A Year and A Day: Rose Dryads

Changeling: the Dreaming

Homebrew Rules

Character Creation Guide Download: Rose-Dryads.pdf

Quoth the Rose Dryad:

“Pepper! Don’t listen to her! The Red Queen doesn’t want Pepper! So bring more Pepper! Lots and Lots of white Pepper!”

Kith Excerpt:

There are a multitude of pathways between this world and the next. There are hidden doorways that lead to open pockets between these worlds – bolt holes, rabbit holes, mirrors, wardrobes, etc… In these open pocket little tween places that exist within these doorways are thorny hedge mazes that keep those ones there and these ones here. These thorny hedge mazes are festooned with large swathes of red and white roses to mark boundaries – boundaries that delineate umbral borders. Every large enough Rose Garden in England has such hidden doorways somewhere in close proximity – that magic mirror, forgotten wrought-iron gate that only opens at Midnight, or a Rabbit hole that opens into a buried Trod underneath. The Roses, you see, are both here and there and if one knows how, they can go hither and yon through the Roses careful to scratch themselves too much on the thorns. However, these Roses are different. They have princesses.

Rose Dryads are a rare form of all – female inanimaeish Kithain that exist on the peripheral realms of the English Dreaming. Less a Dryad in the traditional sense, (such as the Nymphae’s, Kubera, or other nature-born Fae creature), the Rose Dryads are manifestations of that Rose Garden’s magic chaotic energy itself. It calls to kinain females in the area, and invites them in. Once inside these princesses are imbued with the frantic energy enough that they are tied to these otherworldly gardens forever as Fae.But proximity to these doorways and hedge-mazes and mirrors and wardrobes; it is sometimes a little too much. The leeching chaotic energy drives these pretty pretty princesses somewhat daffy. In a frenzied bid for dominance, each of the Rose Dryads in any garden clamors over each other to be the next Queen-Rose of the Garden.

Coming in two colors – Red and White – the Rose Dryads to a one of them suffer from dementations. And while they will absolutely ally with each other to protect their liminal realms from both one side and the other, they will battle against themselves if no imminent threat is present. Not that they hate each other mind, far from it. But White vs. Red, and Red vs. White is the order of the day. Who are you to tell them otherwise? Nobody puts baby in the corner.

Flavor

“Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”
― Susanna Kaysen, “Girl, Interrupted”