Interview with Ethan Skemp

From WW forums
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I just wanted to let you guys know that we've posted our interview with Ethan Skemp as a part of Episode -12. It is a very Werewolf centric interview, but the head man does let us in to the thoughts and influences surrounding the new game. I hope you enjoy.

Thanks,
Tyler of The Gamestas
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The Sinistraphobe
Even more frightening than the right hand man
www.Gamestas.net
In Search of the Perfect Game
The full podcasts coming soon!

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Transcript of the part concerning the new Changeling game.... Ethan's voice was kinda hard to hear so I did the best that I could.

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GS: Ethan, what do you wanna do with changeling, where are you going with it?

Ethan: I want to make a really, really cool game.

GS: Ok

Ethan: It’s funny because we when made our pitches for what we wanted to do for the year 2007 someone observed ‘this is the year that everyone pitched changeling’. Because obviously on the internet you have may have noticed that before Justin left he was consistently pitching changeling every once in a while. He wanted to and I guess Bill and Will pitched them as well and so did I. For two reasons, one is that I did like the old changeling. I did write for it, I did freelance writing for just about every game line, except Demon back in the old world of darkness…

And the other part is that well I’ve been kind of saturated with the whole myths and legends of Fae and changeling just because I’ve been interested in myth and fantasy and such horribly easy ? ever since my mother let me read the chronicles of Narnia she had lying around. It put be on the track to other such things, and to some extent just the idea of doing changeling, in the new world of darkness that fit the overall look we’re going for. Just taking a look at the cover of the World of Darkness core book and saying ‘alright’ how does this images of darkened streets and shadowy silhouettes translate into something like that? How can you do that and make a game about the Fae… and instantly the ideas started coming.

ES: Yeah, the first thing that kinda comes to mind is almost the odd look of that pressed Faerie book, I don’t know if you guys have ever seen it but is bizarre illustrations of, you know a young girl would see faeries out and she would slap the book together to catch them, I dunno if you guys have seen em but it’s like every page is this new smooshed kinda weird faerie.

Ethan: Yeah that’s maybe a little more over the top of a farce than we want to go.

ES: so can you tell us about the mood? I know you can't really go into specifics...

Ethan: Yeah I can’t talk about content until the time has been deemed right and the stars are in alignment.

GS: So what is the mood? What is it going to feel like?

Ethan: well the thing is about changeling is that I felt that a game that deals with the Fae, it’s going to be a horror game to some extent. They all are, even if they aren’t games of such-and-such horror any more, um but it also requires a sense of beauty and the original stories about changelings, about having your children stolen away to Faerie. And the people dealing with the Fae often have this sort of sense of loss and terrible luck for just having been mixed up with them in the first place, but you also have seen some incredible and beautiful things.

I guess one of the classic tales that I remember that made an impression on me as a kid was this woman whose taken to the bottom of a lake by this kind of draconic looking faerie sort of thing called the Drac and it wanted her to act as a nurse-maid to her child and every day she has to rub some ointment on its eyes, and at some point she rubs her own eyes while she’s got oil on them and now she can see all things faerie. So she does a good job, and eventually she’s returned to the mortal realm and the child’s all grown up, but then some day when she’s walking in the market she notices this strange and incredibly beautiful person and she realizes she can see her and she says ‘can you see me?’, ‘yes I can’ and she covers up each of her eyes in turn and asking ‘can you see me now?’. When she realizes which eye is seeing her, she puts it out.

And that one, it kind of says it… well I won’t say it says it all cause you can’t build an entire gameline of it, but it’s that idea that mixing with the Fae is going to give you the opportunity to see things no-one else will see, but it may come at a price. I will also say, that this story is not really about Faeries per se, but might as well be is Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and that’s another example, which I actually point to because it’s modern. It’s very much the fae myth of ? and strange and ancient and weird creatures that want something from us that we thing we can probably give up the terms of something that is actually more precious to us than we wanted to. Their interactions with the carnival in this town is very much like the Fae and the old deal with the devil stories, which overlap a lot. The Fae might as well be the devil in some of those cases.

But it’s modern, it’s very much a 20th century story, it’s very much an American story, and it’s the sort of thing that makes me point to it and say… ‘this is why I wanna do changeling’ because I want these medieval myths… I want them as modern stories, this kind of interaction. You can put them all together and make this really great game.

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