The Moon Court
At night, the monsters howl and play. They hunt the innocent. They leap over fires. They drink and smoke themselves into languid stupors. They invite peril, taunt the Gentry, and become masters of Goblin Markets. Beneath the full moon, all manner of strangeness and depravity may bask in the bare light -- all the better to serve the darkness and to snub one's nose at the fools of the Sun Court.
It's odd, in a way, that the Moon Court is ultimately less concerned with the Sun Court than the Sun Court is with the Moon Court. Members of the Moon Court don't really seek to undo what the Court of the Day does, instead doing their own thing with great glee and abandon, knowing full well that it invites the revulsion of those supposedly virtuous upstarts.
So, what is it that they do? Whatever they want, for one. The Moon Court doesn't care to give its members many boundaries. They don't view this is as sin, but instead see it as freedom. Want to shoot up Afghani heroin in a vet curtained jazz bar in Kiev? Want to sell Afghani heroin in Budapest? Want to stalk the lonely women of Warsaw, haunting them night after night until they cannot sleep for fear of the nightmares they'll have? Want to pierce your face with slivers of bone and lengths of chain, brand your body in a spider web network of puffy scars, or play a game of Russian roulette with your nearest and dearest? The Moon Court asks only that you do as you desire, worrying about the consequences later. The stranger and more grotesque the urge, the better it is.
Simply put, the Moon Court is composed of changelings who know that they are monsters and relish in the fact. Does this make them evil? Perhaps some of them. Because they are allowed, even encouraged, to embrace their monstrousness, this leads some to be particularly horrendous. It's amazing, though, how few of them are truly malicious. Many are tricksters, yes. Con men, sure. Some flaunt their ugliness and deformity like a strictest of senses. Most are just gleefully selfish, glad to give into whatever so-called wickedness demands their attention at any given moment.
At night, they own the surface, and during the day, they dwell beneath the ground in sewers and subbasements and caves. But even when they retreat to the world below, they still leave their mark on the world even as the sun shines high in the sky -- they leave behind allies, networks of criminals and human monsters who are as bad as or worse than they are. They like to think of it as "leaving a present or two" behind for the Sun Court. Just enough to keep the righteous fools busy and out of real trouble.
Mantle
The Moon Court's Mantle is, appropriately, skewed to darkness. The miens of the courtiers seem to absorb light, and shadows move around them as if of their own accord. At Mantle 1 to 3, a changeling seems always cast in a band of shadow, even if the shadow has no source or shouldn't exist at that angle. At Mantle 4+, this shadow becomes something almost alive. It may ooze away like tendrils of fog or may pool at the character's feet and drag behind him like a sack filled with severed heads. Some have miens where only certain body parts are shrouded in darkness -- hands cloaked in tenebrous spheres, eyes "leaking" darkness like squid ink in an untroubled sea. The courtiers of the Moon Court embrace (and are embraced by) this darkness, providing them with benefits external and internal. At Mantle 1, the darkness helps a character perform acts of minor theft more easily, as his hands are blurred by shadow -- any Larceny rolls involving manual theft or some other kind of prestidigitation gain +2 dice. At Mantle 3, the darkness may accentuate the character's already monstrous ways and features, casting sharp shadows and seeping gloom across tusks or serpent eyes or from long talons. Whenever the character spends Willpower on an Intimidation roll, it provides that character with four bonus dice instead of three. Finally, at Mantle 5, the darkness seeps into the character's own soul, nesting there and feeding. Any time the character gains Willpower from giving into his Vice, he gains two Willpower instead of one.
Related Species
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