The Laughing Strangers opens up with this masterpiece of bad “folksy” writing.

Dancing at the Crossroads
Well, good morning, Mr. Congressman! By my ears, I am bettin’ you got just a ceiling full of thoughts right now, all tied up like you are. I swear you look like a denim full of concern! It is almost memorizing how sweat and worry just seem to just fall out of you like penny candy stolen from the five and dime. I bet you hadn’t even felt the dangers coming on, since you were sleepin’ all deep. It was like they had walked up a dusty road from a long way away and now are tracking fret across your bedroom floor. Of course, I can understand wakin’ up knowin’ you tried to cheat me might be a bit of a jangle on the nerves. Ain’t that just the thing about makin’ deals ya got no intention of keepin’, though?

When you up and forget to pay the piper, the piper ain’t gonna ever forget about you.

As for the fluff…they’re Kender. They’re fucking good-ol-boy rodent Kender. Tricksters, folksy down-home wisdom, spinning tales, going on retarded adventures, being douchebags that dance just out of reach, all of that. Also they’re psychopathic sadists when in Warform. There’s a lot of words to the writeup but I just saved you the effort of reading it.

Here’s their stereotype block:

Stereotypes
Man: Have you ever noticed that they all taste like chicken?
Mages: You have to admire the kumquat-shaped balls of those crackpots. You would think they don’t realize that the Universe is keeping score.
Vampires: Two words: road kill.
Werewolves: Hard to respect a critter whose big claim to fame is getting down with his mangy transgendered self in Granny’s old flannel pajamas… (Wow, intolerance and retardation, way to combo!)

Anyway, now for the breeds themselves. Apparently, the person they got to make art for this section watched a whole bunch of Rock and Rule while huffing a whole lot more glue. Let’s play a game, shall we? I’ll post all the images, and you guess what breed they are, which will be in a spoiler below each. See how many you can guess!

—Rat—

Hare. Seriously.

Either raccoon or –fox–, it’s between the two entries and it’s really fucking hard to tell!

Coyote

If you got any of those I call you a liar and a cheat of the foulest kind.

See, if this artist was going for the Uncanny Valley, then he hit a fucking home run. However, I think he missed the memo that this was for shape-shifting animal people. These all look like Near-Human forms to be extremely generous, and only one of the breeds in the chapter starts with that by default. So, either he’s drawing very lame depictions of PCs that may not even exist, or these are the most pathetically ineffectual Warforms I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, the writeups proper.

The Minjur are the rat-people, who are apparently all Indians used to being treated like royalty who look down on all the rest of the Laughing Strangers for being common rodents, due to Indians believing rats and rat-people to be the reincarnations of dead children. Right, let’s just roll with that. Continuing in the fluff-without-mechanics, Minjur can never get lost and carry diseases in their warform without actually having backup for either of those. Minjur also set the stage for four of the six breeds in the chapter by having the breed bonus be “Nine Aspect dots, can pick from the Bag of Tricks aspects, and gets +2 to Stealth rolls to hide from creatures of Size 5 or above.” The other two are only minor modifications of this.

As the justification for the increased Aspect dots says, the Warforms for most of the Laughing Strangers are utterly pathetic wastes of mechanics that nobody’s gonna use. The animal forms are all tiny, fragile, and ridiculously fast.

The Baitu are hare-people, who apparently have zero characterization or relation to hares beyond “insatiable lover” and “ridiculously lucky” for some reason. They can make the impossible happen for other people, so long as they get their end of the bargain fulfilled, and wreak hell if not satisfied.

Apparently, many legends of Satan and Loki have to do with fucking rabbit people being douchebags. Just making this its own paragraph so it’s noticed.

They’re all either albino or blacker than Norwegian death metal, and their Warform is more charitably described as “I’m cosplaying an elf” form,“ which actually means my theory about all the warforms being hilariously ineffectual looking was right and that picture really is what they look like. Welp.

And then there’s THIS bullshit.

Background: Baitu often manifest their Gift as early as five years old. Most offspring are the children of parents who cut a deal with some mysterious patron and paid off that debt in bed. Considering how fertile hares can be, the Gift runs surprisingly light in the family. Many births fall squarely in the animal or human camp, with no sign at all of the Gift. If a true Baitu is born, however, the attentions of the Laughing Stranger who sired the Baitu is immediately drawn. Often pointedly aware of the paternity situation, the human guardian parents are usually too skittish to harm the child, for fear of retribution. Oftentimes, this leads to the young Luck ruling the household. When the Baitu who sired the youngling believes the offspring is ready, he takes it from the guardians’ care. Superior mentors, Baitu make time throughout their lives to stay in touch with their children.

So, let’s break this down:

• Baitu require payment in sex more often than not.
• A married woman gets saddled with the kid. Apparently, no Baitu woman ever gets knocked up, or if they do, they stick them with the father and his wife because fuck you that’s why.
• A normal woman could possibly give birth to a motherfucking rabbit (which is actually addressed earlier in the book, generally stating ‘It’s rare, it’s horrifying, the mother usually doesn’t live, and if she does, she’s probably left insane’).
• There’s a disturbing implication that these people may broker luck deals to, and fuck, normal rabbits.
• Despite being transient drifters with no real attachment to people, they’re perfect parents who fucking KNOW when their kids are born and if they are so much as disciplined once they’ll kill you.
• I hate this book and I want everybody involved in making it to be slow roasted over a grease fire.

Baitu have the same breed bonus as their ratty relatives, and the same speed bonus as Rat forms (despite their fluff boasting that their hare forms could run at 45 MPH, and no, I’m not doing that math again). However, they get Nine Lives, a five dot Favor, for free as a breed favor. Y’know, the one that brings you back from the dead as long as you have a spare dot of Feral Heart and your body is relatively intact. Yknow, the one that’s based off cats in its fluff, and yet no Bastet breed starts with it, and only one has it as a discounted Favor at all.

I’d like to reiterate that grease fire thing. Just saying.

The Archunem are the raccoon-people and are curious, snarky, romantic bad boys that apparently look enough like bears in war-form that “most reports of bears near cities” are actually Archunem schooling people. They also have Nine Lives for free, with pretty much no justification. Their animal form is also better than their bear-esque warform in every way except health.

There’s so much wrong here that I want to strangle this book. I want to find this book’s neck, wrap my hands around it, and choke it until it stops being alive. Then I’m going to peel off its skin and make a funny hat.

The Reynardi are the (oh God this is going to hurt already) fox-people. They reference the kitsune by saying that the Reynardi have a sense of honor compared to them: tricks must be done with style, attacking the weak is poor sport, etc. They’re the classic Robin Hood and trickster with a lesson in the laughter kind of people, only made insufferable by this book’s writing. Warform is apparently rare and Near-Human is favored more, which (fucking duh) is not mechanically represented. They always have vertically slit eyes in all forms, and also have Nine Lives for free because why not.

If you notice that as each of these posts reaches the end, I stop trying, it’s because fatigue and horror sink in over the course of the whole thing and I’m unable to keep up the meticulous levels of nitpicking.

The Mistai are the coyote-folk, and the writeup is basically “Coyote is a douchebag, coyotes are adapting well to mankind’s dominance.” They literally hunt and eat children for no real reason except “because I can” or “because my soul is that of a coyote AND one of the Native Americans killed by Whitey.” They’re generally loners (what) and have, by mechanics this time holy shit, a Near-Human form instead of an animal one. However, compare this description to the picture posted above:

Just as other trickster breeds, Coyote’s brood have no War-Beast form beneath their skins. Instead, Mistai favor their human aspect, but with lean and beastly features. Softly furred with silvergray and dry-grass brown fuzz, Mistai wear their coyote heads proudly. Seen so often in shadow, these faces look like masks from a Western fever dream. Tall — seven feet from soil to hat — Coyote’s children remain slim. They are never idle chatterers; their silences let other tell too much.

Doesn’t really match, does it?

Also, the Mistai are heavily implied to seduce and/or rape their way across the country to keep their numbers up. DRAKENGA-wait, wrong universe.

Last in the chapter, in the Other Breeds, are the Wapathemwa, the possum-folk. They’re essentially hillbilly Nosferatu without the sun allergy or the mandate to look like they fought with a grain thresher and lost. They keep large info networks between themselves and stick together (despite the book saying that very rarely happens), and prefer living in the mountains. They, yet again, have Nine Lives free, only in this case I buy it because of possums playing dead.

Next time: The Pack. I sure hope you like shitty knockoff werewolves and half-erased cocks-and-balls, because I sure don’t.