I've written about making a Pendragon-based Changeling: The Dreaming variant before, and it strikes me as a worthy project for after Yoon-Suin gets finished. (Work on Yoon-Suin is progressing, by the way. I hope to set up a playtest play-by-chat campaign at some point.)
Some preliminary thoughts:
- Pendragon works because it restricts what starting players can be. This gives it focus. (Lack of focus is what makes D&D such a great game, but it is what made the original Changeling: The Dreaming so difficult to play. This is a reflection of the special nature of trad-fantasy games and D&D in particular, a point which Zak Smith makes very well here. D&D works when you have a lot of options because everybody shares a broad understanding of what it is; in Changeling having all those options and a free reign but no real direction made the thing a bitch to make an actual game out of.) Therefore, Changeling Pendragon should be about young fae (preferably sidhe) in the service of a noble house on the cusp of knighthood, and go from there. This makes the game manageable, taut, directed.
- Pendragon's Traits map almost perfectly to the idea of the Seelie and Unseelie (and legacies) in Changeling. You would barely need to change the system at all. In fact the Pendragon system of Traits is probably a better fit for Changeling than the original rules.
- The winter phase fits fine with Changeling's emphasis on the importance of seasons. Again, you would barely need to change the system at all.
- Glamour, Willpower and Banality can all work using the Passions system as their basis.
- The major problem is cantrips and magic, which don't really fit readily into a given Pendragon mechanic; indeed "magic is not the point of a Pendragon game". I'd be tempted to either a) just lift the Changeling system wholesale or b) adopt the Pendragon approach and basically make it an NPC ability.
I would also have to remove all the tedious references to "gothic-punk".
Following on from last night's post, I present the Duchy of Liverpool, a campaign location for Pendragon/Changeling. Today is the overview. Tomorrow I'll write up adventure locations, and the day after I'll produce a list of seeds of conflict.
The map above details the lands of Donnchad mac Briain, Duke of Liverpool and Earl of Lime Street, and those who owe him (and the hose of mac Briain) fealty - the Barons of Waterloo & Litherland, West Derby, Knotty Ash, Wavertree and Mossley Hill, and the Earls of Docklands and Bootle.
Also on this map is shown the independent County of Knowsley, and the Cantref of North Wirral, which is ruled by Lord Llywelyn ap Owain, mac Briain's great rival and oft-warred against foe.
Most of the nobility and knights and ladies in the area are of course Sidhe. Those in Liverpool trace their heritage to Irish Sidhe, while those on the Wirral side are of Brythonic origin. The exception is the Earl of Docklands, Ezekiel Blythe, a troll who was knighted and later granted the Docklands title by the King of Dublin.
All of the kiths are represented in the area, though nockers and eshu are particularly common thanks to the maritime flavour of the city. Redcaps and satyrs are everywhere in the streets around Concert Square, and in the sewers and old railway tunnels lurk Sluagh and much, much worse.
Today I will mostly be talking about Pendragon and Changeling: The Dreaming.
Much as I loathe the rpg.net obsession with "doing" unspeakable and transgressive things with games which have no earthly business "doing" it (e.g. using Dark Heresy to "do" a Western) it does strike me that the Pendragon rules are rather narrowly defined given how good they are. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to change the game one bit, but I do think that Mr. Stafford's opus has the potential for a far greater scope of application than just knights in Arthurian Britain. There's this Japanese variant, for one thing, which appears to "do" The Blossoms Are Falling better than The Blossoms Are Falling, and neo-feudalism in space a la Dune for another.
My latest idea is to use it to "do" what Changeling: The Dreaming always should have been about but lacked the wherewithal to focus on - namely fae, living among us in the real world, with a feudal system all of their own. C:tD had the trappings (Sidhe nobles, courts, aristocratic houses, kingdoms, knightly oaths, etc. etc.) suggesting this, but its execution was so incoherent and so burdened by that White Wolf need to dress everything up as a "story" that it never came out and said it outright. Instead, the overwhelming sense reading through its rulebook is that the atmosphere is great but it isn't at all clear what you're supposed to do with it. What the game was crying out for was the sort of robust character generation system and graceful mechanics for things like Traits and Passions and winter phases that Pendragon possesses.
What C:tD also needed was the kind of focus that Pendragon offers in its core rules: as a player character you are taking on the role of a young knight from a minor family and that is it. My C:tD's scope would essentially be the same thing - newly knighted fae of whatever kith, trying to make their way in the world, slaying Chimerae and beating up redcaps. Exercising ghosts. Fighting dragons. Travelling to other realities. Questing for ancient and powerful magical swords.
And I would set it in Liverpool, natch.
