Overview Continues with Fetches and Other Antagonists
Fetches: Like I Said
Same ol' same ol'. You have a Fetch or you don't, you can kill them or not, but they now have more teeth. They are build like a character with the Fetch supernatural template.
I don't know if they're doing this in other CoD games, but seeing "enemy 'x' is built normally and then you do 'y'" is both nice to see and frustrating. The nice should be obvious: Here's a character with a template. The frustrating is having to build a character. I never have nailed down what makes WoD/CoD characters good, except that the characters listed in the WoD/CoD books are not those built for the very different Mu*es.
Loyalists
Loyalists were introduced in the original Changeling: The Lost, but never really had their day. Here they are much better fleshed out.
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Bridge-Burners: Destroy everything connecting Changelings to Arcadia. Yes, their motivation makes them terrorists. Kudos!
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Privateers: People who work for the sometimes Gentry, sometimes Goblins, but mostly Huntsmen to give them more freedom and so they don't have to worry about being hunted.
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True Loyalists: People who work directly for Arcadia.
Hedge Ghosts
Ghosts born in the Hedge, or of the Hedge. Emotions can become Hedge Ghosts, apparently. Sure, why not! Bits of souls caught on the Thorns, too. They are created like normal ghosts, but with Glamour instead of Essence, Anchors instead of Threads.
A lot isn't said outright about them, bits of information hidden within bits of other information. For instance, under an "Injuries" header we have this important bit of information:
Despite appearing to the naked eye and being solid, a Hedge ghost doesn’t have any internal organs to injure.
The real answer is three sections later, under Manifestation: They're always manifest in the Hedge and they can leave but don't care to. More grumbling about making things easy to learn.
Hobgoblins
The book says outright there is no standard Hobgoblin, and that there is no standard way they're created, thus reversing Equinox Road, which honestly is good to see.
They use a full character sheet too, but with far more lax creation rules and in some cases far more powerful: A Wyrd 3 Hobgoblin can have 7-dot traits. Their creation is very solidly "whatever makes sense", but with a foundation of understanding their limits and abilities.
Hobgoblin Deals are detailed deeper here, too; more than Goblin Contracts raise your "Goblin Debt" stat. Humans can gain this debt, but at 10 dots they are so indebted they become a Hobgoblin themselves. Spooky.
Liza Cantwell,
Age 9, Goblin Queen
“Kneel before the queen!” [dissolves into giggles]
Huntsmen
Here's the completely new element. 100% Pure New.
The Gentry, instead of splitting off an aspect of themselves to pull back Changelings, now put an aspect of their will in another creature and send it out.
The Huntsman, leader of a Wild Hunt.
But here's the twist, because I honestly believe this game is trying to make their enemies compelling or at least make some kind of sense:
Huntsmen were Arcadia's original inhabitants.
No music sting needed here; the Huntsmen were going to be this game's Big Bad Antagonist, their Strix or Idigam. Only here's what I think happened: So much else balanced that the Huntsmen are now just an antagonist. They can certainly be a Big Bad, and probably the worst of the bunch, but a lot more is going on in this Changeling.
This is good; one of the largest criticisms of CtL1e it wasn't clear what there was to do. If you don't get that sense from this edition then you and I are reading different books.
I was kind of hoping they would make a big analogy between Firbolg and Fae in this, but they have left it a mystery: The Huntsmen were natives whose big goals were things like "lasso the moon" or "conquer all lands where". Impossible dreams. (Human dreams, is how I'm reading it.)
I don't know why the Gentry need to do this, though there are the occasional hints that the Huntsmen are better with the Hedge than even the Gentry. The take-aways are that Huntsmen's personalities are almost completely subsumed by the Gentry, which is I think a large part of why. The fiction reads better this way. A Huntsman has (rare, dangerous) occasions they can be talked down. They make mistakes. This tells a better story.
Huntsmen are created when a Gentry decides it's time. They use the same Huntsman every time until someone kills it or frees it (also very dangerous), then a new, unknown Huntsman is made.
Bringing a Huntsman into a game for a PC is a game-changer. It would be a Chronicle in its own right, for the same reason that Terminator 2 didn't have a whole lot of downtime.
True Fae
A Gentry consists of two parts: A Name, and up to five Titles, including zero.
One of those Titles was a Keeper.
Oh, and there's Gentry chargen. I'm going to ping @Ganymede here because I know she's going to groan, wanting Gentry to be truly alien.
Well here's why: One Title is one Contract category. Sword, Crown, etc. That Title can use every Contract from it.
To kill a Title, you must either trick it into an Oath that it breaks (because it swears the Oath on itself) or destroy that symbol in its Arcadian realm. This means any Gentry must be killed up to six times: Once per Title, then kill its Name.
There are other ways, but read the book and let the ideas spark in your head.
The End
That's it. That's my Changeling Overview.
Wait, what? There are more sections?
There's "Other Courts of the World"? There's "Fae-Touched"?!
Chapter Six is about other courts, and it's a good summary. If you don't want to use Seasonal Courts, then don't. Making your own Court Contracts will be a bit challenging to balance, but it's a lot easier than it used to be.
Maybe I'll go into Fae-Touched next post, but they're in an appendix, and that's absolutely where they should be.
All in all, Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition is worth the read and maybe even worth the play. Complexities from the 1st Edition have been streamlined, gaps have been filled, and the reason to play Changeling has been injected with a big syringe filled with plot ideas.
It suffers the same things that Onyx Path has always had problems with; being reliable teachers. I'm also disappointed in the overall vagueness of the Pledges and I'm not sure how to feel about Contracts.
All in all, though, I'm willing to give this a try, and I'm glad that when they removed something (pledges) they gave more back in its place (dreamwalking). If my favorite character concept is now an Ogre then eh, so be it. I don't feel dictated, and can see paths of stories waiting to be told.