Okay! Now! That outta the way, let me tell you about how FUCK CHANGELING.
Roll back to '95, '96 or so, and you'll find me and my cronies playing the hell out of Changeling. It was tons of fun, and I have lots of fond memories of such. In fact, I still think that the greater premise of the game (half-human/half-faeries walk the narrow line between both literal worlds) is totally awesome and I would totally dig a game with that theme.
So the other night, my daughter and I were reading a book about Irish folklore. Fairies, you know; the sidhe, and like that. So I pulled the old Changeling rulebook off the shelf and started showing it to her, reminiscing. Good times. Mostly we were looking at the art because, even though my first-grader reads at a second-grade level, we were just chatting about the game and not reading it.
Today, however, I pulled the book down again and began to read at random, and got a face-full of White Wolf's notorious (but, to me, largely overlooked) anti-scientific screed.
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| He's got 5 Dots in "Murdering Wonder". |
I can't stomach this stuff anymore. It's ridiculous, patently ridiculous. The assertion that scientific discovery creates "a banal world with no mysteries or wonder" in which "all the questions have been answered" and people have "forgotten how to dream..."
...oh, give me a fucking break.
Look -- no, no, no. I know, I know. The World Of Darkness, and all that. Melodrama, hyperbole, it's a fantasy, it's essentially a horror setting. But it really bugs the hell out of me when I see these arguments about science sucking the magic out life and so on, mostly because it's so grossly antithetical to what science and discovery are all about.
I don't know about you, but when I look up and see the Sun, I don't think it's a giant mysterious lamp in the sky, or a distant inscrutable god or an unknowable cipher of mystery and flame--I see a massive nuclear furnace that is constantly exploding, a star whose energy bathes us with light and heat, a giant roiling inferno that gives life. And the fact that I don't have to guess at that but rather know that it is demonstrably true is so, so, SO much amazing to me than "It's a bonfire...we think".
The more we seek, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the more we realize that our universe is, literally, awesome.
By the way, if you haven't seen this yet...
