Changeling the Lost Second Edition: Beasts

Changeling: The Lost, Open Development

Lost 2.0 is coming.

I’ve talked a bit about it. How Kith is defined by the role you play in Arcadia, by the place your Keeper put you. Seeming is defined by that moment where you took control, where you broke free. We’re set to have about 100 Kiths in the Lost 2.0 core rulebook. We’re set to have six Seemings, and one additional one in REDACTED. I wanted to share a Seeming with you, to show you how they look and feel.

Each will flavour and influence its Kith. You look like your Kith, but your Seeming makes it unique and yours. Certain types of people are likely to end up as a Seeming, that’s covered in Background. After all, your personality helps determine how and why you take control. The actual escape is the defining moment, that’s in the Seeming description. Blessings are anchor points you can use to freely regain Clarity, by grounding yourself in certain behaviour that’s natural to you. Curses are things that risk your Clarity, unique to your Seeming.

So here you go. Beasts. This is brought to you by the amazing Filamena Young.

Beasts

You hear that sound? Like an animal, wounded, god that gets the blood going, doesn’t it? I’m just going to go check it out…

They’ve got wild eyes and untamed hearts. They’re reckless, passionate, and dangerous. They’re a wet dream made flesh when they’re turned on, which is common, they’re walking nightmares when they’re angry, which is also common. The Beast has reached inside, found her animal self, and embraced her id. The animal inside of her kept her alive at the worst times. Humanity has failed her, failed her when she was the most in need, and so she rejected it.

Appearance: You will know a Beast by her gait, by her pose, by her appetite, but most often, you will know a Beast by her eyes. To the mundane eye, the Beast is wild and unkempt, or perfectly kept but with the presence of the animal about her. No one says of the Beast, “he’s like a shark.” They say, “he is a shark.”

To the Changeling eye, the Beast has let the wildness inside out, and remade himself from parts of the wild real and imagined. He may be simply lion on two legs, proud and golden and beautiful. Or he may be parts and pieces, a horn, a maw, dripping bird-talons and snake teeth. Chimera-like Beasts may reflect a conflict between the Kith inflicted on them and the animal soul they claimed for themselves at the time of their escape.

Background: Many Beasts lived before their Durances, already trapped and caged. Social bindings or literal incarceration can both lead to an attempt to ‘escape’. For examples, a cog in the wheel of a big corporation willing to make any deal to get out of their cubical or a three-strike looser serving life on a technicality. Even a lovely, well kept house-wife in a gilded cage dreaming of some other, wilder life, might fall into the clutches of a Keeper, anything to escape confinement. That’s not to say that free spirits who lived life in the wide open can’t become Beasts, as they do, but most often, a Beast felt trapped before they were captured.

The Escape: From one cage to another, the Beast has been pushed too far. She already knows what it feels like to be without choices, to submit, to lean on humanity and civility. After all, that way failed her as her situation went from bad to worse in the hands of her Keeper. So she makes a choice, she chooses to do something wild, something socially unacceptable, something animalistic. She bites through flesh, claws through soil, smears herself with shit and blood to escape the Huntsman on her heels. She chooses to break a taboo, destroys her civility, and in making that choice, she escapes. In making that choice, she becomes the Beast, the frail captive she once was left behind, forgotten.

Character Creation: Beasts favor the physicality of life, and test her capability at every turn. This is not to say that all Beasts are hulking brutes or thoughtless thugs. Cunning can be tied to physicality; after all, the brain is a part of the body. Instead of assuming Beasts are meaty, brainless animals, create a character who is always testing her limits. A fair scattering of Skills is likely as the character tires and bores of everything the world has to offer. At some point, the Beast will find a thing she wishes to focus on, some perceived limit in her capacity that she’ll push and push and perfect. And so, a Beast only a few years out of the Hedge may appear a jack-of-all-trades. A Beast with some time, however, will look more like a creature of passion, hyper focused on the ‘thing’ she thinks is her pinnacle. Like a cat playing to perfect her hunting skills, the Beast is relentless in improving this one aspect.

Blessing: Clarity of Abandon. Lost in the lies and oppression of society, a Beast has great difficulty making head or tales of the cultural landscape before her. She remembers, though vaguely, that there is a reason for many of the rules and laws that keep people civilized, but the importance of those reasons has faded away. Rules of society are only chains around her neck, and obedience to those old ways is suffocating. (Perhaps suffocating to everyone, but only the Beast is wise enough to notice.) Once per story, a Beast can flaunt a cultural taboo despite great personal cost, and regain a point of Clarity for free.

Curse: A Beast’s Burden. Confinement is a fate worse than death to the Beast. She’s experienced it already, and her spirit is simply too big to fit comfortably into bondage. A Beast can, of her own free will, enter into a Contract or Pledge or other more intimate acts of binding, but it chuffs her more than the average Lost. Forced confinement, especially the physical kind, is too much for her. Escaping bonds requires three Glamour instead of one. Once per story, if a Beast is confined or imprisoned, she suffers a Clarity breaking point.

Concepts:

The broker’s made of teeth and cunning. He’s figured out how to land the big fish; he’s a shark and he’s always hungry.

She’s free, running like the wind at the first sign of danger, not out of cowardice, but because nothing matters more than the freedom to run.

He’s got a drumbeat in his blood and every heavy step shakes the earth under him and he will never, ever, forget the one that tried to poach him.