[UA] (OT) More Modern Elves

[rowan at media.mit.edu]

> I'd like to try running a Changeling game using
> variations on the UA rules.  I remember reading some
> guy's suggestion that the different "kith" (faerie
> races) be treated as Avatars, which sounded like a
> neat idea.  I suppose I could translate the Arts into
> magic schools, but I think I'd rather just use the UA
> magic schools and be damned to the rest of it.

That was I. I definitely favor using the UA rules for this 
kind of game, but using the Changeling setting for inspiration. 

The idea actually grew out of an AMAZING adaption of the 
World of Darkness games to the Kult setting: it was called 
"The Jail of Night", and it was published in some gaming 
magazine. It linked the Fairies to the Madmen in Kult, societies
of insane outcasts living on the fringes of human settlements.
Their domains began to take on surrela qualities, they gained 
some magical powers, they held elaborate, absurd ceremonies, and
a lot of them had vague, half-nonsensical delusions that they 
were from another world and had been exiled to Earth eons ago.
The changeling/madman parallel was pretty uncanny.

I fell in love with the adaptation and then I fell in love with
UA a little later. I came up with the avatar/fairy connection 
and decided that these "lunatic societies" could be cool UA
material. They provide a "safe" area for acting out and 
reinforcing archetypal behavior: the Executioner and the Necessary
Servant serve the True King, the Fool jests at his court, and the 
Healer tends to the wounds of the Martyr while the Rebel poses a 
menace to the rigid ways of the court. Some of the societies have
elaborate mythologies about their origins and past lives in "Arcadia"
or their true origins in the Dreamland or Asgard or Metropolis or
"the statosphere" or the Chess Game or the Palace. Some even speak
in hushed tones about those lucky few who have found the way back 
"home".

With all the talk on the list recently about the End of the Universe
and the Comte and all, I had a thought for a new twist. White Wolf did
a terrible job with the Autumn People book (it looked like three writers 
had compiled their notes together an hour before sending the package to the
publisher), but it had some nice tidbits. Some Autumn People were
simply regular folk who were _too_ regular and who stood in the way of
Glamour passively; some were mundane fairy-hunters; and some were 
ex-Fairies (the Dauntain?) who had turned to the forces of Banality, with
a vengeance. Sounds to me like (respectively): mundanes who make life 
difficult for avatars by deconstructing the stereotypes they try to 
represent; people who catch on to the nature of the IC and are trying 
desperately to eliminate up-and-coming avatars to prevent the End; and 
either ex-IC members from the HoR or avatars trying to take out the 
competition. Many of these people may be deluded about what's going on,
and many may be tools of more clued-in parties.

How about a psychiatrist who gets hired to "deprogram" some kid who
thinks he's the incarnation of some god? Could be a handy way of taking
out an enemy avatar...

> I'd definitely include the faerie link with the dead
> and the ideas of greys (ghosts that seem to have a
> body, a lot like Chineese ghosts from Feng Shui, now
> that I think about it.)  I also like the idea of a
> scene where the characters are pursued through the
> woods by a bunch of freaky Grey E.T.s as a parrallel
> to the Wild Hunt.

Awesome. I always wanted to introduce more ET/fairy stuff into my games.
The closest I came was a Dauntain based on Mulder who had had his sister
kidnapped by "aliens" (he only remembers the funny lights and their weird
faces and bodies before the missing days...). He scours FBI files for 
references to missing people, memory loss, people showing up confused after
20 years, and other inexplicable phenomena, but he never quite manages to 
put his finger on the aliens' activity. He runs into his sister
a few times only to lose her again, along with hours of time.

I thought it was a cool idea for a totally sympathetic character who was
a terrible threat to the changeling community.

-Matt Norwood