Oh. Well, first of all, this is a good benefit and worth donating to. But oh, Changeling. I have so many feels about Changeling. https://twitter.com/bundleholding/status/1346893054356160518

I got into roleplaying in high school because it was where the goths were. And since it was a late 90s goth group we played Vampire: The Masquerade. And then I ended up at the same college as a few of my roleplaying friends and so stayed with the hobby.

At college I discovered Changeling. It took me a while to really get to Changeling. I think I thought every other mainline White Wolf game was interesting first. But eventually I came to the system and ran a game. And I fell in love.

Roleplaying games being what they are, what I fell in love with was not strictly speaking the game as written but rather the game in my head and that I could run.

More than any other White Wolf system, and frankly more than most systems period, this was a game that could flex genres. It could swerve from comedy to horror to epic fantasy to tragedy and hold all of those at the same time.

It could swerve on scale as well. The fae existed as guardians of stories, hope, meaning, and creativity. This let you make huge, broad brush philosophical statements about art and meaning, but also to drill down and do small stories on the individual scale.

You could do a story about restoring hope to a family whose mother was dying and then suddenly pivot to world-ending apocalypse.

More to the point, you could do both at once. “A young boy whose mother is terminally ill lets a cosmic horror representation of Cancer into the world through his dreams.” And then you could fight it by recruiting literal Santa Claus to help you.

Or, you know, it could be an epic romantic tragedy about nobility and duty and sacrifice. Or any number of other things. It was a setting you could do absurd amounts to and with—a glorious shared universe you could break and deform again and again and always reset for next time.

I’ve been playing it for twenty years, and have written more stories in that setting than I can count. It’s a mythology my brain naturally adapts to—a default setting.

And one of the reasons for this is that it’s blatantly the game where White Wolf ripped off Sandman the way they’d ripped off Anne Rice for Vampire.

So a few years back when I was noodling around with comics ideas because I was bored and driving and I hit on a dark fantasy 2000 AD homage with a *fantastic* first issue closing image, it was fundamentally a Changeling idea under the hood.

And similarly, last year when I was looking for a game to run I remembered that idea and went “oh, I could just turn that into a Changeling game.” And I got a bunch of notes and ideas together, and early last year ran a session, reusing my closing image as a cliffhanger.

And then I never ran another session because pandemic. But when I asked Penn what he liked drawing and he said “faeries,” I immediately went “oh, I can change that game back into a comic.” And I set about filing the serial numbers off of a Changeling game.

And that’s Britain a Prophecy, the ongoing comic with Penn I’ve been teasing a little. And it still has its first issue closing image. And you’ll hopefully get to see it end of this year/beginning of 2022. Because it’s an absolutely wild ride.

So anyway. One of the people responsible for Changeling and thus for all those stories I’ve told and for my first ongoing comic desperately needs financial help, and you can give it to her by throwing a few bucks at a cool game.

I think you should.