CW: Animal abuse, body horror
In the first part of this four part series, I discussed the differences between White Wolf’s World of Darkness and the Chronicles of Darkness, what Skinchangers are, and reviewed the book that they debuted in, World of Darkness: Skinchangers. In the second part, I talk about the first books to bring Skinchangers to the Chronicles of Darkness Second Edition: Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras and Dark Eras: Beneath the Skin (Skinchangers and Demon: the Descent) from Onyx Path Publishing and Borrowed Power, the first Skinchanger community content sourcebook available via the Storytellers Vault.
In 2013, the second edition of Chronicles of Darkness launched with The God-Machine Chronicles. This updated ruleset improved CoD gameplay with a tightening of the Storytelling System and opening the door to revising the core CoD rulebooks to match these updates. With that update, all CoD1e books became targets for updating, including World of Darkness: Skinchangers.
WHAT ABOUT DARK ERAS?
“From Template to Merit: There’s never enough room to do everything. We can’t update the original skinthief template from Skinchangers here, so we’ve written a Merit designed to accomplish something similar.” – Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras
In 2016, Onyx Path Publishing officially update the skinchangers from CoD1e to 2e with a blurb and one-and-a-half pages detailing the updated Merit. Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras, and the later chapter reprint Dark Eras: Beneath the Skin (Skinchangers and Demon: the Descent), both presented an abridged option to create a Skinchanger, altering the creation process from a Template to a Merit. The Skinthief Merit simplified how you create your character and opened up a variety of combinations. At the same time, taking the CoD1e Template, where it is the whole of the supernatural character, to be a CoD2e Merit means it might be one of several notable supernatural powers a mortal character could possess.
Written by Peter Schaefer and Developer, Eric Zwadzki, this work made Skinchangers viable for 2e, yet did so without dedicating a great deal of space to their mechanics. Out of the 600 pages present in Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras, only one-and-a-half pages are spent on Skinchanger mechanics. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, the book offers a pair of creature stats useful for Skinchangers: Eagles and jaguars. Skinchanrgers need animal descriptions and stats to maximize their in-game options, so getting those two is a bonus. Still, the crunch is thin, which might make this book sound underwhelming, but that’s not true. This book makes up for the lack of crunch with something that Skinchangers need, a setting. In the original book, the characters were inhuman people living on the fringe with no society of their own. This book changes that but turning back the clock and putting them into another time and place. The setting portrayed in the “Beneath the Skin” chapter of Dark Eras shows Skinchangers in the Aztec Empire between 1486 and 1502. That world, when viewed in a respectful light, offers a greater connection between humans and animals that has been lost in the modern era as species are hunted to extinction. By placing the Skinchangers in a setting that provides context, story ideas begin to take root and you can see some real gaming options. While Dark Eras is not a major advance mechanically, the setting is a breath of fresh air and throws open the door to making use of these characters in historic fiction.
BORROWED POWER
The Storytellers Vault allows fans of the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness to create new, semi-official products as community content. These supplements fill in the gaps that White Wolf, Onyx Path Publishing, Renegade Game Studios, and others have left open among the official releases. Among those gaps, I’m including the Skinchangers.
The first community content book to tackle that subject is Chris Falco’s Borrowed Power, published in late 2018. The book is a Storytellers Vault community content book that updates several WoD concepts such as Channelers, Sanguiomancers, and Skinthieves. Within the book, there are six pages (of the twenty-one) dedicated exclusively to the Skinthief concept and how to use the Supernatural Merit Template ideas of Chronicles of Darkness: Hurt Locker to create one.
Borrowed Power takes concrete steps to enhance the Skinchanger by revamping the Merit first rolled out in Dark Eras. Mechanically, this book expands the Skinthief Merit to about a page of content. It goes further by reintroducing and reinterpreting some of the Merits from the original book, Skinchangers, but redoing them for CoD2e. Beyond the Merits, this book offers the Skinchanger Drawbacks, hindrances that increase roleplaying options while reducing the in-game costs of certain Merits. This book does a nice job of deep diving the Dark Eras Merit while adding more crunch to this.
However, this supplement returns to the structure of offering powers without linking it to a metaplot or specific setting. Without a world, these characters aren’t baked into our collective mythology to offer a long-term tale to carry this to a gaming table. This is not a shot at Chris Falco’s work. The book is of excellent quality and worth checking out. But, you’ll need to read it and be inspired to craft your own narrative from this baseline.
Borrowed Power is community content. The concept behind community content, a marketplace with fans can create original works using a specific RPG, can cause some fan trepidation as, without editorial control, fan created works may not be polished or poorly laid out. That fear is needless with Chris Falco’s book. Chris took full advantage of the free art packs and multiple style guides and layout templates to craft a professional product. Fans can enjoy this work without worries that it’ll be hard to read or pull them out of the content.
If you’re interested in writing for the Storytellers Vault, check out these style guides and layout templates as well as the many others White Wolf provides.
- White Wolf Storytellers Vault Style Guide: The Definitive Guide
- Chronicles of Darkness Storytellers Vault Style Guide
- Chronicles of Darkness: Mortals Storytellers Vault Style Guide
- Chronicles of Darkness Mortals Templates
ONE MORE REVIEW TO GO
In the next part of this series, I’ll look at the fourth Skinchanger book, Chronicles of Darkness: Beneath Shifting Skin, by Travis Legge, TJ Wilson, and Sam Young, another offering published via the Storytellers Vault.
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