A little background knowledge: my FLGS has a huge wall of White Wolf books (they even had WoD: Gypsies for fuck's sake). Buying Gypsies would have made me feel dirty so I went with the next best thing in Changeling, off some half remembered Frankism on its creepiness. The guy at the shop was really enthusiastic about it, which might say negative things about his character. I've got some tequila, I've got this book, and I've got no idea what I'm about to get myself into. Here we go.
We start out with a picture of a desk with a handwritten note on what it is to be Kithain which I cannot read and floppy disks that namedrop several Shakespeare characters. The note goes on for several pages, surrounded by random objects like those old I Spy books. There's a bokken on page five and I have no idea why. Koumei provides the art on page 8 and I am already rapidly running out of fucks to give here so I'm going to move on to
Book One - Childling
We start, as WW products often do, with some intro text. It sounds like it's about a little kid doing little kid stuff but then they talk about Courts and pomegranate brandy and I'm getting a Michael Jackson vibe out of this already.
So the thrust of Changeling is that it's about the Dreaming, which is basically the reality floobiness that you're aiming for in oMage, as far as I can tell. It's a game about "lost innocence and the cynicism of adulthood" and I'm going to need an adult by the time this is over aren't I? WW gives you the storytelling patter and tells you you're caught between the boring human world and the batshit world of the Fae and you eventually succumb to Banality (loss of wonderment) or Bedlam ("Go crazy? Don't mind if I do!").
An interesting thing to note among the standard pretentious White Wolf intro stuff is they tell the ST it's their job to make sure the other players have a good time. That's obvious, but given what I've heard of STs this fell on deaf ears. They hit you with the lexicon/slang section and apparently the path to real ultimate power is being a child. Apparently Changelings work on Magical Girl logic.
As always, WoD is a gothic punk horror game, which doesn't seem to jive with being magical fairy children but what the fuck. You're aiming for Arcadia, where magic and wonderment and shit happen. And back in the day, again, like oMage, magic and wonderment happened on Earth too until the Sundering fucked that up for everybody. This leads to the Shattering, which is where mean old logic and reason fucks the Fae into either going to the Dreaming or staying on Earth. You really get the sense that the White Wolf designers were beat up by engineers in high school or something. But then the Moon landing sparks everyone's imagination and faerie magic comes back. Since this is the World of Darkness, shit goes crazy between Earthbound and Arcadia fey and there's a bloody civil war. There's something about a New York guy who becomes king of the fae but who gives a fuck?
Anyway, you're a faerie. This means your power source is Glamour and the thing that gives you the bad touch is Banality. To awaken to your true nature, you trip balls and spew Glamour everywhere. Sometimes this drives you mad, sometimes it turns you into the main antagonist, you know how this goes. There are nine flavors of faerie, either because three and three again or because that's just how White Wolf rolls. They are: busy-body Boggans, token black raconteur Eshu, ugly Nockers, annoying Pooka, unliked Redcaps, cake and blowjobs Satyr, beautiful people Sidhe, constantly whispering Sluagh and stubborn Trolls. They talk about households and freeholds and coats of arms and shit, they're really pushing the feudalism angle hard. You've got the Seelie Court, which is hidebound and honorable and the Unseelie Court, which embraces change and doesn't care about your rules man. They discuss titles within society, rules of society, various groups you can be a part of, the usual. I am once again running out of fucks to give but the chapter is over so woo.
The chapter on Storytelling is what you'd expect: keep things interesting, don't railroad, let the players add to the world, set up the playspace nicely, all of that shit. They then discuss themes: Isolation/Alienation, Family, Romance, Wonder, Nightmares, Freedom/Wildness, Madness and Humor.
Those last two together like that worries me because Fishmalks. This whole list worries me because it seems like there are two different games this is trying to be. On one hand, you're supposed to be an outcast but there's a whole society you're indoctrinated into. They want you to go crazy and fear what's out there, but what's out there has to be able to be vanquished by noble heroes. It's kind of a mess. They drop the Hero's Journey on you and then give you some story and campaign hooks before giving you the advanced techniques. They tell you to roleplay dreams and set up a play within a play, which is hard enough in a regular story and seems dodgy in a collaborative storytelling environment. I see they add a random element with tarot cards and wonder if that's where Frank got the advancement system for After Sundown from.
Finally, they end with crossover potentials, which blows my mind since I thought the WoD games don't play nicely with each other.
And that's book one. Next is how to actually play the damn game. So far there's nothing too alarming, although I am worried about the whole adult children thing.
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