My campaign planning has progressed since last time. After choosing to play Changeling: the Lost we have narrowed down the field to a few themes, sketched out a setting and penciled in some character ideas.Theme Prospecti
First the themes. This is somewhat similar to how I handled things for my Hunter: the Vigil game: Corrupted Transmission, in that we voted on various flavors and combined the results. So it was less of an either/or choice and more of how much of each to add. Here are the prospecti for this phase:Dimension of Dream
You are explorers of dream space, traveling the Skien, to fantastical locations. Perhaps you are researchers looking to mend minds or simple lucid dreamers in search of diversions. But as you explore you risk getting Lost, and the lines between Fantasy and Delusion become blurred. Elements from your dreams appear in the real world but only you see them. Are you awake or dreaming? Worse in your dream travels you begin to see dark threats emerging. Why are fairy tale elements entering people's dreams?This is a variant on the theme Fantasy vs. Delusion with a hefty dose of dreams.
Through the Looking Glass
You and your friends have found a doorway into another world, a tangled labyrinth of brick, stone, and thorn. Within this alien realm though, you encounter people and things that remind you of your normal life. A prison stands where your workplace is. The schoolyard where a bully who harasses you at recess might be reflected as a grassy meadow with a lurking ogre. The evil queen of this realm resembles the manager who makes your life miserable. But when you make changes in the Hedge things change in the “real” world. Killing the ogre might make the bully back off...or disappear. Are you going crazy or is the Hedge real? Or to put another way when you harm something in the Hedge is that a real person you hurt?This is another variant on Fantasy vs. Delusion used more externally.
The Price
We all need things. A cure, an escape, a way to get ahead. There's a market that opens after midnight under the old bridge. You can get anything there as long as you pay the price. The real price however isn't the tails of three rats that died of fright or the memory of a pleasant evening with your parents. It is allowing magic into your life. Once you pay that price there is no way out. Magic will continue to intrude, require larger and larger prices to fix. And that price will be your humanity.At first it might be the ability to look at someone and know what they fear. Or it might be that after evening in the haunted house (to get those rat tails) hunted by something in the walls, you find yourself better at hiding. And those in the know can see your skin has become strangely dark (to help you hide) and your ear large and pointed (to listen for danger). Eventually you might lose who you are. And maybe when you return home that last time, there is someone waiting for you. With your face.
This is the basic Magic Changes You theme.
The Taint of Magic
It started with the faerie ring. Just a ring of mushrooms. But by stepping into it you entered a strange new world of goblins and magic. The problem is that its spreading. At first the plant life around the ring became gnarled, twisted and sporting hidden thorns. Then insects began to grow into deformed fey things. Stray dogs are learning to walk on their hind legs and mingle with growing numbers of Hobs. Only you can see the vines growing around certain doors. People are changing too, hollowed out by magic into vessels for stories. The vines are growing into their dreams.This is Magic Changes You made into a more external threat.
The Results and Making Sense of Them
The votes were somewhat surprising (to me):- Dimension of Dream: 1, 3, 3, 4
- Through the Looking Glass: 3, 4, 4, 3
- The Price: 5, 5, 4, 2
- The Taint of Magic: -2, -1, 2, 1
It turned out none of my players were very hot for The Taint of Magic, which is a game idea I first came up with well over a decade ago. Also while most of them loved the Price, one of them was much more into the Fantasy vs. Delusion theme. What I ended up doing was having a separate session (using Google Hangouts) for us to discuss what the game would be about.
The Hangout itself worked wonderfully and made us all wonder why we kept using Skype for so long. As for the game we toss around a number of ideas.
One we decided to use was starting with children characters and jumping forward in time for when they returned home, like in Stephen King's IT. We also decided to use The Price and Through the Looking Glass as our main themes, balancing our group's interests.
As for setting I suggested several locations: New York City, London, and Detroit. New York City was shot down because half the group was very familiar with it, perhaps too familiar. I like a little looseness with geography. In the end we favored Detroit where its urban decay and ruin might add an element of the surreal to the mundane world of the game. We also decided to set it in the mid to late 90s to allow the characters to grow up without the timeline entering the future.
As for the characters we began to float some ideas, such as a hacker kid, a goth, an older sibling, and a sister. We decided they all living in the same apartment building, probably a large tenement. This would focus the setting somewhat and give the group a good reason to know each other. We also began to come up with ideas for how they would learn of the Hedge: rumors of ghosts in the basement of the building.
House Rules
Finally we decided firmly on some of the house rules. Since they were not going to be Changelings to start off and I wasn't doing the typical kidnapping scenario of the default setting, we needed to outline how they would gain their powers and Wyrd score, as well as Seemings and Kiths. In the end we decided to go with making the elements of the Changeling Template free and having them appear as made sense in the story. We also decided to use the God-Machine update to the core rules. So I got hard to work at mastering them.A few specific rules we decided on were that the sum of Clarity (the Changeling sanity trait) and Wyrd would be capped at 10. Thus the more powerful one became the crazier they would become. Also the penalties for low Clarity would be Social penalties with ordinary mortals as the character’s insanity bleeds through. At Clarity 6-5 they are a little off and tend to react in odd ways, giving a -1 penalty to Social rolls. At Clarity 4-3 they often see or react to things that aren't there, resulting in a -2 penalty. At Clarity 2 they often mistake the people around them for someone else, creating a hefty -5 penalty, At Clarity 1 where they think are and with whom is almost divorced from reality, making all Social rolls a chance die.
The last major house rule has to deal with the Courts, the default social institutions of Changeling the Lost. We decided they didn't make sense in the setting and abolished them. The powers or Contracts associated with them became non-affinity Contracts available to all Changelings without restriction. The rolls for the Contracts then are modified to Attribute + Wyrd. However we did decide there would be Guilds which have similar properties. The Guilds gain two affinity Contracts and a Guild Status merit. The merit grants a bonus at 1, 3, and 5 dots. I hope to detail them in a future blog.
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