The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Ever since the kithbooks started coming out for Changeling: the Dreaming, I've been worried that they would end up like the actively insulting as some of the splatbooks of Vampire: the Masquerade or Werewolf: the Apocalypse or as empty as some of those for Mage: the Ascension. For the most part, I was thankfully disappointed. I very much enjoyed Kithbook: Sluagh and Kithbook: Trolls and while Kithboo: Nockers and Kithbook: Satyrs were both somewhat tame and disappointing, they were still very useful. Kithbook: Pooka, however, is a nice return to form and, while no where near perfect, is still very nicely done.

Lion and the Heart of Wonder

The opening parable is an excellent one. I loved reading every minute of it and I was never really disappointed by it, but I am still wondering why it prefaces the book about the pooka. It doesn't deal at all with their trickster nature nor much with their animal heritage (what is dealt with comes from left field) and it is apparently set in that mythic time before the pooka began to lie (Lion's last words are the first lie ever told by a pooka). So I wonder why it is here. The only reason I can think of is that it tries to show another side of the pooka, portraying them not as tricksters and pranksters but as the purest of the kithain, the ones most tied to their pure instincts, not bound up in pride or honor or material greed. A good story none the less, and I suppose since it makes me think so much, it may be fitting.

Chapter One: Evolution

Kithbook: Pooka, after the initial parable of Lion, starts off on a slow foot. The history chapter really isn't that good, especially compared to the rest of the book, and it gave me a poor first impression. It is also surprisingly short, which allows readers to quickly get to the meat of the book.

Either way, it is not that important, because pooka never were changelings to remain in the past anyway, so history is of less import. Some amusing things to note in the chapter, however, is the fact that apparently the pooka claim that the Egyptian pantheon was composed of various pooka hoping to educate humanity. While I don't think that they fit perfectly, I valued this idea simply because it contradicts volumes and volumes of lore and "facts" from Vampire: the Masquerade books and World of Darkness: Mummy Second Edition. This is supposed to be the World of Darkness after all, why should history be any more definite there than in the real world?

Another surprise was the fact that so many pooka apparently jumped ship for the Dreaming during the Sundering and Shattering, digging Dream-burrows in the Near Dreaming to hide in. This really helps to bring home the pooka's animal nature, as well as providing some reasonable explanation as to why there are so many pooka still alive today. Apparently when the Resurgence hit the Dreaming, the Dream-burrows were flooded with Glamour, sending many pooka into Bedlam, sometimes a violent Bedlam. From the deadly conflicts that resulted, many of the fae were reborn into physical bodies, right in the middle of the Accordance War on Earth. My only question is why they were reborn if they fled before the Changeling Way became so commonplace? You don't get reborn into a body without it. Did they undergo they Way, and then flee? Why?

The only annoying feature of this chapter was the almost Garou-like repetition of the crimes humanity has committed against nature. This got me worried that the kithbook would turn to pooka into miniture fuzzy Garou instead of developing them as the unpredictable tricksters (both good and bad) they are. While the trickster aspect is largely missing from the history, is it not entirely gone from the rest of the book, but it gets much less focus than it should have.

Chapter Two: Diversity

This short chapter deals entirely with how to handle a pooka's animal form. There are many more exotic breeds of pooka beyond cute house pets and field animals. Now you can play dangerous animals, like tigers and wolverines or strange creatures (at least for pooka) like butterflies or goldfish. There is a reasonable discussion of how to handle attributes and abilities of the animal form (although the character sheet provides no place for such information) as well as a definitive list of just how rare different animal forms are among the kith. Some of the rarities made little sense, but worked well enough overall, although they amazing spread and diversity implies more pooka than one (or at least me) would initially think of.

Chapter Three: Love, Lies, and Losses

This chapter deals with pooka social interaction, or more specifically, how pooka love and how they lie. Much, or at least more than I think necessary, of the chapter deals with pooka romance. This romantic and love-focused trend in Changeling: the Dreaming books is not something I entirely understand, but then I have never played in a romance-focused game. I would have preferred more discussion on general psychology than pages on how the pooka go about seducing mates or what kind of bondage they like to indulge in.

That said, it is little wonder that I liked the psychology sections much better. They focused on reasons why the pooka lie, and paint the kith more as wounded animals than playful tricksters. Apparently, pooka lie more out of a reflex to direct attention away from themselves and their pain than anything else. There is a nice look at the various ways the pooka avoid their pain, and it is a very novel motivation for the kith, but I am not entirely sure I like using such a broad brush for them. Granted, it makes them deeper than fuzzy-bunny happy-bouncy annoyances, but it also serves to distance them somewhat from the trickster archetype I keep mentioning, and archetypes are something I think are very important in Changeling: the Dreaming.

In addition to the inner pain all pooka feel, the chapter also looks at their mentalities, commenting on how pooka have an almost instinctual need to belong to a pack in one manner or another. Those few who are truly alone are likely unhinged and dangerous. The section also points out just how paradoxical the pooka are. Often seeming to be the most active of kithain, they are more often the most passive, watching more than they act, almost as much as a sluagh. The book also explains much of the motivation behind pooka pranks, at least toward those in positions of authority, they are tests of worthiness. Pooka place vast amounts of expectations and responsibilities upon their leaders, and they expect them to live up to it. Those who don't are challenged mercilessly, and since pooka most often lack direct power, they must be challenged with great cunning.

There is also a rather nice section on many of the different methods that pooka use when they lie, and just what their frailty of "cannot tell the whole truth" means. There are discussion of various methods as well as useful examples and a warning against defaulting to simply saying the opposite of what you mean. I rather enjoyed reading about how and why pooka lie, even though I wonder at placing such a rigid birthright across an entire kith in a game based around possibility and imagination.

Chapter Four: It Wasn't Me

This chapter details the mainstays of changeling society, such as seemings, mentors, the Courts, factions and the other kiths. I really did enjoy the parts on seemings, even if they were a little broad and generalized, and the sidebar on mentors was nice and practical.

The examination of the Courts was nicely written, overall, and the Unseelie section showed the darker pooka to be more animalistic than actively "evil," although it was kind of short. The secret societies were all rather bland, for the most part, but at least they were not all pranksters, like the Uncrowned (unseelie pooka looking for positions of power) and the Salvage Crew (those pooka out to save the endangered animals of the world). The Political Animals were a nice faction devoted to trying to show the other fae how stupid and artificial their politics are by taking the rules to foolish extremes and the Renunciation Faction showed just how fearful the pooka are of the possibility of war with King David gone.

The best part of the chapter, however, was the "Who Cares?" section detailing the other kiths and supernaturals of the World of Darkness. There was no "everyone hates us" or "everyone loves us" feeling, each kith liked or hated or didn't care either way about the pooka for good reasons. Not always adequate reasons (at least objectively), but the author had a nice handle on psychology and gave good reason for camaraderie or distance between different kiths. Both blunt and honest while remaining interesting and intelligent, this is one of the best parts of the book, and one of the best "relations with others" section of any splatbook. My only problem was that many of the sections seemed to lean towards an attitude of "Seelie nice, Unseelie mean" that got really annoying. Changeling: the Dreaming already has enough of that to climb its way through without adding more to it. It wasn't entirely overt, and the actual section on the Unseelie pooka was actually pretty good, but here is seemed too much like older, worse books.

The section on the Prodigals was even better, in some ways. There were no mention of clans or tribes or traditions, just bits about "some vampires" and a few mages suffering "backlash from Banality." I really liked reading a section of a book about other supernaturals where the splat did not make any claim to knowledge that they shouldn't logically have. The author did a damned nice job indeed here.

Chapter Five: Animal Magnetism

This chapter has eight characters, the "Who's Who" gallery of pooka. Sometimes I wonder if these sections are becoming more and more simple vehicles to show interesting characters instead of a place to put the major "movers and shakers" of the splat. As much as I liked all of these characters, few of them actually seemed to be well-known at all. I don't mind a few characters like that in such a section, more "people to keep an eye on" than anything else, but I prefer this to be where we get major personalities to transplant into our campaign's background.

Chapter Six: The Animal Kingdom

Chapter six has six (oddly enough) templates. This is the place where "neat character ideas" should go, I think some of the characters from chapter five would have been better placed here. Anyway, the templates are serviceable as templates go. Not terrible but neither are they really that compelling either. I never really did much like most templates anyway, though

Chapter Seven: Quirks and Baubles

This is the toys chapter, including several new merits and flaws, most focused on the pooka's animal nature, but not all. The six sample treasures, one for each level of the background as well as a "legendary" one (Osiris' Flail), are all reasonably interesting and a few (like the Flail and Balthazar's Bracelets) are quite nice.

The character sheet bothered me as well, although normally I wouldn't care about such things (unless the game has new traits, like Land of Eight Million Dreams which was an entirely new game - without a character sheet) but if you are going to bother to take up four pages with something, make it a useful something. Each splatbook has a special splat-sheet, but only a rare few actually have any real changes, enough to warrant a new sheet. For a pooka sheet, why not include a section to put the stats for the animal form in? Why not reprint a short version of the birthrights for reference? Character sheets are, almost universally, useless in splats, and I was actually struck by how amazingly useless the pooka one was. All that was changes we that the word "pooka" is at the top. Nice use of four pages indeed.

So what does this all add up to?

A pretty good book. Well-written and intelligently done overall, the main flaws of the book lie in two areas. First, the book largely ignores the trickster side of the pooka and sometimes presented the Unseelie pooka poorly, especially in comparison to their Seelie counterparts. While the psychology and discussion was great, there was little attention to the great, more archetypal aspect of the kith. Second, the layout, while better than Pour L'Amour et Liberte: the Book of Houses II, was still very bad, with staggering amounts of white space left blank at the bottom of nearly all pages. Also, the font size was at least two points larger than in most White Wolf books. Both of those traits combined to make the book much longer than it need be.

The art, on the other hand, was generally very nice. We have the standard kithbook cover drawn by Tony DiTerlizzi, a man that White Wolf must get back, and the excellent artists Melissa Uran (of Kindred of the East fame) and James Stowe illustrate the inside. Stowe does a great deal of really excellent work throughout the book, but I was disappointed by Uran's contributions. Sometimes, such as in the Kindred of the East Companion, she leaves her work in a drastically unfinished style more resembling practice sketches than a finished product. While her art is still good (and her proportions and realism only getting better) it is annoying and only adds to the almost unprofessional look that Arthaus books seems to be stamped with.

Overall, I think that the book is definitely more than a little expensive, and so I would I have to recommend it only to those who really do like Changeling: the Dreaming. I don't think that this will win over those who hate the game line, but it will add depth to fans. Furthermore, it bears the strong stamp of Nicky Rea and Jackie Cassada's development, containing strong foreshadowing and showing more and more a picture of a kingdom tingling with tension and apprehension at the disappearance of High King David and the possibility of another Accordance War. The developers have big plans for the setting, and it is beginning to show, and show well.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Kithbook: Pooka
Author: Angel McCoy Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Game Studio Line: Changeling: the Dreaming Cost: $15.00 Page count: 91 ISBN: 1-56504-729-X SKU: W7054 Capsule Review by Derek Guder on 09/15/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Modern_day Horror	Ever since the kithbooks started coming out for Changeling: the Dreaming, I've been worried that they would end up like the actively insulting as some of the splatbooks of Vampire: the Masquerade or Werewolf: the Apocalypse or as empty as some of those for Mage: the Ascension. For the most part, I was thankfully disappointed. I very much enjoyed Kithbook: Sluagh and Kithbook: Trolls and while Kithboo: Nockers and Kithbook: Satyrs were both somewhat tame and disappointing, they were still very useful. Kithbook: Pooka, however, is a nice return to form and, while no where near perfect, is still very nicely done. Lion and the Heart of Wonder The opening parable is an excellent one. I loved reading every minute of it and I was never really disappointed by it, but I am still wondering why it prefaces the book about the pooka. It doesn't deal at all with their trickster nature nor much with their animal heritage (what is dealt with comes from left field) and it is apparently set in that mythic time before the pooka began to lie (Lion's last words are the first lie ever told by a pooka). So I wonder why it is here. The only reason I can think of is that it tries to show another side of the pooka, portraying them not as tricksters and pranksters but as the purest of the kithain, the ones most tied to their pure instincts, not bound up in pride or honor or material greed. A good story none the less, and I suppose since it makes me think so much, it may be fitting. Chapter One: Evolution Kithbook: Pooka, after the initial parable of Lion, starts off on a slow foot. The history chapter really isn't that good, especially compared to the rest of the book, and it gave me a poor first impression. It is also surprisingly short, which allows readers to quickly get to the meat of the book. Either way, it is not that important, because pooka never were changelings to remain in the past anyway, so history is of less import. Some amusing things to note in the chapter, however, is the fact that apparently the pooka claim that the Egyptian pantheon was composed of various pooka hoping to educate humanity. While I don't think that they fit perfectly, I valued this idea simply because it contradicts volumes and volumes of lore and "facts" from Vampire: the Masquerade books and World of Darkness: Mummy Second Edition. This is supposed to be the World of Darkness after all, why should history be any more definite there than in the real world? Another surprise was the fact that so many pooka apparently jumped ship for the Dreaming during the Sundering and Shattering, digging Dream-burrows in the Near Dreaming to hide in. This really helps to bring home the pooka's animal nature, as well as providing some reasonable explanation as to why there are so many pooka still alive today. Apparently when the Resurgence hit the Dreaming, the Dream-burrows were flooded with Glamour, sending many pooka into Bedlam, sometimes a violent Bedlam. From the deadly conflicts that resulted, many of the fae were reborn into physical bodies, right in the middle of the Accordance War on Earth. My only question is why they were reborn if they fled before the Changeling Way became so commonplace? You don't get reborn into a body without it. Did they undergo they Way, and then flee? Why? The only annoying feature of this chapter was the almost Garou-like repetition of the crimes humanity has committed against nature. This got me worried that the kithbook would turn to pooka into miniture fuzzy Garou instead of developing them as the unpredictable tricksters (both good and bad) they are. While the trickster aspect is largely missing from the history, is it not entirely gone from the rest of the book, but it gets much less focus than it should have. Chapter Two: Diversity This short chapter deals entirely with how to handle a pooka's animal form. There are many more exotic breeds of pooka beyond cute house pets and field animals. Now you can play dangerous animals, like tigers and wolverines or strange creatures (at least for pooka) like butterflies or goldfish. There is a reasonable discussion of how to handle attributes and abilities of the animal form (although the character sheet provides no place for such information) as well as a definitive list of just how rare different animal forms are among the kith. Some of the rarities made little sense, but worked well enough overall, although they amazing spread and diversity implies more pooka than one (or at least me) would initially think of. Chapter Three: Love, Lies, and Losses This chapter deals with pooka social interaction, or more specifically, how pooka love and how they lie. Much, or at least more than I think necessary, of the chapter deals with pooka romance. This romantic and love-focused trend in Changeling: the Dreaming books is not something I entirely understand, but then I have never played in a romance-focused game. I would have preferred more discussion on general psychology than pages on how the pooka go about seducing mates or what kind of bondage they like to indulge in. That said, it is little wonder that I liked the psychology sections much better. They focused on reasons why the pooka lie, and paint the kith more as wounded animals than playful tricksters. Apparently, pooka lie more out of a reflex to direct attention away from themselves and their pain than anything else. There is a nice look at the various ways the pooka avoid their pain, and it is a very novel motivation for the kith, but I am not entirely sure I like using such a broad brush for them. Granted, it makes them deeper than fuzzy-bunny happy-bouncy annoyances, but it also serves to distance them somewhat from the trickster archetype I keep mentioning, and archetypes are something I think are very important in Changeling: the Dreaming. In addition to the inner pain all pooka feel, the chapter also looks at their mentalities, commenting on how pooka have an almost instinctual need to belong to a pack in one manner or another. Those few who are truly alone are likely unhinged and dangerous. The section also points out just how paradoxical the pooka are. Often seeming to be the most active of kithain, they are more often the most passive, watching more than they act, almost as much as a sluagh. The book also explains much of the motivation behind pooka pranks, at least toward those in positions of authority, they are tests of worthiness. Pooka place vast amounts of expectations and responsibilities upon their leaders, and they expect them to live up to it. Those who don't are challenged mercilessly, and since pooka most often lack direct power, they must be challenged with great cunning. There is also a rather nice section on many of the different methods that pooka use when they lie, and just what their frailty of "cannot tell the whole truth" means. There are discussion of various methods as well as useful examples and a warning against defaulting to simply saying the opposite of what you mean. I rather enjoyed reading about how and why pooka lie, even though I wonder at placing such a rigid birthright across an entire kith in a game based around possibility and imagination. Chapter Four: It Wasn't Me This chapter details the mainstays of changeling society, such as seemings, mentors, the Courts, factions and the other kiths. I really did enjoy the parts on seemings, even if they were a little broad and generalized, and the sidebar on mentors was nice and practical. The examination of the Courts was nicely written, overall, and the Unseelie section showed the darker pooka to be more animalistic than actively "evil," although it was kind of short. The secret societies were all rather bland, for the most part, but at least they were not all pranksters, like the Uncrowned (unseelie pooka looking for positions of power) and the Salvage Crew (those pooka out to save the endangered animals of the world). The Political Animals were a nice faction devoted to trying to show the other fae how stupid and artificial their politics are by taking the rules to foolish extremes and the Renunciation Faction showed just how fearful the pooka are of the possibility of war with King David gone. The best part of the chapter, however, was the "Who Cares?" section detailing the other kiths and supernaturals of the World of Darkness. There was no "everyone hates us" or "everyone loves us" feeling, each kith liked or hated or didn't care either way about the pooka for good reasons. Not always adequate reasons (at least objectively), but the author had a nice handle on psychology and gave good reason for camaraderie or distance between different kiths. Both blunt and honest while remaining interesting and intelligent, this is one of the best parts of the book, and one of the best "relations with others" section of any splatbook. My only problem was that many of the sections seemed to lean towards an attitude of "Seelie nice, Unseelie mean" that got really annoying. Changeling: the Dreaming already has enough of that to climb its way through without adding more to it. It wasn't entirely overt, and the actual section on the Unseelie pooka was actually pretty good, but here is seemed too much like older, worse books. The section on the Prodigals was even better, in some ways. There were no mention of clans or tribes or traditions, just bits about "some vampires" and a few mages suffering "backlash from Banality." I really liked reading a section of a book about other supernaturals where the splat did not make any claim to knowledge that they shouldn't logically have. The author did a damned nice job indeed here. Chapter Five: Animal Magnetism This chapter has eight characters, the "Who's Who" gallery of pooka. Sometimes I wonder if these sections are becoming more and more simple vehicles to show interesting characters instead of a place to put the major "movers and shakers" of the splat. As much as I liked all of these characters, few of them actually seemed to be well-known at all. I don't mind a few characters like that in such a section, more "people to keep an eye on" than anything else, but I prefer this to be where we get major personalities to transplant into our campaign's background. Chapter Six: The Animal Kingdom Chapter six has six (oddly enough) templates. This is the place where "neat character ideas" should go, I think some of the characters from chapter five would have been better placed here. Anyway, the templates are serviceable as templates go. Not terrible but neither are they really that compelling either. I never really did much like most templates anyway, though Chapter Seven: Quirks and Baubles This is the toys chapter, including several new merits and flaws, most focused on the pooka's animal nature, but not all. The six sample treasures, one for each level of the background as well as a "legendary" one (Osiris' Flail), are all reasonably interesting and a few (like the Flail and Balthazar's Bracelets) are quite nice. The character sheet bothered me as well, although normally I wouldn't care about such things (unless the game has new traits, like Land of Eight Million Dreams which was an entirely new game - without a character sheet) but if you are going to bother to take up four pages with something, make it a useful something. Each splatbook has a special splat-sheet, but only a rare few actually have any real changes, enough to warrant a new sheet. For a pooka sheet, why not include a section to put the stats for the animal form in? Why not reprint a short version of the birthrights for reference? Character sheets are, almost universally, useless in splats, and I was actually struck by how amazingly useless the pooka one was. All that was changes we that the word "pooka" is at the top. Nice use of four pages indeed. So what does this all add up to? A pretty good book. Well-written and intelligently done overall, the main flaws of the book lie in two areas. First, the book largely ignores the trickster side of the pooka and sometimes presented the Unseelie pooka poorly, especially in comparison to their Seelie counterparts. While the psychology and discussion was great, there was little attention to the great, more archetypal aspect of the kith. Second, the layout, while better than Pour L'Amour et Liberte: the Book of Houses II, was still very bad, with staggering amounts of white space left blank at the bottom of nearly all pages. Also, the font size was at least two points larger than in most White Wolf books. Both of those traits combined to make the book much longer than it need be. The art, on the other hand, was generally very nice. We have the standard kithbook cover drawn by Tony DiTerlizzi, a man that White Wolf must get back, and the excellent artists Melissa Uran (of Kindred of the East fame) and James Stowe illustrate the inside. Stowe does a great deal of really excellent work throughout the book, but I was disappointed by Uran's contributions. Sometimes, such as in the Kindred of the East Companion, she leaves her work in a drastically unfinished style more resembling practice sketches than a finished product. While her art is still good (and her proportions and realism only getting better) it is annoying and only adds to the almost unprofessional look that Arthaus books seems to be stamped with. Overall, I think that the book is definitely more than a little expensive, and so I would I have to recommend it only to those who really do like Changeling: the Dreaming. I don't think that this will win over those who hate the game line, but it will add depth to fans. Furthermore, it bears the strong stamp of Nicky Rea and Jackie Cassada's development, containing strong foreshadowing and showing more and more a picture of a kingdom tingling with tension and apprehension at the disappearance of High King David and the possibility of another Accordance War. The developers have big plans for the setting, and it is beginning to show, and show well. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 4 (Meaty)