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Stan: No.
Pip: I'm the head Wickerknicker. And you are all little Wickershams [Butters bows] We all sing the merry tune of Stratford until I yell, "Turrah!" and then you all fall down laughing, and I join you, as I find it funny too. Stan, would you be the Wickersham of Brumble Briar?
[Stan just looks at them]
And all right, here we go. Whippy-tippy tootoo, tralala-la.
All three: Whippy-tippy tootoo, tralala-la. Whippy-tippy tootoo, tralala-la.
[Stan tries opening the door again]
- "Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub", South Park
It took me a while to write this review. Part of it has to do with the fact that it's very difficult to review any of White Wolf's corebooks just because the concepts are so broad; your run-and-gun Vampire is going to look a lot different than my political backstabbing, but the game makes both possible. Another part of it is that this is a fairly deep game, and there's a lot to absorb. In fact, I would say that this review is incomplete, and it's going to remain incomplete; think of it as catching a few of the game's high and lows points. You don't want me to make this review any larger. Trust me.
Changeling has always been one weird bastard of a game. In its earliest incarnation, it was four or five concepts for a game stuck together and saddled with an unfortunate system that had you buying collectible cards in order to be able to play the game, and while the system saw its fair share of revisions, it never coalesced into something that was popular beyond a few diehard fans. I read a lot of Changeling’s supplements, thanks to a book-swap program I had going with another role-player at my college, and I can pretty much safely say that there was never anything in there that I thought would be interesting.
And there’s a lot of reasons behind that. Changeling was fundamentally a game about immaturity, trying to arrest your development at the age of a child and staying that way in order to capture some nebulous childhood magic that in no way resembled Michael Jackson’s desperate attempts to stay eleven forever by claiming the innocence and wonder of young children, thereby creeping everybody the fuck out forever.
There is nothing quite as creepy, to my mind, as people pretending that they’re children again, simply because children exist in a state of Hobbesian ignorance that adults misinterpret as innocence, and because there’s something profoundly disturbing in somebody claiming the rights and privileges of another group simply for their own gratification. The same holds true for suggesting that there’s something special about your soul, because down that cold path lies the Elven Holocaust and claiming that you’re the reincarnation of Severus Snape, Frylock and Goku – all in the same body, of course. What, you don’t believe them?
It was also as confusing as hell. Changelings existed in two states at the same time, to the point where you’d have the real world overlapping with the fake world, a la The Maxx. Most of the character types tended to be NPC types – the ogre, the tinker, the spooky goblin, the alien Sidhe. It was very hard to find a character concept that you’d actually like. On top of that, you had the whole concept of Banality, which meant that anything that wasn’t wondrous and pretty and magical would cause Changelings harm. Titty bars? Banal. IRS Laws? Banal. Concrete? Banal. One of the major threats in the Changeling section of the WoD ocean-focused book was a gigantic chunk of concrete, if I remember correctly. Not being dropped on people or anything. It just sat there.
Here’s the fortunate thing: Changeling: The Lost is nothing like that - or, if it is, it's like that only in spurts. C:TL feels a bit like what would happen if Tribe 8 dragged Changeling: The Dreaming into a back alley and worked it over with a pair of brass knuckles for being too cute. C:TL isn’t about the magic of childhood; it’s about what happens when people who can’t grow up decide to treat you like a playtoy, and what happens after that. It’s about how you survive great trauma, or even dramatic change. It’s about how you decide to define your life in relation to what your life has done to you. If you showed up on Changeling: The Lost's door with a big chunk of concrete, you might wind up eating it. The basic premise of the game has you as a normal human being who was kidnapped by the True Fae – the classical True Fae, the ones that Steve Darlington described as being much like Nyarlathothep. You spend time in Arcadia as a slave to your Fae masters, getting warped by the ambient magic into something that’ll suit your role better. You won’t be missed, though, because there’s an exact duplicate of you that took over your life in your absence. Meanwhile, you’re memorizing huge passages of text for no good reason, or acting as a hunting hound, or maybe you’re helplessly in love with somebody who isn’t physically capable of loving you back.
That would be a game in line with My Life with Master, but C:TL starts you a step further down the road. You’ve managed to escape your captivity, and now you’re in the real world. Your body’s still been warped by your captivity, but you’ve got an illusionary mask that makes you look human when you’re in public. You can get your old life back, as long as you can figure out how to kill and replace a creature who’s been living your life for the last twenty years. At the same time, you’re not helpless. You escaped from your captivity, so you start the game with a major victory underneath your belt. You can find your own place within Changeling society if you want to – in fact, one of the major ways to manipulate supernatural powers is to make symbiotic pledges. (Or one-sided pledges.) You can even gain vengeance on your captors, ensuring that the last delicacy that the cruel Lord of the Feast tastes is the curb in the alley behind the 7-11.
Vampire is about alienation from society; ditto Promethean, often to that game's detriment. Changeling has the creation of a society from a pack of refugees as its central purpose, hiding from your former Keeper. I mentioned Tribe 8 earlier because the two games share a basic core. Tribe 8, if you haven’t played it, is about a group of exiles from a society which is dominated by a number of powerful, inhuman entities, and their attempts to form a society in the absence of those entities. C:TL is about something similar, but rather than having been exiled, you were kidnapped. Somebody decided that you’d look good on their mantle, or working for them, or you took a wrong turn, and you’ve spent an indeterminate amount of time essentially suffering under the domination of an alien creature before managing your escape. The parallels between the Serfs of the Z’bri – or even the faithful Tribals – aren’t hard to find.
But at the same time, the game seems to shift from foot to foot as the book goes on. Initially, the changelings are described as fundamentally scarred by their experiences in Arcadia. Their faerie Seemings are described as the scars that they bear from their captivity, rather than a fundamental part of their personality. Sometimes the game seems to be about being a Changeling, and other times it seems like your half-Faerie nature is just scar tissue that you have to work around. It's not something that I was entirely able to resolve, and it's possible that authors may have been working from different templates when they wrote their section of the book.
The game's Morality replacement trait, Clarity, acts less as a determiner of how far you're down in the hole and more along the lines of how you can balance the real world with the fact that you aren't human anymore - for instance, showing your true form to a human, or displaying magic in public, is a rank 6 Morality check, but so is going without human contact, or grand larceny. Like any of White Wolf's morality scores, it's got some head-scratchers - for instance, killing your fetch is a rank 5 sin, but what's more assertive of your own identity than in taking it back from somebody else?
For that matter, I can't entirely agree with White Wolf's idea that every supernatural creature must have its own individual moral code. It's akin to using SAN scores in Elfquest because it worked so well in Call of Cthulhu, just because they both used the same system. It works okay for werewolves and Prometheans - particularly Prometheans, because they're trying to imitate humans - but for mages and changelings, not so much. The Clarity system seems to be simultaneously measuring two or three different things with the same scale. I would say that it's not the best rules implementation that I've seen.
The splats for the Changelings have been loosened up quite a bit. The original game’s splats were fairly narrow; you were a Pooka, or a Nocker, or a Sidhe, and each splat came with its own set of preconceptions. Pookas were animal fae, Nockers were goblins, and so on and so forth – but since 99% of fairy tales use those fairy types as antagonists, or as metaphors, it was sort of difficult to wrap your head around how the personification of beauty, or industry, or animal trickery would act in the real world. (Does Brer Rabbit have a job? Doubtful.)
Changeling: The Lost goes a lot broader with its character archetypes, called Seemings. In the original game, the fairy types were narrow; if you were a satyr, you were pretty much guaranteed to have hairy legs, horns, and generally revolve around the concept of being a satyr. In Changeling: The Lost, you can pick just about any animal you want and have your changeling be that animal. Are you a shark? Then you're a swimmerskin, and you can hold your breath for a long while. Spider? Skitterskulk, with a venom bite. Deer? Runnerswift. You'll never guess what they're good at.
That's just one Seeming, though, the Beasts. There's others, each with a similar versatility and a relation to the original game. For instance, Nockers, in Dreaming, were just goblins who were good at tinkering. The Wizened, by contrast, range from the guy who's been forcibly modified into a half-Gray creature to the man-shaped bundle of sticks that's really excellent at surgery. (The linkage between them and the Grays of alien abduction folklore is actually what sold me on the game - the willingness to step outside of the rigid straitjackets of fairy archetypes and into something a little crazier.) Each type of changeling has a number of subclasses, each of which grants some benefit, but none of the subclasses dictate behavior. You may be a mannequin-girl Elemental who works down at the department store, but that doesn't change who you were before this happened - or maybe that's what you want to be; it's up to you. You could pick out any element and still retain the same character.
I cannot comment on the original powers that Changelings wielded in the original games, although the phrase "bringing a lute to a gun fight" keeps springing to mind. Lost Changelings get access to three sets of powers - one relating to their Seeming, a choice of two others relating to their specific court, and a set of powers that all Changelings can access. No, wait, four. There's also Goblin Contracts, which is your basic pain-for-play set of powers.
For the Seeming powers, there's no real surprises; Darklings wield power over fear and shadow, the Wizened remake stuff so that it's better (giving them in-game mechanical bonuses), Elementals gets control over their chosen element - including glass, metal or plastic, for mechanical Elementals - Beasts get something very much like vampiric Animalism, the Fairest are good at looking like they're in charge and/or pretty, and Ogres break stuff and eat stuff.
While they initially seem similar to vampiric Disciplines, they're a lot twistier and less direct. Take, for instance, the Ogre's Contract of Stone. At its first level, you can boost your Strength dots for a single turn by rolling your Strength + Wyrd. It seems like Potence, but you've got a much more variable range of strength every time you use it, rather than a straight blood-for-bonus. The next two levels let you boost your strength in specific situations, such as breaking down doors or showing off your strength, while the last two let you pig out in order to heal damage and Hulk out in a rather spectacular fashion. The first and last are the most useful, while the ones in between are good only if you're acting ogre-ish, which puts the onus on the player to find situations where the power can be used. The Darklings Contract of Darkness lets you hide at the second level, by doubling environmental penalties - unlike Obfuscate, it's up to you to generate those environmental distractions if you want the bonus. The Fairest are able to make themselves seem superior, similar to Majesty, but only by pretending to be a celebrity or superior. I'm sure that dedicated players have already found the weakness and strengths of these powers, as I've seen on an errata thread on the WoD forum.
The Court powers allow you to tailor your Changeling a little more. Each Court has a particular emotion that it's associated with - wrath for summer, fear for autumn, sorrow for winter and desire for spring. With the exception of fear, however, I question their utility in the game. For instance, let's look at the emotional power list for Summer. At its first level, you can sense the greatest source of wrath around you. This is useful for...just about nothing. Ascending the ladder, you can turn somebody's wrath against somebody else - but you get a huge bonus for directing it onto yourself, because Lord only knows that werewolf was just going to kill the other guy, and obviously you needed to be on the receiving end of that ass-kicking, because, um... (For that matter, there's a -3 penalty if you redirect anger off yourself. The most obvious use of the power is the one that has the biggest penalty to use.) There is a particular Ogre Seeming that lets you soak damage, but I wouldn't say that it's enough that you'd want to start inviting trouble on purpose.
The next two levels let you really piss somebody off or quell their anger entirely - and finally, you reach a power that you could really use, where your rage gives you a +2 bonus to your physical rolls. And in order to get that, you have to have Mantle of Summer 4, which is worth four background points in addition to the cost of the power itself.
I'm picking on the Contract of Summer in particular here because the book suggests that the Summer Court is the court that's most interested in gaining vengeance on the True Fae - but their powers focus on the manipulation of an emotion, as opposed to channelling your power into combat. If I knew that I was eventually going to be banging on somebody whose combat stats vastly outpowered mine, I'd be focusing my powers on something that actually did something to the Fae, rather than finding the nearest dude who happened to be pissed off. I'd be looking for something that allowed me to mess with the True Fae's ability to find me, or to generate decoys, or to find vulnerabilities of the True Fae through divination - but I'm making people angry instead.
Compare that to the Court of Autumn's emotional manipulation powers, which manipulate fear. You can grab somebody's worst fear out of his head (invaluable), scare the hell out of a crowd about a particular thing (really useful), protect yourself - and later your allies - against fear (useful), and make yourself look like the thing that your victim fears most (again, really useful.) Desire lets you figure out what somebody wants and then give to them, with a variant of the Thousand-Faced Stranger in the middle. Sorrow lets you bum somebody out, or cheer them up, which damages social rolls. Overall, I can't say that they're particularly useful powers - I feel like I'm missing part of the puzzle here, but I can't say why.
But the various Court-related powers also get a second set for each, this time manipulating a particular element associated with that season. But again, they don't exactly follow a theme. Summer allows you to feel comfortable no matter how hot or cold it is at its first level, illuminate a room at a second, boost your strength at the third (which is useful), destroy supernatural disguises (also useful) and generate true sunlight - the kind that kills vampires - at its fifth. The first two replicate the function of fan, a scarf, or a flashlight, which sort of leads me to believe that the first two dots may lie idle. Spring, by contrast, lets you rejuvenate somebody, summons down rain, heals somebody (very useful), cause something to grow to maturity instantly, or literally cause the plant life in the area to start attacking your enemies. You see how it sort of bounces around? Perhaps it's meant to replicate the flightiness of faeries, but I can't imagine players enjoying the fragmented nature of the power lists.
There's an interesting discussion here - http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=7834685 - where some people explained the use of the various Court powers. I'm not going to try to generate an overview of the thread, but there was a lot of stuff in there that I didn't pick up on. Particularly notable was the realization that the Mantle merit did a lot more than just give you social bonuses within a court and a special effect for your character; they give you dice bonuses, which get better as time goes on. Mantle of Summer has some really nice effects, including extra health levels, an extra bonus dice when you use Willpower on a Strength roll, free armor - basically, the stuff that I was thinking would be useful for fighting. But the details of the Mantle benefits are contained within the descriptions of the Courts, rather than in the description of the Mantle merit, so you have to jump around for information that could have easily been placed where it should have been.
What's really cool about the Contracts that the Changelings wield is that each power has a catch associated with it. If a certain precondition is met, then you can use your power for free - for instance, the Wizened can repair anything really well, but only if they're doing it for somebody that they don't know in exchange for a favor, a la The Elves and the Cobbler. Since each power has its own unique circumstance, players can save on Glamour and/or Willpower by doing a little prep work. There are some preconditions that are going to come down to fiat, or how well the player can argue. There's one power whose catch is that you have to have spent an hour walking barefoot on the grass within the last day, and the possibility exists that players will either have to retroactively argue that they did that yesterday - which spawns arguments - or that players will have to carefully detail what they do every day in order to keep certain Contracts flexible.
The generic powers allow you to get at the core stuff that Changelings can do. Changelings are able to manipulate dreams - walking around in them, armoring up inside of them, even teleporting from dream to dream, or pulling items out of dreams and into the real world. They can manipulate fate to a certain degree, which works well with the contract system, but also as a way to guarantee an automatic success if you really need to get something done. They can change their shape really well, starting with impersonation, moving to shrinking or growing, including a nice little set of bonuses for what basically amounts to fleshcrafting yourself, and ending with the ability to literally turn yourself into an inanimate object - a roulette wheel, a clock, a chair. The bonuses from the fourth level of the power alone are almost worth making it mandatory, because you can pick whatever bonus you'd like whenever you roll, rather than being stuck with a single application. The last generic power lets you hide marks of your passing, eventually stepping up to manipulating shadow and even becoming truly invisible.
The Goblin contracts, finally, give you specific bonuses - but they have little catches that make them hurt. You can drop the penalties associated with shooting a gun with a particular Goblin Contract, but it turns one of your next three shots into a chance roll. If you use one to open a locked door, then the local lowlifes find it easy to break into your place. None of the penalties are particularly crippling. In fact, a lot of them make the game more fun, because they inject plot complications that the players brought down on themselves. It's kind of neat.
In short, you've got a huge number of powers available to you, and a grand total of five dots to spend. At a bare minimum, you can put those dots into - let's see - four generic Contracts, one Seeming, two Mantle, one Goblin - you can put those five dots into eight separate powers, each with its own merits. I'm just at a loss to say how players are supposed to look at this and figure out just what the hell it is they want their character to do. I think that the problem could be fixed by giving you three dots in generic Contracts and five dots in Seeming or Court Contracts, because otherwise you're trying to cover too much with too little. That way, your character can have a backup specialty that lets him do something useful. (Thanks to James Gillen's most excellent review, I found that you don't have to buy your powers sequentially; you can buy them in any order you want, so you're not stuck with a dud power as a prerequisite for the power you do want.)
Let me offer my experience in making a character. I decided that I'd try to turn Jack Robat, one of my old pet Mage: The Ascension pet NPCs, into a changeling. He was an idealistic, smartss Ecstatic acrobat, and the victim of a bit of goobery on my part when I wrote him into Midnight Siege - and by the way, in MY world, he wasn't Camarilla-aligned, but I digress - but I figured that he'd make a good changeling because the core of his character was fundamentally medieval; he was a harlequin.
The first problem that I ran into is that he didn't really have a seeming that fit him. Figuring that his dexterity might have made him attractive as a playtoy, I created him as an Elemental - specifically, as a Mannequin Elemental. It worked pretty well up until I hit the powers section. I made him a Summer changeling, but found that none of the powers did anything for his character concept except for his Seeming, and his Seeming power only gave him power over various forms of glass. He could do some interesting stuff with it, but nothing that really supported the character concept. By the time that I was finished, my character didn't feel anything like my original concept. The fundamental core of his character was sarcasm, freedom and agility, not the ability to translocate himself through space, but that didn't survive. He wasn't the same character by the time he was done, and while that may be one of the points of the game, it didn't feel quite right.
With most World of Darkness games, you can come up with a relatively normal person and then turn him into a monster, roughly speaking. Jack would have made a pretty good Bone Shadow, Carthian of any variety, maybe a decent Galatean Promethean. (He'd be the Dunedain legacy, the one that acts as the mysterious avenger of wrongs.) In Changeling, however, the bones of his concept get broken quite a bit in order to fit into the game's concept. It is entirely possible that I'm missing the best way to translate him, but the first try didn't go so well.
Approaching it from another perspective would probably yield a better result - picking out your Seeming and your Court, then working backwards to make your character. The Courts reflect what your general outlook on life is, but they also serve to augment particular Seemings. If you're a Darkling, picking out the Autumn Court pretty much makes you the master of fear for your neighborhood. If you're an Ogre, the Summer Court augments your already fearsome strength-related abilities. At the same time, it's kind of like augmenting your strength with even more strength, or your spookiness with even more spookiness. It's kind of like putting chocolate sauce on chocolate ice cream. There's only so much chocolate that you can taste at any given time.
Anyways.
Besides the large number of Court powers, Changelings also get the ability to create contracts. Your Changeling can, essentially, grant people boons in exchange for favors. If the local cop agrees not to hassle you, then you can boost his ability to investigate crimes - but if he breaks his word, then his ability sours. If you swear your loyalty to the Summer King, and provide a tithe of glamour, he can drop a variety of benefits on you in exchange. You aren't limited to specific, pre-rendered oaths; rather, you create them using a built-in system, balancing out your oath's benefits with stuff like how bad the consequences are if you don't hold to your oath, or how long the oath lasts. You're also not limited to long-term oaths. If you just want to get the local street kid to show you where a good hiding place in the area is in exchange for a sudden rush of Faerie-generated cash, that's entirely do-able under the rules. For that matter, you could give the kid a day of the Giant Size merit. (Shades of Tom Hanks in Big.) You also have plot material for miles with a system like this. A single oath can provide an entire adventure, just because of how many people it can affect and why. Somebody makes a bad deal? The PCs can get you out of it, for a price. The local populace needs protection against a particularly nasty vampire? Make a deal with some kids to turn them into the Middle School Vampire Hunters. The local crime kingpin's done a deal with the local privateers to offer his resources in hunting free Changelings? Sure would be a shame if he couldn't follow through on his end of the deal.
You want to collect the teeth of every kid in the neighborhood, but there's another Changeling who already made a deal? Well, it's time to redo "The Tooth Fairy's Tats 2000". (Cartman is a Fairest whose Mien is of a fat kid, Kenny is a Promethean who's bought multiple resurrections, Stan is a Mage on the edge of Awakening, and Kyle - or Stan - is just a mortal who's a friend of theirs. You could make him a vampire, if you wanted.)
The social organization of the Changelings initially weirded me out a little, specifically because of how medieval it feels. Changelings organize themselves into freeholds, scattered kingdoms of refugees whose leadership rotates according to what season it is - so there's a King and Court of Spring, King and Court of Summer and so forth. The book explains the freehold system as explicitly rejecting the True Fae's focus on a single, unchanging season. Because they change, they're not the fae, but they're still able to connect themselves with something in the real world. I don't entirely buy it, personally, and I think that it has to do with the game's somewhat schizophrenic approach to the idea of Changelings.
As a matter of fact, here's as good a place as any to discuss that.The game seems to suffer from a sense of schizophrenia. I would say that might be suitable for a game that claims to be about "beautiful madness", but it really isn't; it isn't sure whether it's about coping with the aftereffects of Faerie, or trying to become part of it again. In the first few chapters, your status as a changeling is a bad thing. You've been ripped away from your life, you've been turned into something different, some alien thing is living your life, and you've got to see what you can do to get it back. But in order to do that, you spend all of your time with fellow refugees, make yourself a bolthole in the borderland between the place that you escaped from, and join up with Courts that seem focused on the same medieval mindset that the True Fae of Arcadia probably clung to. If you got your scalp pulled over your face like a paper towel dispenser by a rampaging grizzly, you're presumably not going to spend all of your time hanging out at Teddy Bear Junction, wearing a bear suit and watching Winnie the Pooh all day, right? And yet Changelings seem to do just that.
The game is about balancing your Faerie and human sides, but it just doesn't seem to follow. In many ways, Changeling: The Lost is the game for people who hated Changeling: The Dreaming; you're not supposed to like the True Fae, and you've underwent extreme trauma as the result of your experiences with the True Fae. That sense of trauma that must inform every Changeling's experiences just doesn't come through.
In fact, that comes through probably the worst in the Storytelling chapter. It's pretty much received wisdom that White Wolf can be pretentious, and that's true. But you can just feel the energy boiling off of some of the early White Wolf books; it's difficult to read the second edition of Mage: The Ascension when you're 17 or 18 and not feel the same kind of boiling, potent, we-could-really-do-something-with-this energy that they transmit. When they say "It's not just role-playing", you can feel the same creative energy that you'd use to write a novel starting up. When you're eighteen, at least.
The storytelling chapter in Changeling: The Lost, however, is pretentious. It seems, in fact, to have been written without having access to the first half of the book, where the cycle of escape and survival is established; instead, it's talking about imagining painter's palettes, Victorian ideas of madness, and how you can play up beautiful images that suddenly exhibit some form of ghastly turn. Lemme show you:
...Imagine an artist's palette, first of all, a color-box from which you, as Storyteller, will "paint" your chronicle: the locales, the characters, the weird quests and dream-remembered promises. Don't consider the actual colors yet, though. Instead, think about the properties of those colors. Imagine the bleak, painterly neutrals of the Hedge and the sharp, dry-brush edges of the thorns. Imagine the oversaturated, high-contrast variety of colors present at an august Court function. Imagine the textured patinas of a lost artifact unearthed, an untarnished metallic luster yielding into verdigis, or perhaps the luminous nacre of a pearl plucked from between a dead man's chalky fingers.
Or, even better, you could do what the rest of the book had been doing up to that point and actually showing us concrete examples, rather than having us imagine pictures. The sudden change in tone is quite frustrating. Even worse, the section later suggests that Changelings should be played as if they spent their entire lives in Faerie, so that they're basically autistic - Thanksgiving reminds them of Arcadia, but they don't understand why people are throwing the celebration. (In a game where the Changelings political structures revolve around the seasons? Huh?) You can play a game where all of the players are utterly unfamiliar with the real world, but it's going to get really annoying around the fortieth iteration of "What is the HOO-MAN invention you call FUDGE? You see, I am from FAERIE, and so need all human conventions explained to me as if I were a refugee from Star Trek doing my cutesy, tiresome Naive Outsider schtick. Also, what is the HOO-MAN convention you call CLOH-THENG?" It's quite frustrating, and I would recommend simply ignoring that section.
There is a somewhat useful section involving how to craft a story - by working backwards from the end - but I'm not sure that the focus on campaigns is useful in a day and age when the competition for free time is utterly ferocious. Long term games are hard to run, and while you do get some really nice results from long-term campaigns, it's harder to keep them together unless you're in college and have copious amounts of free time. That's perhaps a discussion for a later day. Anyhow.
The game really shines when it hits the sample NPCs, who illustrate the game's themes almost perfectly. There's a Wizened artist with a horrible secret, a Darkling movie fan who represents the survivor's trauma that I was talking about perfectly, a True Fae with a malicious secret - it's almost a shame that there aren't more of them, just because each character suggests something more about how to run a game. (The foppish dandy who would seem to be the ideal Changeling: The Dreaming character has a really nice sting to him.) There's a really decent section on Fetches, which is excellent considering how much story material you can generate just with a Changeling's interaction with his Fetch.
The prestige-class analogue for Changelings are the Entitlements, which - well, let's be honest; they're not that great. There's some great thematic ideas in here, but the mechanical benefits that you accrue from them are almost nil. For instance, the Magistrates of the Wax Mask, whose illustration suggests all sorts of Carcosa-esque shenanigans, essentially allows a character to get +3 on his Social rolls - and then he drops off to sleep after two hours, which kinda sucks. The Scarecrow Ministry is an excellent idea, but Lord, if an Autumn Court Darkling was chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce, then having him join the Scarecrow Ministry is like having that ice cream sundae shot into your body with a shotgun made of chocolate. They get a nice mask and some beautiful art, but you'd have to struggle again to justify why your Spring-aspected Satyr wants to be a member of a clearly Autumnal court. None of the Entitlements seem really worth it; they're interesting as organizations, but compared to the perks that other supernaturals pick up, they just aren't quite there.
The book rounds out with the Court of Miami, which, I think, doesn't really quite capture how good Changeling: The Lost can be. Because Miami's pretty much sunny year-round, the Court of Summer has declared that it holds permanent domain, destroying or negating the other three Courts in the process. And it's here again that you see the pigeonholing that tends to hurt the Changelings represented in the NPCs. The leader of the Spring Court is a wood elemental, the Summer court a flame elemental, while the Autumn Court's leader is a Darkling; there's no sense of thinking outside the box. The basic idea seems a little Vampireish, in that there's a corrupt leader who needs to be replaced or overthrown in order for things to go back to normal, but it's a principle that's worked well for White Wolf for a long time.
And, of course, that noxious newspaper story about the homeless kids who talk about Bloody Mary makes its appearance, which I am not happy with. The original story seemed exploitative enough on its own. To see it appear in an RPG seems doubly exploitative.
Overall, I would say that this is one of the strongest games that White Wolf has put out in recent years. It manages to solve the seemingly insoluble problem of how to play a Changeling without falling into trap of being overly cute or fey, gives Storytellers huge gobs of story meat to work their teeth on, and has room for expansion for miles.
At the same time, I can see players having a problem with it. I think that there are far too many powers and far too few points to spend them on; I think that players will have trouble coming up with a concept that fits with the game's rules, and I think that it's going to be a hard sell to players who aren't ready for the shift from more familiar games. I didn't get a chance to touch on the game's potential flirtation with victimization porn, although there's surely much to be discussed in that area.
But you can do so much with it. You can redo Tribe 8, or The Fisher King, or Big, or even - if you're feeling weird - Portal. (Think about it. Inhuman master, strange powers, escape that may not be an escape...) I've managed to touch on a few problems of the game, but for every problem, there's bits that I keep rolling over in mind, thinking about how they could be made into a really neat story. I can recommend it even if you don't like Changeling, even if you think that the game's warts aren't worth it, because it is, in every respect, worth the money that you'll pay and then some.
-Darren MacLennan
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