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I'll review the book on a rough chapter-by-chapter basis. As in previous reviews I've written, I should point out that I've never played (nor even seen) its predecesor from the old World of Darkness line, Changeling: The Dreaming, so no comparisons to the latter game will be made. I will generally assume the reader to be familiar with the new World of Darkness core book, though hopefully not to the point of complete incomprehensibility otherwise.
The Book Itself
I don't normally resort to hyperbole, but forgive me one lapse here: the cover of the book is absolutely beautiful. Honestly, the picture on the right doesn't even do it justive. It's basically a picture of a mass of thorns, with a subtly hidden clock-face in the background, and what appears to be a moth impaled on one of the thorns, but really the cover is the nicest I've ever seen on an RPG book. All the new World of Darkness books are good-looking (even the core book isn't bad), but this is the best of them. My only complaint would be the ever-so-slightly pretentious declaration "A story-telling game of beautiful madness" on the cover, but firstly, hey, this is White Wolf; some pretentiousness is pretty much mandatory, and secondly, it's in a fairly small font.
Inside, well the whole book isn't quite up to the standards of the cover, but it's still fairly impressive. Most of the artwork is very good (I can't actually recall any horrible pieces) and because almost all of the text is still black-on-white, with the green being reserved for pictures and borders, it manages to be readable as well as pretty (Mage, with its gold writing, fell a bit short here). The Court and Seeming descriptions (wait a bit) are black-on-green, which is less good, but not disastrous. The book seems pretty sturdy.
I detected absolutely no spelling errors or typos, which is almost nothing short of miraculous.
The index is suspicuously short, but I spotted no obvious omissions. I haven't made a serious attempt to use it.
Opening Fiction, Contents, Introduction and other such things
The book opens with a piece called "What Alec Bourbon said". I wasn't massively impressed, but there's nothing really wrong with it.
Each chapter, as is the WoD tradition, begins with a very short piece of fiction accompanied by a full-page illustration. The illustrations are generally excellent; the fiction is a bit hit-and-miss, but some of it's OK. There's not a lot you can do with 300-odd words.
There's also the usual introduction. It starts with an actual introduction, which basically sums up the game, follows it with a list of sources and inspiration (I was very pleased to see Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel among this collection.), and finishes with a glossary. The later is probably the only really useful bit of the introduction, as it tells you what the Changeling terms for all the usual WoD concepts are. That is Wyrd (note spelling. ?!?) for level, Motley for player-party, Contracts for kewl poworz, Glamour for mana, Seeming for class (well, more like race, really, but hey) and so on.
Hm, perhaps that came across as slightly cynical. It is true that every WoD game has all of the above concepts (for example, the Mage equivalents are Gnosis, Cabal, Arcana, Mana and Path) and some. But the formulaic approach does have the advantage of making rules easy to grasp if you're already familiar with one of the other games, and it doesn't feel too forced.
There are new concepts unique to Changeling. The Glossary is pretty comprehensive on most of this. It's a slight pity it couldn't be right at the beginning of the book for easy reference rather than 17 pages in, but that's a very minor niggle.
Chapter 1: Setting
Technically its called "The World behind the Mask", but I'll settle for slightly more descriptive chapter-headings. This is the pure-fluff chapter that explains what changelings are all about. I'll give a very brief overview; the chapter describes everything better (but not in so much detail that you get bored reading it).
Changeling were originally human. They were captured by faeries (usually as children), they were held prisoner by the faeries in Arcadia (basically a nightmarish world in which the faeries live), with creatures that look exactly like them called Fetches put in their place in the mortal world so that no one would notice they had gone. Eventually (probably after many years), somehow, they escaped from their captors and returned to the world.
That's the basis of it. In the process of being captured and escaping, they were altered, becoming something like faeries themselves. There's a bit more: there's a very strange place called the Hedge (much what it sounds like) between the mortal world and Arcadia, changelings are good at manipulating dreams; changelings appear normal to humans due to an illusion called the Mask (which makes them look as they did prior to capture) but look strange and faerie-ish to other changelings... oh, and the Courts.
Ah yes. I often wonder why White Wolf seems determined to include politics in all their games, even those in which it clearly doesn't seem to fit. It's a particularly strange mesh with Changeling, which doesn't seem like it should be about politics at all, but here goes. Courts are the usual player organisations, equivalent to Orders, Tribes and Covenants (Hm, I notice Promethean doesn't have an equivalent. Refinements are not orgnaisations. Chalk one mark in its favour), distinguished only by the fact that there are four of them rather than five. My initial reaction was that this was a disastrous idea. I never liked the Orders in Mage much; they didn't seem to make much internal sense to me, particularly as they were all apparently globe-spanning, and their philosophies don't seem to be clearly defined. But at least I could accept the idea of Mages politiking. But faeries... I mean, come on.
However that was before I read the actual descriptions (another organisation complaint here: the orders come in the middle of chapter one, with no fanfare, and no easy way of referring quickly to them. Ahem.)
There are four Courts, after the four seasons. Each has a simple, easy-to-state and entirely reasonable philosophy about life as a changeling. In summary:
Spring: Live life to the fullest and try to put your capture behind you. Summer: Wreak bloody vengeance upon the True Fae (the afore-mentioned faerie captors) for what they did to you. Autumn: Study the changeling magic, condition, and the hedge and the fae to discover more about it. Winter: Hide and hope the True Fae never find you again.
I really, really like these. It's hard to think of a character-concept that wouldn't ascribe to one of these philosophies, and the game even seriously considers the possibility of being Courtless (there's no mechanical advantage to it, but at least it gets a proper mention, unlike in Mage). Also, Courts aren't merely political organisations. They're more like ancient bargains with the seasons themselves that changelings can "buy into", in a sense. In fact, the way I read it, a changeling could in principle become a member of a Court without ever meeting another courtier, if they could work out how to make a bargain with the season in question (changelings are all about bargains. See later). Another courtier would probably make it easier by showing them how to do it, but it could be done alone.
But they are political organisations, for the most part, at the same time. At least, members of a Court in a given area (city, region, whatever) will probably work together, though there's a strong suggestion that there's actually very little contact at all between different branches of the same Court. I can forgive all this for several reasons.
Firstly, there isn't another level of politiking. Courts are it. We don't have Consiliums, Heirarchs and all that lot (I'm looking at you, Mage).
Secondly there are a lot of very good reasons for changelings to work together. They trivially-easily recognise one another (thanks to the Mask and the fact that changelings see straight through it). They need the protection of each other against the True Fae in case they come back. They're all a little mad and eccentric, and can't really talk about their condition to non-changelings. They often can't (and certainly can't easily) get their old lives back, because there's a fetch in their place. And so on. This is excellent design (and by the way, is a major issue with Promethean. There aren't any natural reasons for Prometheans to work together and those that are added feel very forced).
In summary, I actually think the Courts work, though I'd never have believed it without reading the book.
Oh, one last thing. Each Court is associated with an emotion. For Spring (Desire) and Summer (Wrath) this makes perfect sense and accords with the general philosophy. For Winter (Sorrow) it seems slightly off (surely fear would have made more sense) and for Autumn (Fear) it leaves me scratching my head. But it's not a big issue.
Chapter 2: Character Creation
Pretty much as it says on the tin. This is a rather long chapter. It starts with a step-by-step character-creation guide, then gives a 2-page summary of what extra traits changelings possess. Then it begins to discuss all the new elements in detail. Oh, except that there's a bit about storytelling a prelude (which strikes me as a lot more interesting in Changeling than other WoD games, since quite a bit happens in it) that seems as if it would have fitted better in the storytelling section.
OK, then, in order:
We start with Wyrd, the Changeling "raw magical power" trait, equivalent of Blood Potency or Primal Urge. As we've become used to by now, having a high Wyrd is generally a very good thing, though it comes with a few drawbacks as well. In terms of mechanical effects, the main reason to have a high Wyrd is that it adds to all contract (magical power) rolls, and as with all the other equivalent traits, adds to roll to resist other supernatural powers. High Wyrd also makes a character generally weirder (wyrder?), affecting their dreams, and allows the character to have more Glamour (basically spell points / mana), spend more Glamour per turn and have more active Pledges (a rather interesting changeling-unique mechanic that I'll get to later).
So far, so predictable. Unfortunately, I think the designers missed a trick here. There are a number of other cool and exciting effects of Wyrd... but all of them apply only when Wyrd is higher than 6. Now I can't see many chronicles lasting long enough to get changelings to 6+ Wyrd. The book doesn't really support that, anyway: it's implied that having 6+ Wyrd lets you have Contracts rated at 6+ too (much like Gnosis/ Arcana. I'll stop referencing Mage at some point. Perhaps.), and there are no 6+ Contracts in the book. All of the Changeling antagonists in the book, bar one, have Wyrd 5 or less.
Consequently, most of this cool stuff will never get used. The most interesting bit is Frailties, which give high-Wyrd changelings Taboos (things they cannot/must do, like entering houses without permission or turning right as crossroads) and Banes (specific weaknesses that harm the changeling, like church bells or having-one's-name-said-backwards).
There's also Glamour-addiction (6+ again), increased interest by the True Fae (pretty much still 6+) and the ability to "Incite Bedlam" (still 6+), which seems a bit random, and doesn't really become useful until about Wyrd 8 (it's basically forcing people to feel very strong emotions).
For my part, I'll certain lower the Frailties' minimum-Wyrd requirements, and possibly those of Glamour-addiction too. I like the idea of there being real drawbacks to a high magical ability.
Next up is Glamour, which gets a brief going-over. The only really new information you get is how to acquire points of it; this is done by feeding off the emotions of mortals. At least, that's the usual way.
The main problem with this mechanic is that it makes harvesting really easy. Since you don't need to touch a mortal, and mortals aren't aware that they're being harvested, a changeling can't really be stuck without a Glamour source unless there are no mortals anywhere near them. (Other changelings can't be harvested for Glamour). Given a bit of time (a few hours) in a built-up-area, it strikes me as hard for a storyteller to justify not allowing a character to refill their entire Glamour pool (actually, a changeling with no emotion-related magic might have a little more trouble than that, but certainly anyone with Fleeting Court Contracts (more on them later) should have no trouble.)
Now this isn't a bad thing, in some ways. It's certainly better than the alternative (making Glamour too difficult to harvest), but given the neat way Willpower-recovery works (easy enough, but not trivial, and basically forces you to role-play), one feels there ought to be something better.
Vampires also feed off mortals, but their feeding is inherently a bit more risky than a changelings', because they have to actually attack their victim. Changelings don't even have to interact with them.
The main problem with this is that it pretty much makes a lot of other potential sources of Glamour (particularly Pledges, which I'll get to later, and which generally provide something of the order of 1 Glamour per week) almost totally useless, and further, because Glamour is so easy to get, makes using contract Catches (more on them later, too) to avoid Glamour-expenditure, unlikely. Harvesting emotions from dreams allows a changeling to add their Wyrd to the roll, but requires getting access to a mortal's dreams in the first place. I'll make a minor complaint here, which applies generally throughout the book, that this simple fact about dream-harvesting takes three long paragraphs to express; the writers seem to from time to time take a great deal of space to explain a single, very simple rule. Mechanics should be clearly and simply stated; mixing them up in the middle of a lot of (sometimes quite useful) flavour-text is not helpful. I think Changeling (and probably all of the WoD line, actually) could really do with some separation of flavour-text from actual mechanics, or at least a summary of mechanics related to, say, dreams, in one place. This would, of course, also allow designers to more easily spot major and minor inconsistencies in rules (this isn't a major problem in Changeling, but some other WW products have it in spades).
Ahem. I seem to be getting a bit sidetracked. Anyway, the basic idea is cool (playing through the whole harvesting scene each time will quickly get old and there are no rules for speeding up the process, but I'm sure most GMs will manage), and, as I said, too easy access to Glamour is better than too hard.
What's next? Oh, yes, Clarity. Clarity is Morality for Changelings. Now, as I said in my review of the core WoD book, I really don't like the Morality system, and the modifications to turn it into Clarity don't make me any better-inclined towards it. Quite the reverse, actually: as has been mentioned in another review it seems to be trying to measure several different things on the same scale, it's specifically stated that you cannot raise Clarity through actions, only xp, and there are still no significant game-mechanical effects of Clarity to actually encourage people to spend the extortionate quantities of xp required to raise it.
To explain, Clarity/Morality is basically a Sanity/Morality (yes, both at once. That's one complaint) measure. High values are good; low are bad; everyone starts at 7, and it's rated 0-10. My basic problem with it is that the mechanics don't really tie it into actual behaviour in any sensible or consistent way. Clarity falls, based on random dice rolls, by 1 point whenever something happens to you/ you do something, that exceeds your current threshold (only massive life-changes and heniously immoral acts qualify at Clarity 1; anything even remotely dubious or tiny changes to routine qualify at Clarity 10). Clarity rises only if you spend xp on it (and towards the top end, rather a lot of xp, actually). In practice, almost everyone will settle down to Clarity 5-7 and try not to fall any further.
There are then a few new merits, most of which make sense and are sensibly-costed (in a bit of a shocker, actually). The only one worthy of additonal mention is Mantle, which basically indicates how closely tied you are into your Court. So, for example, Mantle(Winter) represents affinity with the Winter Court. A character can only have one Mantle merit. Mostly it's useful as a prerequisite to Court Contracts and as an adder to their dice pools, though it has small mechanical benefits itself (which, oddly, aren't mentioned in the description of the merit itself, only in the Court descriptions in the previous chapter).
Then we get onto Seemings, which are basically race. There are Beasts, Elementals, Ogres, Wizened (goblins/brownies and so on), Darklings (things that go bump in the night) and Fairest (flower faeries and similar).
Now I like the concepts for these a lot. They seem to encompass neatly virtually any faerie you might think of. There are also kiths, which are like sub-seemings, and seem a lot less all-encompassing, but it is basically implied that you can think up your own.
Each seeming gets a blessing and a curse. The blessings mostly allow you to spend Glamour to increase certain dice pools on a one-for-one basis. This is very expensive, but potentially very powerful if used sparingly. It does seem to me that there ought to be a cap on just how much Glamour you can spend per roll, possibly equal to your Wyrd. But hey, I don't think it's broken as it is. Not until very high Wyrd levels allow you to spend stupid amounts of Glamour if you want.
The curses generally cause you to lose the "re-roll 0s" rule on certain other dice pools. This is usually a minor penalty. All of the blessings and curses are flavourful and make sense for the seemings, though with just a little thought they could have been made a lot more consistent (a lot of things work slightly differently from seeming to seeming).
Each kith has a minor blessing too. Others than Mirrorskins (a type of Darkling), which are massively powerful, I have no real complaints with these.
The chapter ends with Contracts, which bear talking about in some detail.
Contracts are changelings' magical powers. The basic flavour is much as it sounds; contracts are agreements with... something (usually an abstract concept) to help you. For example, a contract of Darkness that makes you stealthier is an agreement by darkness to hide you. This is a nice concept, though little about the mechanics actually reinforces it.
They basically work much like the magical powers in other WoD games (Mage excepted, of course). One has to buy powers in a given contract in sequence: so the 1-dot Hearth power must be bought before the 2-dot one. (the individual powers are called "Clauses", which continues the theme; "Contract" means all five in a given set)
There are a total of 18 standard Contracts in the book, and a number of special "Goblin Contracts", which are bought as individual powers out of sequence.
Each Contracts has a "Catch", some way of using it without paying the cost (always Glamour and occasionally Willpower as well, much as you might expect). Examples are "the changeling looks into the subjects eyes", "The subject is carrying a photograph of an older relative", "the changeling has made the subject happy within the last ten minutes".
These are an interesting idea. They usually make some sense in the context of the clause in question (there are one or two totally random head-scratchers, but not many). Some are easy to qualify for (the first of the examples above, say); others are much harder, but this isn't itself a problem.
I'm not convinced they actually work all that well, though. They're one extra thing to remember (the catch, while sometimes making sense, as I said, is never at all obvious from a description of what the clause does), and because of the ease of getting Glamour, the difficult ones will almost never be used, while the easy ones just force the player to specify that they're doing X before activating a clause, which doesn't really add anything to the game, quite the reverse.
Anyway, it's easy to ignore them if you don't like them, and I for one would certainly try using them to begin with, in case I've mis-judged them.
Where was I? OK, to the Contracts themselves:
For the most part, I think they work well. With one exception (Favoured Fate, the 2-dot Clause from the Contract of Hearth, is amazingly good) none of them seem over-powered in themselves. All of them (except the 2-dot and higher Court Contracts, which I'll get to in a moment) require the player to roll (attribute or skill)+Wyrd to activate, making Wyrd very useful indeed.
There seems to be a bit of confusion in some areas as to whether "roll (defensive attribute)+Wyrd against an aggressor's roll" or "subtract (defensive attribute) from aggessor's roll" is the appropriate way to resist something (yes, I know the game supports both. I think the wrong choice has been made in some cases, and I'm also dubious about the fact that the latter renders Wyrd as resistance irrelevant, allowing some very powerful mind-affecting abilities to work regardless of their target's raw-Wyrd, e.g. on the True Fae). Some of the powers seem a bit randomly-distributed, but the flavour almost manages to make that seem like a virtue, due to the "ancient bargain with forces of nature" shtick.
Then there are Court Contracts, which require you to be a member of the appropriate Court (or have the Court Goodwill merit, technically, but that's very expensive and has drawbacks) and have a suitable high Mantle rating to purchase and use. Each court has two Contracts, a "Fleeting" and "Eternal" version. Now, the Eternal Contracts let you manipulate the season physically: making it warmer, making it rain, accelerating plant growth, and so on. Some of them heal or inflict damage. They're mostly alright. The Fleeting contracts let you manupulate the Court's signature emotion, and many of them are very powerful mind-affecting abilities, perhaps too powerful. There's a tendancy to make number of successes rolled determine the duration of the effect, not it's strength, meaning that anyone can trivially have their mind warped for at least the remainder of the scene, which is a bit strong.
I'm more than slightly worried by the fact that, for the 2-dot Court Clauses and beyond , instead of rolling (attribute or skill)+Wyrd, you roll (attribute)+(skill)+(relevant Mantle). Oh, and there's actually what I assume is an error in the description of the 1-dot Eternal Spring power, in that it too uses the a+s+Mantle roll, unlike all seven other 1-dot Court contracts which use a/s + Wyrd. Anyway, this makes for a much higher dice pool. Not only do you get two attributes/skills in the pool, but most starting characters will have Mantle much higher than Wyrd. Characters could quite easily get dice pools of ten or more with this sort of roll (note: this is not Exalted or Scion: 10 is a lot ), and that's without even really trying. It makes resisting those contracts that are targeted and hostile virtually impossible (since the dice pool to resist is (defence/resolve/composure/stamina)+Wyrd or even just a subtraction of (defence/resolve/composure/stamina) ). I think those rolls could do with looking at.
And finally, there are Goblin Contracts, which are individual powers with their own dot-rating. They each have a significant drawback, which materialises some time after their use. These are pretty cool, but I'm not sure if they're really worth investing in by comparison with the non-Goblin ones. Time will, as always, tell.
Chapter 3: Special Rules and Systems
This chapter has five basic sections. There's a brief discussion of what being a changeling is like and what special rules apply to them. There are then longer sections on Pledge-crafting, Dream-manipulation, Tokens (basically magical items) and the Hedge (the mysterious tangle of plants and thorns that exists between the mortal world and Arcadia).
The first bit is very brief, because really, changeling are very much like mortals. They're eminently fragile (easily more than any of the other four supernaturals in nWoD to date; even Mages have easy access to armour-boosting spells), don't live much longer than humans (even those with Wyrd 10 live only about 3 mortal lifetimes, and at low Wyrd there's barely any difference), and they don't even really have any specific weaknesses. Cold Iron is immune to and may disrupt changeling magic, however. It also deals Agg damage to True Fae, which is potentially useful. I actually like all of this. It's nice to have PCs who'll actually have to worry about getting injured and hurt, and who need to eat and sleep and all that. And the rules for cold iron are quite cool.
Then we have Pledge-crafting.
This is basically exactly what it sounds like. Changelings are able to use their Wyrd to seal bargains, and oaths. It makes perfect sense to allow them to do this sort of thing; fairy-tales are full of this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of the mechanics (I seem to recall saying that before). Firstly, they're quite complicated, which is in itself not good. I'll try to summarise.
Changelings are limited to a number of pledges at one time equal to their Wyrd plus three, plus one extra for anything they can think of the specifically swear on (their true name, their status in an organisation, their fae-captor's name, another changeling; there are some rules given). This is, I should point out, a rather large number. Even for a starting character it's easily 8 or more, so I can't actually imagine any changeling wanting to exceed this limit, which sort of leaves one confused as to why it's there in the first place.
Each pledge consists of any number of up to three types of component: tasks, boons and sanctions. Detailed examples of each are provided. Tasks are things that one party in the oath promises to do, give, or whatever. Sanctions are magical wyrd-inspired penalties that will strike one or both parties if they violate the terms of the oath.
Boons are where I think most of the problem comes from. They're basically the opposite of Sanctions: magical wyrd-inspired bonuses that parties to the oath get if they keep their word. They can give skill or merit bonuses, give glamour, and do a few other things.
The problem with this is that it encourages changelings to swear oaths just to get the boons, and this is where the rather complex balancing-system comes in to try (and fail) to prevent that. Bascially, you add up the strength of the tasks and sanctions involved in the oath, and you can have boons equal to that value (every possible task, sanction and boon has an associated number). There's nothing to stop one party of the oath getting all the boons and the other all the tasks and sanctions, but presumably no one would swear such an oath in the first place if on the wrong side.
Of course, this is trivial to twink. You swear an oath with no (hm. Actually, as a GM, I think I would bar pledges with no tasks involved) or a very minor and easy task, but with huge and horrible sanctions. You then get similarly large boons at very little cost. Alternatively, you swear an oath with a horrendously difficult task, but which can't be completed until some time in the future, and no sanctions at all (this latter is valid; there are examples in the book with no sanctions), and again get the boons. Of course you break the oath shortly afterwards, but there are no sanctions, so it doesn't matter, and you immediately re-swear the same oath.
Now this is clearly not in the spirit of things, but it's very hard for a GM to justify not allowing players to do exactly that. In fact, it even makes IC sense.
Now I understand why the Boons are there in the first place. The designers wanted to allow the whole "fairy makes life easier for a mortal by making them rich / attractive / healthy" sort of thing, without forcing the changeling to take contracts to do that sort of thing and trying to balance them so that they weren't broken when used by changelings on other changelings. It wouldn't be difficult to fix, though. Ditch Boons and the whole number-balancing system. All existing Boons becomes Tasks, mostly only performable by changelings for a mortal, and probably costing the changeling so much Glamour per week or so. The Boon that allows changelings to trasfer Glamour between them should clearly have been a Task anyway.
Ahem. Right.
(Oh, there are some fairly cool sample pledges, too)
Next up is dreams.
Changelings can manipulate dreams. There's a lot of perfectly reasonable flavour-text about dreams. The biggest problem with this section is very poor organisation of mechanical information. There's rather a lot of game-mechanical stuff, but it's all mixed up higgelty-piggelty with oceans of description and is virtually impossible to untangle. It badly needs a mechanics-summary at the beginning or end. I detected no major problems with the rules, but it's hard to be sure the way it's laid out.
Then we have tokens. Just one complaint here (all the examples are cool and interesting). There are three ways to activate a token: spend 1 Glamour, roll your Wyrd in dice and hope for a success, or use the token's Catch (these are better than Contract catches, for the most part; requiring you to actually do something difficult or painful); the last option being the only one available to non-changelings.
The problem is, there seems to be zero penalty for failing the Wyrd roll (it's specifically stated that the token's drawback, if it has one, doesn't activate if the roll is failed, unless a dramatic failure is rolled), so there's absolutely no reason not to try the Wyrd-roll first (and successively until you run out of a dice pool, if your Wyrd is higher than 1), so no one's going to spend Glamour unless they make a succession of really unlucky rolls. Personally, I think the system would work better if one had to spend 1 Glamour and roll Wyrd to activate a token without the token's Catch.
But yes, the sample tokens are cool. They're rated 1-5 in dots, with the more powerful having higher ratings, but this seems to be relevant only for the purposes of buying them at character-gen. There are 0-dot tokens called Trifles, that seem to be very similar (other than the need to pay 1 Glamour/ roll Wyrd to activate) to Goblin Fruits (next section), so one wonders why they aren't treated together. One of them even is a fruit.
The final section is on the Hedge. It suffers slightly from the same problems as the dreams section (poor organisation), but not to the same degree. There are fewer mechanics in this section anyway (just a few about navigating the Hedge). I like all the flavour-text; this is very solid section.
Goblin Fruits get a mention: they're basically fruits found in hedge which generally do interesting things when eaten. Some of them aren't actually fruits, and can't be eaten, but have odd powers anyway. Very strangely, they're mentioned as a potential source of Glamour in the Glamour section in chapter 2, but there are no actual examples given here of fruits which restore Glamour.
Then we start talking about the things that live in the Hedge. This is where the Changeling book as a whole truly shines (here and later on in the Storytelling section)- it is very good at presenting antagonists and ideas for antagonists, far better than most of the other WW books I've read recently. Changelings, the True Fae, and Hobgoblins (strange fae-like creature that live in the Hedge) all get mentioned.
There's then a good example of play within the hedge, which I found very useful.
Chapter 4: Storytelling
Changeling breaks with all established tradition by actually have a decent GMing chapter.
It doesn't, lamentably, begin very well: the first page or so is pretensious claptrap. However, things improve.
There's some vaguely useful advice about where to set a campaign, then an example of designing one (which seems a bit rail-roady to me, but opinions may differ). Then the chapter gets actually good, by providing several ideas for a central campaign plot. Next we have a long-ish section on Fetches, the fae-created creatures left behind in the place of changelings (including the PCs) so that they won't be missed. This is very good indeed. It discusses all sorts of ways of using fetches, including the possibility of them being sympathetic, and perhaps not even aware of their identity. It presents simple (and therefore functional- a lot of games have a tendancy to fall apart worse the more complex they get, and changeling is no exception) rules for magical powers that fetches have. They're generally a lot weaker and more specific than changeling abilities; this is not a problem.
Almost all of the remainder of the chapter is devoted to various types of antagonist for PCs, from mortals to True Fae. It is, however, easily one of the best sections of the book, providing both good general advice about how to use antagonist and excellent examples to drop into a campaign (or adapt slightly, if you're feeling less lazy).
There's a final short section on Goblin Markets, which are a bit weird (this seems to be one of the themes of changeling, though, so that's all right. They do seem slightly out of place here, however; one wonders why they're not in the setting chapter or even chapter 3. They seem like the kind of thing you would expect PCs to know about. However.
Appendices
There are two. One on Entitlements, the by-now-familiar nWoD prestige-class equivalent, and the other with the default setting of Miami.
Entitlements are a bit unusual. They have basically no mechanical impact (you generally get a unique free token upon joining one, but this is a minor benefit); they're more like mini-Courts, really, with philiosophies and small effects upon the character's mien (faerie appearance). They all seem reasonably interesting, if (again) a bit weird. I could take or leave them, but the way they're presented it's easy to do exactly that. Some of them contain interesting plot-hooks, too.
The default setting presents quite a lot of interesting antagonists to add to those in the storytelling chapter, but the whole logic behind it's design leaves me very puzzled indeed (I suppose I should add that, as a Brit, I know nothing whatsoever about Miami except that it's in America, so I can't comment on the veracity).
Basically, it presents a very political campaign. The ruler of the city's Summer Court has refused to give up power for several years (normally rulers rotate with seasons) and this is upsetting the balance of nature, letting True Fae in and, oh, everything. Now given that, there's very little wrong with the setup. There are lots of interesting characters and divided loyalties, and the assumption seems to be that eventually the PCs will work out as way to remove the Summer Court ruler and restore the seasonal rulership. But what I can't understand is why the writers of this self-proclaimed game of "beautiful madness" thought it was a good idea to make the focus of its signature campaign politics. It simply makes no sense. There's a large dichotomy between the game that the designers seem to be trying to tell you to run, and the game that they present for you in the appendix.
I remain confused.
Summary
I will say this now: for all my criticisms in various bits of this review, I was very impressed indeed with changeling as a whole. The game is full of creativity, for the most part its mechanics work nicely, and the overall flavour is absolutely wonderful. On top of that, the storyteller section actually works, and leaves me full of ideas about things to throw at players.
I do think it would have benefited from a more thorough going-over to improve consistency of mechanics in a few places, but my main issue with the game is something different. In many ways, it's just a more general statement of the problem I noted with the Miami setting: in the hands of most GMs (including myself, I might add, were I to get round to running a game), changeling is going to be a players-with-certain-magical-abilities-compete-in-various-ways-over-a-period-of-time-with-other-individuals-much-like-themselves-to-achieve-their-ends sort of game, much like, say, Mage, or (to move away from WW), Unknown Armies. With differences, granted, and certainly a very good example of such a game, but at basis, exactly that. And the setup of the Courts, and Entitlements, and especially the Miami setting, all reinforces that, as, for the most part (hobgoblins and True Fae notwithstanding) does the antagonists section of the storytelling chapter.
Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The only problem is, that doesn't really seem to be the game the designers intended to create. The tagline, pretensious though it is, "beautiful madness" and all, and the opening to the storyteller chapter, and even the introduction, confirm that they wanted changeling to be something a bit different from that; something weirder, something more like a faerie tale, in fact. And in that, I'd have to claim they have failed. I'm not saying it would be impossible to try to run changeling that way, only that most of the elements in the book don't actually support it.
Does this mean changeling is a bad product? Of course not, but it does end up being a slightly schizophrenic one in places, and it isn't really quite what it claims to be.
I'm done.
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