Nicki Midnight is a character I played for about a year in a game of Changeling: The Dreaming. Out of all of the World of Darkness games, Changeling was the one I connected with the least and yet somehow, Nicki grew to be one of my favorite RPG characters ever. In heavily narrative games, I often write a short piece of fiction about the character to sort out who they are and how I should play them and this piece is just such a thing. It’s also an excuse for me to try out Substack’s podcasting platform since Fear is the Mind Killer is top of mind for me and I’m really not a fan of spreading my projects out across numerous platforms. If one of them collapses, you end up with all this orphaned content that needs a new home and it’s tedious. Tedious, I tell you!
Changeling is about characters that straddle the line between the world of the fae and the world of humans. Its central struggle is about magical characters being consumed by a world where magic is quickly dying and banality is spreading like a cancer. As it would happen, this is something that I actually think about often as a magician in a world that just doesn’t do much for me. This was the hook that sold me on Changeling. I endeavor in my own magical practice to flood the world with high strangeness, to get people dreaming again. Some time back, when I was toying with chaos magic and trying to get a hold of something amazing, I stumbled across Ryan “Arjil” Lloyd’s long and very engaging video about the origin of the DKMU’s now-quite-famous sigil, Ellis. I recommend you watch it. It very clearly explains what I’m getting at here and Ryan is a hell of a storyteller.
In game-terms, Nicki is a type of faery called a Pookah. They’re shape-shifting animal spirits known for mischief and when thinking about the character I wanted to make for this game, along those lines, I thought that no character could be more emblematic of the theme than a transgender teenager. The premise was pretty solid, I thought. They’re a charismatic performer that you can’t help but be charmed by. They upend your expectations of gender and win you over with magic and sheer force of personality. Nicki was portrayed as one part petulant teen and one part Drag-Race contestant. They’re also rules-bound to lie all the time. So, Nicki became an avatar for my feelings on ontological terrorism and to fit her into the game’s fairy tale mechanisms, I liberally stole from Puss In Boots, which is a fucking hilarious story. In the magical world of the game, she was a chimera cat that walked upright and dressed like The Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s. She claimed to be the emissary of a nobleman by the name of “His most eloquent and mendacious excellence, The Count Montmarte du Faberge, who is a real person and in no way made up” No. Nicki has no idea what mendacious means.
With her motley crew of other fae, they routinely skipped school to climb a beanstalk and steal gold from giants by convincing them that she was sent to bring the gold back to The Count so that he may inspect it for its authenticity, and stop a rampaging school mascot that was consumed by grief being that he was at one time a student’s imaginary friend, now forgotten. There were other adventures, too: Errands given by the wayward souls of the recently dead to see to their unfinished business, a game of The Floor is Lava where the floor was literally lava, a battle with rats in a ship’s bilge to recover a stolen Vinyl Pop, and a trip to Savers that magically became a fashion show worthy of Milan Fashion Week.
Like most games, people get busy and schedules change and it becomes hard enough to get four or five grown-ass adults together to play a whimsical role playing game that the rhythm is interrupted and the game comes to a halt. But I am so in love with this character that I continue to use her in creative writing and other gaming projects.
Nicki Midnight