Archive

Prerequisite: Hollow

Effect: Your character maintains, within his Hollow, a personal collection of useful information that can help with natural and supernatural research. Whether it’s in the form of a musty collection of occult tomes, a talking skull with several lifetimes of information at hand or a Glamour-powered computer network, the archive includes reference materials that can help the changeling learn about the world around him. The archive also offers insight into supernatural and occult topics that mortals cannot comprehend. In both fields of knowledge — mundane research and occult lore — this collection relates to one or more fields of specialization.

Each dot in this Merit represents one field of study or area of knowledge in which your character has a wealth of tomes or computer files (or perhaps a supernatural resource) and from which he may draw information. If he has Archive •••, his dots might be assigned to computer operating systems, medieval history and goblin fruits, respectively. Topics can include arcane lore that most people don’t know about or that has been forgotten since antiquity, as well as fae lore that humanity has never known.

Gaining information from an archive is a research task, as described on pp. 55–56 of the World of Darkness Rulebook, except that a changeling spends only 15 minutes per roll when researching in his archive. (This time cannot be further reduced by the Brownie’s Boon Merit, below.) Success doesn’t guarantee exactly the information for which he looks. Archives aren’t all-knowing, and they don’t always provide one definitive answer to a question, since multiple authors may have different points of view on the same subject. The Storyteller is perfectly justified in saying that a particular archive simply doesn’t reveal something. A changeling may allow another changeling the privilege of consulting his archives, but unless this consultant puts points toward the Archive Merit, the standard 30 minutes per roll are spent researching his topic.

Archive areas of study include but are not limited to Fairy Tales and Folklore, Herbalism, Trods, Tokens, Goblin Fruit, Hedgebeasts, Goblin Markets, Court History (with each Court being a separate topic), Local Changeling History, Orders and, of course, almost any mundane topic from Archaeology to Zoology. An archive is located in a Hollow and is protected by the Hollow’s wards. See the Hollow Merit on p. 94 of Changeling: The Lost.

Special: Characters who share a Hollow can also share Archive dots, with each contributing to its area of knowledge. These characters each receive the full benefits of the Archives. It may happen that changelings suffer a falling-out, in which case one or more might be asked to forfeit their research privileges by the others. Those who are banned lose whatever dots they contributed, unless an agreement is worked out to split the Archives, allowing outcasts to take their areas of knowledge with them. Shared Archives should be marked with an asterisk (*) on your character sheet. See the description of the Hollow Merit for details on how to allocate dots.