The Hair of the Dog that Bit Me

I promised Daniel Perez I’d write a blog post that is related to both roleplaying and Ireland today, in honor of his St. Paddy’s Day blog Festival. You’d think that would be easy-peasy for me, and Daniel sure does, but you – and Daniel – would be wrong.

I’ve played several Irish or pseudo-Irish (i.e. with serial numbers scratched off) characters in my day, and I even based my first made-up fantasy world around a pseudo-Irish/Scots/Welsh Celtic mashup setting. Oh, that was so many years ago. And of course anyone who knows me knows about the Brigit fetish that makes its way into most of my creative pursuits, including my roleplay. So yeah, the Gaelic spirit infuses my rpg life pretty deeply.

But the most “Irish” experience I’ve ever had as a roleplayer was one in which I did not play an Irish/Gaelic character but rather a black man of  West African heritage. Well, not a “man” so much as, you know … an Eshu – one of the kith from the original Changeling rpg.

Yeah, it was Changeling. The original one. Changeling: the Dreaming. I was an African American Eshu named Theo Mendaharin and the setting was in Louisville and Cincinnati, and we never went anywhere near Ireland, but you know, it’s friggin’ CHANGELING, and thus it draws a great deal of its source material from Irish lore. And our saga was particularly steeped in those cultural concepts. But the real reason I say it was the most Irish game I’ve played is that the way we played it – the tone of the thing – very much fulfilled what Brad Pitt’s character in The Devil’s Own said at the end of that film: “It’s not an American story, it’s an Irish story”.

Flawed heroes. Dark fates. Moral murkitude. Divided loyalties. Friends in conflict with one another. And most especially, no expectation of a neatly-wrapped-up sanitized American-style happy ending.

Well, today, in the midst of my pondering about whether I’d be able to write anything interesting for Daniel’s carnival, I got a note from one of my closest friends, Shawn Nichols. He was the storyteller and driving force behind the Changeling saga that I’m talking about. He introduced me to the World of Darkness and opened my eyes to the notion that there were new ways to play and new worlds to explore. He tapped into my penchant for Celtic lore in ways that blew away my measly attempts at creating my own re-imagined pseudo-Celtic setting, and he did it down and dirty, gritty, dark, gut-wrenching knife-twisting … but somehow still always oddly life-affirming and hopeful.

That Changeling saga was Shawn Nichol’s magnum opus.

See, Shawn is in many ways a walking, breathing “Irish story” all his own. He and I connect on so many levels, but the most compelling one is that he is a good man who wears his inner darkness on his shoulders like a cloak. Not so much in an emo-porn kinda way, but in a “this is who I am” kind of way. Honest, refreshing. With Shawn Nichols, you don’t get the glum, rude brat who hides his pain under a veneer of light and happiness. When he’s happy, you know it. He has the most effusively happy laugh in the world. And when he’s down, you know that, too. But it is a “real” sort of down, not a “please feel sorry for me” kind. It is, if I may generalize a bit, an Irish kind.

Over the years Shawn ALWAYS played PCs and populated his worlds with NPCs who were really dark, scarred, broken heroes who were prepared to give it all to save the world but would never be able to save their own souls. Never was this more so than in Changeling. Play is therapy for Shawn. He unapologetically works through his stuff by playing characters who are mired in archetypical versions of that same stuff.  And through my participation in that I learned to let MY inner darkness out a little, more and more over the course of our play.  He taught me that my Shadow is not something to be feared or buried, but integrated and accepted. And the most effective conduits of those lessons were through our playing Changeling. It changed my life.

Oh, those days.

Well, over the years, Shawn and I have maintained our friendship but have not been able to roleplay with one another, and for that matter, Shawn has practically been unable to roleplay at all. And I’ve seen how that lack has hindered his ability to process some of his stuff. So it was with great delight that I read in his note today that Shawn is playing again, finally, and that he’s playing Changeling. I want to share his note with you. It’s pretty cool. And if you are grokking anything I’ve been trying to say up to this point, you’ll realize that’s it’s also pretty Irish.

So, from here on out, I present a reprint of the note that Shawn shared with me. Your mileage may vary, but this is is ambrosia to me:

I’m tired of school work and existential ponderings – I want to share something fun!

Which is that I am finally back into role-playing.  YEAH!

A group of us from the seminary are playing the new Changeling game.

I started out playing my usual type of character:  dark and brooding, with a Batman-esque intensity.

But he just wasn’t working for me.  I my Unconscious kept popping out with strangely lighthearted, playfulisms.  (Kirk – it was sorta like what happened when you and Heather played pooka together, except without the “gasoline on the fire” effect of playing off each other!)

This wasn’t fitting with my character’s back story however.  He had a “Dark Fate”, which means that there would be no “happily ever afters” for him.  The best he could hope for was to die with his hands around his enemy’s throat.

I do find his story compelling and the GM was working it into the games storyline; but it just didn’t feel right.  Thankfully the GM allowed me to “retool” my character.

He began as a particular type of Changeling known as a “Beast”, with catlike features and abilities.  I kept him a “Beast” but changed him into a “monkey” – based on the mythological characters of Hanuman and the Monkey King (from India and China respectively).

Not only is he a silly, undignified, trickster; but……now this is a really big deal for me……get ready for it……..he has NO back-story!

If that didn’t take your breath away then it’s been far too long since we role-played together. Normally, I’m off and running on a ridiculously meticulous background – delving into all sorts of personal history, motivations etc blah blah blah.

This time I just made him an amnesiac.

He has no memory of his life in Arcadia or his human life previous to being abducted by the Fae.

At first this felt like a cop-out.  But I simply could not get a hold of the character – all I knew was there was something trying to come out.

So I decided the best thing to do was to remove all controls and just see what happens.

So far it has been an unmitigated blast!!!

This is a strange new experience of freedom, spontaneity, and self-discovery.

- Shawn Nichols, March 17th 2009