Strange Changeling Child

thank you for the community copies

~an autistic uni student

Hi! I’m neurospicy and an educator. I’d love a chance to get a community copy of this but I refuse to use the platform formerly known as Twitter because the owner is … well. What he is.  Is there another option for contacting you?  Thanks!

Hold on, I’m going to ramble a lot here. But the tl;dr: is, I loved it. It was a powerful experience. I recommend trying to play alongside other Neurodivergent friends if possible. 

I just played this game with a few other ND friends (Autistic, ADHD plus others). We all seemed to have a pretty powerful experience but I can only speak to my own. I’m an ADHDer and this past year has involved a lot of soul searching. I came across this game at a particularly vulnerable time and had been waiting to play it until I had a group of like-minded folks to play alongside with. Yay parallel play! 

I am a member of the Community of Applied Spiritual and Therapeutic Tabletop Gamers (CASTT Gamers) and this game perfectly illustrated how games can help you learn about yourself, the world, your place in the world, and beyond. From just 2 hours of game play I realized why I’m always so burned out, why I feel like I’m never just doing “okay”, and why I always feel like I’m never enough. I knew some of these things beforehand. But Strange Changeling Child condensed all that stuff I “know” into a few hours. It’s a simple game, almost deceptively simple, but it will be sticking with me for a long time. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any of my confidantes reveal that they were also changelings. This is why I was so grateful for my ND friends to have joined me. Having them there, experiencing it in a similar way, and also relating to all of the experiences that they were willing to share helped validate my experience and make me not feel alone. I think if you’re the type that would struggle with coming up with your own scenarios you could easily add a DM/GM function with a safe friend and IRL confidante. 

When I play it again I plan to have my character and the confidantes a little more removed from my real life. I also hope to play into some more fantastical elements and make it more magical. I definitely leaned into the downsides of my neurodivergence and I hope that next time I can elaborate on my fairy magic and what it is for me. I’ll also be making a little chart to make it easier to reference when I change my Fey, and the moves. Just so my brain can more easily digest the information.

Wow. That was long-winded. Overall. This is a deceptively simple game that serves as a fairly perfect allegory for what ND folx, particularly Autists,and maybe just as well, ADHERs. I could see hacking this game for a variety of marginalized identities but ultimately wouldn’t want to change the original intent of the game. 

Thank you for this game <3

I really appreciate this game.  I played a relatively short game, with only two confidants, and got a "good" ending with nobody leaving me when they found out my changeling nature.   I wasnt expecting myself to be so strongly affected by it, emotionally, and yet, I was STRONGLY affected.  Probably because I put my character thru situations similar to what I experienced growing up, oops.

Its an emotionally intense game, and its important to be gentle with yourself if you play it and not bite off more than you could chew.

I'm just always happy to see autistic art, so I bought this game twice, once on its own and once in the fundraiser unsale bundle.  Thank you for making this game <3.

Here is our character sheet.  Our apologies for our messy handwriting and unorthodox switching of writing directions.

edit: Oh, the itch comments section formatting seems to elongate images.  Thats frusturating. It seems like if you open the image in a new tab tho, it displays normally.