Changeling the Podcast

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: "Sensible advice" (from Episode 19, The Shado...

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...

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 per...

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 s...

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...

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...

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...

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 ev...

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...

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 w...

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 th...

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 succes...

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 com...

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 in...

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 so...

It's been a while since we've done a dive into media, so—here goes! Friend of the show Charles Siegel joins for Pooka for a discussion of how video games and tabletop games inform and resemble each other. We go through a shortlist of ten titles for inspiration to round out this series of episodes (for now) (the other big one is music, and no way are we getting the rights to do that one). In our op...

For many years, the Changeling community has longed for a better take on the hsien of East Asia. In our previous episode on their introductory 2e supplement, Land of Eight Million Dreams , we discussed at length how these fae were portrayed in... not the greatest fashion, and it's a characterization that the 20th Anniversary didn't really fix. But! The latest release from Hsienfan on the Storytell...

And so we return! We're coming back from hiatus a little bit later than anticipated, both because it was a busy summer, and because we realized there aren't really that many episodes to get through before the end of the year. So, now that it feels more like autumn in this bit of the world, it's time to get through the rest of C20 and ancillary things on our list. One of the latter is Graceful Wick...

One more minisode for the summer! We'll be back to our usual schedule of full episodes in September, but we thought we'd share a cross-production that we participated in a couple weeks ago. Barney Smith from Storycomic reached out to do an interview with us about Changeling: the Dreaming, our podcast, and associated thoughts. So we have shamelessly appropriated the audio from that interview and ar...

A surprise minisode, just in time for Highsummer week! We've talked about the Immortal Eyes novels, we've talked about the Anthology of Dreams, and we've even mentioned Pomegranates Full & Fine ... but what about the rest of the Changeling fiction from the 90s? This includes The Splendour Falls , a short story collection released in tandem with 1st edition; "Playing with Fire", part of the Ess...

And so we come once again to a bit of downtime, as we wind up the first half of Season 3 . It's just another minisode on the eve of the solstice, to let you know where things stand and what we've been up to, plus some of our plans when we return in six weeks, give or take. We're getting our schedule of recordings together and making plans for getting through some books we want to read, and thinkin...

We were going to just release this bit of content as Patreon content because it's our shortest yet, but by popular demand, here it is as a minisode...! For all of you Storytellers who feel the need to hide yourselves away from your players, or maybe just shield your dice from revealing too much, the Storyteller's screen is a time-honored tool of the trade. Changeling has had three over the years,...

Yes, we already did an episode on those long-suffering boggans, but don't you think they deserve another? Having dealt with the fanmade "old" Kithbook: Boggans previously (check out https://changelingthepodcast.com/podcast/episode-77-old-kithbook-boggans/ ), we are now moving on to the new Kithbook: Boggans , released as a Kickstarter goal for C20. In the spirit of the older editions' kithbooks, t...

The freehold is the center of changeling life, providing safety, community, and a connection to the Dreaming for wayward Kithain. But what makes each of them unique? We get some extensive systems and suggestions to answer this question in Book of Freeholds , a C20 supplement that greatly expands previous editions' take on building them. It's a short but dense book, and in this episode, we scour it...

Alternate and/or historical settings for Changeling is always something that piques our interest. So we were keen to read the Gimme Shelter Player's Guide supplement (released April 2) that presents the fae of Swinging Sixties London. We're joined this week by the book's author, Bram Clark, who talks with us about his take on this slice of pre-Resurgence life. Clocking in at over 300 pages, the Gu...