White Wolf Devlog 6: Changeling
My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling. I've run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more.
I don't know if I'll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes.
Seelie vs Unseelie
The book began by saying 'Seelie' does not mean 'good', and 'Unseelie' does not mean evil, then instantly forgot its own advice. Every paragraph associated the Unseelie fae with bedlam and banality, with slavery and death. The Unseelie clearly received the role of the 'bad guys' at every turn.
To fix this issue, I would like to rewrite a lot of the fluff passages to give far more of the impression that the Seelie are aligned more with the Weaver, and that the Unseelie are more allied with the Wyrm. The Seelie would then gain associations with Banality and slavery, while the Unseelie would keep their associations with Bedlam (they gain madness, just as the Wyrm has gone mad), oath-breaking, and death.
Random Rules
Changeling had a nice core, but so much of the books clearly fell out of an author throwing out fun-sounding ideas, without thinking about them.
Changelings have to open magical doors to enter the dream land, and travelling-kith (such as the Eshu and Sidhe) gain +1 to the roll. The first problem here: we need all doors to work for most stories, so why roll to open them at all? The second problem: the +1 dice doesn't fit into the system anywhere. We don't see it written as an ability next to the entry for 'Sidhe', the book just springs it on us, randomly, while talking about magical doors ("trods").
A random splat-book then threw the idea that Eshu could summon horses with secret incantation at the troupe, but gave no indication this fit with the existing magic systems. It existed apparently 'because plot', but without any plot, it was more like 'because flavour'. The same effect might have been achieved by just noting that a lot of Eshu use the existing arts to summon horse-chimaera.
Oaths also seem an unnecessary system. When the Vampire books tried to create the creatures which could plausibly cast the classic vampire mythology as a shadow, they used Disciplines; so vampires turning into bats, or mist, or vampires' heightened senses, all became instantiations of Disciplines. Changeling created oaths as some separate sub-system, when I felt the entire thing could have been a series of details on the powers of the Sovereign Art - this Art already allows someone to enforce protocol, so why not simply make the oaths a standard thing to say at the start of a ritualized fight, or similar, and then allow the Art to do the rest? One level of the Sovereign Art could have just been the power to force someone to keep their word, and each oath they state becomes just another example, and the rhyme stated with each one could be interpreted as a Bunk. The world retains all the same flavours, but with fewer rules - and the rules would already have the ability to let players create new oaths.
More Bloat
Nightmare dice, the Dragon's Call, and so many other tiny little systems added nothing but complications with little sub-systems. The lot of them need to be cut.
Chimaera
Magical, pretend creatures dotted the world of the changelings. Dragons, Nevers (fairies from Never-Never Land), and all manner of other creatures darted about, and sometimes befriended changelings as a permanent imaginary friend.
When werewolf did this, the werewolf rules created a simple system whereby the creatures had only 4 stats: Gnosis, Willpower, Rage and Essence. Actually, 'essence' was usually just the sum of the other 3, and also counted as hit-points, so the creatures really just had three stats.
Instead of pulling a similar move (Glamour, Willpower, Rage), the Changeling rules gave each Chimaera full stats, then weighed the GM down with a new character creation system just for chimaera, then (as if this weren't enough) added 'redes' - a brand new system for chimaera powers.
Clearly, it would have been better to go the same route as Werewolf, then allow the Chimaera to use Arts, just like the changelings - it would mean one fewer system to worry about, and the Chimaera would have plenty of abilities. Perhaps some new Art might be included just for Chimaera, which contained features which were useless to standard Changelings, just for variety.
Realms
Changeling Arts let them do a verb-thing like 'destroy', 'heal', 'create', 'levitate', and the Realms are noun-things, which allow them to select a target. So where a Sidhe may fly, a Nocker could make a carpet fly, then ride upon the carpet. This all makes sense, and it's a fun system, where the same Arts can be used very differently by different charactrs.
Unfortunately, the writers decided they hated parsimony, and then split the Actor Realm (the realm which allows changelings to target normal, banal people), into 5 stages:
- Close friends
- Friendly people
- Known people (i.e. the name is known)
- Complete strangers
- Enemies
...or something like that. And it may have sounded fine in practice, but I cannot understand how anyone playtesting this did not complain about the system's demand on either their memory, or the constant demands to reference the book.
The Deep Dreaming
The book of the Dreaming was excellent in many ways - evocative, and detailed, and it had a nice theme running throughout: the deeper one goes into the dreaming, the more pronounced one's kith becomes. Sluagh would become quieter, Sidhe would appear more noble, Satyrs would hump everything in sight, and Redcaps...would eat anyone who was not a Redcap. This essentially made Redcaps unable to enter the deep dreaming with a group, as they would immediately know that they would kill their friends. The Sluagh characters would have to start writing everything they wanted to say down, and nobody could argue with any Sidhe due to their lordly mien, so everything would then just become 'yes, sir'.
If Arcadia really was to be found in the Deep Dreaming, then it suggested that the changelings should not bother returning home.
I think a nicer way to represent this would be to grant the changelings only more powers.