This is a Motley (a faction of imaginary friends) for a Changeling LARP scenario. Maybe it'll give you some ideas for your own games. You're certainly welcome to use it whole cloth and I'd be flattered if you told me how it worked at yokeltania@yahoo.com.

the KINDLY RATCHETS
wild, wild hunters

IMPORTANT GAME NOTES(SKIP)
The play area represents the banquet room of the local Children's Hospital, where a sumptuous feast has been laid out and enhanced by glamours. Mortal society beleives this is some sort of private fundraiser. Only Kithian, fay like yourself, know that it's really a magical ritual in a wondrous fortress.

The hospital is really the Tor of a Thousand Towers, a place of high magic which only faeries or those they enchant can access. It is so precious to the world of magic that even faerie are allowed in here only once a year, for a grand festival: the Rade. Once mortals gathered berries at festivals like these. Faeries use them as an excuse to collect DROSS.

DROSS is the stuff dreams are made of. The dreams and nightmares of the many children here create it. Faeries can use it as currency or to cast magical spells against the encroaching winter of the soul and the death of magic. There isn't much Dross available in the main banquet hall.

If you want to collect some of the free Dross, you will need to find a Guardian. Some players may have been selected as Guardians, to take the pressure off Storytellers and Narrators, so ask around if you can't get to an ST right away. Each Guardian has the right to impose a puzzle or riddle upon you, or some other kind of test, before awarding you with any Dross you found in your search.

Your character can pretend to leave the hospital/tor at any time and re-enter at will, but if you want to go into the woods around the Tor (which are thick with hostile Indian Spirits called the Nunnehi), you will have to speak to a ST/GM first.

BACKSTORY
By Hook or By Crook
The Escheat is a code of laws by which all Changelings are supposed to live. Since these laws are restrictive, oppressive and arbitrary (and clearly bent toward Sidhe rule), the other Kith tend to break them whenever possible, albeit clandestinely.

That's where the Ratchets come in. The Ratchets act as a sort of fairy secret police. Ratchet is an Old English world for a hound that hunts by scent. It's the unofficial, but vital, job of the Ratchets to catch those who break the Escheat and deliver them before the nearest local noble for a Fior ("Challenge of Justice.")

The Escheat is pretty simple, but also very open to interpretation. Like all other WoD codes of law, it has five elements:

  • Don't kill other Changelings
  • Don't use Glamour to directly inspire creativity in mortals (this is called Rhapsody and is kind of fairy freebasing.)
  • Don't reveal yourself (as a magical being) to the humans
  • Don't let magical places be destroyed
  • Do what the nobles say (This one gets broken a lot.)
Any fairy caught breaking one of these rules is subject to a Fior. A Fior is a stupid little test, administered only by a fairy noble, to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused party. The Fior can be anything, from an arm-wrestling match to a quest and you have never, personally, seen a fair one (although nobles always think they are being fair, especially with a little reassurance from the Ratchets.)

There's a lot of profit to be made from a failed or refused Fior because, if the accused fails the Challenge of Justice (or whatever the test the lordling decrees), the lord who proclaimed it may call a wild hunt against the accused. That's where you really make your living. A wild hunt is a chase which ends, if you can help it, in the victim being torn to shreds for their glamour, clothes, cash and anything else the other Fey can carry away with them.

Now, if you can get someone accused, hauled quickly to Fior, given an impossible task and then sentenced to a wild hunt, you've got a running smorgasboard of free glamour, goodies and flesh (eating wild hunt victims is allowed around here as long as you leave some for everyone else.)

Being a Ratchet, you're good at catching people and even better at tearing them apart. Tonight, your instinct for a good hunt has put you onto several rumours. Several people have been sneaking into the Tor at night, despite explicit orders from the high laird (who is afraid of the Nunnehi, a group of angry Indian Spirits, who live near here.) Tonight is the only night of the year changelings are allowed up here on the Tor, for the Rade.

If you can't catch any escheating criminals, you could always stir up the more jingoistic fey against the Nunnehi. You could drive those native american punks out of the woods surrounding the Tor once and for all and, in the process, get ahold of some juicy, glamour-soaked Indian flesh. Hoo-ya! Who's the monster now, you unseelie pussies?

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OTHER MOTLEYS
Although players are supposed to pick only one Motley and play it, you might be surfing this site as a potential storyteller. Use the links below to flip through the other Motleys quickly.
The Folk Next Door
The highest nobles in the land.
The Come Hitherers
Seelie Knights, here for a joust.
The Gentry
Their underhanded unseelie opponents.
Them What Goes Around
Mysterious visitors with a strange agenda.
The Short Hoggers
A group of guides helping a friend through the Chrysalis.
The Kindly Ratchets
Goons (that's how the most tasty criminals always see justice.)

Feel free to drop me an electronic line at yokeltania@yahoo.com. Make sure to take your tell me who you are and what this is about. My name is Rp and I like to get letters.

Last fiddled with in October of 2002, but first fiddled with in 2000.

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