The Changelings are the player’s tribe — nomadic, mask-wearing shapeshifters who belong to every place and settle in none.
Speed 110% · Health 100%
By default a Changeling reads as one of the forest folk: tall, slender, and faintly elf-like, easily mistaken at a distance for an Aelfar. But nothing about a Changeling is fixed. Skin, hair, dress, and bearing are all their own to choose — and with the right mask and the magic woven into it, a Changeling does not merely disguise but truly changes shape, walking among any tribe as one of its own.
Their gear is as unfixed as their faces. Where the Aelfar carry the longbow and the Mallardine the named sword, a Changeling carries whatever works — a scavenged blade beside a salvaged device, a club, a bow, or even a gun — and they are far more versatile fighters than the elves they resemble. They travel in small bands along circuits no one else maps, raise no settlements, and are seldom in the same place twice.
The Changelings are a hybrid people of elven descent — close enough to the Aelfar to pass for them at a glance, distinct enough that the Aelfar do not quite claim them, and their opposite in temperament: restless where the elves are patient, irreverent where the elves are solemn, and endlessly talkative where the elves are quiet. They hold no doctrine. If pressed for a single conviction, they would say only that many voices are worth more than one will.
What they have instead of a creed is conspiracy theories, traded around the fire like currency. Some swear the “aliens” are real and that they have seen strange lights moving in the sky. Some insist the Backrooms exist and that you can fall into them by stepping wrong. A fringe holds that the whole world is a game named Vox Maxa and that the Changelings are its “players.” No two Changelings believe quite the same things, and an unsettling number of their theories keep turning out to be true.