As we drift into midsummer night dreams, it remains only to give an accounting of the State of the Podcast before we take a semi-hiatus for the next several weeks. There are a couple episodes planned, but otherwise we'll see you on the airwaves again in mid-August or thereabouts. In the meantime, we've got some data about listenership in the last six months, an update on the Changeling 30th Anniversary Project, some discussion of upcoming episodes, and the nervosa in the room: the rumors around ...
Jun 23, 2025•22 min•Season 4Ep. 118
Summer is arriving with a vengeance in the northern part of the globe, so it's a bit odd to be going back a season... and yet, we regret it not, as we open up the pages of Rites of Spring . This supplement for Changeling: the Lost 1e is a compendium of magics and Glamour, folklore and rumor, all of it steeped in the eponymous Court's energy of desire. In a sense, that emotion underlies the principle of magic to begin with: the desire to reshape the world as one wishes. But fae being fae, such wo...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 50 min•Season 4Ep. 118
Cantrips and oaths and Unleashings (oh my!) are all perfectly respectable kinds of magic, but what others might the fae be heir to? We're tackling that question with another entry in the Changeling 30th Anniversary Project lineup, as the anniversary itself approaches... The book-in-progress of our discussion today is Book of Gremayre , a compendium of systems and setting options that build upon what's in the C20 system. Inspired by the never-finished Book of Glamour for 2nd Edition, we've let ou...
Jun 16, 2025•58 min•Season 4Ep. 117
The emotion espoused by the Winter Court of the Lost is sorrow , but it's hard to feel too down about the sheer volume of material provided in their nominally associated book, Winter Masques . (Maybe we can shed a tear for the wild inconsistency in font sizes between sections?) While Autumn Nightmares was more of a Storyteller-facing guide, this one introduces a wealth of options that players can take advantage of as well: new kiths, new Contracts, alternate Court systems, and so forth. There ar...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 59 min•Season 4Ep. 116
The nature of evil is a wiggly thing in all the World of Darkness games, but especially in Changeling. Who's to say whether a rabid beastie or a diabolical Eiluned is more dastardly than the other? Surely it's a matter of perspective. Still, among the various groups in the game, the Thallain and the Dauntain in particular are treated as Bad News, suitable as antagonists due to their extreme disalignment with the goals and values of Kithain and Gallain. Naturally, that hasn't stopped players from...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 4Ep. 115
So, we had thought, surely the supplements for Changeling: the Lost's first edition can't be as dense as the corebook. Surely there will be some let-up in the sheer volume of material crammed into the pages. And yet, here we are with the first book in the line, Autumn Nightmares , applying nostrums to our eyes and brains after the sea of tiny text and dizzying array of concepts and creatures contained therein. Have we regrets? Always, but not about this one. The book is focused on antagonists fo...
May 26, 2025•2 hr•Season 4Ep. 114
If you've been listening to our show for a while (or hanging out on our Discord!), chances are you've heard Josh mention Dr. Jenna Moran's game Nobilis . In some ways adjacent to the World of Darkness and Exalted, in some ways adjacent to its own distinctively hallucinogenic blossom-laden spatial warp of hyperconsciousness, it seemed like a good choice for our first discussion of games outside of our usual bailiwick. And indeed, there is lots of inspiring cross-pollination to explore! We're givi...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 4Ep. 113
At long last, with this third installment, we are at last finished our readthrough of the Changeling: the Lost 1st edition corebook . Here's hoping that when we get to 2nd edition, we can just breeze through and say "nyaaahhh, it's mostly the same but here are things that have changed." (Doubtful.) This week, we're talking about Entitlements, the sample freehold setting of Miami, our thoughts overall on the book, and listener questions that we've been saving til the end. But of course, this is o...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 34 min•Season 112Ep. 112
Another week, another as-rapid-as-we-dare readthrough of the Changeling: the Lost 1st edition corebook . This time, we're having a look at Chapters Three and Four. "But Pooka and Fetch," you might say, "this was supposed to be a two-part series, not a trilogy. How could you spend just under two hours talking about two measly chapters?" Well, when those two chapters clock in at ~120 pages with small text, little art, and extensive detail on both the intricate bespoke systems of the game and how t...
May 05, 2025•2 hr•Season 4Ep. 111
As the light half of the year breaks over the horizon, it's time at last for us to take the deepest of breaths and open the tome that is the Changeling: the Lost 1st edition corebook . The density of the text and the number of pages meant that this was always going to be a multi-part endeavor, but we did our best to keep the wild tangents we could have gone down to a minimum. In this installment, we're covering the introductory material and the first two chapters... which is a solid 170 pages of...
Apr 28, 2025•2 hr•Season 4Ep. 110
We're visiting other shelves on the bookcase again, this time to dig into World of Darkness: Hong Kong . As with the Tokyo citybook, this was a Year of the Lotus supplement that was ostensibly for all the oWoD gamelines, but in truth was more vampire-centric than anything. Still—the tilts at the other games are present, and to help us sort through the Prodigals, we were joined by Terry Robinson from Mage: the Podcast (recorded before his passing) and Josh Heath from Werewolf: the Podcast (with w...
Apr 21, 2025•1 hr 47 min•Season 4Ep. 109
It's rare that the fae and the dead have much to do with each other, which is surprising given that within the latter category, the wraiths called Sandmen are oneiromancers extraordinaire. Manipulating the dreams of mortals from beyond the grave, they should be one of the more likely sorts of Prodigal a changeling may encounter. They are suggested as antagonists (in the C20 corebook, if not elsewhere), but what do these dramatic ghosts get up to on their own time? We're opening up their splatboo...
Apr 14, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 4Ep. 108
When talking about these games that we love, sometimes we may give the impression that we know more about the history behind the scenes than we let on. It's when we have the opportunity to interview an actually knowledgeable person that the extent of how much we don't know becomes obvious. So it goes today, as we talk with Pete Woodworth about the creation and development of Changeling: the Lost back in its earliest days. As one of the stewards of Changeling: the Dreaming who helped carry over s...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 4Ep. 107
For a solid year now, we've been going on about the Changeling 30th Anniversary project, a celebration of three decades of this game we all know and love and dedicate too much headspace to, probably. We've also mentioned that one of the things we're trying to do for this Season is a series of books produced by the podcast for release on the Storytellers' Vault. Well—the day has finally come. This week, we're talking with guest Andrew Goodman in his capacity as co-author on the first two volumes,...
Mar 31, 2025•58 min•Season 4Ep. 106
Apologies for skipping an episode release last week—there's a point at which even a pooka must throw in the towel for a day or two to recover from the wheel of reading, preparing, recording, editing. Now that things are a bit settled, we're back on track as we delve into the Changeling-adjacent library again today to talk about Sorcerer[s] ! The hedge magicians of the World of Darkness haven't made many inroads into the game line, but today we're talking about a few groups that might be relevant...
Mar 24, 2025•51 min•Season 4Ep. 105
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 Wolf website, as well as the usual swag: Storyteller's screen, c...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 4Ep. 104
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. These two books show glimpses into fae conceptions that didn't ...
Mar 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 103
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. This edition ran from 2004 through 2013 (or thereabouts) befor...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 51 min•Season 4Ep. 102
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 smattering of Changeling material). This episode was recorded a ...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr 43 min•Season 3Ep. 101
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 Shadow Court ) "Dual-wielding" (from Episode 19, The Shadow Court ) "Neck fashions" (from Episode 28, Isl...
Feb 03, 2025•21 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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 fiction, and a meditation on supernatural phenomenology (whew). We'v...
Jan 20, 2025•40 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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 this week, at least, we'll keep with the convention for giving fract...
Jan 06, 2025•27 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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 content, we're talking about statistics from the Season, plans fo...
Dec 20, 2024•19 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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 poetic about it in our online games episode a couple weeks ago. Th...
Dec 16, 2024•30 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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 filled with 10,000 people, but at least everybody was as lovely an...
Dec 07, 2024•40 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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, who shares wisdom from her extensive experience, which we compo...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Season 3Ep. 100
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' Vault, but with a different team, even though their books for...
Nov 18, 20240•Season 3Ep. 99
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 whether it will reincarnate in the future, as the fae are wont to do,...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Season 3Ep. 98
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 around the setting for your game will impact its feel. And not j...
Oct 28, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 3Ep. 97
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 to try and redeem mortal life in Changeling a bit, giving due co...
Oct 22, 2024•57 min•Season 3Ep. 96
