"The Big Rulebook of Fables"- Plans For an Upcoming Changeling Campaign

My Changeling campaign is coming closer with each passing day. So, we'll begin the campaign and all my planning will be tested, but until then, I've got at least about 2 to 3 weeks, maybe even more. As such is the situation, I've decided to get into the fairy tales a little bit closer, so the first session will be a session that worth the wait. Anyway, I've came to a few observations about this genre of stories. My changeling game is supposed to resemble these tales in so many ways, that there's no other way so beneficial to prepare for the game. What follows are some of my observations, accompanied by how I plan to use them in games.

My first observation was about the world. It's pretty much clear that all fairy tales occur in a place that is  familiar and alien. In one hand, there's its normality, with normal human inhabitants, wars, kings and queens and much much more. On the other hand, though, there's the strangeness of the world. It's a strange, peculiar, alien, wonderful world, filled with all kinds of wonders (and some other things). A world that is both familiar and alien, fearful and wonderful, magical and mundane is hard to create in a moment, but it's not impossible, and that's something that I plan to do in my game.

The easiest way to make this happen is to make it some kind of an urban fantasy game, but it may be too familiar this way, so a twist has to be made. I'm still not sure what mine will be, but I'm sure thinking about it, and that's where the magic of the world will come from. Possibly an exile? Attack of the Gentry? Maybe a discovery by the humans?

Another thing is the infamous justice. What's bad shall be punished, what's good shall be greatly rewarded. How can we insert this into the game without making it feel strange or forced? Maybe it's more suited to be strange and forced, to come in terms with the strange world? I'm not sure, but I have to make the punishment something both peculiar and frightening, and the main inspiration for that will be the dancing in the burning shoes. When thinking about rewards, it's much easier to think about things, as rewards in fairy tales are pretty much normal: Marriages, nobility, gold.

The last thing I wanna go over today is the point of "Happily Ever After". How can we make that into a game? How will it be happy? How will it go in line with horror gaming? My take on this is quite simple; I think that I'll go for the tragic "Happily Ever After" end. Things will end badly, really badly, but the lesson will be learned and the mistakes and bad deeds won't come back to hunt others; people will to handle properly. I think that I start this game with the "Once Upon a Time" notion, told by the only living person from the story that s/he tells.

How will it go? Will it work? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out. Maybe, just maybe, this will help to make my game better, or even I'll be lucky enough to help another's game also...

A Fairy Tale Feel

In his commentary to the movie "Pan's Labyrinth", Del Toro expresses a key concept for making movies that feel fairy-tale like: the fairy tale is a simple story with simple characters. you can change one of the elements, but not both of them.

If we'll look at Pan's Labyrinth, the plot is complicated, with intervals of fantasy in the middle of reality, and with these 2 worlds colliding to each other. But the characters? They are really not that complicated. The Capitan an egocentric person whose love for control and order is unquestioned (as can be seen by his work on his clock). Ophelia's mother is a pregnant woman, who is in love with the Capitan, and who surrenders to whatever he says. The Dr. and the maid are double agents, who are not brave enough to join the rebels, but that's as far as they are complicated. The illusion of complexity is broken once one looks into the film.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the movie Spirited Away, a movie that although I didn't like it, I truly appreciate. The plot is pretty straight forward, with a girl trying to save her parents, but the characters are full of eternal conflicts, of metaphors, of allegories. All the characters in this movie are not as simple as seen at first sight, and even the evil ones are not as evil as they seemed.

In both movies, there is a strong feel of a fairy tale story. True, there are other elements there that make and/or help to enhance the theme, but this concept is one of the stronger and more important ones.

In RPGs like Changeling, this little thing can do magic. The stories in Changeling (or in Grimm, or the like) resemble and are closely related to fairy tales. While Changeling goes back to the original uncensored ones, and Grimm to the twists on them, keeping the idea and the feel of the fairy tale is a need in this kind of games.

Because usually, one gets to these games when they are more advanced as players and GMs, the characters will be much more rounded and much less flat usually. That means that the GM has to shift the focus from the plot to the characters, and that his/hers NPCs must be more developed and also, must resemble the concepts that the players want to explore in their characters.