coraa | rpg neep

It just occurred to me that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would make a great inspiration for a Changeling: The Lost RPG session/campaign.

(I thought of it while catching a clip of the Gene Wilder movie, of which it's particularly true, but I think it'd fit for any of them -- book, Gene Wilder movie, Johnny Depp movie.)

Basically, for the one person who clicked the cut despite not knowing Changeling: The Lost, Changeling is a game where you play humans who were lured, tricked or kidnapped into Faerie by the True Fae. The Fae are inhuman, completely amoral, and deeply powerful; even those who intend to be nice don't know enough about humanity to be anything other than horrible, and most of them don't even try. They steal humans because they find humans to be entertaining and interesting diversions, and also because the True Fae aren't truly creative and need humans for that. (In a lot of ways, Changeling: The Lost is pleasingly compatible with European folkloric faeries, although they make a pretty concerted effort not to tie anything to any one mythology.) Anyway, as they live in Faerie and eat faerie food and drink faerie drink, the human captives are irrevocably changed into part-faerie, part-human creatures. Most of them never escape. Some do, and those are the players in the game: people who endured the insanity and beautiful horror of Faerie and then fought their way back to the real world.

Anyway!

So: Willy Wonka, a strange, reclusive man who lures children (well, and adults) into his world with a golden ticket that bears the promise of fabulous wonders and the fulfillment of sweet (literally) desires. And his world is beautiful, and populated with strange little men, and yet it's... slightly wrong. But the deeper you go, the more wrong it is. And the rules start to appear. And things get stranger and stranger. And if you break the rules, horrible things happen to you -- horrible, mangling things -- and the little men laugh and sing at your mutilation. And Willy Wonka seems unperturbed: well, you know, that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't broken his rules.

And one boy comes out the other side and lives to tell the tale.

(Okay, so, technically all the children do emerge, although some of them are permanently changed by the experience and not necessarily in good ways. But throughout the story, Charlie doesn't know that.)