Changeling

Changeling: The Dreaming is copyrighted by White Wolf Games, those pixies!

Bad Hair Day

Submitted by thunderpigeon

A few days into a cross-country voyage, Lemuel, an Eshu wilder, was visited in a dream by the spirit of his dead lover, Gwendolyne. Unfortunately for Lemuel, dreams in this world are not always private, and his new girlfriend, Liane, happened to walk into this one.

This fed into Liane's insecurities (Liane is Sluagh; Gwen is Sidhe--the difference between their Appearance ratings is 6), and in the morning she was visibly shaken. Lemuel shrugged it off, saying it was only a dream, but for Liane this only made things worse. According to her take on the metaphysics of the situation, it meant that in a moment of passion he might call her by the wrong name, thereby causing irreperable harm to her name and thus her identity. So, for the next couple of days, Liane gave Lemuel the cold shoulder.

In this time, however, Lemuel was attacked and almost killed by vampires. Courtney the Valley Troll (see previous story) called upon the Wyrd and demolished an eighth-generation Gangrel in two rounds, thereby earning herself the nickname "Buffy." This so terrified the other vampires that they leapt back into their VW bug in a panic and skedaddled out of there, a Malkavian working the pedals with his hands (his legs were still dangling out the door) as another Gangrel steered from the passenger seat (thus earning themselves the nickname "The Keystone Vamps").

As Karen and Alexa (2 other Eshu) did their best to tend to Lemuel's wounds, even constructing a makeshift system for blood transfusion (there were no nockers present, but Alexa is remarkably resourceful), Liane was there frantically casting Soothsay cantrips, spending all of her Glamour and Willpower to make things work. Courtney, meanwhile, returned from pulling everyone's bacon out of the fire, saw Liane worrying over Lemuel, and said, "What gives? I thought you were done with this guy." At which point Liane raised her head to give Courtney a withering look, and Courtney's impeccably-coiffed hair . . . well . . . withered.

[For those interested in the game mechanics, this was Soothsay 2: Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair. If someonce can lose their health or a valued friend, then it seemed to make sense that they could lose control of their hair, and Liane had a dice pool of 9 for this spell.]

For the next few days, resentment seethed among the travelers. Liane was still angry with Lemuel, and Courtney, whose hair became less manageable with each passing day, was furious with Liane and was doing anything she could think of, short of physical violence, to get revenge.

Fortunately for Liane, that didn't amount to much. Fashion sense wasn't much use in this situation, and both Karen and Alexa knew better than to pass hurtful gossip, so Courtney was limited to sending Blood, her trained falcon, to dive-bomb Liane's hair with bird droppings and pigeon bones. Liane, who tends not to smell that good anyway, bought a hat from a tourist trap and shrugged it off. When Blood swiped the hat, Liane got one with a chin strap, and Courtney ran out of ideas. Liane did try a couple of times to explain why she was upset, but Courtney repeatedly missed the point, and this ultimately made matters worse.

Unfortunately, Courtney's player had to leave abruptly before this story played out. In game terms, this meant Courtney got a call on her cell phone insisting that she come home immediately because of a family emergency.

As they were walking through the airport, Liane approached Courtney and asked, "Does your hair make you upset?"

"Well, duh," Courtney replied.

Liane then asked, "Does that mean you're done with it?"

"As if!" Courtney answered indignantly.

"Well then," Liane said, "Let's go fix your hair."

And they went into the ladies' room together. Since Courtney's player wasn't there for this exchange, I was running Courtney, and I had to conclude, based on what I'd seen previously, that Courtney still didn't get the point, but Liane seemed to think, and I agreed, that it would be cruel to leave Courtney's hair permanently dissheveled.

Beware Pooka Bearing Gifts

Submitted by Caris

I was GM'ing a Changeling game for a while. You might remember my homophobic troll in my party of troll, satyr, nocker, and kitty pooka. Well, the nocker decided to grace the troll with a gift. He wrote me a DM note: "I'm going to go buy a large [unspecified sex toy not generally used by males] and put it in a shoebox, wrap the box in white paper, and give it to the pooka to put in the troll's Camaro." (The pooka was riding with the troll.)

The plan went well. The pooka agreed to do it, via DM note, but on his consent note to me, he wrote "I'm taking one of the nocker's business cards and taping it to the bottom of the box." He neglected to mention this modification to the nocker. Somehow I kept a straight face and told the nocker the plan had been completed.

I don't know what was funnier, the troll's response to the box's contents, his response to the immediate discovery of the card, or the surprise of the nocker to said discovery. The pooka got an exp for that stunt, and the nocker learned not to give pooka unmarked parcels to deliver to explosively-tempered trolls.

Maybe it's the cologne?

Submitted by Caris

It's probably very embarassing to design an object as a reward for one character and have another PC pick it up. Actually, it's definitely embarassing. At least for the PC....

Had a very homophobic teenager in the group playing a tough-guy troll. He was doing quite well at it, actually. We also had a nocker, a kittycat pooka, and a satyr girl. They did a lovely job of foiling a plot by a nasty Unseelie noble sidhe, and I'd designed, among other rewards, a pretty ring that had belonged to her for the satyr to find and pick up.

It wasn't really IC for the troll to swipe it, but he did anyway. He asked me privately, "Do I sense that it's magical?" I said he did. "Does it seem harmful?" I said no, it seemed benevolent. So he put it on.

I laughed my ass off as, over the next couple sessions, every guy in the game began hitting on the troll. He was getting more and more mad and actually thought I was just making fun of his homophobia. After he more or less threatened to blow up, I finally told him what everybody else had figured out -- that he'd gotten himself a Ring of Attracting Men, +Lots. I don't think I need to tell you what his general reaction to that concept was.

The Sole of Wit (or: Be Careful what You Quest For)

Submitted by thunderpigeon

A few years back, I started to run a Changeling game for a few friends. One player, amused by the notion of folkloric archetypes in the modern world, though it would be fun to play a Valley Troll. So she watched the movie Clueless, took notes, and wrote up a character sheet.

Because Courtney was a Troll (and her player was a power gamer), she put physicial attributes first. Because Courtney was a Valley Girl, she needed above-average appearance and manipulation just to fit in, so she put social attributes second. This left mental attributes last, so she took a 3 in Perception (a useful stat for clothes shopping) and a 2 in Intellingence, leaving Courtney with only 1 dot in Wits. We all found this to be particularly apt for the type of character she was creating, and on more than one occasion, Courtney's player was heard to quip, "I don't have two wits to rub together."

Unfortunately, when she realized that wits was the attribute required for initiative rolls, she decided she would have to raise that attribute. That is, after she upped her physical stats, and her realms, and her melee skill a couple of times (did I mention she was a power gamer?), so she was able to make that same joke for quite some time before she ultimately upped the stat and said, "At last! I finally have two wits to rub together!" The joke had by this point lost some of its newness but still elicited a small amount of laughter.

This witticism then slumbered until a week or two later, when another player mentioned something she had just read: that in Elizabethan English (and therefore in many Shakespearean puns), "wit" was also a slang term for a vagina.

Your Ash behind Glash

Submitted by thunderpigeon

The player characters needed information, and they were at the municipal library of Hematite, Michigan. Of course, being Fae, they did not all have the skills or even the patience to do research. So, while Karen the eshu was on the Internet and Bob the nocker was in the Map Room (oddly not the other way around), Pomona the dryad (kubera) was in the Children's Section, trying to learn to read, and Delilah the pooka was in Periodicals, photocopying her butt.

Sarah (Delilah's player) rolled 3 successes, so I ruled that Delilah was able, without getting caught, to make 3 copies with the quarter Bob had given her (OK, money management never was my strong suit), and--after describing each photocopy in detail, including the hints, for those who knew how to look, of her Fae seeming's catlike tail and the presence or absence of the butt of her chimerical catnip mouse--announced that Delilah then wrote on one of the pictures, "To Bob, my greatest fan," and autographed it for the nocker.

Bob, having no use for it himself, decided that this picture would be more useful locked behind glass on the community bulletin board. Bob was skilled enough that he did not need to roll to pick the lock, but his player decided to consult the dice anyway, and with 5 successes I ruled that Bob not only managed to gain access but to change the lock as well, and (at the prompting of a couple of players) to situate the autographed photograph directly next to a photograph of the Mayor of Hematite, Mr. Robert Ash.