Changeling [Birthright]

There are two kinds of changeling. Human changelings are babies carried off from the continent by faeries of the shadowy faerie realm and brought up at the Seelie Court. Faerie changelings are the ancient faeries left in the cradle in their place.

A human changeling looks like any person, of any human stock, noble or common. Depending on how long ago it was taken, it may still be a child or fully grown. A faerie changeling is a very old seelie faerie that can pass for human. It is child-sized, but it carries an ancient air, and its eyes often betray millennia of hidden wisdom. When first swapped in it seems anywhere from a few days to two years old, and if no one catches on, it uses its modest fey glamour to age its looks over time.

A faerie discovered in a missing child's place, above all a noble's child or a domain's heir, is a natural hook, and any odd youngster, strange adult or player character can come under suspicion. Heroes in the faerie realm may also meet long-stolen humans; grown ones may refuse to come home, but they know that realm well.

Statistics cover three groups: faeries, adult humans (15 and older), and human children aged 8 to 14, who given their strange upbringing could fight if forced to.

Faerie changelings keep all their spellcasting from the shadowy faerie realm (see the seelie faerie entry) and prefer it to their daggers. They keep know alignment and their immunity to charms and illusions/phantasms but lose the power to turn invisible once they enter the mortal world, and iron weapons still deal them +3 damage. Once unmasked, a faerie changeling flees at the first chance, often using baffling fey speech to cover its escape. It keeps its extraordinary perception, but can only work the glamour it carried out of its realm like an aura.

In combat, grown human changelings count as 2nd-level rogues, armed with a short sword, a dagger or both, a farewell present from their keepers. That weapon has a 75% chance of being +1, and there is a further 45% chance of another magical item, chosen by the DM and the more outlandish the better. Children are cherished and guarded by the faeries and fight only in self-defense; outsiders rarely meet them except at court, where they are thickly cloaked in glamour.

Adults remember the fey but can never find the way back, because a seelie spell of forgetting is laid on them as they leave, and they never seem quite normal again. Human changelings learn from their keepers how to work and see through glamour. Faerie changelings have no bloodline or blood abilities; humans may have either or none. Perception and glamour: faerie, extraordinary and lesser; adult human, middling and slight; child, slight and none.

Seelie faeries love beauty, human children included. Mortal lives are so brief to them that people are novelties, not equals, and taking a baby as a plaything troubles them no more than adopting a puppy.

They do treat their pets kindly. At the awkward age of 12 or 13, when it stops being cute, a human changeling is armed, equipped and sent out into the world, and the stealth, guile and tall tales it learned at court see most through to adulthood, whether they reach home or stay in the faerie realm.

Meanwhile the faerie in the cradle plays its part. Exposed at once, it slips away home if it can; otherwise it stays as long as possible, curiously studying humans, until after six or seven years at most it grows bored and vanishes one night for good.

Faerie changelings, like all their court, eat almost anything except milk, which they refuse. Because milk is a staple for most young children, that refusal gives them away more often than anything else, and now and then a perfectly ordinary child is suspected simply for disliking it.

On the rarest occasions the faeries take an elven child instead. Elves are too much like faeries to hold much charm for them; it is the differences that make human children so appealing.