Changeling The Dreaming



         


Changeling: The Dreaming was part of White Wolf Game Studio's original "World of Darkness" role playing game line. Player characters are changelings, fae souls reborn into human bodies, a practice begun by the fae to protect themselves as magic vanished from the world. The game explores the balance between imagination and practicality, and the struggle of art and beauty against the dark, banal "gothic-punk" World of Darkness. Changeling draws primarily from Irish mythology, particularly stories of the sidhe and Tuatha de Danaan, but also uses mythology and folklore from various other cultures including Native American nations, Greece, India and the Middle East.

While Changeling developed (and maintains) quite a devoted following, its themes and subject were often perceived as too complex or too childish, and White Wolf discontinued the game more than a year before the end of the World of Darkness line. Dark Ages: Fae is a new World of Darkness - Dark Ages game with strong links to Changeling. There is no indication yet that a game about the fae will be part of the new World of Darkness. Justin Achilli, a developer with White Wolf, reportedly submitted a request to write a new Changeling game for the World of Darkness 2.0 line; even if such a request were approved, the current backlog of work in updating other games means a new Changeling wouldn't emerge until 2006 at the very earliest.

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Overview

The fae are creatures of imagination, drawing magical power and their very existence from "glamour", the creative energy of humans. Glamour created and maintains a separate realm of imagination known as the Dreaming, from which the fae originally came to the mortal world. During the Renaissance and the subsequent rise of rational thought and science, glamour became less common in the real world, and the opposing force of banality could injure or kill the fae. In response, the fae nobility (the sidhe) withdrew to Arcadia, their home deep in the Dreaming, and the commoner fae developed "the Changeling way", and became changelings.

Traditionally, a changeling is a fairy child substituted for a human baby, but Changeling: The Dreaming uses a very different interpretation. In the game, a changeling is a fae soul born into a human body. Early in the human's life, usually before puberty, she undergoes the "Chrysalis", a magical awakening of the fae soul which previously lay dormant. Once through the Chrysalis, the Changeling exists simultaneously in both the real world and in the "chimerical" reality of the fae, where creative ideas and imagination have substance. (The metaphysical aspects of this are the complex concepts present in the game.) The human soul becomes joined with the fae soul.

As well as the usual roleplaying traits representing their skills and abilities, Changeling characters are further defined by their ties to the Dreaming. Each Changeling has Seelie and Unseelie aspects of their being, one of which dominates a given Changeling. The courts do not easily map onto human ideas of good and evil, but instead represent a host of philosophies - light and shadow, law and freedom, duty and passion. In days past rule would be divided between the courts, the Seelie court ruling in the Summer months from Beltaine to Samhain, and the Unseelie court in Winter from Samhain to Beltaine, but now an uneasy truce exists and each court rules its own regions. Each Changeling has two legacies, one for each court, which represent how the dual nature of her fae soul is expressed.

Each Changeling is also a member of a "kith". Somewhat like different species of fairy, a Changeling's kith indicates the kind of dreams which birthed her soul in the Dreaming. The kiths are based on fairy archetypes from various sources, and while the most common kiths are drawn largely from Irish mythology, many others also exist. The descriptions below touch on only a few of the types of stories or traditional fairies which correlate to each Kith.






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