Today ...

When's the last time you used a pen and paper, dear Cancer? In this day and age of computers, the keyboard has all but replaced these wonderful tools. In the same way that walking provides much more than fresh air, the kinesthetic value of the rhythmic motion in writing with a pen is far more soothing and even more healing than most realize. Moving your hand across the page can feel good, and unlock places within you that aren't always accessed by typing. Try it today.

:D :D :D

Texts from Naaila

naaila just sent me a couple of texts from her holiday in Dubai. Making her likely the sender of the longest distance texts I have ever received.

So I sent her a couple of reply texts, all the way back to Dubai. Two of the longest distance texts I have ever sent.

And considering the recipient, they were well worth the burnt credit, even though I feel I lit a fiver under my phone each time. :)

Changeling: the Lost - the Fifth Game for the World of Darkness

White Wolf have launched the fifth game for their World of Darkness roleplaying game setting, Changeling: the Lost.

For those of you with a passing interest in this sort of thing, I won't bore you with the specifics of what roleplaying games are, who White Wolf are and what the World of Darkness is. There's plenty of material out there, notably on the White Wolf website.

So, then, what's the particular interest in this game?

Simple. Of all the supernatural types, the one game of the old World of Darkness the fans most wanted to see a return to in this incarnation of the WoD was Changeling.

The Changelings in the old game held a special kind of fascination and affection from the old skool fans, who saw in them, maybe, a sense of the innocence one loses with adulthood and age. It was an innocent game, of play and fun amid the horrors of soul-sucking grey Banality eroding the Glamour, making the world a little duller and darker and meaner each day.

Well, there is a new Changeling game. But it's not the same as the old game.

Changeling: the Lost is billed as "A Game of Beautiful Madness". It comes in a glorious, shiny green book whose cover is adorned with a thick snarl of dark green thorns, through which very little light seems to shine. The lettering is picked out in shiny silver, and there is a clock with a weird face partly buried amid the thorns, and a Luna moth, on the front cover.

The story, basically, goes like this.

Your characters start out as mortals, living their normal lives. But then, at some point, they are typically abducted - sometimes as infants from out their very cribs - by a Fae, a true denizen of Faerie, and taken through a region between the worlds called The Hedge to their home in Arcadia, Faerie Itself. There, they are kept for an indeterminate time, fed on Faerie food and drink, and worked to the bone, the uniquely human creative impulse of a living soul turned to use in the service of the Gentry, who cannot display anywhere near the capacity for creativity of human beings.

And then, at one time, the character manages somehow to escape their Gentry captors, their Keepers, and return through the Hedge to reach the mortal world, and back to their lives.

Only ...

In their absence, the Gentry who stole the mortals will usually have left behind a simulacrum, a Fetch, living the oldlife the characters once knew.

Suddenly, the characters have no life of their own. Their faces and bodies warped by contact with Faerie in distinctive ways, they find that they really can't go home again.

So they live day by day, keeping their human halves fed with ordinary food, and their Fae halves fed with Glamour - which they reap from human emotions they stimulate through their actions and Contracts, the magical abilities they possess.

And all the time, they are looking back over their shoulder, fearing the day that their Keepers, their True Fae abductors, will find their way back through the Hedge to claim them again. Because if they are reclaimed ... next time it could be forever.

I'm just posting this announcement so that those who've expressed an interest in this game can find out what this new game's about. Now you can try out the new World of Darkness and this game, if you wish. :) Have fun.