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[EternalValkyrie]

This is the forum for serious role play. There are real life rules for this game and a character will be made. There is a gamemaster, me. Rolls will be required to do certain things. This forum will open soon. I have to post some of the rules first. Thank you  

[EternalValkyrie]

Changeling is a game about what happens when the fae of celtic myth steal you away into their immortal realm. The Others do come
and take people away, keeping them as slaves in a fairyland
that’s as much nightmare as dream. Using them as they seem fit, changing them by whim or fancy.
Keeping them in a realm beyond death where they face a torturous existance. Severed from the mortal world, these abducted humans gradually become more and more like their captors, losing themselves in their new lives.
Some completely forget there lives before they came heere, some where taken as infants and have nothing to remember. But some of these captives remember who they are, and try to escape back to the place they were born. Changed in form and feature, scarred by their durance, some of them even make it back. Back to the lives stolen by a fetch, or perhaps to find three hundred years have passed and everything they knew
is dead. They all live in fear of being recaptored by the fae hunts that pursue them.
Some become so accustomed to it there they live a little in both worlds,
Braving the dangers of the Hedge to get the things from the land of the fae.
Chancing capture or worse within to feel the magic or to find the goblin fruits.
Some go to the markets hidden there, where you barter in things unlike money. Perhaps a memory of you happyiest day as a child, maybe your first born child, maybe the beating heart of a robin. Many strange wares and even stranger things are in the markets.

 

[EternalValkyrie]

This Arcadia is indeed breathtaking, but its beauty also terrifies. It is a land of deathless joy in gnarled gardens, and of mountains built of half-gnawed bone. In Archadia, forests, dark and primeval, writhe alongside concrete jungles thick with artfully bent metal and delicate snowflakes of broken glass. Almost Victorian estates squat along shorelines that are crowded thick with the carcasses of a thousand sailing ships, all of this bordered thickly by the Hedge’s labyrinthine mazes.
Because of the nature of Faerie, even firsthand accounts of the land are inherently skewed. Those who have journeyed there, and escaped to tell the tale, find themselves deeply changed by their experiences. Many seem no longer certain of the reality of the world around them, let alone of the alien one they just left. Some, perhaps the fortunate ones, remember little to nothing of the time spent in Archadia.
Faerie is a land of mutable reality. Science and logic hold no power there, unless this is the particular interest of the Fae who rules the area in question. Natural laws may or may not apply as they do in the mortal world, depending on whether or not the land is bound by Fae Contracts that simply replicate the effects of these laws. Time is no exception to this phenomenon. A changeling may find return from what seemed to be a week of time in Faerie, only to find seven years have passed in the mortal world in his absence. Conversely, a changeling may serve for decades and return to find that mere moments have passed while he was gone. This may make reclaiming one’s former life impossible. Imagine trying to explain to your parents that, although their son only disappeared a few days ago, the person before them who claims to be their child is actually in his 50s, having experienced decades of slavery at the hands of his inhuman captors. Just as difficult is the fate of the woman who returns to find her children grown and married with children of their own, when it seems to her that only a week has passed in Faerie.

 

[EternalValkyrie]

The thorny maze that surrounds Faerie holds many mysteries to the Lost. Certain aspects of the Hedge are wellknown, but much like modern technology, even those who use them regularly do not necessarily understand the “how” of them, and almost no one is certain exactly of the “why.” Those who remember being abducted by the Fae almost always have memories of being dragged painfully through the Hedge’s Thorns on their way back to their would-be Keeper’s demesne. No matter how clear the path seems to be, none but the True Fae pass uninjured into Faerie. And those who remember their return recall an equally painful departure, as if the Thorns were unwilling to free them before exacting a suitable toll. Because of this, if nothing else is known for certain about the Hedge, it is generally held to act as a boundary between the mortal world and that of the Fae. This is, however, one of the only (mostly) certain facts about it. Most other aspects are mutable, as well suits a place whose entire reason for being seems to be to obstruct and confuse.
The Hedge can as easily manifest as immaculately landscaped Victorian hedgerows as it can ghastly stinking bogs where passage is marked (or hidden) by treacherous stretches of murky water. Thick primeval forests where undergrowth snatches at the clothing and flesh of those who would pass through is as much a part of the Hedge as impassable jungle tangles rife with venomous-looking sucker-vines and carnivorous vegetation. Perhaps more confusing than the many possibilities of flora and fauna within the Thorns, however, is the Hedge’s mutable nature. There seems to be a psychoactive element to the Hedge, an effect that is heightened by those with powerful fae magic. Around those with a high Wyrd, the Hedge conforms intrinsically to their nature, manifesting cold winds and ice around winter-aspected changelings, or deeper shadows around those who prefer to remain in the dark. It is as if the fae borderlands inherently sense the strength of the changelings who travel there, and echo back elements of the strongest fae spirits in a physical form.
Certain aspects remain true, despite the mutability of the landscape, however. Paths and roads traverse the Hedge, some leading solely to other entry and exit points to the mortal world and some most often the clearest stretching deeper into the fae landscape. While human instinct often dictates that the broad road is the safe one, in Faerie such idioms are rarely true. Those roads that are the clearest are often those that are maintained by the magic and will of the True Fae. Such roads may provide swift passage, but the destinations are often ones from which no human returns.
Traveling through the thorny Hedge that surrounds Arcadia tears away at both the body and the sanity of any but the native inhabitants, who are themselves rumored to be nothing more than manifestations of the land itself — immune to, or perhaps merely symptoms of, its reality-shredding power.
An account of Arcadia are the following: Faerie is the nightmare from which there is no waking. Reality, at least as humanity knows it, does not exist there. Faerie’s “natural” laws are not those of science, of spirit or even of magic as mortals can comprehend it, but a complexly woven tapestry of agreements and loopholes with no rhyme or reason. The inhabitants there are bound, and bind themselves, in constantly shifting strata of power and manipulation that not only determines social structure and hierarchy within the sentient population but shifts the very nature of truth as well.
Faerie is filled with supernatural denizens who each possess almost unrestricted power within its own demesne. Certainly their abilities are far beyond those witnessed in the mortal realm, leaving no wonder why they were thought to be gods or the most powerful of spirits by humanity’s earliest civilizations. These creatures’ ability to enforce their own will on the world around them is manifested in the form of oathsworn Contracts — some ancient, some newly uttered — with which they can change the very nature of reality, binding time and fate to their whim.
Within the Hedge-hemmed borders lies the potential for both utopian wonder and brimstone torment. The human mind, however, seems incapable of comprehending the vast paradoxical nature of the place, just as the human mind is unable to truly understand the wholly alien nature of those who make their home there. When humans enter the Hedge, the Thorns do more than tear at their flesh the Thorns rip away at their souls as well. While some lucky individuals may quickly return to the relative safety of the human world and escape relatively unscathed, those who venture deeper, further and longer into the Hedge find that the separation from the human world affects them in strange ways. Their senses may begin to play tricks on them. Not only sight and sound, but their sense of what is right and wrong as well can become
skewed, and they may find themselves reacting to situations or contemplating actions that they would have considered loathsome before entering the Hedge. This undoing is disconcerting, to say the least, for those who notice it. Far too often, however, those who are thrust into the madlands do not have sufficient touchstones with reality to realize that they themselves are changing, or the tools to deal with the damage should they recognize it. Still, assuming that they are able to escape back to the human world within a reasonable period, most will find themselves able to heal the damage to their spirit. Some, however, travel too long or too far in the Hedge and become lost to the human world altogether. Rumors exist of the fate that may befall humans when bereft of their souls: they become monsters that haunt the Thorns, seeking to steal from others that which they no longer possess themselves. Far more likely, however, is the chance that those who travel deep enough into the Hedge to lose their souls entirely are, as they near Faerie proper, found by the True Fae and “enlisted” in one fashion or another into their service.

 

[EternalValkyrie]

For centuries the Fae have preyed upon humanity. Every year thousands of individuals go missing without explanation. For some, mundane explanations exist. Runaways return, murder victims are discovered, fugitives are apprehended. For others, the explanations are much less clear.
In some cases, the lost people are never found again, and no clue ever leads to their whereabouts. No bodies are discovered, and they never again raise so much as a blip on the radar of human society. Investigations lead to dead ends, leaving their families and friends befuddled as to their fate. It is as if they had completely disappeared from the Earth, leaving no trace behind. And many who vanish are never missed at all, not until it’s far too late. In other cases, the disappearance is not permanent. The missing individuals may not remember anything about the time they were gone, even if they were missing for years. Other times, they may claim to remember, but their tales are befuddled, at best. Many cannot remember how they came to return. Perhaps they earned their freedom, or escaped through stealth or guile. Some even claim to have slain their captors, although often the least lucid are the ones who make these claims. In both permanent disappearances and those in which the victims eventually return, the simplest explanations are again the correct ones. Their stories, if they live to tell them, are rooted in truth, no matter how fantastic they may seem. However, not all who are stolen by the Fae vanish. The majority of changelings are never missed at all, their lives replaced by an impostor created by their captors. They fight their way back only to discover that they were never missed, and that they have no lives to return to. Unable to live as they once did, the Lost must find a new road to walk.
Many of the classic human legends speak of children
stolen from their beds, or even their cradles, by their Fae abductors.
Many Fae do prefer to kidnap their new “wards” at a very early age, and the abductions of babies certainly form a large part of those abductions that were historically identified as the work of the Gentry. After all, snatching a sleeping child from a cradle is far easier than abducting a strapping youth who is more capable of self-defense. Also, should the abduction of a youngster be thwarted by circumstance, a child’s babblings are far more likely to be ignored or downplayed than those of an adult. As well, although time in Faerie often lengthens a human’s lifespan considerably, compared to the True Fae, a human lifetimeis a very short period.
However, the majority of changelings encountered as adults weren’t taken as babies. While many humans are stolen from the cradle, their mortality rate is very high due to the fragile nature of human infants, the inherent dangers of Arcadia and the unreliable attention they are likely to receive in Faerie. In fact, no human taken to Faerie as a babe has returned to the mortal world on his own cognizance.
Their memories of the human world are simply not strong enough to afford them passage through the Hedge and back into the land of their birth. Those who do manage to escape their Keeper’s care and set out for a world they never really saw are doomed to wander endlessly through the Hedge, before either finding another Fae Keeper or possibly ending in a much more dire fate. However, in rare circumstances,
those stolen from their human kin at a very early age can be rescued by other changelings and brought back into the mortal world. These individuals may well develop severe emotional disorders at later ages, and may also be prone to wandering back into Faerie, intentionally or not.
Not all changelings are abducted by force. Some are seduced across the border between the mortal world. Sometimes amorphous globes of phosphorescent illumination may appear similar to the natural phenomenon of swamp gas, but it is no naturally occurring bioluminescence that craftily lures its followers into the depths of the Hedge. Playing upon a human’s sympathy, they may appear as a lost child or an injured animal, and lead the Good Samaritan who seeks to aid them into Faerie, proving that no good deed goes unpunished. Lust is also a powerful motivator, and many humans are literally seduced across the border and through the Hedge into Arcadia. Likewise, while romantic tales have been spun of the Fae falling in love with mortals and sweeping them off to serve as consorts, the realities of such tales are far from idyllic.
Some changelings, especially those who were seduced across the Hedge, may have been concubines to their Keepers, but the role was scarcely more romantic than that of an abducted sex slave to a mortal master. The Fae are fickle beings with no real ability to empathize with a lover’s wants or needs. They might have played at being attentive and “considerate” from time to time, but only for as long as it seemed fashionable or amusing.
Other changelings, especially those who were taken later in life, seem to have been chosen to continue their mortal roles for their new Fae patron. Child prodigies, cunning inventors and philosophers have been snatched to serve in the laboratories, naves and libraries of Faerie, while writers, poets, singers and musicians are abducted for their Keepers’ entertainment. Cooks and craftsmen, those with a knack for working with metal or plants or taming wild animals, and found themselves stolen away for their use.

 

[EternalValkyrie]

Returning to the mortal world is often at least as jarring for changelings as finding themselves in Faerie was. How difficult their transition back is depends on several factors, any one of which may be enough to drive a changeling mad with frustration, fear or confusion.
Perhaps the singular most difficult challenge to returning to the mortal world is the fact that they are no longer mortal themselves. He is no longer the same as his parents, his former friends, the people he grew up around. Even if they were to accept his return, he is walking between the world of the fae and the human world, and is no longer truly a part of either. In order to thrive as changelings, each individual must maintain somewhat of a balance between his human side and his fae self. To ignore his human side is devastating to a changeling’s Clarity. He begins to lose any sense of what is real and what is merely the discontented grumblings and terrified shrieks of his wounded soul. Delusions, hallucinations, depression, compulsions, phobias and psychosomatic ailments all wait down that road, greedily anticipating the arrival of a changeling who eschews the mortal world too greatly. Considering the dangers that await those who have immersed themselves solely in fae matters, the logical reaction would seem to be to err in the other direction. The other extreme, however, is, if anything, more dangerous. While low-Clarity changelings are in danger of losing their sanity, those who eschew the fae world entirely put themselves in danger of withdrawal-like symptoms as their fae-side slowly starves.
Those who try to return to their “normal” life, they are nothing when compared to those who return to find that, at least according to their friends and family, they have never left. The True Fae are masters of manipulation, and many replace the individual they’ve taken from the mortal world with a simulacrum. This mock-up, called a fetch, steps in where the changeling disappeared, continuing his life as if he had never gone. And, considering the travails that changelings undergo in Faerie, the chance is high that they, rather than the fetch, will be seen as the imposters should they return and attempt to confront their families with the simulacrum’s existence.
These fae creatures appear in all aspects to be the abducted changelings. Their faces, bodies and voices are allidentical to the people they are replacing, and through some fae spell, they seem to know as much about the changelings’ lives as the changelings themselves. For all that they appear human, however, they are not. When killed, a fetch degenerates back into the stuff it was made from: bits and pieces of bizarre junk, held together with a shard of the abductee’s own shadow. The reversion can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few minutes; a fetch’s corpse may last long enough to pass an autopsy and be interred, or be nothing more than bits of wood, string and bone bobbing in the water.
Destroying a fetch may be an important step toward a changeling reclaiming her former life. Science-fiction mirror world fantasies aside, however, the act of killing something that appears to be oneself is a task for which many changelings find they have no stomach. After years spent in Faerie, many changelings find themselves in a very conflicted state while looking at the creatures that look just like them, act just like them and have been living beside their friends and loving and supporting their families. Some changelings wonder if they are doing their loved ones a disservice by attempting to destroy the substitutes. Other changelings, especially those with low Clarity, may find themselves wondering if they are the originals at all, or simply poor deluded fae creations that have been cursed with others’ memories of earlier lives.
Changelings who have been replaced by fetches are faced with a particularly thorny challenge. Directly attempting to take one’s place back from the creature that has lived with one’s family for years is rarely successful. The fetch has, for all extents and purposes, been the family member while the changeling has not, and nothing short of killing the fetch and revealing it to be nothing but constructs of flotsam and shadow is likely to prove the changeling’s claims. Attempting to slaughter one member of the family in front of the rest, of course, is equally likely to end in disaster. Those who wish to attempt to replace their replacements must use subtlety both in dispatching them and in stepping into their place, a role that the fetch now knows far better than the original occupant. Even if the fetch has died during the changeling’s absence, the problems remain. It’s difficult to explain to your wife how you’ve returned to her when she attended your memorial service four years ago.
Some changelings find that reclaiming their former lives is simply impossible. Perhaps their families have gone on without them, or their time in Faerie has left them far too old or young to hope to recover their previous existence. Or perhaps other factors stop them from doing so; the True Fae are a cruel and manipulative race and more than one changeling has returned to the human world to find himself accused of vile crimes that were actually perpetrated by his Keeper during the changeling’s abduction. For these changelings, there is little choice save for creating new lives for themselves.
Some stay near their hometowns, riding the bittersweet line between monitoring their families’ well-being and not revealing their own true identities. Others are unable to bear the pain of such proximity to the familiar, or are in too great of danger by remaining near their former homes, and must set up new lives for themselves elsewhere. In both cases, established freeholds often provide support for displaced changelings who are attempting to craft new identities for themselves. Not only do many have resources for creating the paper trails required to be acknowledged by human society, but they also may act as a surrogate family, offering the changeling the acceptance and inclusion that he has been unable to reclaim on his own.
And, considering the travails that changelings undergo in Faerie, the chance is high that they, rather than the fetch, will be seen as the imposters should they return and attempt to confront their families with the simulacrum’s existence.
These fae creatures appear in all aspects to be the abducted changelings. Their faces, bodies and voices are allidentical to the people they are replacing, and through some fae spell, they seem to know as much about the changelings’ lives as the changelings themselves. For all that they appear human, however, they are not. When killed, a fetch degenerates back into the stuff it was made from: bits and pieces of bizarre junk, held together with a shard of the abductee’s own shadow. The reversion can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few minutes; a fetch’s corpse may last long enough to pass an autopsy and be interred, or be nothing more than bits of wood, string and bone bobbing in the water.
Destroying a fetch may be an important step toward a changeling reclaiming her former life. Science-fiction mirror world fantasies aside, however, the act of killing something that appears to be oneself is a task for which many changelings find they have no stomach. After years spent in Faerie, many changelings find themselves in a very conflicted state while looking at the creatures that look just like them, act just like them and have been living beside their friends and loving and supporting their families. Some changelings wonder if they are doing their loved ones a disservice by attempting to destroy the substitutes. Other changelings, especially those with low Clarity, may find themselves wondering if they are the originals at all, or simply poor deluded fae creations that have been cursed with others’ memories of earlier lives.