Changeling Campaign Themes: Planning Wayward

When I went to prepare my first Changeling the Lost campaign, Wayward, I had a few themes in the back of my mind. I executed some of these better than others in the course of play. But here were the four notes I really wanted to hit.

See also Changeling Round Up

1. PTSD

In the campaign, I wanted to stress the idea of the damage the characters suffered in their durance and what that meant to their present lives. They’d been changed physically- that much would be obvious. But the experience also changed them mentally and emotionally. They would have a difficult time dealing with those memories: repressing some and rewriting others. I would let the players define their experience and try to build from that. But I wanted to leave that open and have them write those broadly. Then we could introduce new flashbacks and memories throughout the campaign. The stories in Changeling the Lost suggest that some of the Taken simply suffer, some hide, and some actively work with their captors. As a kind of former PoW, they would have difficulty engaging with that.

That would also shape the experience of all of the NPCs. The obvious motivation driving a Freehold is fear of the Keepers. But some NPCs also operate from guilt, some from buried anger, and most from difficulty trusting others. In some ways, that’s what makes the artificiality of the Vow system in the Changeling setting work. These people have had their trust abused, have been fooled, been betrayed. They need to have concrete Vows and Pledges in order to have anything like trust- and even that’s artificial. I also knew that no one would actually discuss their durance. Everyone would know internally that what they went through was worse than what anyone else suffered. That would always be the haunting thought at the back of their mind in discussions. Like an internet argument where everyone knows they’re actually more informed about the subject, but no one wants to say that and have the thread blow up in a cycle of one-upmanship.

Sidebar: How did that actually play out? The party suffered a lot of mistrust at the start of the campaign, which put them a little on edge. But that eventually allowed me to differentiate between NPCs- with some becoming more favored because they were more charitable earlier on. There were explicit discussions about trust as well. Unfortunately, that also played into a couple of players’ hang-ups. In particular one player who had ego, superiority, and trust problems. They were unwilling to trust anyone who didn’t acknowledge them as super cool and awesome. That created problems. The durance question also became a stumbling block. A couple of the players clearly envisioned their durance as having been super-happy fairy-tale fun time. They were heroes in their stories about those days. That was something I should have spotted and dealt with then. It symbolized their own distance and superiority and created problems down the line. When I tried to suggest alternate versions in play- making it less a cool thing they did and more actually problematic, they reacted badly. One gave lip-service acknowledgment, but still bristled when the suggestion arose later.

2. New Courts

I’d been introduced to the concepts of Changeling the Lost in a Hunter the Reckoning game that used them. It was a diversion from the linear plots and one of those sections where you watch the GM play out their current fascination. The Changelings there came off more like beings from Changeling the Dreaming, but there were some interesting bits (the suggestions about the Keepers, for example). When I went to run CtL, I knew I wanted a set-up distinct from the one I’d seen in that campaign- the traditional seasonal courts. I didn’t want to repeat those structures. The Winter Masques book suggested some alternatives, and I ultimately decided I would have a pair of Courts- trading power back on a regular basis. They would revolve around rising and falling which ultimately led to my creation of "The Court of Rust" and "The Court of Gardens." In my first draft I called the latter the Ploughman’s Court which is a dumb name. I’ll come back in a later post to how I defined those and the relationship between them.

I also wanted the Freehold to be simultaneously important and isolated. In many of the World of Darkness books, there’s a suggestion of a broader, national or international community to the creatures and beings discussed. That made less sense for Changelings, creatures who need to remain hidden from mundane and magical pursuit. The existence of slaver Changelings working at the Keepers behest means they would be paranoid. The sourcebooks hint that travel between Freeholds- and the protections thereof- is terrifying and dangerous. So I decided that contact with other places and groups would be more rumor and hearsay- the tales of a far off land. Eventually I worked that into the structure of the story, with Wayward being more magically isolated (creating some narrative problems in the future).

3. Twinning

I’m not sure why but the idea of twins and doubles stuck with me. I'd watched a number of Kiyoshi Murosawa films before starting work on the campaign, including Doppelganger. Some of that came from the concept of the Fetches and their relationship to Changelings. I also had two Courts which would had acts mirrors for one another- with two “brothers” as Princes of those Courts. I stole a concept I’d used in an earlier piece of fiction and had the city actually on the state border between Indiana and Ohio. So you ended up with two cities which were one, split by a river. It doesn’t fit with real world geography, but that was fine. The Indiana side would be decaying and falling apart, while the Ohio side would be a little more sterile but developing. My hope was to have several kinds of twins and doubles throughout the campaign, a detail I didn’t get to follow up on as much as I wanted to.

4. Arrival

Importantly I wanted the group to arrive in the city new and fresh. They would just have come out of the Hedge and be bound together through the circumstance of that. They’d all originally come from the city, but several years had passed since they vanished. Most importantly they would have no idea what Changeling society was like here, be aware of Fetches, or the nature of magics here. I wanted the first several sessions to be about them exploring this world and slowly figuring things out. In some ways, that worked really well- as they built up a picture of the social structure of the Freehold from multiple unreliable witnesses. On the other hand, we had some difficulty in what the players could reasonably claim they knew about the world. One of the players wanted to kill fetches to get powers, but I had to pull them back from that- suggesting that wasn’t a) something they knew about and b) not necessarily the case. In retrospect, I needed to be clearer about that split between player and character knowledge right at the beginning.

NEXT: Early Notes for the Campaign and What Came from Those.

Sarah No-Tears Dreams: Changeling Month

Sarah No-Tears as drawn by Gene Ha.

Some of what I have to post for Changeling the Lost month comes in the form of vignettes- for example, after the players escaped the Hedge I gave them each a set of dreams. One of the ideas I've held to is that Changelings consciously bury some of the memories of their Durance. But some of those memories are stolen or hidden by their nature. Changelings suffer from a form of PTSD- the were treated horribly in some cases and treated others horribly in others. There's a mix of survivors guilt, repressed recollections, and worries that they have been monsters. So I wrote up tough dreams that reflected that. First, however, I present a dream written by the player about their character Sarah No-Tears, the Wizened Physiker. Eventually I brought these details around full circle a couple of years into the game...

Brink of Dreams-First Night
A room with windows to the east—sunrise after darkness... It was certainly not that she was thinking poetically when she'd asked for that room. Instead, she'd just wanted to be sure she'd wake up when the day started. There would not be the sirens here to announce the next wave of injured nor that half-intelligible PA with every squawked out name followed by "STAT!".

The sky was already lightening. She hadn't slept yet and she felt the exhaustion bone-deep. Her mental lists were almost done—the things she'd need, they'd need, ways to get them. She'd arranged the dolls that she'd pulled from the shrinking Hollow on the top of her empty chest of drawers, and covered the mirror with an extra sheet. The room still felt too big and too empty. She had long ago become accustomed to sleeping among the supplies in the ubiquitous storage closets, wary of the rows of bunks where the unkindest or most broken of the Stolen preyed in too many ways. But now she had a key to a lock that worked, and even if it wouldn't keep anything truly determined from reaching her, it prevented at least the casual cruelties and abuses.

Finally, Sarah let herself lay down. The smell though, clean bleached cotton case over a pillow that had been in storage, jerked her up and back up out of the bed. It was familiar, but not in a bad way. Mind reeling as she tried to place the scent, she automatically took up pacing and then, finally decided to remove her Coat so that the smell of it would not interfere so badly. She was uncertain in that--the Coat had been protection for so long, the sign of station and what small amount of freedom was accorded those useful to The Hospital. She folded it carefully and placed it next to the little crowd of dolls, and then, rethinking the choice, moved the Coat to a desk chair that she placed near the bed--in case she needed it.

Stripped down to the pale seafoam scrubs, oversized and loosely tied (so that they could be easily removed while still wearing the Coat, lest she need the full protections of that Token), she felt more vulnerable than made sense--and in a fit of annoyance at her foolish reaction, she kicked off the canvas moccasins that she wore too. Still, she stood trembling at the side of the bed. Now...now or never, Sarah.

She flung herself at the bed and hastily scrabbled the blankets close to her so that it would be more work to jump up again than to remain. It had been a clumsy bellyflop, and the scant moment's work of clutching the blankets to her chin and wrapping them around her legs left her breathless and perhaps a little nonsensically exultant.

Then she remembered. Summer camp. Before she got sick, between second and third grade. That's what the pillow smelled like--the mattresses on the cabin bunks. And her dive into bed this night had been just as graceless as her first attempt to dive from the pier into that cold cold lake. It was like finding a treasure, this memory before illness, before pain. She concentrated, starting with the lake itself.

Mornings, the mist rose off of the water. She'd been signed up for the first week of the summer camp, and it was just barely past spring. She remembered quickly learning to dread the morning swim lessons, the climb down the many flights of stairs built into the hillside to the smooth green-brown lake. If you had morning lessons, you had to wear your bathing suit under your shorts to breakfast and then take off trudging right after flag-raising to get to the piers before the counsellors starting blowing their whistles.

She remembered her towel, which had a smiling yellow and orange sun emblazoned over blue stripes...and her swimming cap that was stinky yellow and stupid-looking. Everyone had to wear them. Her swimming buddy was Meggy Dobchek, and she had a light blue cap that matched her bathing suit. Meggy's bathing suit...it was light blue and navy blue stripes--horizontal..an unfortunate choice for a girl who might have been described as 'still having her baby fat'. It made her look like a smiley blue bee, especially when she wore her goggles...and she usually did when she was in the water because she was afraid to open her eyes underwater otherwise.

Swimming buddies had to hold hands. Sarah couldn't remember why just then. Probably to keep someone from getting forgotten and then drowned. Meggy always insisted they be the first two in the water and that they had to put their faces underwater or it didn't count. She claimed it made it easier to bear the cold water. Once in, they had to wait for all the others to join in and there was always lots of protests and squeaks. Meggy liked to drag her over by the piers to ask the swim instructor where the classes would be swimming and then, to whisper gossipy things into Sarah's ear about the lifeguards and the counsellors who were down by the lake. Meggy was an old-hand at camp--she'd been there the year before and stayed for all the sessions--and she was going to stay that summer for them all again. She knew who had boyfriends and who did scandalous things like smoking or talking mean about other counsellors. Sarah couldn't remember much of it now, but she remembered staring at the older girls and feeling like they were altogether different creatures than herself--they had long legs and tans and got to wear jackets over their bathing suits and they had whistles. Somehow, this had seemed at the time to be a prerequisite for having a boyfriend or smoking...

For all the swimming lessons Meggy must have had to go through, she was still in Beginner class. If you'd known Meggy though, it wouldn't surprise you. She was a collection of odd desperate fears and, paradoxically, a strange zen-like acceptance of the things she was very very bad at. And if there was one thing Meggy was very bad at, it was the backfloat. She simply couldn't do it...didn't trust the water to hold her up and could not relax enough to find out that it would do most of the work. She just sort of flailed about at the surface until her struggles drug her below the surface, no matter how Sarah tried to convince her she just had to lay back and swish about once in awhile.

So long as Meggy had her goggles on and her swimming cap covering her ears, she didn't seem to mind sinking over and over again. It was just an excuse for more giggles and dramatic re-enactments of her near-peril. Meggy's eccentricities had caused Sarah a great deal of consternation at first, but by the the sixth day, she had filed most of them under the "that's just Meggy" category of explanations where she no longer felt obligated to look on in concern and struggle to help Meggy, but understood that she was more than welcome to giggle with Meggy.

So, that sixth day, when they were taking their competncy tests for the week's classes, Sarah had recognized the gravity of the situation when Meggy had flailed her way out of a passing score in the backfloat, but instead of popping right back up, Meggy had lurched off to the side and come out of the water with her eyes and mouth shut tightly. "I'll find them for you, Meggy! I'll find your goggles." Sarah had grabbed one of Meggy's hands to squeeze it, to reassure her--but Meggy was trembling so hard that Sarah was glad to let go and concentrate on something else. Finding Meggy's goggles--that would make her fear go away.

Sarah remembered, she herself hadn't been afraid to open her eyes underwater. She was much better at swimming underwater than trying to do those wierd swim strokes that they had been learning. So she dipped her head underwater, looking first around Meggy's feet--the water was not that murky as long as people didn't stir up the silty sand, but there were at least another dozen girls grouped right around them, so the water wasn't exactly clear. Not that easy--the goggles must have started to drift away. She spun around, looking for them--and caught sight of a glint a few feet away. She swam past some other girls, but the glint kept moving and then stopped glinting as the goggles passed under the pier and out of the dim morning light. Sarah shot forward to grab them before she lost track of their path, brushing past another few people. She caught onto them, her fingers closing around the strap and then almost losing them again because the strap had snapped and wasn't in the loop she had expected. Still, she managed to catch hold.

She'd surfaced under the dock, the world of sunlight squished into a strange horizontal mural of the lake's surface exploding with great splashes as people dove in and, a second later, the noise resolved to screams of her own name. She hadn't understood what was happening. She'd paddled along, under the dock, afraid of being jumped on by one of the counsellors as they dove in. It took her a bit to pick out Meggy, standing mostly still and sort of slowly revolving in place amid all the excitement, her eyes and mouth still clamped shut and her arms and hands held above the water as if it were somehow the most unbearable and frightening thing in the world.

She'd taken another deep breath and pushed herself out toward Meggy, kicking against one of the pier supports so that she would be moving too fast to get jumped on. It was only a few frog-like underwater strokes to Meggy's legs. She'd surfaced next to Meggy, coming up closer than she'd meant to--and there was a second in her arc, coming up through the water, that she had the impression that it was Meggy who was underwater and coming toward her.

With the blue swimming cap and her eyes and mouth shut so resolutely, Meggy looked so much like an infant--like a very cold, very oxygen-deprived infant. The recollection stuttered and Meggy's face remained underwater. The cold lake water receded and was replaced by chilled air as quickly as the light too changed, to the brilliant white overhead of...of the Surgery Theatre.

"Mammalian diving reflex. Fascinating." The Director's voice was precise and emotionless--the words made sense, but Sarah had never been sure that he understood them himself--she had the impression that he was somehow remotely pushing a button that said and waiting for the sounds to finish before he selected the next button. He let go of the infant subject, still underwater. : "She may yet be resuscitated, I'm-counting-on-you-Sarah."

"Ahhh." His pleasure at the lance of hate she could not hold back was at least his own utterance--the thing he most certainly understood. He had smiled and tipped her chin up so that she could not avoid his eyes, had made a show of his favoritism so that he could reap the jealousy, resentment and hatred from his other assistants--but she had then, and even now in the recalling, let herself detach from that. Instead, she waited patiently for him to finish and then turned back to the matter at hand.

It was the Theatre, a place where the carnage of the Real World was called on stage. This time, there was an impossible tank with it's opening on the side--a column of murky water that rose from floor to ceiling. Suspended in it, inches away from the opening, was a car. More correctly, the opening was inside the car somehow. The car seat that the infant was strapped into had started to tumble lazily back further into the car's interior. She reached in to pull it back, had to reach far enough that she was submerged from the waist up.

Meggy had been right--it was easier to do if you stuck your face underwater right away. She'd even thought that then, but hadn't been able to think why. The water was so cold--her hands numbed almost immediately.

The bodies of the baby's parents were still in the car--wan light from above gave her fuzzy silhouettes of a driver tangled in seat belts and the passenger half out the window. She'd reached, stretched, clumsily bapped at the car seat trying to get a grip on some part of it, but it was all round edged and the straps that were on it had snapped or were still tucked in close to the child. Desperation had made her jump up onto the frame of the tank--and she'd had a crazy thought of swimming out through the car window back to the world--but it was all certain death for her in that cold water--a chill she felt at every level. Somehow, she managed to wrangle the car seat back toward herself and into her wooden arms.

She'd slid back down to the Theatre floor, infant in car seat held close to her chest. Gasping for air, reeling from the cold and trying desperately to pull the energy together to Command the team that she would need to get this done--that was when he'd leaned in and whispered just to her, "It was her father's dying wish--that his little girl should live. I'm-counting-on-you-Sarah, we always honor the wishes of the dying here. Yes?"

The stab of hate and fury and desperation was just a new and keen as it had been that day. Trapped...

...and trapped again now by the wishes of a dying man.

Sarah tried to recollect what the baby had looked like, but all she could picture was Meggy, trembling, with her eyes and mouth clamped shut.

Her six-days best friend from so many years ago...

With a strange burning resentment kindled in her that even she, long inured to all the flavors of anger, recognized as something altogether new for her, she considered what was holding her here.

There was something. The pledges and bonds, probably. They just seemed a sort of resistance, something that made her mind skitter away when she thought of bolting, of leaving Wayward. Not like the premonition of death of that cold watery portal in the Theatre. Not like the thorns of the Hedge. More like an undefined fear, like Meggy perhaps felt in the water without her goggles--like something unknowable would stop her and it's unknowability was frightening.

Sarah gritted her teeth. Well, she would do this--but she'd not do it for a badly made wish. No, this time she'd do it for something real that perhaps she could touch again. For Meggy, maybe. For the Meggy-ness of life--of the tiny group of people who one could come to love in just a few days and still think of years later and smile to remember the shared warmth and still hope that they had their goggles or that they didn't need them quite so badly.

She didn't have to parse the wish then. She didn't have to see all the places where it could go awry or be turned back in some horrible irony.

She was done with wishes.

L5R Second City Boxed Set: Samurai of the Wild Frontier

CITIES OF SPICE AND IVORY
I love city sourcebooks and, after some prodding by the notable Australian Crab Clan leader, Hida Mann, I have come to love the fourth edition of Legend of the Five Rings. So something like the Second City boxed set should be right up my alley- combining the best of both worlds. In it, AEG have produced a massive and sprawling product. I would have held off buying this for myself, but the generosity of the players in my G+ Supers campaign put it in my hands. Is it a perfect strike for L5R?

L5R 4e has taken an approach I applaud, aiming to be more “era neutral.” There’s so much history available to play in that attempting to keep up with the “meta-story” generated by the CCG meant a desperate race and supplements which weren’t useful to players working with earlier time periods. I’ll admit that made me skip L5R Third Edition until I started seeing used copies at my FLGS a couple of years ago. The recent Imperial Histories book really exemplifies that approach, covering all of the metaplot/arc so far and a few alternate eras never before described. It means that players can easily use the setting and materials from previous editions. It is fifteen years since the game first came out and I’m still in the time before the Clan Wars.

That being said, there’s a bold statement right at the start of the first Second City book, “The City will be most difficult to adapt to campaigns that do not follow the canon storyline of the Legend of the Five Rings…(Still,) there are many things in this book that can be mined for use in different campaigns, even in campaigns that have nothing to do with this sort of setting.” This set-up takes a bold risk. The Second City is major settlement for Rokugan’s colonization of the now-empty Ivory Kingdoms, an ancient-India analogue filled with mystery, jungles, and foreign-ness. I’ll confess to being more than a little thrown when I read the set up- I honestly had no idea about recent history of the CCG or the canon timeline- with everything leading up to The Destroyer War and the fallout from that. The book does a good job of setting that up, but hit more than a few s’wha? and really? moments as I read along.

That’s a risky set up- a campaign frame that many GMs might not want or be able to buy into. It is also a framework that puts aside or downplays many of the most essential elements of the L5R setting. Instead of presenting a more conventional city sourcebook- like a reworking of City of Lies or an examination of the new Imperial Capitol- Second City doesn’t fit within Rokugan. It tears the players away from the conventional structures and power balances. It does split the difference- as this is really a sourcebook about that city, rather than being about the wider colony it represents (though it stops off there).

It isn’t all about the new setting, though. There’s a split in this boxed set between the campaign materials for The Second City (three books plus a map) and what could best be described as a GM’s Pack. All of this comes in a large and incredibly sturdy box. This is a long way from the screwy boxes of old L5R. I had a couple City of Lies boxes crack apart. On the other hand, the boxes for Tomb of Iuchiban and Otosan Uchi were supremely solid- but also too small for their contents. The Otosan box in particular had everything jammed in and bent. This box, though, is a keeper- solid and sturdy like the best board game containers. There’s an insert for holding the cards and dice in place, but you’ll want to toss that as it is pretty useless.

GM’S MATERIAL
*Dice: The box set comes with a set of ten emerald-ish d10’s with the Imperial Chrysanthemum in the place of the 10. On the one hand, I’m pleased to see these kind of dice. It suggests they might eventually do mon dice for each of the clans. On the other hand the dice seem more than a little chintzy, a lighter plastic than I care for. They’re certainly not to the same standard as Chessex as far as material quality goes. There’s an accompanying small drawstring black dice bag with the L5R logo and name glued/ironed on.

*Cards: I’m a little surprised, given L5R’s origin as a CCG, the company hasn’t leveraged that for card support before. Second City includes reference cards for each of the School techniques from the core rules. These are about half illustration and half text- with the image the same across all techniques for a school. There are also six copies each of a card for each of the five stances. The cards are nice- glossy and of good thickness. I recall the weird bendy paper of the old Clan War game, so I was relieved to see these. It is a nice touch, though given that players only have a few school techniques, it seems more like a prop than something highly useful. Perhaps for introducing the game to new players. I like the cards, though there are a few illustration choices that seem weak. Clearly the success of cards with Pathfinder and 4E has inspired this development. Of course since places like RPGNow presently offer POD cards, I wonder if AEG might make cards for the Advanced Schools, Alternate Paths, and new Basic Paths from the other supplements available that way. I imagine spell cards would be equally useful.

*GM Screen: I don’t run with a screen, but if I did, I would use this one. The landscape set-up has two main panels, plus two half panels to keep it standing. The front image is nice- busy, but not too crazy. I hated the 2E screen for that. The interiors have the key tables: Fear Rules and Condition Summary; Essential Mechanics (sequence, target numbers, maneuvers, stances, void point uses); Skills and Weapons; and Gaining and Losing Honor. I love the layout and graphic design on this- my favorite bit from the whole thing.

*Character Sheets: There’s a pad of full-color, double-sided character sheets. These are printed on nice stock- it takes pencil well and pen doesn’t smear on it (I sacrificed a sheet to confirm that). There are also six copies of the Premium Character Log. These saddle-stapled full-size booklets have a cardstock cover with eight pages of expanded character sheet inside. The paper’s a little glossier and I didn’t test it to see how it took writing (not willing to sacrifice one of these for a review). These are cool but I’ve always preferred a more compact sheet. Otherwise, as a GM there’s incentive for me not to kill a player and waste a booklet…

CAMPAIGN MATERIAL
The actual campaign materials for Second City comes in three full-color softcover booklets and two mini-booklets. There’s also a poster map just of the city. The books generally look good- with the same attention to layout and design present in all of the other L5R 4e materials. The paper stock is glossy and heavier- which in the case of softcovers like these makes for a weird bowing to the books. They are perfect-bound, with a good cover cut for folding open. The text design is excellent and the writing is pretty good throughout (though more than a few instances of wordiness). The art’s generally excellent- drawn as it is from across the L5R universe of cards and books. I can’t fault the art itself. But many of these images have appeared in other L5R books so there’s a good deal of recycling going on. There’s recycling between volumes of the set itself. Some of the images I associate with particular characters and places in L5R, so seeing them here in this context is more than a little jarring. They’ve been repurposed and I’m not so sure about that. Most importantly there’s not all that much art which shows the distinct locales and backdrop of the Second City, the Ivory Kingdoms, or the new modes of dress suggested by the text. There are some pieces- and I imagine trying to generate more would have incurred a significant cost in money and time. But much of the art doesn’t actually illustrate or enhance the material of the text- it seems like cut and paste art for art’s sake- pretty, well done, but not making a real contribution.

The City
This 98-page book lays out the background for the Second City campaign, with its focus on that urban center. Just six pages set up the history, before we get to chapters detailing each of the districts of the city. Each of these chapters is about ten pages with a general set-up, relations to the other districts, important personages, and a location guide. There’s also a detailed map presented and annotated. These maps have some pixilation. The district material is quite good- offering plenty of plot hooks, stories, and concepts. I really liked several of the locations and people and can easily see borrowing those for elsewhere.

Second City presents a very different set up than the usual samurai city. In some ways it offers a more lax approach to the rules and restrictions- which may appeal to those gamers who feel bound by the codes and obligations of the conventional L5R setting and campaign. I suspect, in part, that’s the intent of this whole setting. It certainly feels like a setting made for players who want a more conventional pseudo-samurai game, engaging in oriental adventures with fewer complications. However, the game doesn’t really open up the world to exploration- there’s some discussion of that. It is a city campaign sourcebook. Material about the Ivory Kingdoms broadly is much scarcer. It takes up the last section of this book (pages 81-98) and even that’s still heavily concerned with issues relating to life in the city.

The People
Here in 106 pages, Second City lays out the major characters, their personalities, goals, issues, and plots. Four chapters showcase a cross-section of the populace: The Ivory Court (7-16), Movers and Shakers (19-35), People of the Second City- broken down by clan- (37-85), and finally Common People (87-96). There are some great ideas here- and characters worth lifting for other campaigns. There’s some interesting discussion about how to adapt the Second City’s Court structure to other settings. I would have liked to have seen some Challenge, Focus, Strike ideas here. That would have aided potential GMs. The book wraps up with eight pages of new mechanics- mostly new alternate paths and a new Ivory Kingdoms-derived basic path.

The Campaign
This book offers a massive and extended story which draws the party from Rokugan to the colonies and Second City. This takes up nearly all of the book’s 106 pages. It presents a fairly linear plot- though with some room for changes and maneuvering. It does stop off to present some plot options- but I found myself thinking several times that I’d have to rework or handle things differently based on my group’s usual play. The opening, in particular, may take some tweaking depending on the group. Still, there’s a decently cool and ambitious story here which reminds me of the scope and scale of Tomb of Iuchiban, perhaps even more sweeping. The book ends with several pages of bestiary for the Ivory Kingdoms. There’s so much here I feel a little bad asking for more, but I would have liked more general material on running an Ivory Kingdoms campaign. GMs not using this particular campaign story will have a good deal of development to do. I can hope that we might see more IK campaign ideas or material in the future. A smaller POD supplement could be hugely useful- like paid DLC for those who spent the money on this set.

Journals
Two digest-sized journals included harken back to older L5R box sets. One is a pillow book of an Ide offering a decent overview of life in the new colony. The second offers a prop for use with the campaign. It is nice to see these kinds of materials again.

The Map
The large poster map of the city is just that- an unlabeled, top down view of the whole of the Second City. There are hundreds of tiny buildings, most identical and clearly cut and pasted. I’ve had preferred a more impressionistic approach to the map- this is so literal and specific that it feels out of place. On top of that, there’s real pixilation to the buildings on the map- clearly done at a smaller scale and then blown up to this size. It is a pretty picture, but not that useful. A smaller map would have worked just as well or better.

But here’s the thing which really bugs me. There’s absolutely no map of the Ivory Kingdoms anywhere in the set. I understand that the region hasn’t been mapped- but there’s nothing. Not a rough approximation offering an idea of size, of relative positions of sites, of the regions described in the text, or even what’s near the city. There’s no rough map perhaps showing what the path from Rokugan to the Ivory Kingdoms looks like. I understand that Rokugani maps are inaccurate and crazy, I take that as a given. But I’d like some idea of general positions- perhaps a kind of old Medieval “Here There Be Monsters” legendary map which is more drawing that chart. It seems like a massive oversight on the part of the designers and continually frustrated me when I went through the book. The material does seem aimed at offering a city campaign in another locale- hence the emphasis on urban populace and locations. But players are going to want to go outside of there and I’d like a little help with that. I imagine some of the argument goes that they don’t want to tie the GM’s hands- but the text already lays out some specifics, so the roughest of maps won’t hurt that.

OVERALL
I’m glad I own Second City- it is a lovely and amazing box, full of game stuff. However, I’m also a little disappointed. The material seems so focused on the urban story and the campaign arc that it doesn’t offer more of the resources which would make this a viable campaign setting for a GM. Beyond the issue of the absent map, the set really needs more material about the colonies as a whole. The kinds of players interested in exploring this setting will want to see that. It isn’t completely absent from the books, but it feels thin against the abundance of other riches. This is also a module which embraces a late timeline, something I’m less interested in. I need to think how I might bridge that gap. Should I borrow ideas and bring them to the mainland- or can I start something like the Destroyer war in my current campaign?

I think the biggest question is this: do you want to run Legend of the Five Rings without Rokugan? It isn’t completely gone- many of the key structures exist here. But it does cut away some essential elements of the classic game. I don’t think Second City would work as well for players new to the setting- in some ways SC only becomes really distinct and exotic in contrast to the original setting. That means that Second City works best for those players and groups who have grown tired or bored of Rokugan. For them this is a dynamite and hugely useful product. On the other hand, for me- I’m not tired of the Emerald Empire yet. There’s interesting ideas in Second City for me, but less than I’d hoped for.

Changeling the Lost: Round Up

WEAVING THORNS
Updated to add a dozen plus new posts and links (7/10/15)
I have a number of new posts on Changeling the Lost I'm putting together- some of them on the construction of my campaign, some on interesting & useful NPCs, and some offering a couple of new tools and tricks for those running CtL. To start out the month, I've pulled together links to all of the posts I've done so far on Changeling. I hope some of them might be useful. Note that I don't run using World of Darkness, but instead with a homebrew system. So where I offer mechanics I use those or skirt the issue entirely. Our current campaign is drawing to a close after about four years- with the group having located the thralled force of the Court of the Wolf, fought in the Animal's Arena, uncovered the secret behind the Beast presence in the freehold, and discovered the sacrifice necessary to dealing with the Hidden Nine last session. I haven't kept up with AAR posts in years, but you can see some of the early session reports here. 

I hope Changeling fans find some of this useful!

IDEAS ABOUT CHANGELING
The Courtly Campaign
Kith and Kind: Some Brainstorming on Changeling the Lost 
More Kith and Kind: Continued Brainstorming on Changeling the Lost
Changeling Civil Ceremonies
Changeling the Lost as a Lens for Horror
Albums Written for Changeling: Middle Cyclone
Changeling Songs
Building Hollows for Changeling
Spoiling the Setting? Thoughts on Player Knowledge (examples from Changeling)
Changeling the Lost and FATE
Changeling the Lost for Fate Accelerated
Changeling the Lost GM Jam
Changeling the Lost and DramaSystem
Kingdom: On Fae and Samurai

NEW CONTRACTS
Court of Judgment and Contracts of Weights & Measures
Contracts of the Merciful and Contracts of Sentencing
Contracts of Words and Contracts of Roads
Contracts of Uniform
Contracts of the Prisoner
Contracts of Kohl

FRAGMENTS FROM MY CAMPAIGN
The Neon Hedge: Building Changeling Las Vegas
The Wayward Notebook
Applying Hamlet's Hit Points: A Changeling Session Analysis
Two Successful GM Tricks from Changeling
Changeling Scene Postscript
Sharing and Play
Changeling Campaign Themes: Planning Wayward
Why You Should Never Look Behind the Campaign Curtain
Pieces Fall into Place 
Sarah No-Tears Dreams
YouTube Playlist of Changeling Lost Vegas Sessions
Changeling Lost Vegas: Session One
Changeling Lost Vegas: Orientation (Part One)
Changeling Lost Vegas Orientation (Part Two)
The Tarot of Changeling Lost Vegas

REVIEWING THE BOOKS
Product Guide for New Players
Changeling the Lost
Autumn Nightmares
Dancers in the Dusk
Equinox Road
Goblin Markets
Lords of Summer
Night Horrors: Grim Fears
Personae
Rites of Spring
Swords at Dawn
Victorian Lost
Winter Masques
Glimpses of the Unknown (WoD)

Poll: Which RPG Genre History Should I Next Trace?

GIVE IN TO YOUR HATE
I believe Blogger now has a complex algorithm  to carefully balance irritations with the recent "upgrades" against the pain-in-the-assitude of actually switching to another service. There are many, many little problems with the new version that never happened before (font defaults not matching up, image weirdness when using Chrome, random deletion of line breaks, adding background color to text for some cut & paste but not others). I've seen many people complaining about it- I'm glad I'm at least reasonably comfortable playing with the HTML or the blog would end looking much worse than it already does. 

Which brings me to this post- a couple of days ago I put up a poll using Blogger's own gadget for that. A number of people voted and then the poll reset. And then some more people voted and the poll reset. And once more for good measure. Checking the Blogger help forums shows that this is a common problem which has not yet been addressed. So I had to go off site to get a replacement poll, which you can see there (I hope) in the sidebar. 

Having looked at the History of Horror RPGs over several posts, I want to trace the history of another genre through game publications. If you have a preference please vote in this new and hopefully stable poll.

Blog Milestone

SINS OF A BLOGGER
I don't usually like to blog about numbers and stats...usually...

So today I hit 150,000 All Time Page Views, with 629 posts. There's a weirdness with Blogger that "all time" doesn't includes the first five months I had my blog up. I'm sure that's pretty modest compared to some of the really excellent gaming bloggers I follow...but that's a decent milestone and I'm pleased by it. 

So in celebration, here's a picture of my wife's character- Dweena Squint, Goblin Matriarch, from our Last Fleet campaign. This was drawn by Alexandra "Lexxy" Douglass at Gene's behest. 

Changelings, Samurai, Free RPGs and Other November Miscellany

1. CHANGELINGS AND SAMURAI

I’m still working on my Legend of the Five Rings homebrew so that I can get the campaign rolling. I don’t get as many hits for those or actual play posts (like the supers game), but I’m going to keep on. A good deal of what I’m doing is highly adaptable to FATE- and I know people had been talking about an L5R/Fate mash-up a couple of months ago. I had put together some plans for the RPG Blog Carnival for November, but that fell through. My other big plan for the month is to pull together more of the Changeling the Lost ideas I’ve been working on. We’re nearing the end of my present campaign, so I thought it would be interesting to share how I planned that campaign and some of the NPCs from it. Other GMs may find them useful for ideas. I also have a couple of campaign design tools for CtL I’m working on. I hope to have that up this month. It is National Game Design Month, and at the very least I also want to either sketch about another one of the board game ideas I have. We're still working on Right of Succession. We hope to test a couple of final tweaks and then get that out for Blind Testing in December or more likely January. I also really want to work on my reskinning of Crimson Skies for a tabletop system. 

A special thanks to Kenny who created the two cut-metal pieces on display here. I've placed them on a hex-map background for scale. They're awesome- he did a amazing job working out how to keep things stable. The Dragon Clan mon below is buffed and looks beautiful.

2. DRAMASYSTEM

The Hillfolk Kickstarter ends tomorrow. You can see my review of that here. You can also see the sample Series Pitch I put together- Malign Universal. I think it is a pretty cool product and I’m looking forward to seeing the final results. Here’s the thing- that’s a pretty amazing game value right now. For example, for $41 you get the hardcover, color interior, 240-page Hillfolk rules. You also get the hardcover, color interior, 200+ page DramaSystem sourcebook Blood on the Snow. Plus you get the playable playtest preview pdf of Hillfolk right now, as well as pdf versions of those two books when they come out. Alternately, I think just $10 gets you both massive pdfs. That’s a pretty awesome deal. Of course, I want more people backing the project as that increases the chances of hitting more stretch goals and getting more stuff in the books. There’s an element of enlightened self-interest to the process I will readily admit.

3. MANY, MANY FREE RPGS

RPG Geek recently had their "2012 24-Hour RPG Design Contest." Essentially entrants have to conceptualize  design, write up, layout, and proof an entirely new rpg in just twenty-four hours. They can use Creative Commons, Public Domain, or their own art to illustrate. These are a crazy competitions, with incredibly restrictive time tables. A couple of years ago I did one and vowed I wouldn’t again. So of course I did one this year, beginning at 4pm on Sunday and wrapping about 3:30pm on Monday. I took a couple of half-hour naps and slept for three hours in that time. I was ready to puke/collapse when my wife dragged me out for dinner Monday. Anyway, please check out this post over at RPG Geek. You can download all 38!!! Games in a zip file there. There are some very cool and professional looking products. I’m already punching myself in the head about the typos and layout choices in mine. If you want, you can also vote in the contest if you have an RPG Geek Account. Full instructions for how to do that can be found at the post. If you like games and game design, it is worth looking through those for ideas.

4. REVIEWS

I’m still doing weekly gaming product reviews- as promised I have some more Mystara products I want to take a look at. I also have some of the new Legend of the Five Rings materials, including The Second City boxed set which I want to review. Another publisher generously gave me a free pdf of their game and I eventually want to review that- but I need to give that another read through or even better get it to the table.

5. CAMPAIGNS

The Scion Campaign finishes this Saturday, so that will be two campaigns I’ve put to bed in as many weeks. That leaves three active campaigns and one in “pre-launch” phase. At some point I want to get some more writing done- at least before I do more gaming. I do want to do more G+ gaming and I wish that the Indie +2 G+ Con had come at a better time. I did watch a great panel on G+ gaming- you can find the YouTube video here. Also, the players from my G+ Supers campaign generously tipped me, which I can attest to as excellent motivation for running again- to try to live up to the generosity they displayed. 

6. YOU WANT IT WHEN?

Three weeks until Thanksgiving. WTF?