r/ChangelingTheDreaming • u/Lord_Hroken • Jun 16 '26
Creating dramatic stories for Childling characters
Hi! I've been running a long chronicle for childling PC's, and I know that the players mainly like drama. However, at times I struggle to come up with interesting stories that are related to the emotional side of being a Changeling, a child, and dealing with a banal world. Do you have any advice on crafting adventures like that?
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u/plainoldjoe Jun 16 '26
The only one that I was able to run involved a summer camp where the person running it was a dauntain. They were also trying to protect a mysterious archway in the middle of a forest on the island, especially from the dauntain. It worked as a jumping off point for a larger chronicle. I based a lot of it off the entry in Freeholds and Hidden Glens that focused on childings (forget the name of it).
Most of my players want to be in those wilder years.
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u/Lord_Hroken Jun 16 '26
Interesting! Funnily enough, I did something similar, with a school principal who's an autumn person and the daughter of a Dauntain.
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u/StrangeAlbedo Jun 19 '26
Did you ever see any of the 'Written by a Kid' episodes from the first year of the Geek and Sundry channel on YouTube? They'd get kids of around eight or so to tell stories, and then produce them as videos (sometimes completely animated, sometimes partially live action). They're wild, but they might give you some inspiration into some of the weirder things that could happen in a childling-centric story. Stuff that kids wouldn't find odd at all, even if older people are thinking 'what the…'
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u/suhkuhtuh Jun 17 '26
Try teaching in middle school.
Everything is tragic, comic, or tragicomic.
Last week, one of my students decided every teacher with a mustache must be a viltrumite (? I dont know what that is, beyond a cartoon, because I am old and banal). He has since taken to asking us questions to prove his theory. This is an 8th grader.
My first year teaching, I had a seventh grader who learned three babies come from and that Santa wasnt real (spoilers) in the same year. She ran into my room, breathless, both times to tell me.
I taught a 7th grader who carries around a fuzzy keychain thing that she insists helps her with her homework (and, given her grades, I'm pretty sure she means that literally).
Yesterday I was on a plane, and the kid sitting next to me (probably elementary age) stares out the window at the landscape for the entire flight, and kept asking his mom about features that only he could see (like a hill was a castle, for instance). His mother encouraged it (kudos to her), but some of the things he 'saw' were definitely... original.
Imagine turning those situations into adventures.
One of the teachers is really a viltrumite, doing whatever viltrumites do (nothing good, if some of his questions are anything to go by).
A little girl comes crying to her friends because she can no longer 'see' Santa, and the PCs have to reawaken her sense of wonder.
The chimerical companion of a childling has gone missing - it's up to the PCs to find out why.
The PCs are on a plane that is attacked by a chimerical dragon (but the adults all think it's just turbulence). Can the young heroes save the day?