but this is a White Wolf game and Firearms are already good enough. We close out the chapter with a long ass example of play with and that's that.

Finally, we have the Appendix, which kicks off with the Antagonists. We start off with Native American changelings and weirdly enough, Fomori from Werewolf. Then there are the Chimera, which include things like a monster that steals loose socks, things that wait for you to go to the bathroom before they jump you but can only get you if you're on the floor and giant fucking spiders. The Black Dog of England gets a special shout-out, and then we run into other splats. Mages and Wraiths are called out as antagonists, even though the Mage entry says that changelings used to hang out with Mages. Finally we have the Autumn People, who work for the forces of Banality. There are passive Autumn People who raise the Banality levels of a place and active Autumn People who, rightfully pissed off at a changeling eating somebody's creativity, break out the cold iron and go a-hunting. Of special note are Vampires and Werewolves: Vamps are the fusion of a redcap and a mortal and have high Banality (zing!) and the furries are a sub-race that split off when the Fomori came.

Finally, we have a sample city (Haight-Ashbury, California), an adventure where you hunt down chimerical toys, a couple of other story hooks, the stats for the chimerical toys and Rein*Hagen gushing about a gaming revolution and moving to San Francisco. Blank cards and a character sheet are in the back and that's it.

Wot I Think:

Like I said earlier, this game has no idea what the fuck it wants to be and it suffers for it. Most things lead towards it being this light hearted romp through dreams and tales of knightly romance, but then you have violent punk Redcaps and Loli Sex Goddesses. It suffers from being a part of the World of Darkness, because there's an attitude there that the game just doesn't commit to. Children aren't punk, childlike wonder isn't punk, don't make them try to be punk. There could've been an interesting gothic punk faerie game about trying to survive in courtly intrigue that's more Game of Thrones than L'Morte D'Arthur but that's just not here at all. And I think what inspired this game was the stories of the Tuatha de Dannan and the really nasty shit the Unseelie Court could do to people, but then they just threw in the child stuff and it's all fucked up.

[Prak]

Whatever it is, it's better than smack, so changelings have to get their fix.

Suddenly tempted to play a "Toadally Radical" Pooka with a frog shape if I ever get to play a Changeling.

You get this from stuff like magic shrooms and the relics of great people, so there are probably Kithkin bidding on chunks of Joe Strummer's guitar and such.

What about molds of Jimi Hendrix' penis?

[Username17]

Changeling's lack of focus is its biggest selling point in addition to its downfall. Fans of Changeling live in denial that the objectionable content even exists. You saw that right here on this thread with someone cherry picking potential definitions of individual words to claim there was some non-sexual meaning of 'carnal passions' such that it would be something not-disgusting for a ten year old child to inflame. And honestly, if you talk to two Changeling fans, the game they describe to you won't sound particularly similar.

Changeling is simply incoherent. Both thematically and mechanically. You can't play the game or tell the story as written, because it's a jumble of contradictory ideas. So people who claim to like Changeling are actually just inspired by some narrow facet of the book, with the entire world and adventures they imagine being self generated from that. It's a 'game of the mind' even more than Call of Cthulhu. CoC just doesn't have a game system and devolves into people telling stories set in the mythos while pretending there is a game system to fall back on. In Changeling, people aren't even telling the same stories.

Some people are trying to play Grimm, some people are trying to do Mercedes Lackey licensed gaming, some people are doing Narnia and some are doing Sandman. There's no shared narrative, and Changeling games almost always fall apart sooner rather than later. And that's even if no one at the table makes a child rapist (of either meaning of the term).

Changeling is the poster child for how if you try to make your urban fantasy do everything it ends up doing nothing.

-Username17

[Covent]

Changeling's lack of focus is its biggest selling point in addition to its downfall. Fans of Changeling live in denial that the objectionable content even exists. You saw that right here on this thread with someone cherry picking potential definitions of individual words to claim there was some non-sexual meaning of 'carnal passions' such that it would be something not-disgusting for a ten year old child to inflame. And honestly, if you talk to two Changeling fans, the game they describe to you won't sound particularly similar.

Changeling is simply incoherent. Both thematically and mechanically. You can't play the game or tell the story as written, because it's a jumble of contradictory ideas. So people who claim to like Changeling are actually just inspired by some narrow facet of the book, with the entire world and adventures they imagine being self generated from that. It's a 'game of the mind' even more than Call of Cthulhu. CoC just doesn't have a game system and devolves into people telling stories set in the mythos while pretending there is a game system to fall back on. In Changeling, people aren't even telling the same stories.

Some people are trying to play Grimm, some people are trying to do Mercedes Lackey licensed gaming, some people are doing Narnia and some are doing Sandman. There's no shared narrative, and Changeling games almost always fall apart sooner rather than later. And that's even if no one at the table makes a child rapist (of either meaning of the term).

Changeling is the poster child for how if you try to make your urban fantasy do everything it ends up doing nothing.

-Username17

I have been reading this review and doing quite a bit of thinking. The main reason is because I had a changeling game that spanned about 5 years of real time played at least once a day.

This was in School of course. I have very fond memeories of it, however I cannot say I disagree with the majority of what has been said. I think what Frank said is very true.

This lead me to dig out my old notes and think "How was this game so fun?"

It basically boiled down to three things.

1.) I ripped out the magic system and rewrote it completly.

2.) I had standardized all of the WW systems I had at that point to make them more easily cross-played.

3.) My players and myself had a relatively cohesive idea of the space we wanted to play in and did not choose to explore some of the more obvious "squick" ideas. In example everyone played Wilders rather than childlings, I even had I believe two grumps.

This has made me conclude that while I did have years of enjoyment from my changeling book, it was mostly the art and theme that we enjoyed almost in-spite of the system.

This has been a fun trip down memory lane, thanks.

[virgil]

Apparently they're releasing a 20th Anniversary edition with revised rules, to be funded by Kickstarter. According to their Facebook, it's a 300k word document.

[Dogbert]

I really, really hope Paradox rescues the WoD from the hands of that Chinese sweatshop called Onyx Path and puts it in more worthy hands.

[Rawbeard]

But why would they care?

[Niles]

The real question is is whether they can still use the old art, because there is no way they can afford DiTerlizzi anymore.



Looking at Planescape & Changeling, if you threw together an "rpg" out of Markov Chains And got Tony DiTerlizzi to illustrate it would develop a fanbase who ardently believe in it's philosophical depth.