The trouble with Elves

Autumn Nightmares - Changeling the Lost

Before you read on, one word of warning: If you are an avid devotee to JRR Tolkien's work, you may find that this post will cause offence and you may be very unhappy about it. I would suggest that you do not read on. If, however, you are a devotee to Tolkien but can accept a different point of view, do read on.

The trouble with Elves started for me with "The Lord of the Rings". I first read the Hobbit when I was around 10. At 12, LotR followd. However, I had known Elves (Alben, Alfen) for several years prior to that. I had first encountered them in the Northern sagas of the Edda and in the Germanic legends. Later, at around age 11, I had come across the "Little People" or "The Gay People" as the Elves are called in the British Isles. They all had one thing in common: the Elves of European legend were deathless, ageless and terrible, yet quite often beautiful, perhaps soulless, but always enthralling to mortals. To meet them was potentially lethal or damaging. Many a boy or girl were taken away and either never returned or returned decades later, just to find their families and friends long dead and gone.
A subset of these Elves were the Fates and their sisters which you can find around Western mythology and faery tales, who either curse or bless humans (especially babies, hence "evil faery god mother"). All types of Elves have one thing in common, they are not of this world, unconcerned with it, solipsistic and yet, every now and again, their paths cross the paths of mortals and some form of interaction (sometimes beneficial to the human party) ensues. I have always liked these Elves, because to me, they embody the true spirit of immortals. They are not unlike the immortals from Greek and Roman mythology, with their self-centred attitude to life. This type of Elf can be found in the RPG Changeling: the Lost, where the Fae exactly these types of behaviours and traits.
Then came Tolkien (and I must say that I have read Tolkien widely, not only his works, but works about him and his sub-creation, so I am well-versed in his mythology, although it would never become my desert-island-pick). Tolkien also models his Elves as immortals, but they come to share the world with other, lesser races (lesser because they are mortal). The Elves are described as something like guardians of the world, they awaken in it, are called West by the gods, dwell some time in their great land and in the end many of them come back and colonize the world from the West and make it their own (and in the Silmarillion, the Elves are actual not really very different from human beings: they fight each other, quarrel, behave as petulantly and irrationally as children sometimes, kill and get killed, fall from grace, get thrown out of the garden, in one word: their story is quite a lot like the story of mankind from the very beginning of biblical creation to the expulsion from Eden, with the only exception that not all Elves were thrown out).
In the Silmarillion, Elves are like human beings, except that they can theoretically live until the world ends, are stunningly beautiful and really like trees. So, this first iteration of Elves, because they will be quite different in LotR, is essentially a group of beings that are human but without the one horrible flaw which all of us are cursed with and all of us (including and perhaps especially, devout Catholic and WWI veteran, JRR Tolkien) hate: mortality. So, they are us, only with no end-of-life date. They kind of resemble in some ways the Greek gods. They are a little closer to original Elves, except that they ally themselves with humans and co-exist with them and teach them.
In his second iteration, as we can see it in LotR, the Elves really become annoying. They turn into ever-grieving, miserable characters that only seem to lament the passing of their age and, in the face of the greatest danger, only basically sigh and look to the West as their road out and to the East as to the lands they once owned, but which are now going to pass to someone else. And it is this grief and this pain that does not work. Because in order to feel pain and grief, one must truly be mortal and live under the threat of annihilation (even Elves that have been killed are not gone, their spirits linger and are reborn, with all their memories intact). So, Elves can never really lose anything permanently. And as beings that are already thousands of years old, the changing of their environment should not come as a surprise nor should it make life miserable for them. Tolkien has fallen into the trap that everyone falls into who tries to turn an immortal being into something that can relate to human suffering. By definition, this is impossible, because the ultimate suffering cannot be experienced by someone who is not subject to death. (And some argue that the story of the coming of Christ was invented as a way to explain to people how the god of the Bible is able to understand human suffering, because he himself became human in his son and died. A very interesting and highly-sophisticated psychological tale.)
This problem is so great for me that LotR loses all its charms as soon as the Elves enter the story (Gildor in the Shire is still okay, because he only whines for 3 pages or so), but everything as of Rivendell is just plain annoying. Faced with the threat of utter destruction by ultimate Evil, mankind, dwarves and halflings rally to fight (and their possible results are: death and being annihilated, subjugation by Sauron if they lose, and, least likely: winning and surviving). The Elves, on the other hand, have decided to leave ("I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel". I felt like saying: "Good for you, babe, don't let the door hit you on the way out, and thanks for nothing.")
As beings bound to this world, and no blissful eternity to go to, human beings by definition only have the choice to lie down and die or fight on, no matter what. That is the "human condition", and no deathless being can ever begin to grasp it. I believe Tolkien should have been able to see this due to his Catholic faith (see above). But he didn't and he therefore failed in making the Elves worthwhile in  his story.
I recently discovered an interview with Christopher Tolkien in which he explained that, towards the end of his life, his father was mainly interested in the metaphysical aspects of the Elves and what it means to put an immortal being into a mortal world. Unfortunately, Tolkien never came to any conclusions and these questions were never addressed. But this remark indicates to me that Tolkien understood the problems he had created with his Elves and they did not work as a race (especially not in LotR) and that they needed to be rewritten.
I, for one, would have been very grateful if he had managed to do it.

Call of Cthulhu RPG – Foregoing revenue?

I have always been fascinated by the CoC RPG (Chaosium Inc.), but due to a lack of interest in my group, I need to rely on playing solo adventures. Now, you will say “If it is solo, then it is not an RPG anyway.” And yes, you are right! A group’s trials and tribulations and adventures being run by a good GM cannot be beaten by any solo experience. Still! If you want your fix, you need to get it somehow. And Chaosium got this! So, in the 90s they published a series of “Alone…” books (Alone against the Dark, featuring a huge adventure in which you travel around the globe, burning through 4 pre-generated investigators, Alone on Halloween, Alone against the Wendigo), in addition, a series of solos set on Grimrock Isle was released.

Now, I did not buy them, because, back then, I just did not have time to do any RPGing. Now, 20 years later, they are unavailable anymore. I checked everywhere, and I could only find pirated PDFs on the web. In addition, I found (and bought) a print-on-demand version of Grimrock Isle!

So, I wonder: what is keeping Chaosium from either selling the PDFs for downloading (I would pay!), or (even better) as print on demand?

The same goes for many other Chaosium publications which are out of print now (Horror on the Orient Express, anyone). I’m sure many people would love to get them/download them and pay for it. But no, they remain unavailable. I don’t understand why a company would forego that kind of easy revenue.

Changeling the Lost - Campaign - Post 2 - Conceptualising the True Fae

What attracted me most about Changeling the Lost was the concept of the True Fae. As a student of ancient languages, culture and mythology, the stories told about the True Fae and the Changelings reminded me strongly of, among other myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses: Omnipotent, callous beings (Greek/Roman gods) pursue and abduct humans, who are changed beyond recognition as a result (Daphne, who is turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo is a perfect example of an elemental Woodblood; Arachne, who beats the Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare and weaving, Athena, in a weaving contest, is turned into a spider because Athena was so enraged that she had lost. Arachne would be your perfect Skitterskulk or Venombite beast).

Other tropes come to mind as well: The Greek gods especially were, even in Greek times, feared and considered immoral and callous (they tend to laugh a lot in Homer, but this Homeric laughter is not really all that merry or positive). Being immortal and forever unchanged, they cannot understand the human condition no matter how much time they spend with humans. They do consort with them, sire children with them, but usually, the mortal partner is not going to be all that happy afterwards. Anchises, whom Aphrodite had fallen in love with, tried everything to avoid a union on account of mortals always suffering after a union with a god. Seeing as Aphrodite as the goddess of sexuality and lust had decided to seduce him, his efforts were, of course fruitless.

The True Fae are very much like that as well: Immortal and omnipotent, they don't need anyone or anything else to live a life that is agreeable to them (in fact, the only thing that they hate is boredom). Seeing as they are completely autonomous, they are unable to empathise with anyone else (human or Gentry). They are described as positively solipsistic. This inability to understand another's needs leads to behaviours that, to humans, may seem totally alien and cold and inconsiderate and possible even cruel. A Keeper might have brought a lovely human to Arcadia to be their lover, but being unable to truly love them emotionally, the human will suffer emotional neglect. Whether this is true cruelty, which, to my mind, implies that the person inflicting the cruel abuse is able to understand what this behaviour causes in the other, or whether it is just inadvertent, but "normal" behaviour, is unclear. The True Fae remain ambiguous. And this is what makes them so terrifying and wonderful at the same time. Many of them are terrible and beautiful to behold, many durances are both wonderful and horrible for the Changeling. Not all Keepers abuse their Changelings, some treat them very well indeed and dote on them, what makes the stint in Arcadia unpleasant is the fact that the Wyrd inflicts changes on the human that change them inadvertently into something else. Imagine an "Old Lady in the Woods"-type Fae who abducts a young boy and dotes on him like she would on a cat, as a result, the boy is turned into a beast True Friend Changeling. He is exceptionally well-treated, but he is stripped of his humanity entirely. This, in itself, is terribly cruel, but was it intended? Hardly.

What makes the Fae formidable is the fact that they are so different and alien that humans and Changelings can never hope to understand them. This leads to great opportunities for gaming. The True Fae can be whatever the troupe want them to be. They could behave completely unpredictably. They could even come through the Hedge and walk right past a motley, merely ignoring them unless challenged, because, at that moment in time, they have their sights on something else. They could even ally themselves with a motley for a while for their own gain. And some Changelings might even choose to stand with their former Keepers in a conflict because their durance was not bad at all, they just escaped because they wanted to go home again.

As far as antagonists go, the True Fae are among the best.

Changeling the Lost - Campaign - Post 1 - Coming to terms

Changeling the Lost - a Storytelling RPG from White Wolf, set in the New World of Darkness. 

I don’t recall precisely when I first heard of Changeling the Lost. I only remember that it was well before 2009. I also recall that it was quite an unusual incident, because I had not been involved in RPG or RPG-related tasks for a very, very long time (more than 15 years). Additionally, I was not aware of any gaming going on anywhere near me, no groups, no cons, nothing. I also don’t quite remember how I found out about it, only that my first contact was through the internet. And somehow, I recall that there was music involved as well.

Anyway, what I did hear back then was somehow both offputting and fascinating at the same time: An RPG about a group of characters who had been abducted by monsters straight from a fairy tale (yes, those evil fairy godmothers exist, and you don’t want to meet them!). After their abduction to Arcadia, these characters were (ab-)used, generally either as tools or toys. Their uses ranging from lovers, muses and entertainers (dancing till your feet bleed and then some more) to hunters (putting the falcon in falconry), prey (the deer being stalked) to plain slaves to be worked (and changed in the process) till they became so adapted to their tasks that their physique and mind changed, sometimes dramatically. Many of them did not survive, some managed to make their way back to the world of mortals, but the changes they had undergone could not be reversed, they would forever be different, apart, lost.

This premise led me to investigate the game, and I read up on the discussions on the web how this could be play, whether it was too dark, was too close to the abuse-storyline to be played at all. I came across a demo pdf, which I downloaded and read, and did not really find inspiring. I then abandoned the topic, as I did not quite grasp the concept (I had never played World of Darkness, old or new) and, of course, had noone to play with anyway.

About 2 years later, sometime in 2010, I came across Changeling the Lost again, this time again by chance, because I had seen some articles on the web and heard it mention in podcasts. This time, it was players who had given it a spin and talked about scenarios, chronicles, story arcs, and it started to make sense. I was still without a gaming group, but now I started to look for more material, and I found loads: message boards, character sheets, entire chronicles, several youtube films, which ranged from trailers to a very evocative monologue by a GM soliloquising about a chronicle he was going to run and thoughts and ideas he had been collecting. My interest was now seriously piqued. Even without the prospect of ever playing it, I just enjoyed thinking about the concepts and listening to/reading up on actual plays: People were having serious fun with this! And the depth of the world they were creating was fascinating.

Fastforward to 2011, I became part of a gaming group, and half-way through the year, we moved to RPG. I also got more involved in actual play podcasting and came across a great CtL-podcast on flamingsofa.com. That’s when I decided I needed to give this a try. I started buying the books and now, after several months of reading and research, am ready to go.

But before I start running (and documenting) a chronicle, just some thoughts on the material and the game itself. There are 10 books altogether, in addition to NWoD core rule book. The books are really well made, great artwork, good to excellent writing (the fluff is very evocative), and the covers are something to behold (take the back of each book and scrutinize it carefully: the front illustration is repeated, but overlaid with the Thorns from the Hedge: you see the world through the Wyrd, really great idea, it took me 2 weeks to see it, and then I had to check every single book to make sure it was there throughout).

The material is so intense that it is very overwhelming, so, I have decided to start slowly, I will ease the players into the world and introduce them to the concepts in-game rather than trying to outline them upfront. The idea of the Changelings being reborn to the mortal world and having to learn how to live there again makes it a perfect starting premise: You don’t know much, decades might have passed, you need to come to terms with the new reality. This perfectly fits the theme of displacement, anxiety and looking for stability and patterns.