Changeling the Podcast

The gravity of Changeling: the Lost's first edition corebook is slowly pulling us in... but before we get there, let's make a few stops along the way. Two whole months before the game was officially released at GenCon 2007, there were a number of introductory and ancillary materials that helped drive up interest. This includes the Demo rules summary and quickstart adventure, "Dwelling in Darkness", featured in previews on the White...

The other gamelines in the World of Darkness rarely engaged with Changeling very deeply, but now and then, a book would have a chunk of pages illuminating some new corner of the lore. We're looking to Vampire this week, and in particular the first Dark Ages corebook and the original Dark Ages Companion. This first edition of Dark Ages, using the second edition Vampire ruleset, was contemporaneous with early Changeling—and it shows....

It's the dawning of a new age here at Changeling: the Podcast, as we begin to eye that entity known as Changeling: the Lost... veteran Storyteller and noted gaming authority Fetch joins us as co-host for this run of episodes that will proceed through Season Four. We're beginning with a deep dive into the (new) World of Darkness 1st edition corebook, the central text for the games that succeeded the original run of World of Darkness...

And so it begins...! meaning Season 4, of course. We have a nice little backlog of recordings to edit, bowdlerize, and disseminate to the masses in the coming weeks and months. While we're done with the core line of Changeling: the Dreaming, there are a number of books we'd like to consider from the old World of Darkness. First up among these is World of Darkness: Tokyo, a Wraith book pretending to be an all-the-lines book (with a ...

One last minisode to tide you over through Winterregnum...! As you may or may not be aware, not all the audio we record makes it into the final episodes. It's been a while since an episode with some outtakes, so we've returned to the cutting room floor for random bits of conversation. Here's the list of disconnected items and the episodes they're from:

1. "Sensible advice" (from Episode 19, The Shadow Cou...

We're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last dregs of content from the vaults. On the LARP side of the equation, there are a few remnants from various Mind's Eye Theatre books that never made it into either The Shining Host or the Shining Host Player's Guide, which we have collected to discuss in today's minisode. These basically consist of live-action Dauntain, adapting the Time of Judgment stories, a piece of fict...

Welcome to 2025, changelings and changelants! We said that Winterregnum was going to be our hibernation season... but truth be told, there are too many things to do and not enough time to do them, so yes, we're going to continue to put some content out for the coming weeks. The Season proper will launch in February as usual. Whether the episode numbering will tick up to 101 in this intercalary period remains to be seen, but for thi...

Woo-hah! We got here at last. Yule is upon us and it's time for another State of the Podcast before we enter our Winterregnum period. As stated before, there will likely be a bit of content here and there through the coming weeks, but—with one or two possible exceptions—no full episodes until some point in February. And when we come rocketing back at that point, well, we have a thing or three in store for you. In this bit of bonus ...

Like any grumps, we often ruminate on the past and what it has (and hasn't) brought us. After the closing of the old White Wolf forums post-Time of Judgment, those in search of community found our way to various places on the internet, one of the most noteworthy of which for the two of us was Shadow'n'Essence, a message board forum with extensive space for each of the WoD lines (and more!) in the 2000s. You may have heard us wax po...

Once again, it happened...! Pooka is in attendance at PAX Unplugged this weekend, and spent Friday afternoon rushing around doing on-the-spot interviews with creators whose work is somewhat Changeling-aligned. Herein are five short interviews about games that touch on the fae, dreams, imagination, and more. The sound quality in this minisode is particularly awful, which is what happens when you're doing interviews in a giant hall f...

Maybe it's pretty obvious that we do a lot of gaming online nowadays, and that as hosts of a podcasts, we are thorough netizens who have thoughts and feelings about the interwebs. Nevertheless, online games have their own particular dynamics, opportunities, and cultures that we thought it might be good to explore, for people who are less or un-familiar with the experience. We're joined by veteran Storyteller of online gaming, Fetch...

In the annals of Changeling history, there are many books that have been promised without coming to fruition. The Changeling atlas, Kingdom books beyond Willows, Book of Glamour... the litany goes on. Things are less clear for C20, but one title with a particular twisty path was By Night Studios' Mind's Eye Theatre: Changeling, which was almost official before it was de-officialized, and then eventually released on the Storytellers...

And so here we are. It's time to open up the last few chapters of the Changeling 20th Anniversary Player's Guide, thereby ending our readthroughs of the game's canon. Feels weird, to be honest. When we started the show, it felt like we'd be going through the library of official texts forever, and now that there are no more, there's a bittersweetness much like when the game was canceled (and then canceled again). We don't know wheth...

What do you get when you cross the infinity of the Dreaming's possibilities with eight billion humans? Questions about how many of them are changelings, that's what. This week, we're applying the art/science of demography to the fae, throwing numbers and proportions and calculations around like so much spaghetti, so that we can see what sticks. You may ask, why does this matter—but how many and what kinds of changeling are running ...

Changelings, lest we forget, are part human. Spending time in a meatsack isn't always Glamourous or exhilarating (though it can be both), but it's an inherent part of their experience that can be interesting both in and of itself, and as a contrast to the escapist fantasies that the Dreaming is built on. Yet players and Storytellers often gloss over those aspects of the characters that populate their games. So! We're here this week...

It's that time again! This second installment of our trilogy of episodes on the Changeling 20th Anniversary Player's Guide continues as we flip through Chapter Three. What's that, you say? An entire installment on a single chapter of a single book? Well, yes, because this "World of Dreams" section takes up a third of a dense text and covers a lot of ground, visiting four continents in swift succession. We're taking an honest look a...

What is love? (Baby, don't hurt me!) In the context of tabletop RPGs, sex and relationships and all the matter around them can be tricky business to navigate for players and Storytellers alike. In the context of romance and Changeling, there are all sorts of specific considerations to think about. What are the norms of chivalrous courtship in this or that noble's jurisdiction? How do cantrips complicate physical pleasure and emotio...

Changeling: the Dreaming's tagline is as a "game of modern fantasy", and it deals with folklore, epics, and magic... so when you talk to most people about it, they rarely bring up science fiction as a genre that the game ties into. We beg to differ. Dreams of technology, visions of futures utopian and dystopian alike, the consequences of humankind's hubris, and alien anxiety all fit very neatly into the setting. We're taking the op...

It begins...! We couldn't bring ourselves to go through Changeling 20th Anniversary Edition Player's Guide (quite a mouthful, but we have to distinguish it from the original) in one go, both because it's an incredibly dense text and because it's the Last Book. So, we're splitting it up into a trilogy of episodes. This first one covers Chapters 1 and 2, with an overarching theme of "politics and society among the Kithain." One of ou...