# Race: Changeling > [!info] Quick Facts > | | | > |---|---| > | **Rarity** | Very rare | > | **Perception in Gryth** | Negative. Anyone could be one, and everybody knows it. | > | **Guide Section** | Very Rare Races | ## Overview Changelings are fey, born in the Feywild and carrying its nature with them wherever they go. They shift face and form at will, and they are among the rarest peoples anyone in Gryth is likely to encounter, partly because there are very few of them and mostly because an encounter does not always announce itself. Where they are met at all it tends to be in the rocky deserts and lush jungles of [[Continent - Iros|Iros]], which suits them: open country, few neighbours, and nobody keeping a count. ## What the Feywild Is Like Every fey people carries something of their realm, and what the changelings carry is its instability. The Feywild does not hold still. Its courts turn, its seasons contradict each other, and a thing that was one way yesterday is quite reasonably another way today, and the changelings are that principle walking about in borrowed faces. They are not pretending to be other people so much as declining to settle on being any particular one. This makes them tricky, quiet, calculated and strange, in roughly that order. A changeling is rarely loud and almost never careless. They watch, they work out what a room needs, and they become near enough to it that nobody asks a second question. ## Nobody Knows How Many Most of Gryth would say changelings are a rumour, and the few places that know better would rather they were. The count is impossible: a people who can be anyone cannot be surveyed, and a changeling who has decided to live a quiet life as somebody’s neighbour for forty years will be buried under that name. What this does to their standing is predictable and unfair in roughly equal measure. A changeling who has done nothing is still a changeling, and the suspicion that attaches to the whole people is attached before anybody has established that there is a changeling present at all. Some respond by withdrawing entirely. Others conclude that a reputation they cannot escape is at least a reputation they can use. ## Unmasking the Thinker Changelings worship Quelaris, the Thinker, the manifestation of thought and freedom, and their devotion is unlike anybody else’s. The Thinker is capricious, fond of trickery and the subversion of expectation, and appears in a dozen forms without committing to one. Scholars venerate them, rogues pay them off, and mad monks in smoking temples make sacrifices to them. The changelings want to see their face. The belief is that Quelaris has a true form beneath the forms, and that a changeling who perceives it will come into an enlightenment that the rest of their people are still groping towards. So their worship is an investigation. Changeling rites are attempts at exposure: contradictions laid as traps, offerings designed to provoke a slip, long patient observances built to catch the god out. A changeling theologian is a person who has spent a lifetime trying to make their god flinch. Nothing about this is treated as blasphemy. The Thinker is a god of thought, freedom and the unmaking of expectation, and the changelings hold that being pursued is precisely the relationship such a god would want. Whether Quelaris agrees is a question nobody has been able to put. The tension sits under everything the changelings do, and they would not have it resolved on any terms but their own. ## Changeling Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Charisma score increases by 2, and your Dexterity score increases by 1. **Age.** Changelings mature slightly faster than humans and have comparable lifespans. **Creature Type.** You are a Fey. **Size.** You are Medium or Small. You choose the size when you select this race. **Speed.** Your walking speed is 30 feet. **Shapechanger.** As an action, you can change your appearance and your voice. You determine the specifics of the changes, including your colouration, hair length, and sex. You can also adjust your height and weight, but not so much that your size changes. You can make yourself appear as a member of another race, though none of your game statistics change. You cannot duplicate the appearance of a creature you have never seen, and you must adopt a form that has the same basic arrangement of limbs that you have. Your clothing and equipment are not changed by this trait. You stay in the new form until you use an action to revert to your true form, or until you die. **Changeling Instincts.** You gain proficiency with two of the following skills of your choice: Deception, Insight, Intimidation, or Persuasion. **Languages.** You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. ## Connections - [[Continent - Iros]] — Where changelings are most often met, in its rocky deserts and lush jungles --- ## Gallery ![[Race - Changeling.jpg]] --- *See also: [[Races]]*