Origins and Epiphanies

Origins and Epiphanies: House Rules for C20 

Here are Simon's house rules surrounding changelings' feeding habits.

The goal of these rules is to make the Epiphany system less restrictive, allowing players the freedom to make European changelings who engage with animism and First People changelings who feed from inspiration. Included is a brief discussion about renaming certain elements of the game to make the system itself more inclusive of world views that might be held by the Gallain, as well laying the framework to begin bringing the Hsien into the Dreaming. Also introduced in this set of house rules are Epiphanies for feeding from worship and Epiphanies that allow changelings to feed from the dead. I hope that these new Epiphany styles add character creation opportunities and narrative diversity for pure Changeling: the Dreaming games, and create space for interesting competition interaction with certain Prodigal groups in cross-over games.

The rules as written reflect the way we've been playing at our table for our Interregnum game, and may require some tweaking to make appropriate for other time periods and play-styles. A later iteration of these ideas may include allowing player-characters to have multiple Origins (and therefore multiple Epiphany styles), as well as clarification for what happens when changelings with different Origins target the same (or very similar) victims for their Epiphanies, and some specific use cases for Thallain, Dauntain, and Dark Kin. All of these are cases I anticipate coming up, but we haven't played with them at all at our table yet. In the case of the NPC groups I'm a lot more concerned about the squish feeling right than with there being a solid system behind it.

"But what happened to Rhapsody and Rapture?" I hear someone somewhere saying. I'm super uncomfortable with Rhapsody as a player ability, so I left it off. Assume Rhapsody works as written in whichever version of Changeling you're using. Rapture, on the other hand, is going to be the center of a later post about changelings doing spiritual quests as part of character improvement.

Finally, think there should be more Epiphanies and Origins? Think I wrote something badly? You're probably right! While the Folk Hero and Animist Epiphanies are mostly a refinement of the extant systems from the game (the Kithain Epiphanies and the Nunnehi/Menehune Epiphanies respectively), the Mystic and Psychopomp Epiphanies are original work trying to fill in holes in the game. First attempts are never perfect (and sometimes quite bad). Feel free to take this as a starting point to make something even better for your own game (and then tell me how it turned out).

Thanks to Victor for providing a sounding board and significant information about Wraith: the Oblivion. Thanks to my players for reading earlier versions of this and dealing with me being confused about which version we were playing.