RPG update, including larps

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

The New Changeling

I've finished reading Changeling: The Lost. I think it's the best of all the WoD games I've read to date, which include old WoD's Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling, and new Wod's Vampire, Werewolf, and Changeling. I still have several issues, from how things are costed to the fact that they are defined by mechanics to begin with to the stuff that got tacked onto the background.

The basic background is good. The PCs are people who were taken by the fae, and who have escaped, and who never, ever want to go back. Yet, they cannot quite fit back into the mortal world from which they were taken.

rob_donoghue says that the mood of the game is loss. I'm not sure he's completely correct about this. Then again, it is a defining note in a lot of the high fantasy I find I read. Michael Swanwick noted that loss is the defining note of Lord of the Rings.

But I think there's another theme here as well, the cycle of abuse. I remember having issues with Patricia McKillip's novel Winter Rose for beginning to look at this, and then stopping right where the issue came out in the open, where an abused son, now a father, strikes his own son. And, then, suddenly, the faerie queen arrives and the issue is ducked. To be fair, that was not really the issue McKillip was writing about, or at any rate, that wasn't the story she was telling.

It is the story Changeling: The Lost is examining. And, the things that seem grafted on -- courts, noble orders, all sorts of thing -- make sense in the context of cycles of abuse, that the changelings are more like the fae than should make anyone comfortable. But, I think I have two quibbles.

The first is that, while this is all acknowledged in passing, I think more space should have been given to examining what this means. As it is, it feels grafted on in a way that doesn't quite stick. My second quibble is that at least one graft, the four changeling courts of the seasons, are said to exist because this set up is different from what the fae are and gives changeling society power against the fae. This, too, deserves more consideration, and it would be nice if we also saw alternative court structures, examples of exactly how this protected changelings against the fae, and examples of how changeling groups without some such structure were vulnerable. Courts are founded on contracts with aspects of the world. Such contracts are the heart of both fae and changeling society. More attention on this would have been helpful.

Intercon H

Straightjackets Optional's larp idea has been accepted by the Intercon H concom. The theme of the convention (to which folks do not have to stick) is Heaven and Hell (much like G's theme was Gaslight). We'd been thinking of a larp set at a martial arts tournament, and we're going with this. It's just that all of the participants died, and they have some issues to resolve before going on to the afterlife, not least of which is determining who has the mightiest kung fu.

Masks

Intercon H is in March. Masks runs at the end of the month. I think zrealm has a lease on my and mnemex's soul until then.

Current Campaigns

jlighton is still running Feng Shui. As I'm not gming it and as he uses colored stones to track things like initiative, I can handle the crunchiness of the system.

mnemex is running Everway, which unintentionally became a bit Wizard of Oz-ish, what with one PC trying to find her home sphere, one trying to find her true face, and one trying to find his soul.

ebartley is still running her Hub game, which uses the Over the Edge system, but she's reached the point where she doesn't want to run Yet Another Adventure like the last several. This means that running a session depends on the right mix of folks for more unusual plot arcs being available.

I'm still running the Cthulhu High PBEM. Exactly what system it uses has been varying. I've shifted from OTE to mostly "we can figure out what happens". One of my players loves Dogs in the Vineyard and has used this system when a conflict either involves just his PC or involves characters from one or more other players who agree to us DitV to resolve the conflict. And, I think he now wants to use Breaking the Ice to see how a few relationships develop.

Campaigns to Be

ebartley wants to start up a sort of dimension hopping game where the PCs have escaped from the evil Atlantean empire. She's probably going to use Spirit of the Century, which means I need to read my copy. I'm playing the rebel princess. jlighton is playing a tall female gladiator. mnemex is playing a girl who's a waiflike psychic. I've made a joke about it being a magic girl campaign.

I'm pondering what to run for face to face. I think I'd like to do a brief Don't Rest Your Head game. I've played in two DRYH games at conventions, and the system is simple enough for me and my lack of crunch tolerance. Character generation is likewise simple. I don't have the exact colors of dice traditionally used, but I figure I have white for Discipline dice, green for Madness, blue for Exhaustion, and purple for Pain. And we have tons of colored stones for tokens of Despair / Hope. I've finally seen Dark City, and I've read Mister Monday, which was probably the last of the major source material I was not yet familiar with.

Whether I do that or not, I'm pondering long term. I don't think I want to run a simple Changeling: The Lost game, as that strikes me as too close to ebartley's Atlantis game. In both cases, the PCs escape from a powerful nasty society and have odd powers. I was pondering both Unhallowed Metropolis and Victoriana, and how they might fit together. I need to read the former and read the 2nd edition of the latter. And, it also occurred to me that a world blending those two backgrounds could also incorporate the premise of Changeling: The Lost. That may be too much mixing, but jlighton seemed to think it might have possibilities. I wonder if Mummy, 1st edition, would blend with all of that.

And I picked up a large number of CoC monographs, so I'd not mind getting some use out of those.

Comments

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

It's a different set up.

Okay, there are basic types, and kiths within each type. So, there's the ogre type, a basic brick type, and within that, several different kinds of ogres.

My problem with this isn't the basic concept, but the contradiction between setting and mechanics. That is, the fae don't follow rules or anything and can change what they are, and the changelings are shaped by their experiences in Arcadia. There's potential an infinite number of types. But, as is usual with White Wolf, for character generation, there's a very limited number of types, and no rules for inventing new types.

For houses, there are courts. The idea with the four seasonal courts is:

1. Fae make contracts with the universe, or, more accurately, with all aspects of the universe. Changelings are not entirely human any more, and they view the world this way.

2. A given fae might be, say, winter aspected. This fae would never allow another season into its domain. The idea of voluntarily letting the seasons turn isn't fae. But, changelings have made bargains with seasons, and do let the seasons change, and this gives them power against the fae, somehow.

The problems I have boil down to not quite seeing how the changelings get an advantage vs the fae this way, not getting examples of other court schemes that work, and not quite seeing how areas with no courts are vulnerable to the fae.

There are also noble orders. One can belong to only one such order. Interestingly, the sample setting, Miami, lists a group of NCPs, none of which belong to any such order.