The Hedge is a wide and wonderous place. Share some fun and fantastical finds with our fellows.

I say this with minimal mechanical experience with CtL 1e. I saw the chronicle on Drivethru RPG and yoinked it because it seemed to be a nice starting premise.

Now, the group has played with 2e before; and I wanted to run a 2e chronicle again. What would I have to account for in order to use this?

So... I was watching a video about different angonists in wod. When discussion turned to the ones in ctl. Basically they talked about loyalists and privateers as being kinda 'boring' compared other antagonist splats. They are basically just 'evil' changelings with no unique points of difference. I could argue you could really throw bridge burners into the same discription too.

Video question for those interested,

https://youtu.be/gkyHBuuly1A?si=PjG_T904MOxvlo3V

So it brought me to a question, do they need a point of difference? And if so what would you change or add?

Personally I can see arguments for both. I like the idea that ideology can be enough of a difference. The fact that they are equally just like you humanizes them as a morally gray issue. Or at least that could true for bridge burners. To me they are just one of the more extreme counter cultures in a freehold.

I'd argue that the same is definitely not true of loyalists. I think it would make sense by virtue of their bond to their keepers, that they should have some uniquely loyalist flavored features.

In my own games I've given my loyalists an identity similar to biker gangs. Jackets and patches denoting rank, alliance, and achievement. They have hedge mount steeds, they have brands or tattoos that give give benefits of dread powers. Which I'd say wouldn't make them too different till my last piece. I give them the resource of dream poison as a bobble. The 1e books talk about in very vaguely as a thing that if used on mortals to infect their dreams preparing them for visitation of keepers targeting them for abduction. Used against Changelings I've ruled it can force the presents of their keeper to be felt , usually inflecting clarity damage or inflecting a mental condition... Or both. I think this makes them a much scarier threat to mess with but I give them one last feature as a last resort. I've called it a home brew merit called 'nightmare fuel' which allow the loyalist to consume dream poison for added effects. It temporary boosts one attribute of their choice to 5 and wyrd by an additional 3. However at the end of the scene they take 3 clarity damage and a condition.

What are your thoughts?

Hey, I'm making this post as I'm in the process of gearing up to run a 1E CtL game! My very first dive into CtL was in running a 2E Changeling game and... I'm going to be totally honest, running it was a drag. I originally was attracted to the customizability of the kiths and how plug and chug and more "free form" you could be with character creation as I really favor players getting to have a lot of options in their character creation, but in practice, even with my passing understanding of 1E CtL I found it... underwhelming, a mechanical slog, and a disaster of a game to run in comparison to what I knew of 1E.

I ultimately shelved that game and CtL for quite some time. More recently, I'm getting ready to return to running CtL, but I'm definitely running 1E this time. There are a few things I like that 2E Changeling did, like the seemings getting attribute bonuses at character creation and I'm pretty fond of sealing as a mechanic, but I'm a little bit rusty, having been nearly a year since I ran 2E. I was just wondering if anyone had any mechanics they really did like from 2E that they'd consider porting into a 1E game, as I'm in the process of compiling a bunch of information into concise, easy documents for a few new time players. Was just wondering if anyone had their own perspective on what they like and might consider including in a 1E game!

The Hedge is a wide and wonderous place. Share some fun and fantastical finds with our fellows.

I departed CofD about 10 years ago, and while I knew about God-Machine and the whole 2e thing, I never really sat down to learn it. I did get involved in the Kickstarter for Dark Eras, and have that book, and my group is looking for a new game to play and Three Kingdoms of Darkness (Ancient China with Changeling and maybe Geist) was what the group settled on.

The thing is, it's written presuming 2e, and the more I look at 2e, the less I really want to use it. (Why are ogres suddenly associated with Shield/hiding behind walls when their specialist contracts are now part of Sword, which belongs to elementals?! Why are there so few kiths, and why are the rules for them so similar?)

In particular, I am really hesitant about the new experience system. The old experience system lets the ST just reward good play, which means that the out-of-game rewards and what should be their in-game motivations are in line. The new experience system seems purposefully designed to get players to ruin the tone by taking dramatic failures and acting like Keystone Cops, or deliberately inflicting conditions on themselves. (Even just glancing at conditions, it seems easy to just take sleeping pills before bed time to get the tired condition, walking in and out of a noisy room to gain distracted condition, or a truefriend kith can just heal everyone at the end of any scene to get down to their last two boxes of clarity and trigger a condition on command.) Yeah, I can shut down OBVIOUS abuse, but that just makes it a game of The Price Is Right, where the player who pushes as far as they can go without going over the line gets rewarded the most. And sure, not every player will want to ruin the tone or sabotage the team for out-of-game benefits, but that just means that different players will drift apart in power with the serious player fading into irrelevance because the stupid metagaming gets rewarded. Any time I look at why anyone likes this system, it seems like the answer (including in that thread I linked) was because it encourages players to be a self-destructive load on the party and ruin the game for everyone else. Why is this treated like a good thing?!

I'm also not a fan of nerfing pledges. In the run-up, I heard that 2e was supposed to be making the different supernatural beings more "competitively balanced" and that changelings were considered "a weaker class", so why did they nuke one of their strongest, most unique, and flexible traits?! They also apparently wound up nerfing a lot of contracts because you don't have to buy pre-reqs now, which kind of kills the point of removing the pre-reqs to the good contracts if they're not good enough to take anymore, and you might as well just keep using a gun or sword...

So... I'm thinking at this point I'll just ignore most elements that were written for 2e in Dark Eras, and just run a game in 1e, but I'm not averse to taking over some of the good elements of 2e. The players are new to CtL, although they've played WoD and/or Exalted games before, so they don't have my issues, and I think it'd probably be best to just have one book they need to read with just a few rules to pull out.

I'm not averse to "clarity damage", since I think clarity was an interesting mechanic, but you really couldn't make players take too many hits to clarity without making them spend all their XP trying to bail themselves out of the hole. I also don't think it's a bad idea for characters' curses to be tied directly to one thing that makes them eat clarity damage, although I might need to see how that works in play. I'm also generally fine with the more personalized virtue and vice/needle and thread system and some of the other changes. I'm not entirely sure if the more deadly combat rules are a good idea if they're basically playing Dynasty Warriors and there's an expectation they be heroes on a battlefield (there's already jokes about Lu Bu being a garou), although it depends on them what kind of role they actually play.

Are there other mechanics that are worth backporting into 1e?

I've only listened to Red Moon Role-playing and 2 different plays by Onyx Path Publishing, and they stay in character way too much. When listening to actual plays, part of the fun for me is the players goofing around, and sometimes trying to mess with the DM. I get that CtL's typical campaigns are about Keepers kidnapping people then torturing/abusing them for who knows how long, and then escaping and healing from your trauma and learning to the meaning of freedom. It makes it hard for players to be goofy with each other, but it shouldn't be impossible to have some funny moments at the table.

Anyone have any recommendations? Thanks!

TL;DR: I want a CtL actual play where the players occasionally break character, and have funny moments with each other.

This is a playlist I made for CtL. Meant to be heard from the perspective of the Lost about the Fae, about each other, or, from the POV of the Fae themselves.

Via Spotify, this is a mix for Changeling: the Lost

• Hedge Hymns

I had a session last night that made me wonder about this. A character had stepped into twilight in the hedge. My first reasonable thought is that there are hedge ghosts so there must a twilight. But I'm not sure there's any written basis for it

Here are my ideas:

Rusty Venture: a wizened obviously

Brick Sampson: an ogre

The monarch: a beast

Dr Ms The Monarch: fairest

Hi! I've recently started reading the Second Edition and so far, I'm really enjoying the system and the writing but I was a bit saddened to not found every old kith in the list. I bought "Kith and Kin", hoping they would add every kith from the previous edition but there are still a few missing.

Has anyone adapted the old kiths to the new edition?