To those of you who play back stabbing vampire, or tank werewolf characters in the rest in the World of Darkness, quit yer bitching. Changelings, contrary to popular belief, have a place in the World of Darkness, read your true Grim fairy tales. Changelings are dreams and many of those dreams are nightmares, some of them are wet, some of them are bloody.
What is a Changeling? A Changeling, or Fae, is a faerie spirit. (do you believe in faeries? Clap your hands!! Good now leave the lights on cause they are gona git you if you don’t!) A Changeling is created when the fairy spirit is combined with a human one, born into a mortal body to take shelter from the ravages of the mundane world.. They were once immortal but may die from damage from chimerical weapons or the force of banality. If their mortal shell dies they are simply reborn into another mortal, that is unless they are the Sidhe. (More on the Sidhe later.)
What do changelings do in the World of Darkness? They strive to create art, inspire art, or simply tear the power of creativity (known to changelings as glamour) from humans. They fight banality, that is, the force of mortal disbelief that hurts and destroys changelings and brings closer the Long Winter (a.k.a. the end of the world in Changeling parlance). In other words, they try to survive. In many ways their story is the saddest of the denizens of the World of Darkness, in that they have the most to lose - their very souls.
Changelings do not view the world as normal people do. The Fae see the world as it is with glamour in it. All the "imaginary" things they see which make the world brighter and more interesting are called chimerical, and all the "imaginary" things or beings they see are called chimera. However, changelings live in mortal bodies, so they perceive the mortal world as underlying the enchanted world; their spirits, in essence, perceive chimera.
What are chimera and chimerical things? Anything made of fairy magic, that one cannot see through unenchanted eyes, is chimera. Chimera can range from a tiny bouncing ball of light to a blazing bonfire; a church mouse to a dragon; a fruit knife to a mystical sword; a cottage to a castle. Most changelings can create minor chimera, such as clothes, but only special changelings can create great chimera, such as artifacts and creatures.
They do not realize their fae nature until their Chrysalis - when their fae spirit realizes itself. The chrysalis is accompanied by bursts of fae magic that attract other fae and allow them to introduce the fae to his/her true nature, and to the local court. If the fae has a spirit that was previously in the court, he/she will take his/her place at that time.
Court, you ask? Ah, yes. Changeling society closely follows feudal structure. There are kingdoms, duchies, courts, houses, kings and queens, nobles and commoners, quests and oaths.
Good fae, bad fae, they're all there. The "good" fae, called "Seelie," tend to love tradition, and prize true love and honoring one's oaths. The "bad" fae, or "Unseelie," embrace change, spend glamour freely, hold the rights to speak and travel freely as most important, and resent other fae trying to restrict them. The two sides are not, as commonly thought, good vs. evil. All fae have traits of both aspects in their spirits; some fae favor their Seelie side, others, their Unseelie. Rumors about of a "Shadow Court," the most common being that the fae of the Shadow Court have no Seelie traits at all. |
