#Changeling:the lost

[kurakurakura99]

Thinking about Changeling:The Lost and how the concept of the Fetch as allegory is kinda genius to a trans/nonbinary reading. The fetch is a facsimile left in the place of victims, spirited away and changed by the true Fae. It is impossible for most people to ever tell the difference:one could go their entire lives without suspecting that your family member has been replaced, but the fetch is different:it is static, resistant to change. the fetch of a child will grow up like you'd expect it to, and grow old as its expected to, as well, and nothing more:it follows the path that blends it in. Does things that those around them would look at go, "oh, they would do that. That is so like them." Consider the plight of a trans person snatched away before they came out, or their egg cracked. It stands to reason that their fetch would NEVER transition:Their family expects their boy to grow into a young man. A deviation from that pattern draws the wrong kind of attention. And when that person comes back, changed by their time in Arcadia, they might behold the Fetch living in their shoes: The imagery of Her family enjoying a holiday dinner with Him springs to my mind. And whats worse is that the family probably likes the fetch better. fathers and mothers pass the gravy to their perfect son when in another life, without the intervention of the kindly ones, they would have ran their true child from the family home when they came out. The same true child that watches from a window now as they share their hearth with an invader, a body snatcher of sorts. Thats gotta sting. I know how much it stings because my family forced me back into the closet multiple times:They simply ignored my confession that I didn't fit in the neat category of "boy" that had been lovingly prepared for me. They told me I wasn't transgender and that was that to them, or they just outright forgot after a while. I have been both the fetch and the changeling at the same time in this scenario. The question is, what does the changeling do now? does she simply vanish in the night like I did, leaving the past life to be content with its fake memory of her, or does she burst through the window and take that fake memory, cave in the loathsome imposters skull until he collapses into twig and twine and leaves, ripping that happiness and baring cruel, unbelievable reality like tusks at everyone witnessing the event? Does she meet her false self in secret, and try to work with it, understand it? That reminds me of half-measures I've seen taken by friends. Call me by my deadname around my dad. Please. I think the most horrifying outcome from a trans perspective is that of replacing the fetch:doing away with it in secret and concealing the truth about yourself to slip into your old life. But that life no longer belongs to you: His flat chest and blunt teeth are antithetical to who you really are, now. Your claws and yellowed eyes and femininity are going to scratch under that false skin forever, until you take it off. Maybe you'll do it in secret, letting your horns breath in nightclubs and venues and forest paths far from the eyes of the people who knew the false you (in both senses of the term) or maybe you'll stuff your true nature away as far and deep as you can, even if it destroys you. Change is deeply, deeply terrifying after all.

[dymdrimluga]

A fae and her servants

[heron0000]

tarot illust for @ephemeraldenizen featuring a timelapse vid

[samueldays]

I was reading Holden's Exalted vs World of Darkness crossover splatbook today. Most of it looks pretty cool. The Exalts are nerfed a little bit to become merely major powers rather than world-ruler-by-default, the interaction rules have some general guidelines and some specific conversions, the secret history doesn't have any gaping holes that leapt out at me.

The chapter for Changeling:the Dreaming opened with a sour note though:

The gates of Arcadia are closed, the roads leading to it lost. The children of dream and nightmare are trapped in a cold, brutal world that has replaced beauty and hope with 24-hour news and Donald Trump. The last of the fae do not merely remember the Age of Legends, they are its sole survivors, nurturing the final embers of the Dreaming’s fire for as long as they can. In the end, they know, it will all be for naught. In the end Winter comes, the last fires go out, and the knights and bards, the princes and cobblers, the big bad wolves and wicked witches all close their eyes and dream no more. But for now there are still yet a few more days of Autumn, and perhaps one more grand dance on the card.

Donald Trump was perhaps the man most a 'child of dream and nightmare' in the last twenty years!

Remember the giant parade float of God-Emperor Trump?

And its counterpart, the Overgrown Manchild Trump balloon?

And the thousand fantastic stories circulating around him like the Russian Pee Tape that probably never existed? And the tweets, man, the tweets. This was a man that people projected their hopes and fears and dreams on, firing the imagination of supporter and opposition alike for years, and so little of it was real.

[smudges-from-murke]

NPC portrait of a Runnerswift from Changeling:The Lost. Sítheach aka:Evan

[strictlyquadrilateral]

what are seasonal etc. courts?

so in traditional fae stories, you get stuff like the fae having seelie and unseelie courts. i forget what the distinction is; i feel like every interpretation is slightly different. in modern fae stuff, for some reason everyone seems to have decided that they would rather have winter/fall/spring/summer. most notable the ttrpg changeling:the lost has seasonal courts, with a half-hearted suggestion of “maybe your game might have other courts”.

but that’s boring. imo it would literally be more interesting if they divided themselves up into paperback vs hardcover (vs the new challenger, ebooks!)

[knitmeapony]

novafigura said: What was the most significant *personal* tragedy a character of yours experienced in tabletop or larp? Did it take you by surprise OOC?

Oh gosh let’s see.  Two stories.

Ace, of the Changeling:the Lost game.  She was the Queen of her court, which meant she had a year and change before she was going to have to sacrifice herself and go back for a second durance to protect the court.  A year and change - or so she thought.

Suddenly, we learn our King is dead.  There’s nothing we can do.  He’s just gone.

Which means suddenly Ace goes from ‘it’s two years, really, I can prepare for this, I’ll have time to adjust’ to ‘I have a few seasons and then my life is over’.

She put on a brave face for the Court.  She said ‘I’ll handle this, just give me some time’.  She squared her shoulders, she laughed, she said everything is fine.  She got shouty when some of them wanted to question her leadership, but in the end she got them all quiet.

And then she walked out into the garden, and stood next to the person who she thought was an ally -- not a friend, but someone she loved a little bit and she could trust to talk about the hard stuff -- and she crumbled.  Absolutely turned on a dime and went from sheer bravado to being what she was -- a seventeen year old girl who’d already been tortured once who was staring another round of torture in the face.  She sobbed, and she told him she couldn’t do it, and she asked for his help in finding a way out of it, or preparing for it, or resolving it, or anything.  God.  Anything.  Please.  Just help.

She was a kid full of bluster and bravado and then she was a little girl broken and lost, and the change happened in under a minute.

And of course the real tragedy is the man she decided to go to turned out to be @euripidesredux‘s Helper. Helper was... not well named, let’s say, and betrayed her over and over.  I once said “Ace just wanted to help Helper fill up the hole in his heart, but she didn’t realize it was a black hole, endlessly consuming until she had nothing left to give’.

But that first loss, of her whole life and future, was so devastating.  That wasn’t the first time I felt LARP bleed, but I definitely cried for, oh, most of the next day at the very least.

The second story is about a Changeling character of mine from WAY back in the day.  I was playing a Seelie Sidhe of House Liam, a brittle woman with no compunction about treating the Help like Help and the dreamers like dreamers and things go in their places, thank you.  I genuinely can not remember her first name; she was always, always Baroness Crabtree.  She had an extensive retinue and like most Liam at least half of it were ordinary mortals who were enough in the know to be useful to her.  She had set herself up in this way that really, nothing ever had to change, ever, and when it did it was such a hassle.

I had a couple of named NPCs that most people knew.  There was Arnold, my kinain driver, a distinguished and kind gentleman who was noble in some way back in England but was happy to have settled into a kind of provincial life.  There was Mary May, my Girl Friday and utter busybody, who somehow knew everyone.  And there was Terra, my steady-as-a-rock Troll bodyguard, sworn to protect me and all in my household.

Dark and terrible things were, of course, afoot.  Banality stalked the city.  Many complicated things happened, but the upshot was this: while driving a couple of PCs at breakneck speeds to come and save me from my own unmaking, Arnold’s car was attacked, they crashed, and Arnold died, his corpse dragged off into the Dreaming by some horrific nightmare or another.  Terra ran on foot from the scene to come and save me, and was successful in doing so.

When Terra was hustling me back to safety, the other PCs told me what had happened. Baroness Crabtree stopped with a simple ‘oh’, refusing to go any further.  She told Terra that she must go retrieve Arnold’s body, and bring him to a final resting place with dignity.

There was, of course, an argument.  The PCs and Terra wanted to get the Baroness to safety, and worry about a corpse later.  The Baroness was insistent.  She would not say more, just repeating ‘you must retrieve Arnold’s body’ over and over, until finally she actually raised her voice to shout ‘you must retrieve my brother’s body, Terra.’  And then, into the silence of that revelation: ‘please’.

The notion that Arnold was her brother and that they were terribly close and she loved him had really not even occurred to most folks as possible.  Arnold was the only person the Baroness ever opened up to, on long drives with the partition down.  He was all of her support, and he’d died while trying to save her.

That one hit me less hard, but it hit the Baroness like a brick to the head.  It was very, very hard playing her for a few games. But lord, it was worth it.

[dylantidprssnt]

Changeling~

@elinorthemeek runs Changeling:the Lost. My character is dressed like this for a party.

She spars with someone before some fun.

[hellpugart]

Inside joke from the Changeling: The Lost LARP game I am in. Basically, a guy played a Beast True Friend that was a Corgi who betrayed us all and was a Knight of St. George. Hopefully I catch that dog this Friday. Also, HI NEW PEOPLE!

[novasiri]

Revamping my Fairest/Minstrel Changeling, Jericho Hall (like I did with Kohana). Both after he escapes his Keeper, and after he becomes the Monarch for the Dawn Court in his story.

I’ll be also revamping his keeper, Tybalt. The Butterfly Knight and Lord of the Cobalt Palace.. eventually.

[kinkowo-blog]

EIRE My character for Changeling:The Lost RPG. I have no-one to play with but I enjoy making characters. As you can see, it's more of a sketchdump, with a character Seeming in the middle, her form as the mortals see her in upper left corner, an attack of panick in the upper right one, and scenes of her backstory in both left and right bottom corner. She's the young Artist Wizened. I'm lately too tired to read in English, so I didn't really read or understood most of the handbook, so her story might make little to no sense. Much more so, since I'm wriring it after the sleepless night. Once upon a time, there was a girl - a bit tiny for her age. She enjoyed wandering alone, thinking and sketching and talking to herself, for she wasn't overly keen of other people company. One evening, during one of her long, lonely walks she found herself in a place she particulary liked, a lovely bit of fields, full of poppy flowers, by the ruined gate, shadowed by an old and crooked willow. Usually, the place filled her with calm, but this time she felt uneasiness instead. She heard a sound resembling a child weeping, and when she turned, she saw a magnificent deer-like creature, with it's dainty antlers caught on the moon. Feeling bad for the beast, the girl climbed on its back, and further up, untangling and pushing away the silver light until the deer was finally free. The creature wheezed, snorted, and shaked poor human from its back. "For touching me in that horrible, undignified way you can not go unpunished" the deer said, and took the girl away to its domain. She was then told to paint all of walls of her new chamber full of creatures alike to her captor, and taking them to feed on the painted grasslands of the fairy land. When the sun went down she was to bring them back home and lull them back to their painted sleep, with not even a strand of their mane missing. If she could manage the task, she could be set free and ask one heart's wish, otherwise she was to be punished. So the girl painted creatures wholeheartedly all morning, then taken care of them all day, but when the sun was going down, she was so tired she had to sit down to rest a bit, and fallen deeply asleep. When she awoke frightened she gathered her fairy herd, and ran home as fast as she could, but alas! The smallest deer-beast was missing. And so the girl was punished. Like this, a year passed, and girl became more and more a being of paint and light, like the would-be deers she guarded all day. The last evening of the year she weeped bitterly, like she never weeped before, clutching her paintbrush in her red-stained hands, remembering the place where she used to feel happy and safe but one year ago. Just when her tears has fallen upon her battered tool, it spoke to her in these words: "Shush, girl, do not cry" it consoled her. "Tomorrow, when evening comes , lie down to sleep by the willow tree, and rest peacefully, and I will help you out. You have to swear, though, than when the time comes, your wish will be to take me with you." The girl agreed, and followed the brush advice. And upon waking she found the small deer-creature trapped in tree branches, wailing pitifully. The girl thanked both the brush and the tree and run to her chamber with a little one in her arms. She put it to sleep next to others on the wall, and counted. One, two, twenty, one hundred, all creatures were on their places, sleeping peacefully! "Well, you managed your task finally, mortal. You can ask me for one thing, then, and you will be set free" said her master. "Do you wish for gold, then? For life eternal? For greatest beauty?" But the girl wanted nothing but the old, battered paintbrush who kept her company for year and a day. The creature offered her jewelled and enchanted ones, but she stubbornly held onto the old one. Finally the beast had to give up and she found herself in the same field full of poppy flowers she was at the start. She would think it all a bad dream, but for the brush she stil clutched tightly to her breast. She dropped it, and as soon as it touched ground, it turned into a thin, obviously mistreated young man. "Thank you" the young man said. "I was enchanted, just as you were, but you managed to save us both, and in due time, too. I do not think I would have awakened before fully losing myself if not for your tears." And then they lived traumatised ever after. 

[pissyeti]

Donovan Demetrius Donahue, my character for an upcoming Changeling game. he's a Bloodbrute, and a trumpet player/singer in jazz clubs. this is him unglamored obviously.

[flannelfrog]