Dreams of the Changeling: A Transformative Tome for Delta Green (Patreon)

In English. Study time: days. Unnatural +5%, special training in ghoul lore, Foreign Language (Ghoul) +1D100%, SAN loss special.

Dreams of the Changeling is a worn, ancient octavo bound in light brown leather, soft as calfskin but shiny with age and use. It bears no title or label on the outside nor any frontmatter to indicate author or publisher. Close examination finds it to be an especially old example of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bound centuries ago: The soft leather case-wrapping is human skin. The braided threads that hold signatures together are human hair. The glue in the binding is mostly consistent with hoof-glue, but DNA analysis does not match any animal known on Earth.

Dreams of the Changeling is typeset in a style centuries old and written in archaic English that modern readers struggle to follow. It begins with an overview of changeling legends from around the world, fairies and demons making off with infants and leaving cursed replacements. It soon ventures into the notion of changing form, of spiritual and physical transformation. Then quite suddenly it brings all those ideas together in one legend-cyle: the eaters of the dead called ghouls. The predatory ghoul of Arab myth, disguising itself as a jackal or its most recently devoured victim, hints at only the crudest notion of the truth. Dreams of the Changeling describes a true ghoul as no mere demon of the wastes and certainly no dead thing but as the ultimate and truest stage of humanity. Throwing off superstitious and sentimental taboos and opening the mind to forgotten secrets begins a transformation. A change from weak and dying mortal flesh to something greater. Something stronger. Something that can stride secret paths between worlds and even between dreams. Something that can never die because it feeds on death itself.

Dreams of the Changeling describes with fearful reverence the ghouls’ obscure god, a formless black hole of hunger for death and the dead. Some call it only Death or the Hunger or by names in strange languages with roughly the same meanings. It worms through space-time and even through dreams in its eternal, lightless devouring. It leaves behind tunnels between worlds where ghouls can feed: most prominently in human cemeteries, in lands of dream where even souls can rot, and in a red-sunned world or underworld or realm of dream where ghoul-priests reign over mortal kings and emperors. Ghouls follow the paths laid by their god to feed wherever life thrives and ends. The manuscript describes underworlds within underworlds, dreams within dreams, connecting myths and taboos with phantasmal visions of black gulfs where things live and hunt that even ghouls fear.

A reader studying Dreams of the Changeling in depth gains the listed points of Unnatural skill, gains special training that grants a +20% bonus to Unnatural skill tests that deal with ghouls or the dreamlands, and gains instinctive fluency at 1D100% in the meeping, yipping, yowling language of ghouls. Over the next 2D4 nights, without fail and despite every struggle, the reader transforms permanently into a ghoul. That transformation costs 1D10/1D100 SAN from the unnatural. Whether a character who transforms into a ghoul but remains sane can stay an Agent is up to the Handler. It has happened before.

RECOMMENDED RITUALS: Call Forth the Hunger, Changeling Feast, Charnel Meditation, The Closing of the Breach (the Hunger), Obscure Memories.

Inspired by Scott David Aniolowski's work in The Unspeakable Oath.