Dark Ages: Fae
I always loved White Wolf's Changeling game. I liked it because it covered everything from childlike whimsy right through to Grimm <sic> horror. I still play it every week or so with a couple of friends. On the White Wolf Forums, there was a lot of speculation for a long time about how exactly the Dark Ages faeries game would turn out.
Was it going to be Chainmail Changeling? If it was set before the Shattering (according to the World of Darkness backstory, that happened in the fourteenth century, when most of the true faeries abandoned the world , forcing the ones who remained to incarnate their souls in human bodies), did that mean you could play a "proper" faerie? What would the splats be like?
Yeah, I know. But we Pale Puppyites do like our splats.
Well?
No, it isn't Changeling. Not in the least. They scrapped the whole lot and started from scratch. Is that a good thing?
I'll get back to you on that in a minute.
Looks
It's a glossy hardback with glossy paper. The cover art is, like all the other recent Dark Ages books, a digital photomontage featuring symbolic objects, in this case a ring of stones on the ground containing a stick doll, an apple and a rabbit's foot, only recently removed from the rabbit. It's not great. Digital art can be stunning when it's good. When it's bad... it looks like precisely what it is: art done with a computer. This looks like art done with a computer.
The endpapers have, as is so often White Wolf practice, a montage of the different symbols used for the various player character groups. I'm not a fan of that style of doing things at all - it just strikes me as lazy (on the other hand, compare those two lovely, lovely maps on the endpapers of Mage: The Sorcerers' Crusade - now that's how to do endpapers), but this montage is so bad, it actually took me until I got about a third of the way through the book before I realised it was more than a selection of random blue squiggles. Oh, dear.
The inevitable page borders aren't so hot, either, alternating between a fairly elegant filigree design for the splats and fiction, which would be nicer if it didn't go under the text and make some of it harder to read, and a really ugly black tree silhouette which frames most of the other pages. It's horrible, it really is. The fuller variation of that design which appears on the chapter heading pages is either much better or much, much worse - I haven't decided.
The various splat symbols which appear at intervals throughout the book are also quite badly done. Basically, they're done with a vector graphics program. Digital art that looks digital, all smooth and precise. A lot of people like this, but for a game about a medieval world that is wild, dark and organic... it doesn't help. Also, they're placed behind the text in some places and they're a bit too dark, again making it hard to read. Annoying.
Editing
The editing's fine. The mark of good editing is that you don't notice it. And you don't. So no complaints there. The index is pretty rubbish, but it's a White Wolf book. I mean, what do you expect?
Art
Five artists supply work for this book. The art ranges from evocative to completely inappropriate to hideously ugly to just bloody awful.
The misjudged: legendary illustrator Tim Truman supplies the splash pages for each chapter. I usually quite like Truman's art. But here... his illustrations are ugly. They look rushed. And they don't look medieval. They don't capture the atmosphere the book is going for one bit. Not a crowd-pleaser.
I must admit that I don't like Melissa Uran's work at all to begin with. I can understand how some people might like that Manga-looking style she has, and I think it worked OK in Kindred of the East, but here it's totally wrong. You're just not going to get across the flavour of "Dark" Medieval Europe with Final Fantasy-style elves. Just wrong.
Vince Locke, on the other hand, who's always a pretty decent artist, delivers some lovely watercolour pieces which are just right. I particularly like the troll under the bridge on page 169. Similarly, James Stowe, whose work I've not come across before, gives good art. It's stylised, but in a good way (think: Brian Froud) and has a lovely black sense of humour, with standout illustrations including one of an innocent but panicked medieval chef getting attacked by flying utensils, a great picture of a grotesque little cherub-like faerie making a deal with a wizard and a priest, and a marvellous one of some malevolent little git enchanting a mortal to fall in love with her hilariously bemused-looking dog.
Now I haven't counted the illustrations, but even if Stowe and Locke's illustrations aren't outnumbered by David Day's illustrations, it really feels like it. This guy's stuff is horrible. It's not even stylised or anything - it's just flat-out bad. The splat illustrations are a case in point. They're really clumsily done. It may be the reproduction in some places, but as it's printed, the guy's work looks like it was done with a really blunt pencil. And not in a good way.
Background
Now I'm done slamming the look of the thing, it's time to get positive. I do actually like the content here. In short, it sticks to the folk tales really closely, and does a passable job of making every tale of the Perilous Realm you have ever heard possible to play.
As I have already pointed out, this is not Changeling at all. It's not even Changeling before the Shattering happened. It's a completely new approach to doing faeries. Most of the history is gone. Some of the names are there, and one or two of the crossover points remain (for example, the Glastonbury Compact) but that's it.
The background material is on the whole pretty decent, although in places it's a teensy bit contrived. The central premise of the backstory is that the Fae left the earth in the stewardship of human kind a long time ago to go off and fight
amongst themselves. Realising that the world had changed and that humans were now in charge, the four faerie courts (Spring, Summer, Autumn and - duh - Winter) ceased hostilities for a hundred years in order to take stock of the situation. The truce is up in, oh, about a week's time. And suddenly you're stuck in a world full of humans who can drive you away with a word and you're at war. What do you do?
I kind of find myself shrugging at that. I mean, yes, there's your metaplot and your motivation for engaging in all kinds of politicking and derring do and stuff, and it's a pretty decent vehicle for all that. It isn't for me, though. I can think of about a dozen things I want my faerie players to explore - and they're evoked by the hooks in the book. Trolls! Giants! An entire realm entered by finding secret shadows under bridges! A Bazaar of the Biz - no, wait. Hang on...
Anyway, you get the idea.
Interaction with humans is handled nicely, too, like all the darkest faerie tales you know. For what must be the first time in a White Wolf game, ordinary humans are shown to have tremendous power, without being given any special powers of their own (like Edges or Numina, or Hedge Magic, or Faith...). The power of Echoes means that with a brief incantation or a folk remedy, the mightiest Fae enchanter can be rendered powerless. It's a really nice idea and true to the folklore.
Characters
Splats! The sound of that word warms a White Wolf fan's heart. You just love those two-page spreads with the picture and the cookie-cutter character template.
No, you do.
Look, just pretend you do for the length of this review, OK? Anyway, Changeling had more splats than any of them. Now when they were done with bringing out Changeling books, there were over well fifty splats available as player character choices. You had your Kithain, Thallain, Nunnehi, Menehune, Hsien, Adhene, Inanimae... Loads of them. It was like every time they read about another kind of elemental spirit, they created a new character class for it. Most of the White Wolf games were splat-happy (Vampire: 30+; Werewolf: 30+; Mage: about 30), but Changeling was the worst for that by far, and most Changeling storytellers I know of have tended to limit what's actually allowed in their game.
Where Dark Ages: Fae wins out is the way that its splats are really just one aspect of character design, and not its centre. What I mean is, if a Changeling player says to you "I'm playing a Seelie Troll", you know what that character looks like, and, no matter how well-designed the character, you know what he's about. You can't do that with Dark Ages: Fae, because what your character is like doesn't really depend on the character type you take.
It works like this: every character first has to choose an origin: either Firstborn ("real" faeries), Inanimae (faerie spirits incarnate in nature) or Changeling (in the traditional sense of a human baby swapped with a faerie baby). Then you pick a court: Spring (inquisitive and mercurial), Summer (traditionalist, hard-headed and beautiful), Autumn (devious and sociable), Winter (eats babies), or Solstice (outcasts).
Three origins multiplied by five courts give you fifteen basic templates, right? Well, yeah, but only to an extent. What happens then is that you design your faerie from the ground up. You assign Features (things that define your Fae's appearance), Oaths (ancestral agreements with humans - for example, you protect a hamlet from harm if they leave out a bowl of elderberries on Midsummer's Eve) and Echoes (folkloric weaknesses - like being anble to harm a dog, or being turned away by the sign of the Cross), and then you add the usual Merits and Flaws.
The thing about Features, Oaths and Echoes is that they're not defined in the book. They give you about a page of examples for each, and then they leave it to you and your Storyteller to agree on what works.
I like that. What it means is you can produce any faerie character from folklore and myth that you can think of. I mean any character at all. Want to be a faerie from A Midsummer Night's Dream? Yep. How about a wood nymph? Yep. Morgan le Fay? Well, you could if she wasn't already mentioned in the background material. The Fachan (the one-eyed, one-legged ogre from Scots legend)? I'm not sure why you'd want to, but yeah, you can do that. One of the goblins from the film Labyrinth? Oh, yes (hell, you could be the cute little dog knight or the big hairy guy, if you wanted). You can be a two-foot high Flower Fairy with butterfly wings, an avenging Knight of the Faerie Queene straight out of Spenser, or Cinderella's Fairy Godmother, if that floats your boat (and all of those last three could be designed as Spring Firstborn. Compare that with your Seelie Troll).
And you could design a medieval version of any Changeling character you've seen (except maybe the Chinese and Japanese ones), without having to resort to extra splats. It's brilliant.
Echoes
The system of Echoes is also, I think a Good Thing. Basically, all those folk remedies against fairies work against some faerie somewhere. The question is, will it work against you?
The answer is: sometimes. Basically, if you find yourself in a place where humans realise what you are, the Storyteller makes a roll (which you can resist if you've got any Oaths with the human race which are still good) and if you're unlucky, all of a sudden, you get driven away by some kid turning widdershins three times while reciting a nursery rhyme.
This sounds like a really crippling weakness, and it is, but rather than limit characters, the rule serves as a fantastic plot hook and encourages creativity and role-playing. Again, it's true to the folklore. Also, it serves to balance the frankly quite awesome magical powers that Faeries wield, and adds a bit of welcome irony. Vampires? Pah! Werewolves? Child's play! Ordinary human beings? Tremble, Faerie...
Magic Powers
Magic Powers in the game use ideas from Mage, Werewolf and Kindred of the East.
Fae characters have the potential to learn magics from four "Dominions", which are basically spheres of magic. These are Day, Night, Dusk and Dawn. Each dominion has its own flavour. In each of these, a Fae can use two types of magic, Cantrips (set magical spells, which work pretty much like Werewolf Gifts) and Unleashing, which is where you create an effect off the top of your head in line with the Dominion you're using (a little like Sphere Magick in Mage: The Ascension), which, although more powerful than Cantrip use, carries the potential to create unpredictable and scary effects, and which can go very, very wrong.
You're encouraged to use both kinds of magic. Unleashing is governed by a trait called Mists, which measures how in touch you are with the chaotic realm of Faerie, while Cantrips are governed by Weaving, which shows how close you are to the human world, and how good you are at bending magic to fit the material realm.
If you use Unleashing too much, you might get imbalanced in favour of Mists, in which case you go mad. If you only use cantrips, it might go the other way (in which case you get a bit boring), although there are no systems to govern this happening, other than player honesty and storyteller suggestion (and that's the way I like it.
The powers of the Fae are really terrifying. For example, there's one cantrip which allows a Fae to envelop an area the size of a ship in sunlight - real sunlight. Imagine, if you will, walking into the hall of a Vampire Lord and with a wave of his hand, reducing two dozen ancient bloodsuckers to ash. Scary.
It's just as well that the limitations on Unleashing and the incredible power that ordinary mortals have over the Fae through Echoes balance that out. You may be able to fry a Tzimisce Methuselah without breaking a sweat, but if you're magic backfires or if that old lady comes near you wearing that garland of asphodels, you're still screwed.
On the whole, the system is rather involved, but it's no more involved than most of the other White Wolf games, and I find it flexible and somehow satisfying. I can't wait to try it out.
So, on the whole...
Notwithstanding the ugly design and uneven artwork, I think this book is worth having if you have any interest in the folklore of the Good Folk and the Perilous Realm. It's a decent take on doing "real" faeries, and yet it remains playable despite sticking close to the original sources. Although the medieval flavour is stymied by a lot of the artwork, Dark Ages: Fae has got enough hooks to keep you well-stocked with ideas. Also, now that the basic Dark Ages rules are available on a PDF file at White Wolf's website, you don't even need to buy the Vampires book to use it, and it can stand alone just fine.
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