A Year & A Day: Pechs

Changeling: the Dreaming

Homebrew Rules

Character Creation Guide Download: Pechs.pdf

Quoth the Pechs:

“Our old tongues are lost, our tribes are scattered, and the Wolf-children want our children to breed with. Yet you still think that a council with Celtoi-Sidhe matters to me? I have far more important things to fix. Let the long-ears fight amongst themselves.”

Kith Excerpt:

From the barrow-mounds of the high-lands to abandoned towers with seemingly no exit, the Pechs were always a mysterious creature. The word pechs comes from a bastardization of the Roman “Pictoi”, meaning painted. A reference to the blue swirls adorning the original people of the Scottish North. The dreams of that people, and the dreams of the conquering romans were realized when the Oldest of the Fae came up from the underground.

The Pechs are the purest of the old-world Celtic Wicht (Kithain). Older than the Sidhe, older than the Fomorians, Older than even the serpent and Arachnid folk said to live deep with-in the earth. They lived out their lives with strength of arm, building great towers that reached to the heavens as well as deep tunnels that crisscrossed under the Rocky lands. They lived with strength of character as well, administering to their sick and wounded with magic heather-ale and battling Romans, Saxons, Danes and the renegade Celtoi tribes all at once. And when a wall was built that would keep the others away from their land, they returned underground. Under the stones and sod, they were able to live out their lives as they saw fit, rarely dealing with the newer kiths that made Caledonia their home.

However, all things must change with time. The gentle Blue Annies grew into monsters, the world forgot about the Orcs to the South, and the Redcaps, once dark-gods of the hungry/dark/cold, were treated like thugs and bastards. The Pechs saw this and were disheartened. And then the Trow, the Pechs younger brother tribe began a war with the new Celtoi tribes called Sidhe. The Spunchie-tribe, ever ready to add insult to injury quickly joined in with the slander. With so much noise and turmoil above, the Pechs had no choice but to remind the whole of the Caledonian Fae why they were still the Kings. With strength of arm, and strength of character, they have come up from their brughs and sitheans deep under the Scottish hills.

Flavor

“Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind.” ― Juliet Marillier, Wolfskin