The Extra Changeling Books

The line for Changeling: The Lost was supposed to be completed with Equinox Road, and it really already had enough to be amazingly complete at that point. Apparently sales were phenomenal, so White Wolf went back and added two books to the line: Dancers in the Dusk, and Swords at Dawn.

My initial reaction was irritation that they had added books. I had bought the game and supplements for Changeling on the basis that I would only have to buy a finite number, so it wouldn't become yet another game for which I buy another book every couple months forever. When I heard that they had gone back on their word and were adding new books, I was actually pretty annoyed; granted it's just good business on their part, but they told us, their customers, that they weren't doing any more Changeling books, and then they did!

After waiting quite a while, though, there's no evidence that they're adding any more. Since it looks like the line is honestly complete, I went to the local gaming store and picked up copies of the two books. Turns out they're actually pretty good!

I'm not sure I would recommend one over the other. As their names sort of suggest, they seem designed to fit together in some ways -- for instance, discussion of Fate is in one book, but Talecrafting (Changeling manipulation of Fate) is mechanically defined in the other, so to get a good overview of Fate in general and how it influences the Lost, you really would want both books.

I'm happy with both books so far. The fluff is good, but that's White Wolf for you. That's really what they're good at.

As far as mechanics...

...if you have a player interested in talecrafting it might be a good idea to lighten or even remove the 'addiction/madness' effect of using it, or at least make it so that if the character doesn't use it for a while his accumulated susceptibility to the addiction cools down. The suggestions in the back part of the Dusk book about how to tweak the game all seem to be mechanically terrible and poorly thought-out, so you'll probably want to just ignore those. Other than those two minor issues, which amount to only a few paragraphs that need to be tweaked or ignored, the books seem pretty solid.