the owl and the olive tree

The New World of Darkness Changeling is awesome.

Now, as much as I liked original World of Darkness, I've been a big fan of a lot of the changes in new World of Darkness. I ran a Werewolf: The Forsaken campaign when I was in LA, and I really liked the flexibility it gave me in theme and goal; I wasn't bound by the metaplot and the 'Fight the Wyrm!' impulse that was so central to Werewolf: The Apocalypse. I had a lot more freedom as a storyteller, and a lot more flexibility, and I really appreciate that. So it's probably not a shock that I like new Changeling quite a lot... but while I think new Werewolf was a mild-to-moderate improvement on old Werewolf (streamlined, tightened up, made more dynamic), I think the differences between old Changeling and new Changeling are even more dramatic. New Changeling takes the handful of coolest ideas in old Changeling, dumps all the dross (ha ha), mixes in a heavy dose of the actual folklore, and comes up with something pretty brilliant.

I'll post more when I've gotten farther, but they've created changelings who are really changelings -- stolen humans -- and True Fae who are really terrifying. Beautiful, wondrous, but whimsical, terrible, and -- in human terms -- quite insane. Changelings live most of their lives in an uncomfortable balance where their powers and their very nature owe a lot to their former True Fae masters, and yet they fear and in some cases genuinely hate those True Fae for kidnapping, ensorcelling and enslaving them. Add to this that they live in very real anxiety that they will be re-captured -- but that they can also never quite be at peace in a wholly mundane existence after their taste of goblin fruit -- and you get a very different vibe than the Renn Faire, librarians-are-our-greatest-enemy notes present in the old Changeling. (I liked a lot of the ideas in the old Changeling, but I felt that it needed serious tweaking and tightening, and this book seems to have done just that.) The True Fae are alien. Changelings are half-strange, half-mundane, not wholly at peace with either half. They're very conflicted beings. It's wonderful.

More when I've read through character creation. This is marvelous. It's what Changeling should have been all along. (I'll probably also post at some point on what I love about Werewolf: The Forsaken, too, because I also think that game is pretty awesome. prrr)

I'm so excited that I'm considering running some local one-shot Changeling and Werewolf games, if I can drum up enough friends for it.