Most of my favorite roleplaying games are published by White Wolf Gaming Studio. Their original gameline, World of Darkness (now in its second, all-new iteration), included various games about various supernatural critters living secretly in a world exactly like ours, except perhaps a little more sucky. Vampires lurked and preened, werewolves committed acts of ecoterrorism and anthropophagy, human mages bent the laws of reality, and brooding ink drawings of each stared out moodily from the pages of their respective rulebooks. And then, there was Changeling.

The World of Darkness’s take on the fae, Changeling was an odd game, hard for most people to take or understand. Its tone included vibrant joy, abiding melancholy, menace and promise. It was about the first wonder of childhood and the way the world blows it away. It was a beautiful, idiosyncratic thing, its pages brightly painted with the splendid and the macabre.

Now, it wasn’t perfect. I’d argue it was far too regimented to seem truly fae. But even its regimentation had charm—for instance, the strictly defined ‘kiths’ or types of fairyes. They were limiting to character creation and nearly antithetical to the free-flowing chaos one naturally associates with faeries. But at the same time they were charming, intriguing, and had that grain of truth that makes a myth appealing.

I, of course, identified strongly with changelings, beings of dream and fancy hiding within boring flesh. In the game, changelings can see each other both as the fleshy shell and as the true spirit - a puckish satyr lurking within the skater-boy, a deer pooka peering from behind the hair of a shy art student. For myself, were I to write myself up as a Changeling character - and there’s no other system into which I think I’d fit so well—I would be an Eshu, one of the travelling, tale-telling fae, that love nothing so well as stories. And every once in a while, I see another changeling.

On MAX once I caught sight of a girl who was clearly a surly, tinkering Knocker, shouldering a bag of textbooks with a frown. I have caught a girl’s profile and carriage for a moment in passing and seen the aristocratic poise of the Sidhe. These are not just people that fit the stereotypes of the game’s kiths—they are people who have a touch of individuality, an aura, an Otherness. It’s only in my imagination, but it amuses me much.

A few months ago a post-doc joined the group in my building. I’m not sure where she’s from. She is thin, with sallow skin and long flat black hair, a quiet face and mournful eyes. She always seems to wear black, and move around things to go forward, like a snake. The moment I saw her, I thought, “She’s a Sluagh.” They are quiet, creepy faeryes that hoard secrets and cannot speak above a whisper. I could almost see her fairy form, even thinner, more downcast, dripping as if just pulled from a nest of seaweed. In the three months or so since, the impression hasn’t gone away. I’ve only heard her speak once, a clear, sweet, normal voice, exactly the kind you might expect if there were some chimerical pet wrapped around her shoulder, speaking for her to the world to allay the mortals’ suspicions….

Sometimes I wonder, when I see these people, if they too see with the eyes of Glamour, and whether they see a tidy, Gap-clad admin assistant, or a bronzed fae arrayed in silk and deerskin, chiming with knotted celtic jewelry and shrouded in her own braided, beaded hair?