What do you get when you cross the infinity of the Dreaming’s possibilities with eight billion humans? Questions about how many of them are changelings, that’s what. This week, we’re applying the art/science of demography to the fae, throwing numbers and proportions and calculations around like so much spaghetti, so that we can see what sticks. You may ask, why does this matter—but how many and what kinds of changeling are running around the setting for your game will impact its feel. And not just the fae themselves: a local expression of the game’s themes and moods depends upon Dreamers, Autumn People, and even just those mundane humans we talked about last time. So take note, Storytellers! We hope that after listening, you too will be able to graph a demo, Dreaming-style.
The spreadsheet to which Josh refers to throughout the episode, with some proposed numbers based on the population of various divisions of Concordia, can be found at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rv_S2aGs1VtfeCvhyOoq_iZ10w9Eag2ERlo-UONllcY.
We also refer to two episodes from our sibling show, Mage: the Podcast, on the subject of games with high numbers of mages and low numbers of mages, and how adjusting those numbers creates a different play experience. Pooka may have been using Chronos when talking about these, as it appears only the former has actually been released thus far. Nevertheless, check it out at: https://magethepodcast.com/running-and-playing-low-mage-count-games/.
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your hosts
Josh Hillerup (any pronoun) bribes fae of the Kingdom of Northern Ice into filling out the census form with maple syrup dross.
Pooka G (any pronoun/they) traverses the Kingdom of Apples in a balloon-ship, dropping leaflets about the benefits of mixed-use zoning.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.
—Agent K in Men in Black