C:TL [is] about what happens when people who can’t grow up decide to treat you like a playtoy, and what happens after that. It’s about how you survive great trauma, or even dramatic change. It’s about how you decide to define your life in relation to what your life has done to you. If you showed up on Changeling: The Lost's door with a big chunk of concrete, you might wind up eating it. The basic premise of the game has you as a normal human being who was kidnapped by the True Fae – the classical True Fae, the ones that Steve Darlington described as being much like Nyarlathothep. You spend time in Arcadia as a slave to your Fae masters, getting warped by the ambient magic into something that’ll suit your role better. You won’t be missed, though, because there’s an exact duplicate of you that took over your life in your absence. Meanwhile, you’re memorizing huge passages of text for no good reason, or acting as a hunting hound, or maybe you’re helplessly in love with somebody who isn’t physically capable of loving you back.
That would be a game in line with My Life with Master, but C:TL starts you a step further down the road. You’ve managed to escape your captivity, and now you’re in the real world. Your body’s still been warped by your captivity, but you’ve got an illusionary mask that makes you look human when you’re in public. You can get your old life back, as long as you can figure out how to kill and replace a creature who’s been living your life for the last twenty years. At the same time, you’re not helpless. You escaped from your captivity, so you start the game with a major victory underneath your belt. You can find your own place within Changeling society if you want to – in fact, one of the major ways to manipulate supernatural powers is to make symbiotic pledges. (Or one-sided pledges.) You can even gain vengeance on your captors, ensuring that the last delicacy that the cruel Lord of the Feast tastes is the curb in the alley behind the 7-11.
