Author: Brian Campbell, Jackie Cassada, Richard Dansky, Chris Howard, Steve Kenson, Ian Lemke (also credited as the creator of Changeling 2nd ed), Angel Leigh McCoy, Deena McKinney, Neil Mick, Wayne Peacock, Nicky Rea, Michael Rollins
Category: game
Company/Publisher: White Wolf
Cost: $30.00
Page count: 296
ISBN: 1-56504-716-8
Playtest Review by Lisa Padol on 12/01/97. Genre tags: none

Changeling: The Dreaming is a role-playing game where players take the part of half-human/half-fae exiles from the Faerie realm of Arcadia. They must walk a fine line between ignoring their Fae heritage and surrendering to Banality, and ignoring their human heritage and becoming lost in the insanity of Bedlam. They face dangers of the Dreaming in the shape of dragons and other monsters, and dangers of the ordinary world, in the shape of overprotective parents and psychologists.

Changeling is one of White Wolf's five World of Darkness Storyteller games. The other four are Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Wraith. It differs from these in that the action in Changeling does not always affect what we might call the "real" world. In Vampire, despite all of their weaknesses, vampires have a definite physical effect on the world. Mages must be more subtle, but they too affect the ordinaray world, even if mortals think that it is merely a coincidence that the lights went off at a particular moment or that it is merely luck that a policeman happened to appear less than a minute after a robbery. In Changeling, however, an epic battle between a knight and a dragon will appear to ordinary humans as a small child playing in traffic.

While Mage has always been my favorite of White Wolf's Storyteller games, Changeling is a close second. The first edition was painful to read because it had the potential to be great, but it had several flaws. These flaws have not all vanished from the second edition, but Changeling has improved.

As soon as I opened the book, I smiled, for Changeling second edition has something that was missing from the first edition: a map showing the Changeling kingdoms of America, also known as Concordia. The celtic knotwork borders are still there, but they are smaller. With very few exceptions, the art is far better than in the first edition.

The old flavor text is gone, replaced by a story about a young troll knight who is a schoolboy in his everyday life. This was an excellent change: it illustrates what Changeling: The Dreaming is all about, helping GMs and players to understand how ordinary reality and the world of the Dreaming interact.

Unfortunately, the worst paragraph of Changeling is still there:

"When you play Changeling, you will come to understand that faerie tales aren't just for kids (not that they ever were), and that they don't always have happy endings."

Oh, silly me. And here I thought faerie tales were just for kids. Guys, if I were that clueless, I wouldn't have so much as cracked the cover of Changeling. But it gets worse.

"You will discover what it is like to be exiled from your homeland"

I see this book is not aimed at political or religious refugees.

"persecuted for your true nature"

Or religious or sexual minorities, or for that matter, any other kind of minority.

"and unable to express the beauty welling up from your soul. You will know what it is like to be alone in a crowd"

Or angst-ridden teenagers, or anyone who's ever been an angst-ridden teenagers, or angst-ridden adults.

As in the first edition, once I got past this dreadful paragraph, the game improved. As in all White Wolf Storyteller games, the first third of the book gives background on the world. This material is better organized than in the first edition, and many passages have been re- written. The quotes for the nine Changeling races are much improved.

The second third of the book covers the basic rules, and here I was very pleasantly surprised. For years, I have been saying that it would make more sense to put the rules for character creation before the rules for dice rolling, and in Changeling second edition, this has finally been done.

The examples used to illustrate the rules have also been changed for the better. Rather than endless examples of combat, Changeling uses examples of dodging spilling milk, trying to save a laptop from the same milk, and trying desperately to retrieve data from the milk-drenched laptop before it is lost. I like these examples, although my computer-savy playtesters insist that the text shows great ignorance of how computers work.

The last third of the book covers the more complex rules for everything from cantrips (the magic of the changelings) to combat. It also has useful advice for GMs, as well as descriptions of the creatures of the Changeling world, including enough information on vampires and werewolves that you won't need to buy White Wolf's other games if you don't intend such creatures to be major parts of a Changeling campaign, but do want them to appear occasionally. The cantrip system has been completely overhauled. Cards are no longer needed, and players can specify their own bunks (the gestures or rituals that make cantrips work better). This does encourage creativity: One of my playtesters had his character talk to a Flinstone vitamin by knocking on the cap of the container and shouting "Wilma!" in a Fred Flinstone voice. However, a list of suggested bunks would still have been useful.

There are no adventures, but I consider this an improvement, since I was not enamored of the adventure in the first edition.

There are still a few bugs in the Changeling system. It isn't always clear whether the text is talking about temporary or permanent points of Willpower, Banality, or Glamour. This is a problem, as these are probably the most frequently used stats. (Glamour fuels magic, Banality saps magic, and Willpower is used in many ways.) The sidhe, who claim to be the rulers of the changelings, supposedly affront many with their arrogance. Now, the sidhe are almost all members of noble houses, and three out of the five noble houses don't seem that arrogant or that eager to rule. Of the other two, one seems more interested in being the power behind the scenes. Are most of the sidhe of House Gwydion? If not, one wonders how exaggerated the sidhe problem is. Also, if I understand the rules correctly, Changelings only kill each other's Fae seemings, as a rule, since to "really" kill another Changeling induces Banality. However, killing a changling's Fae seeming also induces Banality, and I'm not sure it's any more cost effective.

I suspect it would take a new edition to work out the flaws I spotted, but part of my problem is that I have a different conception of how changelings and magic and glamour should work than the authors do. For example, the idea of destroying a potent item to gain Glamour goes against the grain for me.

The Playtest

I am an English instructor, so I tend to assume that if I have problems with the language of an RPG product, it is because I'm too used to correcting student papers. However, all of my players spent the first twenty minutes of the playtest session (we went from noon until nearly 8 pm) snickering over the text, reading aloud particularly awkward passages, and wondering how much Banality White Wolf gets for trying to trademark "Dreaming." I did not encourage this; indeed, I tried to get everyone back to making up characters. But let the record show that awkward and pretentious prose bothers people who are neither teachers nor reviewers.

It took about 2 hours to create three characters, using not only the second edition, but also my old copy of the first edition for things like attributes which have not changed. I was surprised to discover how much flipping back and forth we had to do. One of the playtesters made life easier by sticking post-its at the beginning of major sections and labelling them.

I think we hit every major snag in the rules. Combat is far more obnoxious than I remembered. You roll a handfull of dice and count the dice which show successes. For example, if the difficulty is 7, I count any die which has a 7 or more as a success. Then, if my opponent is dodging, he does the same thing. If my attack does get through, I roll another handful of dice to see how much damage I do. Then, my opponent rolls more dice to see how much of this damage he can ignore. This is more complicated than it needs to be.

I know that there are more complicated systems out there, and that Changeling is relatively simple, but we were all ready to throw up our hands in disgust less than two rounds into the combat. The old R. Talisorian system of adding two numbers to a d10, and comparing to either a difficulty number or an opposed roll is much simpler, even though the principle is almost the same.

The need to split the dice pool to dodge or parry drew complaints from our resident fencer. Changelings will often use swords or rapiers, and in fencing, the parry-riposte is a common manuever: You parry your opponent's blade, and instantly counter-attack. I have seen this done. It is lightning-fast. While the second edition does have the rules for a parry-riposte on page 240, thie did not entirely satisfy him.

Page 136 describes the attribute Strength, explaining that this attribute is added to the damage dice pool for brawling and melee combat. This needs to be repeated in the combat rules, which don't occur for another hundred pages. Also, we're not really sure why successes for melee and brawling don't add to the damage pool.

The area which gave us the most trouble, predicatably, was the cantrips. Part of the problem was the flipping back and forth I had to do, and I suspect that a second session would show this to be less of a problem. Part was that the rules are not always as clear as they should be. One character had a treasure: sneakers that would let her run really fast. Now, cantrips involve both an Art and a Realm. The Art is what you do. The Realm describes the target. A treasure has an Art, but not, as I understand it, a Realm. So, the treasure supplied the power to run fast. But the character did not have the Fae Realm, which is used to affect changelings like herself. Does this mean that she can't use the sneakers? But treasures can be used by humans (or at least, that is my understanding of the rules), who generally have neither Arts nor Realms. So, presumably, she can use the treasure. So, how do we calculate the difficulty, which is based on an Attribute plus a Realm? I ruled that the player should just roll dice for the Attribute, and that the Realm score was zero. Perhaps this is what the authors intended. Perhaps not. In any case, clarification is needed.

Another problem was summed up by one of the playtesters as follows: The rules say that you can invent your own cantrips for each Art. But instead of explaining what sorts of things you can do with each Art at each level, the authors just give one example of one thing you can do.

This problem became apparent when the player in question tried to use Legerdemain to make his character invisible. We discovered that the differences between that Art and Chicanery were not very clear. Legerdemain seems part illusion and part physical effect. The rules for one Legerdemain cantrip clearly stated that, while it could be used for illusions of most sorts, it could not be used to produce invisibility. However, there is no reason that another cantrip at a higher level could not produce invisibility. I finally ruled that since the character had five dots in Legerdemain, she could do it, but I'm not at all sure that this is what the author intended. I know we all fudge the rules and that we're supposed to do this, but this is still a flaw in the rules.

One thing went far better than I had expected: creating the adventure. I had no idea what I would do, since I did not like any of the Changeling adventures I had read, except for Midnight Circus, which is a crossover adventure and far too complex for me to run at a moment's notice. I had a vague memory of one plot idea suggested in the rules: The characters are invited to a party for a noble sidhe, and only after they show up do they learn that it is the sidhe's birthday. I did add a few twists, but this was the basic idea I started with, and it went very well.

The Verdict

On the whole, Changeling works. The system is clunkier than it needs to be, and the text is far more pretentious. Not all of the problems have been worked out, and several rules need clarification. Nevertheless, the concept is great, and the second edition is clearer and more focused than the first. I almost hope that there will be a third edition, but this one will do until then.

I can recommend this product to people who do not own the first edition. If you do own the first edition, do you need the second edition? This is a tricky question.

Game companies come out with new editions far too frequently, and first editions are often released before all the problems are worked out. There are enough problems with the first edition Changeling that it really is better to have the second edition. But I don't like advising people to do something I would not do, and I know that if I had not gotten review copies of both editions of Changeling, I would probably have either waited for the second edition to come out or have bought the first edition, but not the second edition. It sticks in my throat to have to buy the same game twice, but if money and shelf space are not problems, go ahead and buy the second edition. This is advice I would not have given for either Vampire or Mage. (I have not seen first edition Werewolf, and I have not read any edition of Wraith.)

If it sounds like I'm holding my nose while giving this advice, I suppose I am. But this is not because of any problems with second edition Changeling; it is because of the problem of releasing a first edition that needs substantial revisions. This problem not unique to White Wolf, but it is one which has plagued the company since the first edition of Vampire came out.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)