Changeling

Types of Freeholds
  • Glade
    Glades are sylvan glens, typically located deep in a forest. Changelings favor glades as sites for their festivals. Unlike most freeholds, glades are naturally occurring wellsprings of Glamour. Glades have a sacred stone instead of a balefire as their heart.
  • Hearth
    A faerie tavern, bar or coffeehouse, usually with a back-alley entrance. Many speakeasies from the 1920s are now hearths. All changelings are welcome, as long as they have something to trade.
  • Lodge
    Cottages, houses and mansions, collectively considered lodges, can be freeholds. Lodges are typically the strongholds of nobles, who spend much of their time in residence.
  • Manor
    A manor is a small glen surrounding a cabin or other building, and is usually located in the wilderness.
  • Eyrie
    Eyries are high mountain freeholds, and are typically the refuges of outcasts.
  • Grotto
    Grottos are often overgrown sylvan glades or abandoned mines. Sluagh and nockers often gather in such out of the way freeholds, though others use them as well.
  • Faerie Ring
    A very small glen found deep in the forest. These naturally occurring freeholds grow increasingly rare as the wild places of the world dwindle.
  • Isle
    These enchanted islands are rarely on maps or sullied by mortal feet. Isles are private refuges, and are among the most prized freeholds.
  • Thorpe
    Thorpes are the faerie towns. They are rare these days. One of the most famous is a mining ghost town known as Mother Lode, located somewhere in Nevada, while Ireland boasts the village of Glenlea.
  • Urban
    Only the hardiest Kithain dare to live in the World of Darkness' choking urban sprawls. Banality is at its highest here, and untainted Glamour is scarce. These freeholds are on the edge of the coming Winter.
  • Market
    Faerie markets are places, often freeholds, where changelings come to buy, sell and trade strange treasures from a thousand realms. These places often share space with human markets covertly, though some may exist wholly in the Dreaming. A human may purchase a piece of faerie craft "accidentally" on occasion. Such transactions may be lucky or disastrous for the unwary human.
  • Lost One Freehold
    Most sidhe left Earth for Arcadia during the Shattering and stayed away for over 600 years. Some few stayed behind, however, immersing themselves in the raw magic of their freeholds. These are rich in Glamour, but dangerous because of their Bedlam-inspiring qualities.
  • Homestead
    Homesteads are freeholds that are wholly in the Dreaming, yet without access to a rath or Trod. They do not have the dual nature of most freeholds; their prime virtue is stability. The Kithain build homesteads to withstand the rigors of the Dreaming. Homesteaders are few, but fiercely independent. Some changelings from every kith set up homesteads (even small villages) in the Near Dreaming. There is currently some tension between long term homesteaders and changelings who entered the Dreaming after the Resurgence.
  • Nunnehi Freehold
    Nunnehi freeholds are inherently different from any other kind, and are misunderstood by European fae. Severed from the Higher Hunting Grounds (their aspect of the Dreaming), Nunnehi freeholds may nevertheless have access to the "Upper" and "Lower" Worlds. They share many characteristics of werewolf caerns; some Nunnehi find themselves in conflict with Garou or human sorcerers who covet their freeholds for their spiritual energies. Nunnehi freeholds vary widely in appearance, and conform to the cultural conventions of the local tribe.
  • Raths

    Although not every Freehold can boast a Trod, a faerie road which leads from the Freehold in the Autumn World through the Near Dreaming and off to somewhere else, every Freehold has a Rath. A Rath is a magical gateway or doorway which leads directly into the Near Dreaming. Freeholds exist where the Dreaming and the Autumn World touch - occasionally a natural touch, as found in rare Glades, but most often a constructed "bridge," the Balefire. Where the Dreaming and the Autumn World are brought together, one can, in theory, step across. So it is in Freeholds, where the Rath can allow one to step from one world into the other. Raths come in thousands of forms; whether a standing stone at the head of a circle deep in a forest glade, or a wardrobe forgotten in a huge mansion where a forest of furs leads you into a forest of firs [remember Narnia?], or a white wooden fence in a stone wall. Walking from one side to the other leads you to the Freehold or to the Near Dreaming, respectively.

Caer August
Type: Grotto/Isle
Caer August, formerly named Caer Rosewood, is a three-Trait Freehold, in the possession of the Baroness Angharad ap Liam, Reeve of the Free Commots of Shining Waters. Caer August is fallen in the attacks which swept across the Kingdom of Northern Ice in the mid-summer of 2004.

Darklingvale
Type: Urban
Darklingvale is a one-Trait Freehold, in the possession of the missing James Nelson, Squire to Sir Gustav the Black of House Gwydion, and cared for by a band of unseelie sluagh. The Rath of this Hold leads out from beneath the South Bridge in the Dreaming Barony. Darklingvale fell in the cataclysmic destruction of much of the Northern Autumn City, on the sixth of December 2004.

Dun Liath
Type: Grotto
Dun Liath is an abandoned Freehold, currently in no kithain's proper posession, although claimed by the eshu knight Aeron Trueblade and formerly under his protection. The fire there is cold and vanished, forgotten by the Adjudicants at Tara Nar. Dun Liath collapsed in the cataclysm of the sixth of December, 2004.

Bosky Tarn
Type: Isle
Bosky Tarn is a one-Trait Freehold, in possession of none, but under transient care of the landless Knight Errant Sir Halfdan ap Kinrowan ap Dougal and his Squire Lilliana. Bosky Tarn fell many months past, by the secretive deeds of the Winter Kithain of the Free Commots. It was never recovered.

Nowhere Blind
Type: Grotto
Nowhere Blind is a secret and hidden three-Trait "motley" holding, in the care of several of the Unseelie of the Barony, notably Doktor Fyne and Kieran O'Reilley. Nowhere Blind also fell with the destruction in the Autumn World in December, 2004.

Goblin Market
Type: Market
The Goblin Market is a rambling hold hidden in various "secret" rooms amongst the Keith's Brewery Market buildings. Here a number of Trods and Raths open into the heart of the Dreaming. Goblin Market, a rambling area of the Near Dream, survives still, a refuge for the Kithain of the Free Commots.
Location: The Halifax Farmers Market chases through a sprawling complex of old stone buildings which played home to Alexander Keith's Brewery since 1820. The public market is open every Saturday morning, when the citizens of the Autumn City gather to barter, to sell and to buy; foodstuffs and crafts, art and artifice, story and song. In the hidden shadows of the Market, Fae and Kinain gather as well. Behind one hidden doorway, a hearthfire burns brightly, where polished wooden counter and old oak tables greet the visitor with cheer and warm light. Behind another, the Rath opens up into the Market Square of the Near Dream, where chimerical artisans of all sorts can be heard crying their wares. Behind another, one of the Silver Roads leads off beneath the Sea to the County Seat. Yet more doors lead to other secret roads.
Household: This Freehold does not have a Household as such. Kinain are the principals of those who keep the Market in these days. The Kithain of the Free Commots have but of late begun to return here, and perhaps the Market shall thrive again.

Raths

Trods

Trods are one of two means to enter the Near Dreaming. Where every Freehold has a Rath (a magical doorway into the Near Dreaming), not every freehold has a Trod, and not every Trod is at a freehold, although the vast majority are. The difference between a Rath and a Trod is essentially Safety.
Where a Rath is merely a doorway, a gateway, a Trod is a path or road. Trods connect two places and bind them each to the other, giving a route between the two. Trods wind their way through the Dreaming, giving travellers in that uncertain Realm a swift and sure passage to their destination. This is because of the Silver Road.
Trods through the Dreaming vary as vastly as the Dreaming itself does. Most in the Near Dreaming are recognizable as paths of some sort, but are more esoteric in the farther Dreamrealms.
The one thing each Trod holds in common is the Silver Road. The Silver points the way to wherever the Trod leads. When you see it woven into the Trod you're travelling, that means you're on the right track. The presence of the Silver -- whether in the form of an actual silver-brick road, or of silver ribbons woven into the roadside trees, or the silver of moonlight across the water -- indicates that your journey will follow all the rules of Fate and the Story. It will be Glamourously fulfilling, magically right. The Silver indicates that the pointless, the boring, and the gratuitously hurtful will be kept outside the shape of your journey. Perhaps it actively keeps them away, perhaps it only serves as a token or a sign. We've lost so much of the old Trod Lore to the Mists.
The Silver Path protects most Trods known to Changelings, and hostile chimera, Dark-Kin, and others are kept from it by the Ban of Silver. Those Trods that do not have the Silver Path are called Twilight Roads. Like the Paths of Balor, many of the Twilight Roads are one-way. The Paths of Balor predate the Silver Path, and like the Twilight Roads do not have the protection of the Silver Path. The most common are the Green Paths of Balor, though travelers have also reported Gold and Black Paths of Balor. The one-way Green and Black Paths of Balor wind through the Near Dreaming, and elsewhere, and are even rumored to go to the spirit-worlds of the Prodigals and Restless Dead.

Types of Trods

Market Road
From hidden doors scattered throughout the Brewery Market, the Silver Road leads the traveller through the Near Dream to many a lost and lonely lane.
Rating: [xx]
Availability: The trods and raths of the Goblin Market are erratic, seeming to keep to some arcane calendar of unknowable complexity. Almost always, some of the doors and paths lead on, but whence is more than most can know...
Description: The unknowing can easily overlook any number of secret doors and alcoves hidden amongst the bright and shining of the Farmers Market every Saturday Morning. For those who know how to look, however, some of those Doors lead to places far distant and lost in Dream. Long abandoned since the great Black Ships of 1917, many of these paths have fallen into disrepair, however the ban of the Tuatha still guards those who walk the Silver Road.
Connecting Paths:
-- the Near Dream of Oak Island (Local)
.. near to the Island Mystery of the County, this Trod reaches a sylvan and forgotten glade, perhaps once sacred to the nunnehi. Now humans have built their Banality-laden cottages surrounding this peaceful place. These habitations have been used on occasion as meeting-places for the Duchy's nobles since the Resurgence, secret reunes and assignations whispered amongst the trees.
--

[heraldry for trod site][Trod Name and location]
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Connecting Paths:
- - [connected site]
- - [connected site]
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[site number one] [(Regional)?]
[description]
[site number two] [(Local)?]
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[site number three][et cetera]
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