New Player Guide

New Player Guide

To be clear, this is not a guide for players new to playing nWoD; this is a guide for players new to our specific game. Fate's Harvest works on the understanding that players have a basic grasp of the mechanics of the game. If you don't know what attributes, skills, contracts, merits, etc. are, please check out the following books:

• New World of Darkness: Core Rulebook (WoD) - For basic mechanics. Ignore the merits here.
• New World of Darkness: God Machine Chronicles (GMC) - This addendum changes some of the basics, rebalances a lot of mechanics, and provides new merits and other information. When you see us mention GMC, this is what we are talking about.
• New World of Darkness: Second Sight (SS) - This is where nWoD talks about Psychics and Thaumaturges. We use some of their rules instead of the GMC rules.
• Changeling: the Lost (CtL) - This is the core rulebook for the CtL gaming line. It will give you the basics of how to play a Changeling character.
• See the Book List page for the names of the other Changeling books. There are oodles! We use them all.

There are PDFs of these books available at multiple online retailers for fairly low prices.

You don't have to be an expert, and you don't have to have everything known by heart, but you do need to have access to copies of the books.

I Know WoD, But What If I've Never Played Changeling Before?

Best advice?

Start as a low-xp, low-power Changeling.

Don't try to get all the bells and whistles all at once.

A LOT of Changeling is in nitty gritties of theme, and unless you happen to have a deep-seated love of reading sourcebooks, it will be a scads more fun for you to learn that theme through RP than through the number of hours of poring through manuals you WILL need to do in order to accurately play a high-powered character. :)

Theme is one of the superbig things this game focuses on, so it's capital Important to learn. That said, everyone makes mistakes. There ARE an awful lot of books to source from.

We use a tiered xp system here -- it's on the Policies page we mention down below, but XP Tiers is a direct link to it. Essentially, you get infinite alts at 100xp and four alts at 200+.

So! If you are brand new to Changeling and don't have a friend to walk you through the nitty gritties, start at Tier 1: 100xp. Make a Changeling between Wyrd 1-3 and learn the world. Once you're comfy, make an alt! Or have fun progressing your first alt up through the beautiful madness of life in the half-world all Changelings struggle through.

Useful Pages

Obviously, all of the pages on the sidebar are important... :) For pages which are NOT that easily accessible, however, and are still important for you to read through, please see below.

The following pages are critical for all new players to read:

• Policies - This page explains our policies regarding players, staff and systems, among others. Ah, a LOT of systems.
• PRPs - This page gives an idea of what plots do and don't need pre-approval from staff.
• Justifications - This page gives an idea of which spends require justification.
• FAQ - This page contains questions and answers staff has been asked often enough to want them up where other people can read!
• GMC - This page contains what we ARE, and what we are NOT, using from the GMC addendum to the core rulebook.
• House Rules and House Rules/Merits - The writers very obviously did not talk to each other while writing out the books. As a result, there are a lot of ambiguous and contradictory rulings. Sometimes, too, staff just plain wants something to work differently!

These pages explain staff's stance on that.

The following pages are critical for all Changeling players to read:

• Kiths - Fate's Harvest has rewritten every single kith bonus to make it so every kith has A) a passive, always-on blessing and B) an active blessing which they can use by spending 1 Glamour.

In a lot of cases, this means they are actually more powerful than before, since many kiths did not previously have two bonuses at all.

• Description - Requirements for character descriptions.
• Mien Guidelines - This explains just how (in)human you should look, per Wyrd level.

Bear in mind that merits and entitlements can also influence your inhumanity, and make you less human than you would otherwise appear.