No, you just don't look like a changeling. You can hold it in your inventory (stopping yourself from showing up as one in honours) and it's still functional. And no one else can use the cameo, unlike almost every other artefact.

yeah, I was being silly.


But seriously, the cameo does make you a changeling. Atleast, binding yourself to a cameo makes you a changeling.

Just because you do'nt revert back to some original race, doesn't mean that you arn't a fully functtioning member of the race you were when you trade in the cameo.

The fact other people use it means the cameo doesn't make you a changeling. You might instead say that it "catalyses" (as Doman and someone else said) your ability to changeling, but the power is definitely inherent on some level to the changeling.

It says very clearly in the Help artifactsmisc that The Cameo MARKS you as a Changeling, it doesn't make you one.

You're a changeling whether you have the Cameo or not, Having it worn just shows it off.

edit: A Thought I had, maybe they've been here since the times of Dynara, like, they're one of her experiments.

That can't be true or they'd have heard the Song of Creation and become half-formed or something. And they couldn't be born from mortals.

I made up a story of how I came across the power to change my race via a cursed cameo. It is somewhere in my history or something. The cameo artifact is versatile and because of it being the way it is you could probably make up any story you want to associate yourself with gaining powers to change. You could buy the cameo and never wear it and never have to say where the power came from.

I bought a cameo and had the description changed to make it different so that it went well with the story I made up.

Yeah, I did a similar thing with mine. It's very nice that that option is available to you. Still, there's something to be said about the "default" changelings.

I meant like an underlying effect Dynara left in the world. Like...Think Chernobyl, but instead of losing your hair, you change forms.

Oh, that makes more sense and isn't totally implausible.

But there's no particularly good reason to assume that either. Pretty arb.

A small admin event would be amazing.

OOOER, can _everyone_ get randomly assigned a new race?

As long as we get a free reincarnation, I'm cool with it.

THAT would be amazing. A wave of pure energy alters the shards of everyone.

Leads to an aetherbubble full of changelings being found, who are researching their own origins.

And then saran pitched a tent to form the new changeling nation, annoying the nil out of the seekers of gaudi/halli/ackle/jojo

I propose, with no evidence to back up this theory, that the primal god Vrandrac, the amorphous mass, splintered into the changeling race. Or, at least, the changeling cameos. And when you purchase one, its amorphous essenceness absorbs you and turns you into a changeling. As we know, Bollikin was the first to splinter, did not concentrate on one specific shape, which is why the furrikin are so diverse, 'imitiating' the forms of many different animals. Vrandrac, having no shape, and thinking of no shape, fathered a race with no defining features, so they are able to literally imitate any race- melting like wax into an amorphous blob, and then resolidifying into the form of another race.


Perhaps Vrandrac slept underground like the other primal gods Dracnoris and Keph, and after he splintered some of the changelings were trapped underground and fossilised into cameos, and Bob has access to a cameo mine. Or maybe Bob fround Vrandrac imprisoned somehow and just carves pieces off him. Isn't baseless speculation fun?

Hmm...maybe it's something like Estarra. She brushes her hair and the Cameo falls like dandruff. The POWAH of the Creatrix makes it so I can be all..melty.

We already have a clan, it's called "House Kamau."

Here are my thoughts on how this all works...

The Changeling's were originally a regular shard. IE: Merian, Human etc.
After a regular shard acquires a cameo, allowing them to become a changeling, their original shard is destroyed and they are reduced to nothing but the divine spark and a mysterious unknown form. Since this form cannot exist for long in the physical world, they quickly change their form into any race of their choosing.

So, in essence, they are nothing more then a Divine Spark and an bodiless entity that can change it's shape and appearance and physical attributes at will.

Edit: How many more posts until I can change my little subtitle?

166. 500 was the old threshhold for the transcendent auto-title, but we all posted so much that most people grabbed it in a hurry.

In this theory, what happens when they have children? If the original shard is destroyed, the child can only be a changeling, but does not require a cameo to do it (in RP -- obviously not in mechanics). And once you have people who are born changelings, you don't need this theory at all.