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White Wolf Devlog 5: The Umbra

I feel the World of Darkness could have done better by having the various spirit worlds accessible only through some trance, where someone enters that world in spirit-alone, and leaves their body behind.

Unintended Teleportation

Garou traversing the umbral planes, Giovanni vampires wandering into the land of the dead, and Changelings, wandering the dreaming lands of happy Boggan villages, all imply the same thing: anyone traversing through the spirit-realm can essentially teleport, i.e. they can move from one place to another without going through the spaces between. If a group of changelings establish a trod which goes to the Summer Lands, and then establish another in a second city, then the results are inescapable: they can travel from their local trod to the Summer Lands, then from the Summer Lands to the second city. They can now teleport to that second city.

This raises a number of questions:

Do changelings routinely teleport about?
How many places are connected? Was the full book on the Dreaming, mentioning the Summer Lands, only there for a particular city, or were multiple connected?
How long does the journey take? How big is the Summer Lands in terms of walking-distance?

This will not necessarily create problems for games, but it adds an unwanted and unneeded power into the mix, which players are sure to exploit somehow, with unintended side-effects.

Surprise Visits

The worst issues from this type of thinking arise from werewolves with escape plans and assassination plans. Let’s say the garou want to assassinate a particular vampire, who sleeps with a lot of body guards in his building. They enter the Penumbra, then switch back to reality, slay the vampire as he sleeps, and they’re done. They can instantly bypass any security he, or anyone without multi-dimensional bodyguards, has. Similarly, they can escape any threat by simply looking into a mirror and going ‘to the other side’.

These problems aren’t 100% insurmountable. A storyteller could plausibly say ‘on the other side of the spirit plane, you find a powerful wyrm creature in the vampire’s lair’. However, unless we want to establish the additional rule that all vampires have an unknown perpetual bodyguard in the spirit-plane, this excuse won’t work all of the time. And certainly nobody wrote the World of Darkness to work that way - the Tzimisce and Tremere do not have magical wards which warn them that their ‘helper-spirit’ has been slain (which would undoubtedly be extremely useful information). Vampires simply have no care for those things. The excuse of this spirit-bodyguard has the additional problem that it must always be strictly stronger than the vampire’s ghouls in order to be a real deterrent, which also does not gel well with the setting. Garou, the book tells us, regularly fight wyrm-spirits, and expect to win if they plan well. The books have never suggested vampire bane-guards are beings of incredible power, merely hinted that such spirits might exist in a vampire’s haven.

If garou did not physically travel through these worlds, but instead meditated, allowing their souls alone to travel into the spirit world, they still have lots of reasons to go. Their gifts still require a spirit to show them how to use the gift, they can still battle cancer by battling the bane-spirit which is causing it, and they can still obtain information from the other side.

(as a minor aside, why spirits don’t have the gifts which they teach I will never understand - if a lightning spirit can teach a gift which short-circuit computers, why can it not use that gift itself? Why create a separate system for spirit-powers?)

Questions of Coordinates

Changelings Don’t Dream

The title ‘Changeling: The Dreaming’ instantly suggests interaction with actual dreams, but the characters in fact have no interaction with dreams. At present, the changelings themselves can teleport through trods, go on a spiritual journey, and only return where they came from if they decide to take that route. If changelings from Houston, Liverpool, and Warsaw are all aware of a location in the Dreaming, it suggests they all go there. And if they meet (whether by chance or arrangement) they can easily show each other which paths they came from, then travel across those paths.

I don’t think we can hand-wave this feature of the fae world away with cheap excuses - it may be dangerous, but changelings are not universally sensible. It may take time, but it sounds like it takes less time than walking or taking a plane. And did this not happen before planes? Were European changelings in the year 1800 not regularly travelling between cities solely via their trods? And did they make bank by smuggling goods? And if not, why not? If material goods don’t travel through the dreaming, does that mean they all have to get dressed again every time they enter a trod?

None of these elements necessarily destroy a story, but the world as painted does not address these issues, despite the fact that they seem like a natural consequence of teleportation. Once again, changeling has a stowaway feature of the world, which it might be better discarding by simply disallowing physical travel.

Rescue Missions

Presently, if someone wanders into some astral plane and never returns, they seem to be simply ‘missing’, as if they’d fallen into a river. This demands that every rescue story begin with some witnesses or a note. This may be the smallest complaint so far, but if a story begins as a rescue mission, going into the umbra/ dreaming/ shadow to find someone who has been lost there, then finding their bodies asleep or in a trance-like state requires less explanation.

The same applies to the characters themselves. If they botch a mission in some spiritual plane, it’s not clear how anyone might find them. World of Darkness games are not really designed for a TPK, so when the changeling wilders find themselves defeated in the Infinite Palace of the King of Frost Giants, most storytellers would stage a rescue by their elders, and use this as a reason to place them under some kind of debt.

Having a sleeping body as evidence of someone’s departure, can really help a story along, and we can easily add gifts/ rituals/ arts which allow people to track someone in a catatonic state through the astral planes.

Details

So in conclusion, if I end up rewriting more than just the basic Vampire: The Masquerade game, I’d like to ensure all travel through the astral plane does not, and cannot, take any physical items or bodies along for the ride.

Changelings might gain some art which allows them to modify dream-items, which could replace that ugly, tacked-on system whereby Nockers can create chimaera - instead we just make a new art which allows changelings to travel through dreams.
Changelings can - of course - still enter the dreaming by falling asleep at trods, such as a stone circle.
Changelings (and others) who lose their body should continue as spirits - pure changelings without a body, who cannot return to the physical world.
Changelings who die in the dreaming simply ‘wake up’, but gain a point of Banality.
Garou should learn how to ‘peak’ into the umbral plane (or from the penumbra into the real world) by some common gift, rather than as an automatic ability.
Garou who die in the Umbra would be able to return, but also lose all their gnosis. However, most enemies of the garou would prefer to trap them.

The Missing Triumvirate

On a slightly different note, something always bugged me about how the Dreaming was handled. Werewolves have a three-part view of the universe - everything is Wyld, Weaver, or Wyrm (and the healthy sum of the lot is Gaia). We have the wraith’s shadow-plane and the Umbra, but the cannon (or so I hear) is that the dreaming is in some kind of sub-umbra…with a sub-penumbra.

This ontology thing strikes me as a needless mess and a waste, so I propose a new ontology:

The wraiths’ shadow realm is ‘of the Wyrm’ (because obviously)
The changelings’ world is ‘of the Wyld’ (which has become rather distant, so presently mages and garou find it extremely difficult to access)
The umbra is ‘of the Weaver’, which explains why the gauntlet always resonates with the local order, meaning it is well shut-off and separated in cities, but less so in the country-side.

The bane-spirits all throughout the umbra only show how corrupted the Weaver’s domain has become. Weaver and Wyld spirits practically never journey through the shadow lands, because the Wyrm has total control there. Similarly, the Dreaming (the Wyld’s domain), does not have spirits of other types there, most of the time.

Each spiritual plane has three layers - the near (which resembles our own world), the far (which has multiple sub-domains which resonate with our world), and the deep (which gets deeply strange in all three planes).

This view could have retained the ever-present theme of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm in the games, without having to shoe-horn Changeling: The Dreaming into some new thing called a ‘sub-realm’ which the rules don’t really cover.