AM: This proof contains plot spoilers for my Changeling: the Dreaming game titled "Bump in the Night". If you are a PD0er who eventually wants to play it (email me! I want to run it again!), you should not read this proof. I will forgive you for not voting.

I've been playing tabletop roleplaying games for, um, eight years now. Mostly White Wolf's World of Darkness games, which have you play as vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures in a world much like our own except more depressing. (I would be thrilled to discuss 3e versus 4e differences, favorite systems, and our most awesome characters from the past with any other WoD nerds, as an aside.) The game system I ran this game in is slightly different from most of the other ones, as it involves changelings -- fairies, frequently children, who have placed themselves into human bodies as protection from the doubt and disbelief of a science-focused world. The themes of the game are magic, childlike wonder, and, eventually, loss of innocence.

I set the game here in Portland, with the characters being elementary- or middle-schoolers going to the school up the street from my house (set as the location for this proof). A classmate of theirs, also a changeling, was sick with an illness that seemed supernatural and claimed that something had happened to his parents to make them not his parents anymore, so Mr Dave, the large blue horned troll who taught PE at their school, asked them to investigate. Eventually, they discovered a crazy woman sleeping in his basement, who then walked through a portal into the magical realm created by human dreams. They followed, only to find themselves inside a hedge maze, overlooked by a castle on a hill, ominously lit by lightning. APR and Sir P traveled to the castle, facing many obstacles and enemies in the way, to discover what in the world was going on and beat the bad guy.

I've run this game three times now, and it's been different every time. APR and Sir P were the first party to completely avoid combat with my first set of bad guys ("Uh, we're going to run away." "They're chasing you." "I light one of them on fire and run away while they're distracted." "...sounds like a plan!") and also the first to dig through boxes and boxes of old junk in the castle to find the goodies within. As players, they weren't familiar with the system, and had the least roleplaying experiences of anyone I'd run this for, so they were much less jaded to the tropes of the genre. ("You discover that the fountain used to run with blood." "EW! Why is everything covered in blood here? That's so creepy!" / "You think you see a bunch of magical spiders hiding under there." "Are they spiders covered in blood?") I had a lot of fun with that.



APR's character (sheet pictured) had several magical items: a shoelace that he could use to trip people from a distance; a piece of chalk that, like the Roadrunner's paint, would create a door through a solid surface; and at the end of the game, a set of three-dee glasses that heightened his senses. His character was a boggan, a type of fairy like the shoemaker's elves that can work very quickly when unobserved. They also have a compulsion to help those in need, a taste for gossip, and an instinctual understanding of social dynamics. As such, some of his highest stats were Empathy and Kenning, a skill that lets changelings perceive magic and magical objects/creatures. His magic was related to the natural world -- the Art of Primal. With it, he could speak to objects (but only in a whisper); create water, fire, earth, air, or wood; cause bark-like armor to grow on himself or someone/thing else; and, with a power called Holly Strike, use magic to cause damage to his foes. Sir P took his character sheet with him at the end of the afternoon, so I have fewer details about his character.

Sir P: I'd like to say, I've played some games before, but never as a 12 year old boy in a modern setting. Blacksmiths, barbarians, fighters, a wizard, guardsmen, a cleric or two, a female dragonkin, sure. The closest I've gotten was when I've played a gnome, and later a halfling. I've since grown tiresome of playing as a smaller person, but that's neither here nor there. I played a quiet boy who liked to overhear conversations and doodle. we ran away from snake men in suits, we fought a comically exaggerated vampire stereotype, and later wandered in a schizophrenic's brain in the form of a large building! There were eyes watching us all throughout the adventure, pretty much. It was suitably creepy!

APR: This was great fun! It could only get better with more people playing as well. One of my favorite things was drawing a door on a locked door, to gain entry. Also important to note is that, due to our great ability to avoid conflict, and the bark-armor, I ended the game with more health than when I started!