hey remember that time when my favorite colors was pink and green

Back around Christmas I and two of my three sisters were driving in our mother's car. We had just done the big extended family Christmas shindig and, stuffed full of food, were driving ourselves back from Massachusetts to Connecticut (I go back and forth a fair bit around the holidays.) The rest of the family was in other cars, because there are many of us and also a dog and so we caravan almost everywhere we go.

Being in the Mom SUV meant we didn't have any real tunes aside from her CDs and the radio, and so we settled on the latter. The radio is of course horrible, but we found songs here and there that were agreeable to all three of us, mostly in the form of pop music from the 80s. I was in the passenger seat, and since the driving conditions were less than ideal that put me firmly in charge of twisting the radio dial anytime commercials or icky bad music came on. Eventually I stumbled across one of the Snow Partrol singles, the one made most famous by the Grey's Anatomy season two finale. Its called "Chasing Cars," and if you haven't heard it then the rest of this entry may not make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, I lingered on the song long enough to determine it was near to the beginning and then sat back to listen.

"Uhhh, depressing," griped my snarky younger sister from the back seat. And at the time I just sort of shrugged the comment off, because I guess its sort of a moody-sounding song, but I like it. The song came up again this morning, on my way to work, due to the wonder and mystery of the shuffle feature on my iPod. And I actually got to thinking about it for a minute, because that's the way my brain works, and I realized that I should have spoken up and voiced my disagreement. Because while its got sort of a downbeat emo sound to it, I don't find the song depressing at all. Exactly the opposite, actually. The start of the chorus goes:

if I lay here
if I just lay here
would you lie with me and
just forget the world

And the thing is I'm pretty sure its a love song. Simple love, expressed starkly. The kind of love Paul wrote about in his first letter to the Corinthians that's such a popular reading at weddings. You know the one. The love that isn't boastful or proud? Of course, in context, its not love he's writing about at all, but rather Christian charity. But for our purposes that is very much beside the point. The point is that this song, with its slow tempo and haunting, almost mournful vocals, is actually quite uplifting if you listen to the lyrics. And I know I pay too much attention to lyrics. I know that sometimes I fall in love with a song because it has a pretty turn of phrase only to later realize that its musically awful and grows unbearable on repeated listening. And I know that reading too much into the lyrics of pop songs is a disorder you're supposed to outgrow in adolescence.

But I didn't, and I doubt I ever will. The fact of the matter is I don't want to.

I wish I could tell you that I was going somewhere with this line of thought. Or at least somewhere other than "Whee, I've got childish qualities, and I'm perversely proud of hanging onto them!" But, well, I'm not going anywhere with it. There's not a whole lot going on with me right now. Between keeping my head down at work and this unexpected bout of actual Winter weather in Boston I'm just sort of on auto pilot. I bumbled past Imbolc without a second thought, and all of a sudden its hard not to notice Valentine's Day on the horizon. And I guess in that context having a long song on my mind maybe isn't so hard to understand.

'cause I don't wanna crush you but I feel like crushing you

The most recent White Wolf Quarterly came out a little over a week ago. Believe it or not I don't usually read the White Wolf Quarterly, but this particular issue contained an interesting tidbit. You may recall I recently griped about the absolute lack of news regarding the new version of Changeling planned for this year. I'm happy to report that developer Ethan Skemp tossed off an interesting one-page note about sources of inspiration for the game. Its a quick piece with a light tone, lamenting how jam-packed he’s going to have to make the Bibliography to fit in all the different books and poems and movies and whatever else. And I find it very, very encouraging.

In addition to citing good sources Skemp also rhapsodizes all too briefly on the character archetypes for the game, what I think of as the splats. He talks about the difficulties of balancing them, not against one another but against the diversity of possible ideas. On the one hand they should be broad enough that a player ought to be able to come to the table with an idea in mind and be able to fit it into one of the existing splats. But, as he puts it, "we've got to make them colorful enough that you can come into Changeling without a character concept and leave with one; they can't be so general they don't inspire."

It sounds to me like Skemp's facing a tricky balancing act there. On the one hand the Fae of legend are so quirky and diverse as to defy categorization; oftentimes it seems as if each individual Fae comes with constraints and particulars that render it unique even if it theoretically belongs to a well-known type. On the other hand White Wolf has gotten fairly well locked into their 5 by 5 template; in all of the new World of Darkness games you place your character on two axes with five options each. The first axis is nature; you choose what particular breed of Vampire/Werewolf/Mage your character is innately. The second axis is nurture; you choose a faction that groups what your character has chosen to believe and practice beyond his origin. Both axes map roughly onto the five elements of air, earth, fire, water and spirit.

For some reason I have faith in the ability of Skemp to resolve these difficulties and come up with five splats that meet the White Wolf standard while at the same time providing maximum utility for people wanting to bring a unique twist to their Changeling characters. This in spite of the fact that its already gone badly at least once in the new World of Darkness, at least in my opinion. As far as I'm concerned the new Werewolf type splats make no sense. Not that I was ever that big a fan of Werewolf (even back in the old World of Darkness days when Mr. Skemp himself was working on it.) I'm eager to see how it works out, although I'll likely be waiting the better part of a year before I actually have a book in my hands.