So I think most people picked one paradigm and stuck with it. I always really liked the idea that Changelings were basically the embodiment of a particular concept, and that—for them—glamour had to do with promoting that concept in some fashion. If you were a pooka whose concept was, Varric-like, bending the truth to make everyone sound more awesome, then when you got humans to believe your stories (or, better yet, start doing the same aggrandizing in their own lives), you got glamour! Whereas the troll whose concept was the rigidity of honor might actually have the opposite going on, getting glamour when they inspired people to be truthful even when it hurt. And if the pooka had past-life memories of being, I dunno, Gwydion, that just means that this particular concept wore that name and face at some point in the past (and at a point when the idea had more impact, and therefore they were more powerful).
But I knew someone who basically hated the entirely of the 'inspire creativity in mortals!' angle, dumped it, and ran a game where Changelings were diminished literal faeries, who were not inherently tied to human dreams/concepts but had latched parasite-like onto them in the past as a means of sustaining themselves, and the point was to inspire literal belief in the unknown. That was metaphysically an entirely different game, and yet it required not really any more tweaks than my favored 'powerful concepts' idea.
This probably all makes it sound like I didn't like the game much, and I did. But like I said, the books crammed in a ton of different ideas, not all of which fit together all that well (as you said, banality was a pretty key example of this), and half the fun was figuring out which elements you liked the best and making the rest fit around those.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-10-18 03:54 pm (UTC)So I think most people picked one paradigm and stuck with it. I always really liked the idea that Changelings were basically the embodiment of a particular concept, and that—for them—glamour had to do with promoting that concept in some fashion. If you were a pooka whose concept was, Varric-like, bending the truth to make everyone sound more awesome, then when you got humans to believe your stories (or, better yet, start doing the same aggrandizing in their own lives), you got glamour! Whereas the troll whose concept was the rigidity of honor might actually have the opposite going on, getting glamour when they inspired people to be truthful even when it hurt. And if the pooka had past-life memories of being, I dunno, Gwydion, that just means that this particular concept wore that name and face at some point in the past (and at a point when the idea had more impact, and therefore they were more powerful).
But I knew someone who basically hated the entirely of the 'inspire creativity in mortals!' angle, dumped it, and ran a game where Changelings were diminished literal faeries, who were not inherently tied to human dreams/concepts but had latched parasite-like onto them in the past as a means of sustaining themselves, and the point was to inspire literal belief in the unknown. That was metaphysically an entirely different game, and yet it required not really any more tweaks than my favored 'powerful concepts' idea.
This probably all makes it sound like I didn't like the game much, and I did. But like I said, the books crammed in a ton of different ideas, not all of which fit together all that well (as you said, banality was a pretty key example of this), and half the fun was figuring out which elements you liked the best and making the rest fit around those.