#thydungeongal

[rampagingpoet]

This is the same strain of game design "balance" without understanding that lead to Paizo banning the Synthesist Summoner in organized play.

In 1E the Summomer is a control/buff - based caster that comes with a free pet. Plenty of spells that just solve encounters but a few less that solve non-combat encounters than the full casters have. Usually these pets are just better than a Fighter.

The Synthesist Summoner archetype trades somr of their nonsense for the ability to wear their pet as a fursuit instead. Nine times out of ten this is worse than having a pet due to action economy concerns. And also resource investment because your pet gets its own feats but if you wear it as a suit it just uses your feats. You're leaving character building resources on the table.

You'd think that, if Paizo recognized a balance problem, the Summoner would be banned wholesale. Nope! Only the Synthesist Summoner was banned. We can't have wizards that are better at melee than the Fighter.

Just their pets.

Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved, a sort of an "alternate Player's Handbook" for D&D 3e which featured all new races, classes, feats, a brand new magic system, and a unique setting, meant to interface effortlessly with the 3e DMG and MM for a unique d20 fantasy game, is very interesting. There's genuinely cool worldbuilding here and while Monte Cook isn't my favorite designer out there he has some fantastic ideas here. It's genuinely fun and it would be fun to explore this game!

However, he also shows his whole ass while discussing the philosophy of the game, especially with regards to magic: Arcana Unearthed somewhat reduces the effectiveness of spells. This is a noble goal, because D&D 3e kind of skews the balance in favor of spellcasters. But then as an example of how this manifests he goes "For an example, there's no magic missile here. It's simply a bit too good." Which is a baffling statement to anyone who's familiar with the game balance of D&D 3e. And this is coming from one of its lead designers.

I love D&D 3e and I think Arcana Unearthed/Evolved has some cool ideas, but statements like this make me want to become the Joker.

[cerinslair]

Heart Heist - Rules Assist the Story

This post by @thydungeongal made me want to talk about how I think my own game's rules help support the types of stories Heart Heist promises - stories of dramatic ensemble-crew heists fraught with intrigue, secret alliances, and inevitable betrayal in the name of romance. It's not just about stealing the target - it's about looking the hottest doing it in the eyes of your team's beloved monster patron!

For starters, the character's stats are also dating preferences, arranged in opposed pairs: Jock vs Nerd, Goth vs Prep, and Thicc vs Lithe. The aesthetics of these (purposefully tropey) dating preferences are directly tied to how the characters interact with the challenges of the heist, inherently connecting the heist elements to the dating competition elements.

Each thief begins the game knowing only one facet of the patron's dating preferences. The other thieves have the other pieces - information that each player wants, as it can be leveraged to win the game. This information can be bought, sold, traded, extorted, or guessed from the other thieves over the course of the game.

Unlike many other TTRPGs, Heart Heist is a game with a clear winner, placing players in direct competition with one another. A player wins the game (and the heart of their beloved patron) if their thief has more favor than any other surviving thief, but only after they have successfully pulled off the heist. If the heist is a bust, everyone loses! The primary way to gain favor is by appearing to match the monster's dating preferences as closely as possible.

Each stat has specific triggers that dictate when a thief's appearance in that stat increases. Generally, it is not enough to simply overcome a challenge - your thief has to succeed in a way that makes them look better than someone else!

But what if you find out your beloved monster prefers a stat you have a low score in? You're still incentivized to find opportunities to increase your appearance in that stat like any other thief, but it will be more difficult for your thief to upstage someone else in that stat. Not all hope is lost, however. For one, you only have to be the hottest thief alive. If someone is ahead of you, you may become keenly aware when they become expendable to your team's caper plans. 👀🔪

But there's another mechanic at play - once per heist, a thief can Fake it Till they Make It, allowing them to roll using their appearance in a stat instead of their score! Claiming small victories earlier in the heist can help you prove yourself when it really matters later on.

In addition to all the base mechanics, each type of monster the thieves might compete to impress has a different effect on the rules. The base patron included in the zine version is the dragon. Bringing weapons, armor, gadgets, and other items to help you on the heist costs favor. But you also need favor to win the game! The dragon doubles-down on only bringing what you need by rewarding bonus favor to the thief who brings the fewest items with them. In the full version, GMs will have several monsters to choose from to help fine-tune the group's desired experience.

All these mechanics incentivize and reward players for careful planning and making/breaking alliances. As they plot out their caper, thieves will look for opportunities to better their standings with their beloved monster while keeping a suspicious eye on their co-conspirators.

A well-designed heist will require a degree of teamwork. This, on top of everything else, discourages the players from just killing off the other players' characters straight away (that wouldn't be very fun). Not only will they need their help to accomplish the heist, but they have information that you want to use to win the game!

The combination of each thief starting with only partial knowledge of the patron's preferences, the mechanics of how appearances shift to earn them the monster's favor, and the fact that the thieves still have to successfully pull off the heist sets the perfect parameters for the sort of story Heart Heist aims to deliver.

[rampagingpoet]

I had a wonderful time at the first session of @thydungeongal's Rolemaster open table last Sunday!

My wood elf lay healer, Halamar, got his face savaged by weasels on the way to the dungeon and almost died. Wearing a helmet instead of a tiara might have prevented that, but his magic doesn't work when his head is obstructed.

10/10 will Rolemaster again.

[orimaswisdom]

[rampagingpoet]

Ah yes, Dungeons and Dragons. A game well-known for its consistent, complete, and immersive metaphysics of magic.

Where healing others with a touch works by summoning the power of Life from the Life Dimension, which is clearly Conjuration.

And harming people with a ouch works by summoning the power of Death from the Death Dimension, equal and opposite of the Life Dimension, itself also an Inner Plane. This is obviously Necromancy because it is spooky and has no connection to Conjuration at all.

Reading stories about people who thought they knew how magic worked in a world where magic does not work is not going to help with D&D - where magic works but each spell is its own individual rules object with no underlying mechanism.

No, you can't "do an Arcana check" to see if there's magic around. There's an actual way in the rules to see if magic is afoot, it's called the detect magic spell.

Also, ask me if you can do any kind of check again and I will bite your head off in real life.

[rathayibacter]

thank fucking god im not big enough to have to interact with dnd people

[imsobadatnicknames2]

This is something I and other tabletop bloggers like thydungeongal have said repeatedly in the past, but I think it bears repeating.

If you don't like WotC due to the recent scandals they've been involved in (such as the OGL thing and sending the Pinkertons to someone's house) and you are serious about disrupting the economic and cultural stranglehold they have over the entire tabletop hobby, pirating D&D products is infinitely less important than exploring, discussing and platforming games and creators outside of the D&D 5e ecosystem.

A person who pirates every single D&D product but continues to exclusively play, discuss, talk, and blog about Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition is not doing as much as someone who religiously pays for every D&D product but also gives some of their precious time and attention to games that aren't D&D, especially if they have any sort of platform or audience.

[jessica-problems]

Seeing @thydungeongal constantly wrestling with people interpreting her posts about D&D in ways that seem completely alien to me has convinced me that there are actually multiple completely distinct activities both being referred to as "playing D&D" Before we begin, I want to stress that I'm not saying one of these groups is Playing The Game Wrong or anything, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and conflict caused by people not being aware of the distinction. In fact, either one works just fine if everyone's on the same page. So far, I think I've identified at least two main groups. And nobody seems to realize the distinction between these groups even exists. The first group of people think of "Playing D&D" as, well, more or less like any other board game. Players read the whole rulebook all the way through, all the players follow the instructions, and the gameplay experience is determined by what the rules tell each player to do. This group thinks of the mechanics as, not exactly the *whole* game, but certainly the fundamental skeleton that everything else is built on top of. People in the second group think of "Playing D&D" as referring to, hanging out with their friends, collaboratively telling a story inspired by some of the elements in the rulebooks, maybe rolling some dice to see what happens when they can't decide. This group thinks of the mechanics of the game as, like... a spice to sprinkle on top of the story to mix things up. (if you belong to this second group, and think I'm explaining it poorly, please let me know, because I'm kind of piecing things together from other people saying things I don't understand and trying to reverse engineer how they seem to be approaching things.) I think this confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Wizards of the Coast markets D&D as if these are the same thing. They emphatically are not. the specific rules laid out of the D&D rulebooks actually direct players to tell a very specific kind of story. You can tell other stories if you ignore those rules (which still counts as "playing D&D" under the second definition, but doesn't under the first)And I think people in both groups are getting mad because they assume that everyone is also using their definition. For example, there's a common argument that I've seen play out many times that goes something like this:

A: "How do I mod D&D to do [insert theme here]?" B: "D&D is really not built for that, you should play [other TTRPG] that's designed for it instead" A: "But I don't want to learn a whole new game system!" B: "It will be easier to just learn a whole new system than mod D&D to do that." A: "whatever, I'll just mod D&D on my own" And I think where this argument comes from is the two groups described above completely talking past each other. No one understands what the other person is trying to say. From A's perspective, as a person in the second group, it sounds like A: "Anyone have some fun inspirations for telling stories about [insert theme here]?" B: "You can't sit around a table with your friends and tell a story about that theme! That's illegal." A: "But we want to tell a story about this theme!" B: "It's literally impossible to do that and you're a dumb idiot baby for even thinking about it." A: "whatever, jerk, I'll figure it out on my own."

--- Whereas, from B's perspective, the conversation sounds like A: "How do I change the rules of poker to be chess, and not be poker?" B: "uhhh, just play chess?" A: "But I already know how to player poker! I want to play poker, but also have it be chess!" B: "what the hell are you talking about? What does that even mean. They're completely different games." A: "I'm going to frankenstein these rules together into some kind of unplayably complex monster and you can't stop me!" ---

So both people end up coming away from the conversation thinking the other person is an idiot. And really, depending on how you concieve of what it means to "play D&D" what is being asked changes considerably. If you're only planning to look through the books for cool story inspiration, maybe borrow a cool little self contained sub-system here or there, then yeah, it's very possible to steal inspiration for your collaborative story from basically anywhere. Maybe some genres are kind of an awkward fit together, but you can make anything work with a little creativity.

If, however, you are thinking of the question in terms of frankensteining two entire board games together, then it becomes a massively difficult or even outright nonsensical idea. For example, for skill checks, the game Shadowrun has players roll a pool of several d6 at once, then count up how many rolled above a target value to see how well a character succeeded at a task. The whole game is full of specific rules about adding or removing dice from the pool, effects happening if you roll doubles, rerolling only some of the dice, and all sorts of other things that simply do not translate to rolling a single d20 for skill checks. On a basic level, the rules of the games work very differently. Trying to make them compatible would be much harder than just learning a new game from scratch. Now, neither of these approaches is exactly *wrong*, I guess, but personally, I find the rules of TTRPGs to be fascinating and worth taking the time to engage with all the weird little nuances and seeing what shakes out. Also, the first group, "TTRPG as fancy board game" is definitely the older and more widespread one. I kind of get the impression that the second group largely got into D&D through actual play podcasts, but I don't have any actual data to back that up. So, if you're in the second group, who thinks of D&D as basically a context for collaborative storytelling first and a game second, please let me know if I'm wildly misunderstanding how you approach D&D. Because I'm pretty sure it would save us a whole lot of stupid misunderstandings.

[rampagingpoet]

Dying in chargen also adds a "press your luck" element, which is an interesting tradeoff. For the most part older characters with more terms served will have more skills and therefore be more powerful than younger characters. Retirement benefits are also better the longer you last and the higher rank you achieve before retirement. However, every term brings a risk of death (and eventual aging penalties). If you're already in pretty good shape it can be worth dropping out to be a starfaring trader/adventurer "early".

it drives me insane that monsterhearts is treated as this pretentious avant garde thing by certain people who don't play games outside of 5e. it's an excellent game, it's very well designed. but it's ultimately a game with a straightforward unified mechanic, where you always know what your target number is, that uses one type of die, that emulates like... cw shows. it's extremely accessible and the way people who refuse to dip their toes past the D&D™️ talk about it you'd think it involved calculus like first edition traveler or some shit

[maximumzombiecreator]

Since @thydungeongal is going through it with the "combat isn't roleplaying" people, I feel like it's worth pointing out that if you're playing a game system with a lot of combat and your big roleplaying moments are happening almost exclusively out of combat, that's a big storytelling problem that's happening.

Here are some classic story beats that most combat-heavy TTRPGs are easily capable of creating with their game mechanics:

The characters are fighting an overwhelming tide of enemies. One of them calls for a retreat, and the characters flee, only to realize that one of them stayed behind, sacrificing themselves to secure their escape.

A character is holding a single use weapon --a pistol with one shot, a scroll, a magical arrow-- and the situation is getting desperate, but that weapon has a hated foe's name on it. Do they use it now to save their friends and give up their one shot?

A character is fleeing from an enemy that has proven overwhelming in the past. Suddenly, they stop, and turn to fight. They are beginning to believe.

Two characters who have been separated for ages are finally fighting together again. They know exactly what to expect from one another, their abilities synergize perfectly, they fit one another. The carnal metaphor is obvious and goes unmentioned, but not unnoticed.

A character is dropped in a fight by an overwhelming foe who doesn't kill them, but tells them to stay down. They know if they get up, they'll die. They get up anyway.

The characters who bicker constantly and seem to hate each other outside of a fight are constantly upping the ante on who can put themselves in more danger for the other in a fight. When death is on the line, true feelings show through.

Filled with rage, one character in a fight is going too far, is being too reckless, is risking too much collateral damage. An ally steps between them and the target. If their bloodlust is truly out of control, then they'll face their friend next.

If you are experiencing a disconnect between combat and roleplaying in your combat roleplaying game, please consider whether you're telling the stories the system is equipped to tell. Because even the less great combat TTRPGs can create stories that rule.

[cavegirlpoems]

I see we're talking about XP!

@thydungeongal and @imsobadatnicknames2 have interesting posts up, and now it's my turn to throw my thoughts out there. SO. I think of XP as the game itself offering you a little bribe. Do the things the game wantss you to be doing, and the game gives you an XP to say thank you. Get enough XP, and you're reward is greater a permanent bump in power, meaning greater ability to exert your will over the world and therefore greater agency. (Systems like Fate Points, Willpower, Inspiration etc work the same, except the increased agency is a temporary one-time thing, not permanent, so at times I'll lump them in).

So. Let's talk about a few different systems and how they handle this.

Let's start at the very begining (a very good place to begin). In the very early editions of D&D - back when Elf was a class - you got XP for treasure. Every gold coin you got out of a dungeon (or equivallent value of other treasure) was 1 XP. This worked well; the game wanted you to go into a dungeon and explore it for treasure, while trying not to die. If you succeeded, you got XP, which made you better at doing that so you could do it again in a more dangerous dungeon. And because treasure is XP, and treasure weighs you down, getting it out is a meaningful activity. Hell, many of these games measure weight and encumbrance on a scale of 'how many coins' to drive this home. It was a good loop. Early D&D has many faults (like the weird racism in the MM) but the xp system is something it absolutely nailed.

Next up, let's look at classic vampire the masquerade. At the end of each session, you get 1 xp just for being there, and then another if your character learned something, if you portrayed your character well, and if your character was 'heroic'. So, what's classic VtM rewarding? Ultimately, it rewards the player for being the kind of player the game wants. If you get into character, engage with the game world, and act like an interesting protagonist, you get rewarded for it. It's a bit fuzzy, and at the GM's discretion, but its very up-front with what it wants to incentivise. It was the 90s, they were still working out how to be a narrative-driven game, but you can see where they were going with it.

OK, now lets look at something a bit weirder; monsterhearts. The main source of XP here will be Moves. Rather than a bolted-on rewards mechanic, each game mechanic you engage with might grant you xp. You can use your strings on another PC to bribe them with XP when you want them to do something. Lots of abilities just give you an XP for doing a thing, such as a Ghost ability that gives you XP for spying on somebody, or aa Fae ability that gives other players XP when they promise you things. Here, XP is baked into the game, but its very up front about being a bribe. Act the way the game wants, or go along with other players' machinations, and you get rewarded for it. And, critically, XP is just one part of a wider game-economy of incentives and metacurrencies; it links in with strings and harm and +1forward in interesting and intricate ways that push the game forward. Monsterhearts is a well designed game, and you should study it.

Finally, let's look at how D&D 5e does it, as a What Not To Do! We have two different options. The first is XP for combat. When you use violence to defeat something, you get XP for it. Under this option, the only way to mechanically improve your character is by killing things. So, we can conclude that D&D is a game that wants you to engage in constant violence. The other option is 'milestone XP'. IE: you level up at the GM's whim, when they feel like it. What does this reward? Fucking nothing. Or, at best, you're rewarded for following the railroad and reaching pre-planned plot moments in a pre-scripted story. You either have no agency in the matter, or are rewarded for subsuming your agency to the will of the GM. (This pattern continues with inspiration rewards, which are given 'when the GM is entertained by you'. Fucking dire.) "Oh!" the 5e fandom says "But a good GM can write a list of achievements that will trigger milestone XP". And yes, they can, but that's not how the text of the game presents it. That's a house rule. That's the GM doing game design to add a new, better, mechanic to the game to fix its failings. Is it any wonder, then, that the 5e fandom puts so mucn weight on the GM's shoulders, and has such a weird semi-antagonistic relationship between GM and player? Is it any wonder that absolutely brutal railroading (and the resulting backlash of disruptive play) is so rife over there? Look at how the incentive structures are built? It's either killing forever or GM-as-god-king! Anyway, yeah. Consider what you reward with XP, because that will become what your game wants. And if you're hacking a game, one of the most efficient hacks is to change what you get XP for and suddenly the game will pivot to something very different.

[thydungeongal]

Wrath of the Righteous opinions! There was a fun little siege setpiece battle! It was fun and even somewhat tense!

[archpaladin]

As an Into the Cess & Citadel fan who has been trying to determine the best OSR system to use it with, this couldn't have come at a better time! :D

The Ostrichmonkey Hack

Hey, its out!

Behold, the Basic Rules iteration of my personal NSR/OSR ruleset.

This ruleset came to life when I needed something to run an Into the Cess & Citadel campaign, and decided to take a stab at cobbling something together. It ended up being a mix of different N/OSR conventions I liked, plus some other twists to fit my own personal preferences.

Fundamentally, its a "roll under your attribute" system, and should be broadly compatible with your favorite NSR/OSR/minimalist rulesets and adventures. Made with fantasy-adventure stuff in mind, but with some bending, could probably be made to work with other genres.

So let's get into what's inside.

This first release covers the Basic Rules;

Classless character creation

Rolling the dice

Items

Characters have no defined class, and are made up of a Knack and a Domain. Knacks cover any special abilities and skill you might have, and are activated by spending attribute points (and typically circumvent rolling the dice - spend the points and do the thing!). Knacks are specifically inspired by how Whitehack's Wise class casts "miracles". Domains are broad fields of knowledge and understanding.

Like I said, rolling the dice involves rolling under your attribute score, but there is also a way to apply full/mixed successes to a roll. These rules also cover things like combat. Enemies are immune to damage unless you can target a weakness, meaning that the bulk of combat is about trying to discover and exploit an enemy's weakness.

For the items section of the ruleset, I ended up adapting some of the mechanics I'm developing for Stampede Wasteland, specifically the abstracted resources and money. Gear is also one of the main ways you can change your stats by altering everything from HP to your attributes.

The long term plan for this ruleset is to continuously update and tinker with it, adding in extra subsystems, mechanics, and whatever else I feel is interesting at the time. There's no set schedule for this, so expect updates eventually and whenever.

Right now, you can pick up a text only version of the Basic Rules, which will always remain free (scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the demo files, including character sheet), and then the paid files will be getting the major updates.

First planned update is to finish up the Archetype rules to introduce a class system that can replace or be used alongside knacks. So look for that down the road.

Anyways, go check it out!

[theresattrpgforthat]

Mint Plays Games: Changelings, Trauma & Gaming

Over the course of October and November, I returned to one of my favourite ttrpgs of all time with @thydungeongal and my girlfriend: Changeling the Lost. About once or twice a year, I get the itch to run the 1st edition of this lovely, lore-heavy game, and every year I come away from it thinking about its potential. This is meant to be a quick break-down of my latest Changeling session, as well as a reflection on the parts of Changeling that really touch my heart.

The Game.

This game happened over three sessions, involving a character creation session, and two sessions of play. We had one character who was a Darkling Gravewright - folks who dealt with the dead in their time in Faerie (and can also see ghosts), and another who was a Fairest Flamesiren, whose entire deal is about burning bright, but also burning out quickly.

I decided to give these girls a murder mystery, with a mortal body found just outside a gate to a Goblin Market, and a missing changeling to track down. We’d talked about themes of grief and addiction prior to my planning stage, so I figured dealing with both a death and a place that offers your wildest dreams (for a price) might be a good place to start.

I don’t like planning out specific plot beats in my games, so instead I tried designing the Market like an adventure location, with various vendors to tempt the players with their wares, while dotting the landscape with NPCs in various states of distress. I figured the Changelings would pick something that resonated with them, and we could go from there. This process also generated a few different villainous characters who could be responsible for the murder, which I’m glad I did, because as usual, what the players decide to do always falls outside the bounds of what the GM plans for.

The story ended up being about saving a kidnapped changeling from a hungry Fae, and bluffing through a group of Privateers (read: mercenaries) and bringing the victim to safety. However, they didn't escape completely unscathed - coming face to face with a True Fae caused a cascade of terrible memories coming back to visit one of our characters right after she thought she'd made it to safety.

Our session was an introduction to the world and lore of Changeling, and I feel like I did a pretty good job on that front. On the other hand, I felt like it was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the things I think Changeling can be about.

The Potential

When it comes to the World of Darkness in general, I think Changeling: the Lost has a relatively sleek amount of lore regarding the various Courts, Seemings, and faerie characters. Each Changeling’s durance can be typified, but ultimately what they went through can be up to the player who designs them, and the Hedge is limitless in its weird and strange creatures, which gives the GM license to create all kinds of goblins and monsters to fit what they want their game to be about - and the players aren’t really expected to know what’s going on in there anyways. Most Freehold history exists in rumour, because talking too openly about it feels like you’re inviting the Fae to your front doorstep, and in the same way, the true nature of the Fae is left up to rumour and superstition, allowing your group to decide what they really are, or leave their nature forever a mystery.

That being said, the toys that you can play with are still more numerous than anything that you can fit into any one campaign, even if you’re playing that campaign for 4+ years. You can very easily play Changeling as a magical urban fantasy game (and I’ve done this fairly regularly with my group), but C:tL also has a lot of poignant themes that can delve into themes about trauma, addiction, and mental health.

Disclaimer: CtL is not always graceful in the way it represents mental health. There are antagonists presented in the books that come across as “madmen”, some pretty gross Merits you can take that can feel bad to play at most tables, and characters that have lost what makes them human, becoming threats to the players. However, I think that the Clarity system does have some interesting ideas in it that, if treated with care, can still provide some interesting depth to the game.

Clarity

Clarity is meant to be a measure of how well your character can tell truth from Fiction - a high enough Clarity score, and you can sniff out a Fae even if they’re trying to hide themselves; a low enough Clarity Score, and you have a hard time differentiating colour and smell, and might even start seeing an overlay of your Durance infiltrating your weekly grocery trip.

Your Changeling moves up in Clarity if they’re able to keep a stable life with elements that help you ground yourself and give you a sense of identity - and mechanically, once you spend Experience points. Your Changeling moves down in Clarity when they suffer “sins” - moments that disrupt that hard-won stability. This sins could be something we’d consider morally fraught, such as stealing, assaulting someone, or murder - but they could also be significant life changes, like losing your job, buying a house, losing a friend or getting married. You also always suffer a Clarity sin when you come in contact with a reminder of your durance - particularly a True Fae.

The higher your Clarity score is, the harder it is to keep yourself there. Smaller and smaller things can trigger a Breaking point, like going a day without human contact, starting a new college course, or using a Faerie token. Furthermore, the lower your Clarity score, the more difficult it is for you to tell truth from fiction - think of the scenes in Mockingjay where Peeta has to ask Katniss “real or not real” and try to trust her answers.

It doesn’t help that so many pieces of the Changeling experience after getting out of the Hedge seems designed to Fuck You Up - like the doppelgänger that’s been living your life ever since you left, or the fact that mortals can’t seem to notice the ways that Faerie has changed you: you can feel the horns on your head, but all they touch is a well-coiffed hairstyle. In many ways it feels like your whole experience with Faerie is invisible - and you’re fairly certain that even if you told a mortal the truth, they’d never believe you. If they did believe you, they would never treat you the same again.

I like this system because it doesn't really measure how "good" or "bad" your character is - instead it's a representation of how your lived experiences can often trigger symptoms even if others get lucky enough to survive those events with their mental health intact. I'm not a bit fan of derangements - but I think dropping in Clarity is an excellent time to ask characters about pieces of their time in Faerie that haunt them, and perhaps saddle them with Frailties instead - what personal rules do you have to follow in order to navigate the world when you have a hard time telling friend from foe?

Other Themes & Metaphors

The Fae themselves are also exquisite boogeymen, mercurial abusers without the familiar human emotions that we might feel more equipped to understand. They act on their whims and follow their appetites - and while real-life abusers often have very human reasons for being that way, we need not feel such compunctions from the Fae.

We might have to feel some compunctions about their right-hand Loyalists however, changelings who have agreed to work for their Fae Masters in exchange for some semblance of freedom. These are enablers: giving the Fae a step into the mortal realm and throwing mortals and other Lost under the bus, just so the True Fae won't turn their abuses back onto them.

Much of the ethos of the seasonal courts in the first edition has to do with different strategies for preventing a day where you find yourself back under your abuser’s control. Do you pretend that everything is fine, because they won’t recognize their victims if they’re happy? Make yourself physically stronger so you can tell yourself that you’ll win next time? Amass magic rituals in the hopes that learning just the right order of steps will keep you safe? Or do you make yourself as un-interesting as possible in the hopes that they give up on you for other prey? (Yes, I think the Winter Court could totally be all about grey-rocking).

On top of that, the Changelings that your characters embody (and interact with) are far from perfect. They have vices, fears and trauma responses that pull and push them into a dance of backstabbing, power-grabbing politics, full of seeking the upper hand and possibly even selling out their fellows in a gambit meant to keep the Fae focused on someone other than them. (A political game or LARP with these themes in mind feels so juicy to me.)

Next is the metaphors of power and/or addiction. The higher your Wyrd is, the more Glamour you can hold, and the more powerful your magic is. At the same time, the more Glamour you can hold, the more you need to hold it: what starts as a fun magical resource can grow into an addiction, if you lean into it hard enough. Sure, your Contracts become easier to activate and you can Incite Bedlam if you get powerful enough, but are you willing to chance withdrawal if you can’t get your daily fix of goblin fruit? How much are you willing to play with human emotions in order to get that sweet sweet taste of anger or grief?

Then there’s the seeming-specific traumas. Beasts struggle with wondering whether they can be human after giving in to animal instinct; Darklings fell into Faerie because they crossed an invisible or moral line and have had to make morally questionable decisions in order to survive. Elementals are used to being treated as part of the scenery, moulded to fit the whims of their captors; Fairest are constantly pressured to be the prettiest or the best with the threat of terrible terrible things should they fail. Ogres have undergone terrible physical hardships, including physical mistreatment and deprivation, while Wizened have been told time and time again that they are only worth something if they are useful. Stepping out of Faerie doesn’t magically “fix” any of these complexes, and as a result each Seeming has to wrestle with stereotypes even amongst their own: if you need someone murdered, go to a Darkling, If you need something made, go to a Wizened. If you need a hot piece of ass, a Fairest is sure to oblige - right?

Lastly, there's the Fetch: a copy of yourself that was made to replace you when the Fae took you away. This other-you is often so much better or so much worse than the person they used to be - they can act as a foil to your character, haunting you or making your life difficult, reminding you of who you used to be, or never letting others forget how badly you may have screwed up. In Changeling society, killing your Fetch is at the very least a regrettably convenient way of tying up loose ends, and at the most, a rite of passage. But it's also a surefire way to risk losing Clarity. Kind of a catch-22 situation, isn't it?

My Experience So Far

Past Changeling sessions I’ve run have included NPCs getting kidnapped by misguided friends, stumbling across characters who were at an all-time Clarity low, trying to save other Changelings from their Faerie kidnappers, cannibals, Fetches, and antagonists who are set out to betray one or more factions of the Freehold that is supposed to protect them. It’s always bits and pieces of what feels like a bigger picture.

On the one hand, I think that's to be expected. There's so much in this game, and I doubt that any campaign can really dig in to all of its systems and complexities. On the other hand, I’m not sure if I’ve been able to really dig into the themes of Changeling: the Lost in the way that I’d really love to be able to do.

The subject matter can be so close to real struggles, that I’m nervous about making those struggles too bare-faced at my local table. Gas-lighting, torture, hallucinations, drug abuse and cannibalism are so very easy to drop into a Changeling game, but are also so very easy to hit uncomfortable moments for someone who's unprepared.

At the same time, I think that playing a game like Changeling with a high-trust table that uses robust safety features has so many interesting stories that can give power to players, even if the setting is technically a horror one. I’ve been having conversations with @psychhound about a lot of the themes that folks try to explore in ttrpgs, especially in response to this post he commented on back in April. To summarize that conversation: TTRPGs are a great way for folks to tackle personal struggles and traumas from a safe place, in ways that can give them a cathartic experience or that can give them a fresh sense of identity. Changeling has been a significant part of those discussions.

I came to Changeling: the Lost as a fairly new GM the first time I picked it up, and the more I learn about Safety Tools and a culture of care, the closer I feel to getting to that game that lives in my head that lured me into TTRPGS in the first place. Every time I come back to It, I think I'm closer to pulling together a Changeling game that sinks its teeth into the themes I’m interested in and hit some of the grime beneath all that glitter. So every time I come back to it, I’m going to create funky little goblins and design weird Fae bars and take the characters’ memories and ask them why they hurt - figuring out how I can twist the knife just enough to peel back the glamour, without opening any wounds that we’re trying to keep closed.

[orimaswisdom]

Prisencolinensinainciusol is a certified hood classic

[mythratica]

discussing practical feminism with @thydungeongal