It's been months since I touched this blog, and for that, I apologize. So many hassles in life, from finding and maintaining employment to other personal issues have a habit of being in the way. Besides, for the longest time, I was completely stumped on what to write next. I couldn't find the voice for the Nurgle article, and I just haven't had the time to roleplay very much.
Still, enough with the excuses. Today we're going to dig into to a whopper of an antagonist. Changeling: The Lost has been considered one of the best RPG's to come out of White Wolf's New World of Darkness line, and I would heartily agree. I've never had a chance to play its predecessor, The Dreaming, however, after a quick couple of glances at the rulebook, I didn't think I would find it that interesting. I'm sure it's a fine game in its own right, just not really what I would think of when I hear the tagline 'a storytelling game of personal horror.' Changeling: The Lost rectifies this immediately, and does something very few other works of fiction involving fairies do: make them scary.
Faeries, in myth and legend, have always been a bit of a weird bunch. They're very alien, and in a lot of legends seem to represent otherness, whether in the form of nature or other cultures or gods or so. They're never really good or evil, just some are malicious and some are benign, just like humans, and they operate according to strange codes of law that don't make sense to people, but are as immutable to them as breathing is to us. The one common thread, however, is that you do not want to get on their bad side. Faeries are very easily offended, and take slights and minor inconveniences a lot more seriously than most humans do. The entire reason the word 'Faerie' exists is as a derivative of 'The Fair Folk.' The reason you called Faeries that was that if you called them anything else, they'd hollow your skull out and use it as a drinking cup. Changeling: The Lost harks back to these old fairy tales, of creeping dread, strange, alien powers lurking outside of civilization, but also great beauty and wonders beyond the ken of mortal men. It remembers that while the Fae may look beautiful, may seem quaint and pleasing, they come from a land of dreams and nightmares, and they're the ones in charge.
The True Fae are a strange, capricious bunch. All of them are utterly mad intellects that dwell in an alternate reality called Arcadia, accessed through a sort of 'in between' world known as the Hedge. Arcadia is an insane tapestry of dreams and nightmares, each one the domain of a different Fae, and within their domains, the Fae are gods. Stuff works because the Fae says it works. In one Faerie's domain, up could be down, and unlucky visitors could find themselves falling into the infinite blue expanse of the sky, never to return. In another, darkness could be a physical entity that hungers for life and warmth and devours anything it touches. There are no assurances within Arcadia, and human visitors` often find themselves completely lost in the mad chaos, like a lucid dream or an acid trip. The Fae are the natives of this land, and constantly fight against each other, devouring each other and making alliances as they see fit, constantly altering the size and shape of the plane. The one thing the True Fae have in common, however, is that they like mortal company. That's where you come in.
Getting selected by one of the Gentry is a harrowing feeling, and should be portrayed in a very lovecraftian way. Whether your particular Faerie is a maiden so incredibly beautiful that the very sight of her gives you a heroin high or a 15 foot tall snake made of living, stitched together dog faces, the Fae want what they want, and they're willing to do anything to get it. Imagine being stalked by a shadowy figure, always at the corner of your eye, or to go for a bathroom break in the office, and instead find yourself in an infinite garden of thorns and brambles. Worse yet, all things from Arcadia (including you, eventually), have a Mask, and no one else can see what you're so afraid of and help you. The Fae make people feel helpless, like they're lost in a waking nightmare, and worst of all, they make people feel out of control. The Fae really are lovecraftian in the truest sense of the word. They care only about their own insane whims, are bigger and more powerful than you, and don't have a care in the world about breaking your mind, body and soul.
The stay in Arcadia, for a changeling, is probably one of the most harrowing experiences a human mind can conceive of. Regardless of how comfortable the realm is, or how kindly your Fae captor treats you, it's still a prison. The Fae doesn't really love you, hate you, or even consider you very much as a person. What's happening right now is just a single whim that will inevitably fade in time. I've heard Arcadia be described as being trapped in a dream, but in reality, it's far worse. It's being trapped in someone else's dream. A dream in which you can't escape, just another little element for the mad dreamer to play with. Everything in Arcadia is vivid, colors are brighter, lines are more crisp, but also more indistinct. The more you try to comprehend a shape, the more one line blurs into another, one hallway turns into a wall, and the more the Faeries laugh. Escaping Arcadia means traveling to the very edges of the dream (if they even exist), and tearing your soul to tatters as you madly try to reach reality, and all this is if your Faerie doesn't notice you. If it does, prepare for a truly harrowing ordeal when you get back, or perhaps something as simple as the Faerie thinking it was all a game, and making you play it again and again, forever. The Fae are never predictable.
When portraying the Fae, it's important to remember one simple truth, possibly the only truth to apply to them. The Fae are CHAOTIC, and I don't mean the Warhammer style, where chaos is evil, or DnD style, where chaos is always trying to break the rules. The Fae are chaotic in the way a psychopath is chaotic, endlessly flitting from one thing to the next, never settling, or maybe settling forever. Even mad is too mortal and comprehensible a term to apply to the Fae, as madness often conforms to certain rules. The Fae can be literally anything, from towering, glorious forms, to traditional gods, to tiny insects, to even more abstract things, like a sentient color or time of day. Fae minds are fractured, broken things, and the way they manifest should reflect that. It's always good to throw the players off guard. Maybe they're accustomed to seeing Fairies in humanoid form, and are instead presented with one that literally IS the domain they're in. Likewise, a Faerie might be able to stride, laughing through a gasoline fire, but flee from the sound of laughing children. Faeries are big, scary, and incomprehensible, but they do have some rules. Granted, these rules are different for each Faerie, but no one ever said that this was easy.
This brings me to my next point. An unbeatable antagonist is a boring antagonist, and the Fae certainly can be beaten. As mentioned above, the Fae have different weaknesses that can be exploited by individuals who know what they are, and as such, the Fae keep these weaknesses very close to their chests. The one universal weakness they have, however, is iron, the purer the better. No one knows why. There are theories, like the Fae breaking a deal with the concept of iron, or iron being a symbol of civilization, but ultimately, like everything about the Gentry, it is simply another fact of life. The important bit is that iron burns a Faerie like a blowtorch, and meteoric iron, stuff that has never been tainted by anything else or sullied by the touch of man can sear a True Fae away like an ice sculpture hit with a blowtorch. This is not their greatest weakness though. Their greatest weakness, is that the True Fae understand humans about as much as humans understand them. Powerful and totally batshit bonkers they may be, but they would never think of a human calling his friends for help, and perfectly normal courses of actions can seem totally alien to the Faerie in question. Clever mortals, who understand the world can outfox and beat Faeries in exactly the same way that Faeries manipulate their own plane to beat mortals.
Finally, a few example Fae of my own creation to terrorize or enchant your players with.
Dr. Knives
There's something very creepy about hospitals. Maybe it's the cold sterility contrasted with the warm guts they interact with, but Dr. Knives is all those fears embodied. Standing 15 feet tall and inhumanly slim, the doctor is a vaguely humanoid figure wrapped in white plastic, with only a pair of surgical goggles on his featureless face. From his back, like the legs of a spider, fleshy appendages loom over his victims, biomechanical tentacles tipped with scalpels, dentist drills, bone saws, and everything else that can take a man apart. Dr. Knives never speaks, but his servants know instinctively what he wants them to do. He views the world as a riddle, and is very interested in solving this riddle, piece by bloody piece. Humans kidnapped by him often never make it, as they are coldly and cruelly pulled apart, each shred of skin or piece of muscle cataloged and filed away neatly, as if he's trying to find something ephemeral, though sometimes he stops after half-flaying his victim and incinerates them. His realm is a vast, and nightmarish pastiche of hospitals, from old victorian bedlam houses to modern day emergency rooms, some cold, white and pristine, and others splattered with gore. The few mortals he decides to keep (assuming they haven't been flayed too badly) are remade into nightmarish horrors wrapped in straight jackets made of their own plastic skin, and are often made to help him perform his gruesome surgeries.
Weakness: Dr. Knives can only manifest and open portals to earth within hospitals, and his victims have to be unconscious, comatose or anesthetized when he takes them. He can never take someone while they are fully conscious, and all his intended victim has to do to escape is leave the hospital (though his changelings are able to leave hospitals)
The Socialite
She's more beautiful than any woman you've ever seen, the kind of beauty that starts wars. Her victims are often her lovers, and the road to Arcadia so subtle that very few realize they're leaving until they've already gotten there. She haunts any place where the upper class go to mingle, and when she finds someone suitably interesting, she gradually draws them into her world. The Socialite is one of the most human of the Faeries, and yearns for a true relationship, someone to be her equal and partner, and maybe give her children. She doesn't really understand love, however, and her realm is a seemingly endless array of high-class cityscapes and apartments, each room filled with the men and women she has entranced. The Socialite floats between them, visiting them, sleeping with some, breaking the hearts of others, and occasionally making them fight to the death on the empty streets for her favor. Like a classic sociopath, the Socialite thrives on conflict, and enjoys pitting one lover against the other, to see who is more worthy. Her changelings are almost invariably Fairest, and almost all hopelessly enthralled. In her true form, the Socialite looks like an impossibly beautiful woman, with subtle changes depending on the viewer. She is as capricious as the tide, and can be fawning over you one day and coldly rejecting you another. Lovers who fall too far out of her favor often find themselves with broken hearts, both metaphorically and literally.
Weakness: The Socialite cannot stand rejection. If a being can look upon her divine charms, and willingly turn away, the Socialite's illusion shatters, and she cannot influence the mind of that being ever again. Worse, looks are everything to the Socialite, and if such a being that can resist her charms brings a weapon to bear against her (though they must be physically holding it. Ranged weapons don't cut it), it will burn her like cold iron. She therefore is a very spiteful hunter of her escaped lovers, as they possess the key to destroying her.
Finally, some nice inspirations for a Gentry inspired tale of Changeling:
Pan's Labyrinth: A pretty classic example.The horrors of the fae world contrasted with the horrors of the real world always makes for a nice dichotomy, and everything in this movie feels like a bizarre dream. The horrors are real though, and the Pale Man and the Faun make excellent examples of True Fae.
Marble Hornets: THE definitive Slender-Man tale, still as effective today as it was when it first came out. Marble Hornets tells the story of a young man who is relentlessly stalked by an unseen but incredibly dangerous creature that can create other dimensions and turn people into its minions. Sound familiar? It's also just an excellent series and shows that you really don't need a big budget to make a good story.
Grave Encounters: A pretty creepy and obscure little film, I think Grave Encounters epitomizes what it's like to be trapped in a particularly inhospitable realm of Arcadia. The crew are trapped in an abandoned mental asylum that warps to prevent them from escaping and is filled with hungry ghosts. The sequel takes it up to eleven by revealing that the asylum-world covers the space of a city, and it even lets them go before drawing them right back in. Who's the True Fae here you may ask? Why, the asylum itself of course. All it wants is visitors.....
- Kephn
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