Notes Towards a Changeling: The Dreaming OSR-Based Retroclone

Buried underneath an awful lot of nonsense, there is a game somewhere in Changeling: The Dreaming, desperate to get out. It is difficult to imagine that there could be a worse, more complicated and confusing - albeit beautiful - rulebook, and vast swathes of it are dedicated to perpetuating a vision of role playing that should really be anathema to anybody with an ounce of sense. One can read the book a dozen times and still have no clear idea how to begin, and ultimately everything just seems to boil down to 'make a railroad'. 

And yet the idea - basically, there is a world of 'faerie' existing behind or in parallel to our own, visible only to certain people who have a fae soul - works when stripped down to its essence. Alongside and underneath the urban environment of houses, schools, parks, offices, pubs, shops and abandoned lots that we know so well is a fantastical landscape brimming with mythical beasts and fairy tale creatures; what looks like an empty old folks' home is really the palace of Lord Grey; what looks like a disused railway tunnel is the entrance to a network of caverns leading to a dragon's lair; what looks like a nondescript office building is really an enchantress's tower. The PCs inhabit the real world, but with exciting 'extras'. Walking down an ordinary city street, they notice that amongst that gaggle of teenage chavs there lurks a redcap, and that peering out of the window in the cafe in the floor above HSBC is the face of a witch. They have normal jobs and normal lives - but at evenings and weekends, they're searching for lost sidhe treasure or hunting a rogue member of the local unseelie court.

There is a way, in other words, to take the basic elements of C: tD and building it into something that is actually playable - a sandbox to have adventures in. It is ripe, that is to say, for the OSR treatment. 

Some basic thoughts:

• I would probably make it race-as-class, and likely keep the original Changeling kith types, basing them on existing D&D race/classes with some modifications. So there would be:
• Boggan (halfling)
• Eshu (druid)
• Nocker (dwarf)
• Pooka (illusionist)
• Redcap (fighter)
• Satyr (bard)
• Sidhe (elf)
• Sluagh (thief)
• Troll (barbarian)
• The PCs would begin as low-ranking squires in a noble sidhe house, borrowing slightly from Pendragon, and would work their way up - to perhaps one day founding their own 'cadet' houses
• Gameplay would revolve heavily around pursuing sources of adventure through investigating rumour of the kind already described above: a friend of a friend says there's an ogre's lair in the waste ground at the back of ASDA; let's check it out
• XP for gold might not work and would need replacing with a different mechanic - XP for glory, or something?