Listen to this episode here.
In the unreliable urban fantasy world of Changeling, Clarity is a mechanic that measures... well, for now let’s go with a character's ability to trust their own reality. But finishing that sentence is kind of what this episode is all about, because Clarity has deep ties to various sanity mechanics from any number of Call of Cthulhu inspired games, even as it’s trying to do something different, maybe a little more nuanced and less obviously offensive as measuring a person’s sanity with a flat number.
There’s any number of metaphors you might find meaning in with Clarity. It’s not clear to me that that makes it much better than sanity. And yet, today's cohost MintRabbit loves this game and this mechanic dearly, sees so much of herself in it. And seeing yourself in a flawed game, still finding beauty in it, that's what makes today's episode interesting.
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Further Reading
Changeling the Lost 1e by White Wolf Games
Changelings, Trauma & Gaming by Mint Rabbit
A second post from Mint about Changeling
Dice Exploder on safety tools
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and get lost with it in some creepy garden maze. My name is Sam Dun Ald and my co-host today is Mint Rabbit.
You might remember Mint from the 2024 year end bonanza of this very show, or from her excellent Tumblr. there's a T-T-R-P-G for that where she's regularly taking requests for is there an RPG about yada yada, and coming back with 10 games from itch that fit the bill.
What a community service. She's great. When I invited Mint on, she wanted to bring a mechanic from, changing along the lost first edition, a game from the World of Darkness, line of books that dates back to the nineties and aunts about regular people who were kidnapped into the fairy world, then found their way back home, and now are trying to settle back into their old lives.
Specifically she wanted to talk about clarity. A mechanic that measures well for now, let's go with These people's ability to trust their own senses after becoming magically discombobulated.
But what exactly clarity measures is kind of what this episode is all about, because clarity has deep ties to various so-called sanity mechanics from any number of call Cthulhu inspired games, even as it's trying to do something different, maybe a little more nuanced and less obviously offensive as measuring a person's sanity with a flat number.
There's any number of metaphors you might find meaning in with clarity, not just sanity, But it's not clear to me that that makes it much better.
And yet Mint loves this game and this mechanic dearly, she sees so much of herself in it and that is what's interesting to me about this conversation. How Mint takes this at times, terribly flawed game and still finds herself in it, It still makes some beauty from it.
Thanks to everyone who support the show on Patreon.
And with that, here is Mint Rabbit with clarity from change length, the lost first edition. MintRabbit, it's so great to have you on Dice Exploder. Welcome,
Mint: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Sam: Yeah. What are we talking about today?
Mint: So today we're going to be talking about changing the lost first edition. But specifically we're gonna be talking about the Clarity mechanic, which happens to be kind of a branch off of. A mechanic that exists in a bunch of world of darkness games typically called morality, although depending on which splat you're using is it's gonna have a different term.
Sam: Yeah, so there's a ton of context that I feel like I personally already need to the two sentences you just said. Right. Because I'm very familiar with like World of Darkness. IT kind, I think of it as like looming large over the RPG scene as like one of the juggernauts of the nineties.
Like the nineties were this interesting time where like Dungeons and Dragons was just like a roleplaying game. It feels like, like it wasn't the sort of behemoth that it is today. And World of Darkness was like one of the other big heavy hitters .
But that's about all I know about it. I know it's got vampires in there and I know it's got maybe some other kind of monstery urban horror stuff going on in it. So I'm curious to hear you kind of set us up first with like, what is World of Darkness and where is it coming from?
Mint: For sure. So disclaimer, first of all, I was technically alive in the nineties, but not, I was not old enough to play role playing games in the nineties. So I can't speak to what it was like back then, although I have heard that while D&D was not necessarily queer friendly for early players world of Darkness.
Seemed to have a little bit more space for that.
Sam: Yeah, it also very goth was the oh yeah.
Mint: Yeah. It was where all the cool goth role players hung out. It's also got a really big space in the LRP scene. I think some of the most established lrp scenes in the world are world of darkness, larp scenes, especially vampire. But yeah my specific knowledge of World of Darkness, it, it kind of started with changing the loss and then it branched out from there.
So white Wolf is the company that that started it in the 1990s with five different game lines. The most famous one is Vampire the Masquerade, which if you've been in the TT RPG scene and you know of games outside of Dungeons and Dragons, there's a good chance you've heard of Vampire.
Then if you fast forward to 2004 the company tried to reboot the series, so to speak. They wanted to revamp a lot of the rules. They decided to redo all of the settings that they had published up until that point. And the fans just kind of rioted and said, no, bring it back. We want the old lore. And so back in, in 2011, the original game lines were kind of rebooted again.
so there's, really kind of complex, like three layer lasagna when it comes to world of darkness, because we have the Old World of Darkness, which is the original nineties settings
Then you have the New World of Darkness, that they, they started in 2004. And then that's not the newest world of darkness now, it's now there's also the Chronicles of Darkness, which is kind of just the second edition of New World of Darkness.
It's kind of complicated and twisty.
Sam: Yeah. 'cause when you say. Five different game lines started in the nineties. You were talking about like Marvel Cinematic Universe style, five different game lines, right? Like they're technically different games, but they kind of overlap and they exist in one setting. Do I have that right?
Mint: Yeah. I mean, it's all, there's this idea across all of the game lines that there is this separate world from the mundane mortal world that is full of terrors. And each game line is just a different kind of terror that is kind of haunting the world as we speak. Fans of the show who know more about this than I do, you can correct me. But as far as I know, the old world of darkness, there wasn't really a strong way to keep it like to, to bring them all together.
Whereas in the New World of Darkness, they released a rule book that was. I kind of stood on its own. It was this core set of rules that allowed you to play regular human beings who were getting into horrific situations. And then that rule book was then applied to all of the game lines that were revamped.
So what's different I think, is that, for example, if you'd get a Vampire the Masquerade book, you don't need an Old World of Darkness Core Rule book in order to play it. But if you're going to play Changing The Lost, you have to have the Core Chronicles of Darkness or a Core New World of Darkness rule book in order to have access to all of the rules.
Sam: Yeah, I maybe followed that, but I also think it's only sort of mid relevant to the actual mechanics that we're gonna get into talking about today. But I think it's, it's sort of like useful context to have, right? That this is like a big established franchise. There's a lot of different lines within this franchise. Some of them are compatible, some of them are not. Some of them are old, some of them are new. And there there's just a lot of people playing around and messing around in this space.
So that brings us to specifically Change Link, the lost first edition. So how does Change Link fit into the broader structure you just described.
Mint: Lovely. So I'm gonna do a pitch, but I want you to give me a character from a, you know, popular piece of media. It doesn't have to be a main character, but just give me a character to work off of here.
Sam: SurE. Let's just do something simple that everyone's gonna know. Let's do Captain America.
Mint: Awesome. Okay. Captain America, so. You are Captain America. For the past, you don't know how long you've been responsible for saving the United States from fascism for years and years and years and years and years until you realize that that is actually all of a lie. You've been set up into this world where you've been given these super strong powers, and you're consistently thrown against Nazis over and over. But those Nazis, they're, they're played by regular people who've been kind of forced into this situation.
And at the back of your mind, you realize that you remember a girlfriend, and it's not the person who plays your girlfriend in this false world. And that memory is enough for you to look past all of the big action scenes and all of the quote unquote happy endings, and you managed to claw your way back out into our world, the modern world.
Except for. It's different. You try to slip back into your old life, but you realize that the things that took you left behind a copy of you, they left behind somebody who is a much worse partner to your girlfriend and still manages to take up enough space of your old life that you can't just step back into that person's old shoes.
And you don't fit into your old clothes anymore. Your skin is hard and your body is much, much bigger. And there's pieces of you that feel strange and Fay, but normal humans can't seem to see like those, the changes that have been brought upon you. And you still have these supernatural powers, even if they don't quite work the same way that they used to.
And that is the premise that I usually give to people who wanna know what Changeling A Lost is all about.
Sam: That's a pretty wild, that's a very Truman show.
Mint: a little bit, I mean, I think one of the strengths that Changeling has is that you can kind of take any idea and, and you can turn that into a changeling. You, you could have been in a monster movie. You could have been in a superhero movie. You could have been in a horror movie, a fairytale, like, anything, you can just take the pieces that you think would be interesting and then you can build a character out of
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So cool setup. my immediate reaction hearing that is like, how do you turn that into a party based role playing game? Like who are the other members of your party, of like other people who have had this happen to you and you've got like a support group going on or.
Mint: Yeah. So there's, there's different ways you can do it. One of the most recommended ways is to say that, you are all people who escaped at the same time. And in the lore change link society kind of gives you so much time as like grace period to like get yourself back on your feet. But then you have to find something to do again.
You can't just, you can't just sit around and be sad. You have to, you have to like find a job or find a way to be useful to the court that found you
Sam: This is terrible. I hate
Mint: yeah. Uh, In other cases, I mean, I think one thing that I can say with a good amount of confidence is that world of darkness games are a great place to be a little bit horny.
And so another thing that you could potentially do as a, as a motley is, is be like, oh no, we're just one big poly Q
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Mint: we've all sworn this like packed to stay together for a year and a day. Not because we feel like a responsibility toward each other, but because we actually love each other and we wanna make sure that like we can strengthen those bonds with magic.
I think it's a great way to do just any kind of queer found family as well. There's this idea that none of you really belong in your old lives, but you can't do it on your own. You, you need somebody who's able to, like, take care of you when you have those low points and that's what the motley is there for.
Sam: Cool. Okay, so then what are you actually like doing during play?
Like what, what's like one session of change link look like?
Mint: So there's a lot of different things you can do, I think in a change lane game. I've had games where I. The players are trying to figure out who is fucking up the life of somebody else. So it could be an investigation. I've had sessions where the changelings are just trying to stop somebody from framing them for doing something wrong. There's been stories where they're finding a kid who's been stolen by a Faye and they have to get the kid back.
Sam: sure.
Mint: you just kind of find a thread in the character's life and you pull it and then you see what comes out.
Sam: Yeah. Cool. So what is clarity, our mechanic for this episode, and what is morality and how does it compare?
Mint: Yeah. So let's talk about morality first. 'cause I think it's an important thing to understand. World of Darkness is first and foremost a horror setting. it, it is meant to spook you. It it's meant to, to scare you a little bit. And so one of the mechanics that the new World of Darkness used to represent that was your morality score.
This is to be frank, not a great representation of morality or sanity or, or anything like that. It's definitely very, very dated. You can tell that this was something that was written back in 2004. It's this idea that your level of goodness is measurable. And the lower it is, the more likely you are to develop some kind of like, quote unquote derangement.
Which is supposed to be some kind of. Negative modifier that's attached to your mental health. The chronicles of Darkness, the, the more updated version. It's been. Updated quite a bit. It's called Integrity. It's meant to represent like your psyche. I think it's a little bit better, but we're talking about Change Link first edition.
So we're gonna talk a little bit about how like the original morality affects the original clarity. And we'll go from there because I think Change Link actually took morality and shifted it a little bit. And I feel like it was a great example of how iteration can kind of refine,
some things about a game.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, because I feel like the, Cala Catullus sanity system is so popular and sticky with people even though it feels so blatantly offensive to me. And I, I feel like it's, it's really hitting on something that a lot of people want to believe is true or maybe even is true, but they are like labeling it in this way that is like really uncomfortable awkward and incorrect.
And I, you know, I think about like mothership has like a sanity system where, where they're like calling it sanity, but really what it feels like is sort of pressure and stress, where like the, you know, the more stressed out you are getting, the less you are able to sort of like not flip out when, something scary happens and like that feels really real to me. You know, like the more stress I am under in my real life, the more likely I am I am to flip out about any number of things or take it out on the wrong person or whatever. I feel like there is something really interesting there, but then like calling it sanity is just, or calling it morality even just feels like.
Mint: Yeah.
Sam: like I, what, what are the people with only two moralities? Should we just lock those people all up? Like that feels really, I don't, it feels horrible. So yeah. I think you are right that clarity does an interesting thing with this. So tell me about clarity.
Mint: So in Changeling first and foremost, this is a game that's fundamentally about trauma. I think to understand clarity, you need to understand that your character is somebody who has experienced an extended amount of abuse from an abuser. That is what the fa are. They are, They are big, magical boogeymen, but they're also just abusers.
And that means that when you come out of Arcadia, your character is expected to have undergone some kind of trauma and in fact, to the different character archetypes are all just different kinds of trauma.
Clarity is a measure of how much of the world around you is something that you can accurately perceive. And the idea is that when you undergo specific events, so in morality, when you undergo specific events, the idea is that your morality kind of tanks, right? The more morally questionable things you do , the lower your morality score goes.
Changeling takes that and it, and it twists a little bit. It says it's not, the fact that these events are morally bad, it's that they shake up your sense of stability. So mugging someone or causing violence upon another human being can shake your sense of stability. So can getting married, right? So can having a child or losing your job or losing your house.
And one of the things that the rule books recommend is that if the Changeling character makes a very big decision in their life, even if it's positive, they should make a clarity role depending on where they are on their clarity ranking.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Mint: And when you drop low enough in your clarity, your perception of the world shifts.
So this is a section in the Changeling book rites of Spring, which is kind of a, an extra rules book, but it has a section about clarity to give you a little bit more perspective on it. And it says
at low clarity glamor and the weird color the change link's perception to a greater degree. The Changeling might see phal echoes of fairy in the world around him, such as a tiny goblin face peeping through a window for a moment, or the creeping briars of the hedge. Conversely, within the hedge, the changeling perceives brief flashes of mundane reality. A section of path appears to be an ordinary asphalt road, or the detritus floating in a stagnant pond might appear to be beer cans and used needles. Lower Clarity Changelings have a perilous time navigating the hedge since they can easily mistake the hallucinations for the actual signs that a hedge gateway is nearby.
So it's basically a representation of, you can't tell what's part of the moral world and what's part of the fairy world anymore, your, your ability to believe. What you're seeing is it's reduced a little bit.
Sam: Yeah, and that feels, especially when you're sort of like tying it to positive changes as well as negative changes in your life, like I love the way that you framed it of like, your clarity comes into question. Whenever your sense of stability is shaken up, because that feels, that feels much more like a thing that happens to everyone.
Like everyone has had an experience like that and turning that into the metaphor instead of just like leaning on this more mental health kind of coded thing.
I like the way that that feels like there are so many more metaphors that can be attached to that than just like morality or just mental health. Like, identity addiction loss and grief at large.
And then like the fun of a juicy metaphor like that is the way that you can map it onto some of those things. One of those things. Different people can map onto it in different ways and then those different interpretations like kind of butt up against to each other. And you're sort of using that metaphor to interrogate all of those and put them in conversation with each other.
Mint: I think it also allows you to talk about some things without having to talk about
Sam: Mm-hmm. Sure.
Mint: Right. You can talk about how maybe your character is having a hard time believing whether or not someone is telling the truth. And maybe it's because the person that they're talking to reminds them too much of someone who has always been lying to them.
Sam: Yeah.
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Mint: Before we continue, I do wanna talk about something that's maybe not so good about clarity, and I think it just has to do with the fact that this is an older game.
Um, so how clarity works is usually when you come across something or you do something that shakes like. your sense of stability or reminds you of, fairy in, in a like really vibrant way you have to face something called a breaking point.
This breaking point triggers a clarity rule, so you have to roll a predetermined number of D tens. And the number of deens determined by the severity of the breaking point.
So clarity is measured on a, on a scale of zero to 10. In average characters at seven, you have to work in order to get to eight, nine, or 10. And over the course of play, I've seen players usually fall to somewhere between the six to four range is usually where they end up.
If you fall, if you go down a rule as written, you're supposed to take something called a derangement. This is an ailment that hinders your character during play. I don't like derangement. I don't like them at all. Some of 'em feel like pretty innocent.
Like if you become depressed, like you just have to roll once a day to try and not lose a point of willpower which is basically character currency. But if you have schizophrenia you're, it's assumed that at some point you're going to submit to some kind of violent change in behavior and hallucinations, which is a very gross
Sam: So we're, we're just like loading back on the mental health vocabulary stereotypes in
Mint: Yeah. Yeah.
And, okay, I'm gonna say I don't know what second edition of Changeling is like. I put all of my money into first edition and then they started releasing second edition. I said, no, I have the entire library already. I'm not gonna buy it again.
Sam: Yeah.
Mint: That being said, there was something that I found in first edition that I felt was much more interesting and something that I could just take it and tweak it and I think it works, and that's frailties.
So typically frailties are something that only affect highly magical changelings, but I've added them to clarity drops to substitute for derangement because I think they're just more interesting because this is a story about fairies.
There's this idea in a lot of fairy folklore that fairies have a lot of like prohibitions or rules that they have to follow. And as a result, changelings are also often held to those prohibitions and such.
So some of those things include you cannot step inside a church. You're hurt by the crowing of a rooster. You cannot say no to a white-haired woman, which has gone over very well with one of my players. Um, and another one of my players took a look at the frailties and was like I want the one that says I'm not able to drink alcohol because I wanna see what happens when I take alcohol without realizing that I've drunk it. And I was like, okay. Sounds good.
Sam: Sure.
Mint: Yeah. So when I run a game, I don't do derangements at all. I just say, okay, here's a couple of frailties that I think are interesting. Do you tell me which one you want?
Mint: So I another thing that I like about it is one of the ideas behind raising your clarity typically you have to spend experience to raise your clarity. And that experience is supposed to reflect, like specific effort in your life to bring some of that stability back. As a player, you're supposed to talk to the group about my character now, make sure that they go to the convenience store every Friday so that they can like, talk to a human being and maybe get like a hot dog or something. And like they have to make that, that part of their routine.
And I think that the frailties can also represent like, no, no, you have to do things a certain way. In order for life to make sense for you. if you have a, counting compulsion, right? Like, oh no, my brain works fine as long as I make sure to count like every time I drop like a bunch of things and I have to count them before I pick them up. Like if, as long as I do that, I'm fine. Or I don't know, maybe you. Have like a specific affinity for the color yellow. So you just make sure that you always have like an article of clothing on you that is yellow and then you're good, right?
And so finding how to live your life while making space for these frailties, I think is also really interesting.
Sam: It's interesting in you, you talking about like those specific examples, like on the one hand that feels relatable to me, that like once I have done something to sort of like give myself the sembla like, like even the false sense of like some kind of control over my life again, like that helps sort of like stabilize things.
And also, you know, we're talking about like, ah, this game sure has a lot of like stereotypes about mental health stuff. And I feel like, counting. Objects when you drop them or always wearing a particular color, feel like they could be stereotyped straight outta Rainman. You know, like, like it does still feel like there's
like, Hey, it's, I, I feel like this kind of thing is always interesting in the ways we're like, okay, it's 20 years old. Maybe it wasn't making a good faith effort at the time to like, treat mental health respectfully. And also even if it was, that looked really different 20 years ago than it does now.
And also it's just so interesting to see the ways that it fails completely. And then the ways where it like succeeds more, but like is maybe still being offensive and then like, like the ways in which like it's, oh yeah. I think this works. Like, I don't know. It's, it's just, I, especially as someone who like doesn't really have a lot of mental health issues, like it, it's
Mint: I don't know. So like, I don't, I, I think what I'm about to say is maybe a little bit perpendicular to what you were just saying, because when I think about some of these things, I think about the fact that I, I think I'm probably autistic. And so for example, if I'm going to clean my house, I have to be listening to music or, or something, right? I can't be listening to nothing. Otherwise it's not gonna get cleaned.
I have very specific routines when it comes to getting ready for the day or going to bed. And if I don't follow those routines, I'm not going to sleep or I'm not like getting out the door on time. I have very specific patterns that I've set up in my life in order to make my life easier.
And so when I look at some of this stuff I still see bits of me that I think are reflected in there. And when it comes to some of the other metaphors, for example, trauma. So I, I do have a little bit of trauma in my life. And it's something that I didn't really realize was affecting me until I was older.
But I noticed that I often had very specific reactions to just the way that sometimes people reacted to something. Often it was like this hyperawareness of the way that someone else was reacting and then feeling like I was responsible for what had just gone on. And so when I see a lot of the stuff that's happening in Changeling talking about
like maybe this belief that the farer is still after you or having like perceptions about somebody else that aren't necessarily true. That feels very resonant to like my own personal experience.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
I think this is the tension that I'm really interested in here, is a question I'm about to ask you because you clearly feel like very, you see yourself in this text in a way that is really cool. Like even as like you are talking about the ways you see the text is flawed too. And I'm curious to hear from you whether you think the ways you see yourself in this text are there intentionally by the designers or whether they are there kind of accidentally. Does that make sense?
Mint: Yeah. No, no. Oh gosh.
Sam: And like look, or maybe even a better question is like, do you think it matters?
Mint: I'm not entirely confident that the things that I'm reading into Changeling were necessarily there according to the writers. I think that there's kind of a powerful thing though in being able to take an imperfect tool and being able to use it to make it into something beautiful.
And this sounds so funny to me saying it because I know that like a lot of the big arguments about D&D is that like, you don't need to home brew D&D in order to make this kind of game that you want because you can just find another game. And my whole blog is, there is a TT RPG for that. Like my whole ethos behind that is help me find you the games that are gonna give you the experience closer to what you're looking for.
And changeling lost. I think I'm not gonna say that there's no other games that provide that experience because that's definitely not true. Rae Nedjadi has Apocalypse Keys right there, and Lowell Francis is currently writing another game that I think like really speaks to a lot of the really resonant themes of Changeling.
But I think that the flexibility and change link. Like there's so many tools in world of darkness. We're talking about one mechanic, but there's so many mechanics. You cannot play a change link session and use every single rule in the book. It's just too much. You kind of have to just pick something and focus on that. But I think that that range gives you the ability to kind of pick up the pieces that look really, really interesting to you, and then make it a very like tailored story to something that you're interested in.
Sam: There's something very admirable and there is a long tradition of taking more mainstream, more popular art that is not doing you well and finding yourself in it anyway,
you know?
And I don't think that's exactly what's happening here because like, what are we calling World of Darkness mainstream now, but like it was, it was like, you know, it big enough to have a whole line of books for quite a while to, to this day.
Mint: And I think that there's something to say that
like the fact that it's it has a strong place in the LRP community. I think that especially in the early days, LRP was definitely like a place for people who didn't feel. Like they, they were not afraid to stand out. Right? if you were LARPing in the early days, I have a feeling that you were probably different and you were not scared of, of, of doing the things that made you different. Whether that's because you're queer or because you are autistic or, you have mental health struggles like. there's a lot of comfort in finding community with the other.
And changeling was not supposed to be this big thing. It was supposed to be a one-off book released in 2007, and they were just gonna do that and then move on, but the, the fan response was so strong. White Wolf have to come, had to come back and build all of these extra books to kind of just satisfy the, the craving that they were seeing from the fan base and now it's on its second edition. So I think they did hit something extremely resonant with people.
Sam: It's interesting you know, just thinking about the, the Vampire LRP world, I was very much not a part of it. But almost everyone I know who was there speaks of it. The, the way you just did of like, it was this place where like I found community and I was a weird outsider and like it was cool to find that community. And also basically everyone I know who is involved with it has some horrific story of emotional abuse related to the community too, right? Like
Mint: Oh yeah.
It's such a vulnerable place that you're, that you're going to be in if you're going to play a Changeling game. I love this game so much, but it's gonna be a very different game depending on who I'm playing it with.
I've had sessions even just in the tabletop where I've sat down with players and then we've come away from that session and I realized, okay, what they signed up for and what I signed up are very different and I need to change half of what I was planning for the game because I, it became very clear in that session that that was not something that they had signed up for. They had signed up for Goofy Goblin time and I was like, I wanna talk about trauma. And, and so we, we kind of put the brakes on that pretty quickly and we, and we, we turned it around.
And I think that a lot of what I've learned about safety tools, I mean, we know that there's a lot of, safety technology that exists in LRP and it exists for a reason, right? We, it, it's kind of like how all of OSHA's rules are written in blood. I'm pretty sure all of the lrp, safety technology is written in tears.
It doesn't stop me from wanting to really tackle those topics, though. I think that taking all of the lessons we've learned from all of those scars of the past and then saying, if we wanna do this, we have to make sure we do it right.
Because it's, it's really like the hurt that you experience. Okay. The hurt that you experience in lrp, I think it hurts so much deeper because you are opening yourself up, right? You are trying to examine like parts of your personal journey and you're trying to do it with other people who are also trying to do that.
But a lot of those times that can collide. And all of those emotions can get tangled up, and that's where we get bleed um, both positive and negative. And that can, really fuck you up. It, it is why I think safety is so important.
Sam: Yeah. I, it's, it's this whole conversation I have felt like completely on the back foot and like part of that is I'm not familiar with this text very well. You know, like I, I haven't played change alike. And part of that is that I think all of these conversations remain really complicated.
Like this feels like the sixth time this episode, I've been kind of like I think I just said something that like, didn't make any sense and made offensive and like, I don't know, but like, feel like the fact that it is a mess and trying to make something of it is like the fun and the value of it too. I don't know.
Mint: I think the fact that people keep trying to come back to it indicates that there's something important that we can get out of roleplaying games.
I've heard the phrase before that roleplaying games aren't therapy, but they can be therapeutic. Right. So I've been playing Change Link for as long as I've been playing Ttrp GS Change Link the Lost is the reason I got into Roleplaying. I had no interest in Dungeons and Dragons. I had seen it on tv. I'd had heard about it. I was not interested. When I found out that you could do that, but make it a game about trauma, I was instantly interested. I was like, oh, okay. We can make it Metaphors about stuff. Okay, let me look into this.
and Earlier this year I ran a, a one-on-one game with another player who's been in a number of my Changeling games. And she said like, I really wanna work through some stuff. And I was like, I, I would love to do that with you. I think it has to be a one-on-one thing because it's so personal.
So we sat down and we played for like, I don't know, three or four hours. And we followed like a narrative of betrayal and desire and looking for love and you know, fixing broken relationships. And it was super, super good. I had a, a really good time and I got a lot of positive feedback from it.
And then this year, the reason it's been on my mind so much lately is because this year I am trying something a little bit different. I reached out to three people. And asked them if they wanted to play at what I call a high trust table. So I said I want to talk about the difficult stuff and I am think this is the stuff that I wanna talk about. And I laid out like a couple of different themes on the table. And then I, I, also wanna talk about whatever you wanna talk about, right? And anything that you don't wanna talk about you don't have to, but like, you know, if you, I wanna see if that's something that we can do.
And we're not gonna mention any details specifically, but we started in January and we just wrapped up our first character arc. And so far it seems like it's going well. It feels like we've managed to kind of find that balance between being able to talk about trauma and mental health and still be able to couch it in fantasy.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Mint: And I'm, I'm hoping to be able to continue this kind of experiment for another eight months or so and then we're gonna call it,
Sam: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else that you want to like conclude on.
Mint: I. Oh gosh. Hey. Hi. Internet. in case you didn't notice, I really like changing the lost. at Some point I will probably be happy to run Changeling The Lost for More People. So keep an eye out because hopefully sometime down the road I might be telling the internet about chances to play the game with me.
So if you are interested in learning more about this beautiful, magical, completely fucked up game yeah hit me up.
Sam: Great. What an invitation. Mint, thanks so much for being on Dice Exploratory.
Mint: Hmm, my pleasure.
Thanks again to Mint for being here. You can find her on Tumblr at, there's a TTR PG for that.tumblr.com or on Blue dash rabbit. Thanks to everyone at Sports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Exploder, or on the dice exploder discord.
You can order my design memoir, dice forager@diceexploder.com And you can find my games@tonal.it.io. Our logo was designed by Spore. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And our ad music is Lily Pads pmo, boy Travis Tesser. And thanks to you for listening. I'll see ya next time.
I hope you're enjoying the sounds of the bath being run in the room next door to me. It's very nice, very soothing.