Pitch: You Can’t Go Home Again

Originally published October 6, 2014

Another post in my continuing series of campaign ideas. This week we are back to the World of Darkness for my (thus far) final Changeling: the Lost concept. As always, let me know if anything sounds like something you would like to hear more about.

You Can’t Go Home Again

Perhaps you took the wrong moonlit path through the woods or accepted an invitation to a dazzling ball from the wrong mysterious gentleman. Maybe you discovered that your son's closet contained a real monster or that house at the end of the lane was more than haunted. Or maybe just maybe you found a market where you could buy your heart's desire.

That was the beginning of your nightmare. You were snatched from your mundane life, carried off into the deepest parts of the Hedge, and changed into something more and less than human. Maybe you were chained to an entrance-way and fed scraps until you became the beast or ogre your captor desired. Perhaps you spent what seemed like decades crawling through an endless haunted house until you became one with the shadows. Or maybe that deal did bring you beauty and power at the price of your soul.

Now you've returned, freshly escaped from the Hedge. There might be hounds at your heels but you are free to reclaim the life taken from you...

But you find things are not that easy. Someone took your place while you were away and they have done a better job than you might have. Your experiences in the Hedge have changed you and transitioning back to your old life won't be as easy as you hoped. It's not just that home has changed but that you have not changed with it.

System: Changeling: the Lost using the God-Machine Chronicle rules update (or perhaps Changeling: the Lost 2nd Edition once it is available).

Character Creation: The player characters should all be recently taken Changelings, with none of them having been missing for more than a decade. In theory each character should be able to step back into their old life if not for something in the way: a fetch, a relationship with a loved one that has changed, or simply the awkward questions of where you have been for 7 years and a day. But there are no physical or age related obstacles. their life is not gone, just occupied.

Setting: The fictional town of Rosebriar, nestled in upstate New York, west of Albany and east of Buffalo. On the eastern most edge of the Rust belt, it survives off tourism and the old chemical plant on the edge of town. The characters should be natives.

The local Hedge is oddly empty with only a smattering of Hobs and Changelings populating it. Each of them wants something they can't have. The mad wizened Hedge seeks a happy ending he can barely recall. The creature known as Alice seeks her lost mortality while the curiously informed mortal Dr. Lada seeks eternal youth. None of them provide any real help to the characters as each is too absorbed in their own desires.

The mortal realm is little comfort as well with the characters' mundane lives so close but just out of reach.

Themes:

• Isolation: between the lack of a proper Freehold and lack of mundane connections, the characters have only themselves to rely on. Do they retreat from the mortal world for the madness of the Fae? Or live on the fringes of a place they can never truly be a part of? Overcoming isolation is the primary struggle of the game.
• What is real?: Fetches look just like the character and believe that they are the real version. Until you open them up to reveal the sticks and shards of mirror that make them up, there is no way to tell if they are lying. The characters can see that they themselves are not human however. Maybe they are the impostors? Evidence begins to pile up that their memories of the Hedge are incorrect and that they really are not who they say they are. Where is it coming from? Is it true?

Enemies and Allies: the familiar Courts are absent and strange Guilds dominate the society of the fae.

• The Red Company: guardians of the markets, explorers, and thrill seekers. Each carries a doom and are torn between two worlds.
• The Bridgeburners: a radical group which seeks to sever the connection between the Hedge and the mortal world. Half think they are saving humanity, the other half seek an end to their own illusory lives. They are systematically destroy gateways to the Hedge and those who can create more, such as the player characters.
• Durance Anonymous: little more than a large motley, these damaged creatures believe they are suffering a mass delusion. They provide support to new arrivals, trying to bring them around to the 'truth'. There is no Hedge and we are not who we think we are.
• Fetches: of themselves and others. How much do they know about what they truly are? And who has been making them?
• Monster hunters: not all mortals are clueless and many are willing to fight to protect humanity from those creatures seeking to steal the lives of others.

Closing Thoughts

This would be a short poignant game with little of the grandness of scale of my earlier Chronicles. Instead I want to focus on the personal stories the characters from their arrival in world with no place for them and ending once everyone has discovered a new life or been broken on the jagged edge of reality.