Winter is coming

[dorchadas]

When I was younger, I was a big fan of Vampire: the Masquerade. I ran a game of it at Penn, for greyselke, jdcohen, spacialk, t3chnomag3, and a couple other people for a year, through the Week of Nightmares and the political chaos as the Ventrue Primogen attempted to overthrow the Prince of Philadelphia. I still have the huge list I made of all the vampires in Philadelphia and their relationships. I even went to a Vampire LARP at schoolpsychnerd's behest, though I never took to it.

I was young, and vampires were monsters. This was a horror game! You were transformed into a terrible creature of the night forced to stalk the living, to drink blood to survive, and ground down under the feet of the elders. What an amazing setting.

Well, that was twenty years ago. Now that I'm older, I can see that Vampire, and Werewolf, and Mage all have the appeal of the young. In Vampire, you play a fledgeling vampire, thrust into a society in which you are at the bottom and all the people older than you have already taken all the power and authority for themselves. You're going to have to fight them and take it yourself. In Werewolf, corporations are literally killing the planet because they're evil, like Captain Planet villains. And in Mage, if you can't accomplish something it's because you didn't believe hard enough. Anything is possible if you have the will and drive to accomplish it.

But no, the real horror game for me now is Changeling. Changeling, which I had no idea what to do with as a kid, which posited faeries hidden in human bodies, trying desperately to keep their dreams alive against the crushing mundanity of the world, knowing that they will inevitably fail and become Undone, the mortal body taking over as the faerie soul sleeps until its next incarnation.

I used to have multiple weekly or biweekly games I played in, even during COVID. Then they dwindled to no weekly games, then only one biweekly game, and now...nothing. No physical dice have been rolled in my house in years. I look at my bookshelves full of RPGs and see not promise and a surfeit of ideas but the falling grains of an hourglass as I'm forced to admit that many, perhaps most, of the games I've bought will never be played and some of them may never even be read. Some of them I've owned for close to a decade and haven't even opened. There is simply not enough time.

And that's the message of Changeling, and of life. There's not enough time to accomplish all that you want to do, or even a portion of what you want to do. I used to read 80 books a year and my to-read list still never got any shorter. There are more good video games coming out now than I would ever have time to play even if I were a shut-in NEET, much less as a family man. I lived in Japan for years and did not get to go to all the places I wanted to in the Chūgoku region, much less Japan, much less East Asia. I've been playing Hollow Knight for six months because I keep using the time I could be playing it to work on my Cataclysm mod. You have to pick and choose, and the doors you open mean that, by necessity, other doors close. Even by staying up to write this, I've closed the door on getting a full eight hours of sleep.

The horror of Changeling is not that you will die--though of course, you will--but that life will grind you down and narrow your vision and crush your dreams to the point that the you of twenty years ago would avert their eyes in disgust, or simply would not recognize you, if they had to see the you now.

Probably going to stay up a bit longer.

Comments

[annofowlshire]

Yeah, all of this. Changeling was relevant to me as a young misunderstood artsy kid who wanted to secretly be full of magic (but I never really understood *playing* it.) Now it's relevant to me as a middle-aged woman who is trying to not let her metaphorical fairie soul fade away. I still think about banality, and the mundane world, but I resent that I'm considered an old Grump for being over the age of 25! I'm not nearly wise enough for that.

[dorchadas]

You can absolutely tell the game was written by a bunch of 20-somethings. "Twenty five? You're nearly dead by then. Pack it in." One nice thing about the 20th anniversary edition they put out is that Seeming is based on mental attitude instead of age--if you're a 15-year-old who thinks everything sucks and all the best music came out before you were born, you're a Grump. If you're a thirty-five-year-old who just met the love of your life and every day feels like the beginning of summer vacation, you'll switch over to Childling.

When I was younger, I wanted to play/run Vampire and read Changeling. Now it's mostly the other way around!

[gwendraith]

> I was a big fan of Vampire: the Masquerade

I've got the book and played LARP in a upstairs room in a pub. I was a Tremere called Franchesca Lucescu. I was an older LARP beginner and the youngsters were patient until I got the hang of it. I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the time which has a huge White Wolf games following.

I have to admit I never understood Changeling.

[dorchadas]

With an actual castle looming over the city, I feel like Edinburgh is a much better city to have a Vampire LARP than I place I played it (in a middle-of-the-cornfields farming town).

I have to admit I never understood Changeling.

I think that Changeling did a lot to make itself harder to understand. Like, it's about the death of dreams, but the idea that science is the death of hope that they imported from Mage and Werewolf makes no sense considering all the scientists who say in interviews that watching or reading sci fi as a kid got them into science. The "Changelings fight dragons but no one can see them" thing also made it so they seemed like they were in a different world than everyone else. It had a bit of an identity crisis it never really got over.

[tcpip]

Damn. Yeah, Changeling was always the really quirky one of that set, and you've really hit on something quite special here.

Would it be OK to republish this with credits?

[dorchadas]

Please do!

It was a game before its time.

[corvi]

I never played a white wolf game but certainly knew plenty of people who did, learned enough by osmosis to appreciate your insight here.

Last RPG I played was ... two years ago? Three years ago? A oneshot for a friend's birthday.

[dorchadas]

What game was it?

[corvi]

Iron Claw, vaguely D&Dish with anthropomorphic animals, though I think our version was pretty house-ruled. I was one of the few people who'd played a TTRPG before, so I decided to be a tanky armadillo so there was someone to absorb combat damage.

[dorchadas]

I've heard of that one! Or at least, I've heard of Jadeclaw, which I think is similar? Another one of those RPGs I've never gotten the chance to play.

[corvi]

Looked it up, and apparently Jadeclaw is the same system but with different available races and skills (with vaguely oriental flavour). Includes non-mammals, which sounds pretty fun, actually.

The armadillo was statted as a barbarian-ish warrior, but I bought him some scholarly skills and played him as a meticulous botanist who absolutely lost it (raged) when his extremely fancy clockwork terrarium hat was threatened (the GM had enemies accidentally hit the hat on the rebound or something whenever I wanted to use rage). Not a complex character, but fun for a birthday one-shot. Would enjoy revisiting him ... sometime.

A bunch of people on tumblr are making 200-word games and it's been interesting reading them. You ever do something like that?

[dorchadas]

a meticulous botanist who absolutely lost it (raged) when his extremely fancy clockwork terrarium hat was threatened

This sounds like a Studio Ghibli character to me. You could build a Miyazaki movie around a ten-year-old protagonist with the armadillo as their traveling companion.

You ever do something like that?

No, I haven't! A long time ago I played through a game of Hikikomori. It's slightly longer than 200 words I think, but it's a similar very focused concept. What's the best 200-word RPG you've read?

[corvi]

I don't have a best one, but I have been watching some of the entries this year and here are some I thought were interesting, either for being evocative (can't fit any worldbuilding in 200 words, you gotta make the player do it), sounded like fun, or struck me as clever. I think a lot of people who have never written an RPG before participate in this, so I don't know if any of them are playable, but I really enjoy reading them (and was curious if you'd ever done something like that). I want to try making one sometime.

• The Fountain of Immortality - evocative


• Altimeter Red - evocative


• Get me pictures of spider-man!!!! - sounds like fun


• Space Station Collision - clever prisoner's dilemma


• Trash Animals - not really an RPG, but evocative


• Wizard Heist - clever tic tac toe

[corvi]

Another one I liked that, like Trash Animals, is maybe more of a fun concept to read than an actual playable game showed up today: Somnowarrior.