Highmoon's Ponderings

Last year, one of the users on the Fear the Boot forums posted some photos from Russian photographer Evgeniy Shaman. One of them in particular called my attention because I immediately saw in it a poster for Changeling: The Lost. A few clicks in Photoshop later, I had this:

I really like this photographer’s work. There are a lot of very evocative photos, both for Changeling (his work will now forever be tied to Changeling in my mind) and for other games/stories.

The poster still has the same effect it did back then: I look at it, and I really want to play Changeling.

Found about this from a thread at RPG.net:

As I’m writing this, first drafts have already started trickling in for the tentatively-titled New Wave Requiem, which is a historical book for playing Vampire in 1980s America — think of it as Requiem for Rome meets Miami Vice.

Read full post at LiveJournal.

Vampire in the 80′s? Sign me up right now!

The jokes have already been made that the game should only go up to 1989, when a breach in the Masquerade happened with the release of a book called Vampire: The Masquerade (this only makes sense if you read/played Victorian Age Vampire, where the setting went all the way to 1889, when a breach in the Masquerade happened with the release of a book called Dracula). Personally, I’m all for it. 

Warning: This is very long. 

On Saturday night my wife and I sat down to finally begin our Changeling: The Lost chronicle, which I have called (in a fit of unoriginality) “Dreams of Miami.” The game has been a long time coming for various reasons (mainly my fault), but now it’s here and we’re ready to play.

I will make periodic session reports here, breaking them off with a [More] tag so that there is the public info and the part I want my wife to stay out of. 
So here we go.

We began late, so we only played for about an hour at most, but we did manage to set up the setting and the situation. Dreams of Miami takes place in Miami Beach, namely the area known as Normandy Island and North Beach. Astute readers will realize this is the same area where we live; it makes it familiar and gives us handy points of reference.

Setup
It is January 2, 2008, as I like my White Wolf games set in the here and now.

My wife is playing Bella Greyflower, an Elemental Changeling of the Woodblood kith who came back from Arcadia about a year ago. She has been living in the Beach with a fellow Lost who came back with her, Mirabilis, a Fairest Dancer, and they both work at a cafe owned by a Wizened Oracle named Amara, who seems to have adopted the two young women as her wards. Bella has been slowly getting used to being back in the human world for the past year, and has even had some contact with her previous life, though that would be when she learned her children had grown to their late teens and that a Fetch was left in her place, playing mother to her son and daughter, and wife to a husband whom Bella last knew as an uninterested good-for-nothing. The only thing Bella has to care for is baby Finn, a boy perhaps 14 months old, that was the key to her escape from her Keeper.

Bella hears a lot of snippets of conversations waiting tables at the cafe, and she has heard two quite distinct rumors enough times to remember them above the din of constant chatter:

1. Over the last six months or so, the reported sightings of Fae around Miami have increased dramatically. Not only have they become more frequent, but they have also become bolder: True Fae have been seen hunting changelings in the Hedge, and sometimes right outside of it, or on their way to a hunting party of sorts. So far five or six changelings have been reported as missing, likely taken back by the Fae.
2. At some point after the new year, a ceremony is to be held somewhere in Little Haiti, something meant to establish some sort of Contract with the city itself in order to prevent the abduction of children by the Others.

Two weeks ago, in mid-December, a somewhat frequent patron of the cafe, a Haitian medicine man who calls himself Old Ti (a changeling without a doubt, though Bella has never seen beyond his Mask, seeing only an old Haitian man) came into the cafe, ordered  a coffee, and when Bella was waiting on him, casually mentioned having heard this rumor about the ceremony in Little Hait; casually, except for the fact he was looking Bella right in the eyes. He then paid, and left.

Two days ago, on Dec. 31, 2007, Bella’s son, Max, came into the cafe, ordered a can of Coke, and then left. Bella was standing not 10 feet away from him, and that has been the closest she has been to her son in an eternity. It was odd because he does not live in this area of the Beach.

Session 1
It is the second day of January, and after her regular day-to-day chores, Bella heads over to the cafe for her evening shift. Upon arriving she notices that there are a lot of customers tonight, both mundanes and changelings (about ten of the Lost, highly unsual). Amara’s Cafe is a sort of haven for the Courtless who know about it, and as such, it receives sporadic visits from representative of the courts, as it does tonight when, at around 7 pm, a burly Ogre proudly displaying a red sash across his wide chest, a symbol of the Court of Summer, enters the cafe. He asks Bella what’s going on tonight, what with so many changelings there? Bella merely shrugs him off, telling him the truth, that she doesn’t know what’s going on. While Bella gets him his coffee, the Ogre gets up and spouts a loud speech exhorting those Courtless present to consider joining the ruling Court of Summer, and to come to him with any questions.

As unhappy as Bella is over this event, Amara is even more, as she arrives just at the tail end of the speech. She asks Bella about the abnormal number of Lost at the cafe tonight, and after Bella says she doesn’t know, Amara makes a few calls and finds out. The upstart Spring Court (the so-called Vichy faction) is hosting a big party at one of their clubs down on South Beach, and they have invited virtually every Changeling in Miami, including members of the now-banished (and some say rightful) Spring Court. Mirabilis arrives at this moment and pulls Bella aside with a very intriguing piece of news: “I just saw you.”

While walking over to the cafe, Mirabilis crosses a woman who looks like Bella, at least what Bella looked like as a human, walking with her husband. Now that she mentions it, Bella does indeed feel her Fetch, not near, but somewhere around, which is strange because they do not live in this area of the Beach. Mirabilis asks Bella if, after closing time, she would like to go down to the Spring Court party, just to check it out. With Amara agreeing to watch over Finn, the two women agree to check out one of these legendary parties. “But we just check it out and get back, ok?” Bella tells Mirabilis. Sure.

And now for some behind-the-scenes…

Read more…

After a loooong time in the works, after a lot of interruptions and other projects getting in the way, after I got off my lazy butt and put the finishing touches on what I was missing, my wife and I are finally ready to start our Victorian Age Vampire chronicle in about a week or so. We’d start this weekend, but we’ll be out of town on a mini-break, though I plan to use the driving time to talk about the game and her character, as I try to get as much info possible to weave the story around that of her PC.

This will be a New World of Darkness game as far as system, using the Victorian Age Vampire book as thematic source material, but for the most part I am looking forward to creating a semi-new mythology for our game; as I told my wife, you might meet a vampire that calls itself a member of the “Ventrue,” but you simply cannot assume you know what “Ventrue” is or means based on your player knowledge. I’ll go into the reasons more in depth later on. I’ve actually set up a tag for “Victorian Age Vampire” so it’s easy to follow the development and the game play.

Fortune of fortunes, I am now also playing in a D&D play-by-email campaign built around Goodman Games‘ Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventures. The campaign, West to the Empire, one of the suggested Adventure Paths in DCC #35 assembled from various of the DCC modules, is being run by the excellent and tidy Mark Gedak (who has done a lot of HMP work both for and with me), and aside from myself, there are two other players, a fella named Kurt and David Jarvis (of Reality Deviant Publications, my collaborator on the DaVinci Labs line for HMP). I am playing a 0-level aristocrat named Squire Fisner, a pregen that came with the first adventure, DCC #35A Halls of the Minotaur (part of DCC #35 Gazetteer of the Known Realms). I’ve already customized this pregen a little by giving him the name Argus and a bit of a backstory which I hope to expand as we play. Though I’ll admit play-by-email is not necessarily the optimal way to play for me, I’m just happy to be in a game, and Mark is organized and detailed enough that I feel good about the whole enterprise and about the opportunity to actually do a bit of roleplay via text. I’ve also created a tag for “D&D PBeM” to track thoughts and play reports from this game.

I’ve put up my collection of Arcadia: The Wyld Hunt CCG up for sale on eBay. You can see the listing here.

This game was published in the early- to mid-90′s by White Wolf tied to their Changeling: The Dreaming roleplaying game. It features adventures played in the fae realm of Arcadia. The game was sold in booster packs divided into Character Packs and Story Packs. To play, you select a character card, then customize it with options from the Character Pack. Once that’s done, you create a playing field by laying down terrain cards. A Quest is selected, enemies and traps are laid down under various terrain cards, and off you go to complete the Quest.

Included in this lot are two card boxes, one all Character Pack cards (including the nifty, stand-up cardboard characters), and one all Story Pack cards. These cards were used in games, but are all in excellent shape. All cards are from the Wyld Hunt set.

This was cool game, but suffered from the way it was marketed. White Wolf tried to ride the CCG train, but this game would have done so much better if packaged as a boardgame with regular expansions. Even today, if I could get it complete in one box, it would be a brilliant little game.