A Year and A Day: Shahmaran

Changeling: the Dreaming

Homebrew Rules

Character Creation Guide Download: Shahmaran.pdf

Quoth the Shahmaran:

“Close your eyes, and I will sing you a song of Cold unforgiving sands, and Silent Stars who turn away from your needs.”

Kith Excerpt:

While the Abgal are cheerful and animated chroniclers of knowledge, the Shahmaran serve by singing of a painful past. As they tell the story, their Mother was a Kurdish Goddess hidden deep in a desert cave. This cave was filled with song and music, honey, and cold-clear water (and some postulate a portal to a long-lost Arcadia). This was all for naught as some mortals escaping from the world of men found their way into this cave, married their mother, and then ate her flesh and made a broth from her bones.

This is why the Shahmaran sing such sad songs. Not just for the death of their mother, but because the Desert Dreaming always comes with a price. The true sadness is that so few of the Apkallu seem to realize this. Only the females of the Khânevâde (Kith) truly can comprehend what it is to live according to the true tenets of Me, tenets which leave only bones behind. While the Shedu, the Abgal, and the Kusarikku boast of the wonders of the Desert and its inexplicable knowledge, the Shahmaran sing songs of Mother’s sacrificed, honey long taken by greedy mortal mouths, and the men who are blind to it all.

With this bearing they serve as Lore-keepers akin to the Abgal, but in a far more poetic sense. Justice is as blind as the Desert is lonely, and no amount of frivolity or joy will change that. Let Abgal teach, let the Shedu lead, and let the Kusarikku disentangle, the Me will still be unfair.

Flavor

“We will all be gone one day. Not as a negative thing – as a positive thing, too, you know, and we should leave something behind ourselves.”
– Irina Shayk

“It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.”
– Henry Rollins