Changelings have a variety of ways to gather Glamour, called the five paths to epiphany. The 5 options are:
Revelry: A changeling may recharge her glamour by acting according to her fundamental nature. The method varies from kith to kith.
Reverie: Changelings can inspire mortals to staggering feats. The fruit of the dreamer’s labor provides the inspirational changeling with Glamour.
Rapture: Through introspection, imagination, and great difficulty, a changeling may unite his faerie and human halves in inspiration and refresh his Glamour reserves.
Ravaging: Using a brutal psychic assault, the changeling channels her Banality into a mortal to force all of the Glamour out, stealing it for herself.
Rhapsody: Forbidden by the Kithian, a changeling may imbue a mortal with so much raw Glamour he explodes in one final burst of creativity, never able to create again.
Due to the online setting we have reduced it to a small scene and a roll:
The scene must be completed before the roll. explaining what the changeling is doing and for how long
roll will be glamour rating + Dots in dreamers if you have any, at dif 7
each success equals one hour spent and one glamour gained.
cannot exceed the hours you dictated in your scene or you total glamour pool.
These can only be done twice per week, though the difficulty goes up by 1 for the second attempt. If you are having trouble gaining glamour, see the Duchess. She has no problem giving from the balefire
Every Changeling can consolidate 1 point of glamour per week into dross. So, unless the glamour is used, each character can make 4 dross per month.
Each point of dreamers adds extra dross as per the following chart:
Dreamers 0: 4 per month
Dreamers 1: 4.5 per month (4 one month, 5 the next)
Dreamers 2: 5 per month
Dreamers 3: 5.5 per month (5 one month, 6 the next)
Dreamers 4: 6 per month
Dreamers 5: 7 per month
This must be tracked in the resource tracking channel on Discord or your ST will assume you have none accrued
Glamour’s counterweight, Banality is cold where Glamour is warm, hunger where Glamour is plenty, apathy where Glamour is hope. More than despair, it is an emptiness, a stasis, the lack of a drive to take life for anything more than a series of meaningless rote actions. Even sorrow and loss are emotions, charged with Glamour and inspiration — what Banality touches shivers and dies, though it puts up every appearance of living on. It is active apathy, a pervasive force of conformity that has infested the modern world.
Banality is a terrible enough foe for mortals, draining the joy from their lives, sometimes even turning them into
walking beacons of the stuff that lashes out at the Dreaming wherever it may sniff it out. For changelings, Banality is 1,000 times worse, a creeping poison that slowly, over the course of a bright and brilliant life, steals that light away, locking it behind the Mists until, at last, the Kithain are left with no more than we remember of our own dreams when we rise each morning.
Others, unaware of the Dreaming, pity them, thinking them senile or mad, but even this pity is no salve for the true tragedy this poor soul has suffered.
By The Numbers
Banality touches virtually everything in the World of Darkness, and therefore everything has a Banality rating. This rating represents, on a scale of 1 to 10 dots, just how much Banality has been invested into the subject. The higher the number, the more apathetic and unimaginative the person or thing in question is, generally speaking. It also measures how dangerous those individuals or objects might be to changelings, and how destructive to their Glamour they will be. A high Banality rating means that a changeling’s Arts might slide right off that person, for example. Mechanically, this means a subject with high Banality (8–10) adds +1 difficulty to cantrip rolls targeting them.
The Storyteller should think about a character’s backstory when deciding on her Banality rating. Was her creativity encouraged when she was growing up? Does she work in a field where thinking outside of the box is rewarded? How many books does she read in a year? Try to get a sense of the character’s mindset, because ultimately that is the greatest determining factor in how high her Banality rating is.
Banality 1-3: Nothing in the modern world is free from Banality’s influence, but Kithain treasure mortals with a Banality rating this low, as their minds and souls are comparatively untainted. Such individuals are called Dreamers, and are frequently used as sources of Glamour. Dreamers are unlikely to be held in high esteem by wider society, unless they’re wealthy enough to be “eccentric” instead of “crazy” or have turned their overwhelming creative impulse to a popular end. Even if a Dreamer does enjoy wealth and popularity, she does not create because doing so brings these things to her — she creates because she must.
Banality 4-5: Individuals with a Banality of 4 or 5 are still passionately, even wildly creative by wider societal standards. They are likely to be known as flakes or idealists by their fellows, and may have difficulty maintaining day-to-day commitments that routinely interfere with their creative pursuits. They treasure any living situation that affords them the time they need to indulge in what they love. These are the sort of people who paint a perfect replica of the night sky on their ceiling “because they felt like it,” or spend years of their lives painstakingly creating a patchwork map of a fantastic fictional world. While they are not Dreamers, they are still an excellent source of Glamour, and are much more likely to be understanding of the unusual pursuits of the Kithain.
Banality 6: People living with this level of Banality do what they can to resist the demands of the wider world around them, but cave to the inevitable. They get the degree that is supposedly “better” than the one they really wanted. If they’re fortunate enough to get a job, they cling to it. People with Banality 6 do what they have to for as long as they must, and retreat from the world around them as soon as is possible. They have hopes and dreams of making it big doing the thing they love, but cruel reality is an insurmountable obstacle more often than not. When left to their own devices, they produce some Glamour, but are hardly the fonts of it as are those of lower Banality, whom they envy greatly.
Banality 7: The battle may not be over, but the war seems lost. At this level of Banality, an individual feels beaten. He knows he should write that novel that’s been lingering in the back of his head, but zoning out on the couch watching competitive cooking TV shows is just easier. The set of high-end markers sits in a corner gathering dust — her guild in Skinner Box Online gives her shit if she doesn’t make at least two raids a week. Their dreams are still within their sight, but their reach exceeds their grasp. Someone suffering with this much Banality needs a real shock to get him out of his rut, so getting Glamour from him is a challenge.
Banality 8: The Banality begins not only to dampen, but to control souls at this level. It’s not a maniacal puppeteer, cackling as it makes people dance at its whim, but is rather a further refinement of what it already does at lower levels. It takes the envy of a freer soul and twists it, turning it to antipathy. Mortals begin to pose a threat to Kithain once they reach this level of Banality, forcing changelings to ever be on their guard, lest they be overwhelmed by even a careless word. The mortal does not mean to be a threat, but this makes no difference. A nasty comment about street art seems innocuous to many, but it plants the seeds of Banality and inflames the sliver of it that all changelings carry within them.
Banality 9-10: Not everyone with a Banality rating this high is an Autumn Person, but one could forgive changelings for not seeing the difference. This level of Banality is a choking cloud of hopelessness, a vortex of negativity that seems inescapable. The person at the heart of that cloud, who exudes it with practically every word and action, disdains creativity to such an extent that it seems wrong to them. Here, a psychologist overprescribes medication for an attention disorder. Here, funding for arts programs is cut even when options to save them exist. Here, the bright wash of color in the world, attenuated slowly as Banality progresses, is rendered a malignant and dying collection of shades of gray.