Chapter Two

From before:

Chapter Two - Character in Depth

• How to create a character
  
• Genre specific mechanics
  
• What's in it to play?

Previously: on Kallisti Press, in "Shadows and Strings," Joshua BishopRoby wrote:

In an offhanded comment in Changeling vs Vampire I pointed out how while both titles highlighted shadowy political machinations in the text, the presented rules did not actually support play involving that content. Most of the World of Darkness line talks big about politics and pulling strings from the shadows, but in actual play, this usually just turns into character and setting color. Players get to feel good because they get to say, “I’m a Reformist! That means I’m not a stuffy Traditionalist!” Generally this is followed up by working for the Duke without question, and me shooting myself in the head.

Now, if I wanted to rip out all the stuff that I liked about the setting of those games — shadowy conspiracies of demihumans lurking in the shadows of the modern world — and create a system to support the political and conspiracy play, how might I go about doing that?


Thematic Components
Politics:

Relationships, Power, and Need
Fantasy:

The Other and Transformation
Secrecy:

Facades, Shame, and Fear
Let’s boil the concept down to three elements: politics, fantasy, and secrecy. Politics is all about relationships, power, and needs. Fantasy is all about encountering the Other and transformation. Secrecy is about facades, shameful truths, and fear. Connecting these, we get… the Other, behind facades, exercise power through relationships to feed their shameful needs, fearful of what happens if they’re found out.

I’m missing transformation, though, which should permeate the entire thing. Yes, this sounds exactly like what lots of the World of Darkness was trying to be. But it also falls into the same trap as the WoD: these aren’t protagonists. No, I don’t mean good guys, I mean proactive characters.

These guys are parasites, clinging to the underside of the world, purely reactive. Their goal is nothing constructive, it’s mere survival, a continuation of the status quo. Not people I’d be too interested in playing. You know what this needs? This needs T. S. Eliot. The only way that the Other will be able to step out of the shadows is to transform their world, but they fear that transformation as much as they fear the vengeance of humanity¹. So the concept becomes: the Other, behind facades, exercise power through relationships to feed their shameful needs, as fearful of the vengeance of humanity¹ as they are of transforming their world....

What about the characters and players, though? The characters, obviously, are individuals from the ranks of the Others that are caught up in the transformation of the world that they both fear and need. Some might work towards transforming the world; others work against it. They do so by exercising that power through facades and relationships, careful not to upset the status quo too much too fast for fear of inciting the vengeance of humanity¹....

The original novelty of the World of Darkness line was its inversion of the encounter with the Other. Instead of being the knight lost in the land of faerie, you were the faerie lost in the real world.

Following this he continues with an interesting experimental game that doesn't have a bearing here, but please give it your attention. This part is pure gold for The Unseen, though. If you change the humanity¹ to Status Quo. Being a game about færie courts, the status quo is highly important. Being as so many kingdoms are 'closed' (sealed in a lake or et cetera), the currently 'open' have a vested interest in keeping them closed. But that never stops sex, greed, or family, does it? What makes it interesting is that you can't just 'look' at someone to know if they are fæ.

That should frame what I want so far.

But what to comment on thematically...?

Fang Langford