Changeling Names Guide

The race of beings with no face might sound like a horrible way to build friends or even make a character. The Changelings from Eberron: Rising from the Last War are these faceless infiltrators. But, rather than being defined by their legacy of being spies and thieves, Changelings can build their personality and background around breaking away from such a past. These are some of the most unique characters in Dungeons & Dragons 5E and knowing their culture is important. Our Changeling Names guide will help you pick a name for your faceless character.

Changelings are so much more complex than their legacy might imply. It’s important to know a tiny bit about their culture, so that you can make a good decision about their names. That’s because every Changeling might have a different number of names they go by!

How Do Changeling Names Work?

In Eberron, Changelings live wherever humans do. Their “base” forms are only really available to them when they are brought up feeling comfortable with themselves. In this form, they are pale, with colorless eyes and silver-white hair. Changelings don’t spend much time in this form, however. Most of the time, they are either stuck in communities of different races where they change themselves to fit in better, or nomadic people who must keep their true nature hidden from races that would destroy them.

If a Changeling is fortunate enough to live in a community with other changelings, they will learn to be skeptical about their relationship with other races. Especially for nomadic tribes, learning how to quickly and effectively read the room and have a shape ready for an encounter is important. A Changeling Adventurer will almost always be ready to transform into whatever the circumstance requires.

They don’t mind this. Changelings change their forms when humans or other races might change their clothes. They might have a Half-Orc for bar crawls, a Goliath for weddings, a human for walks around the town… The list goes on and on. If the shape comes from just a natural want to change, then it is called a mask. These masks can be used once and discarded, or they build an identity behind the mask that they come back to again and again. These masks might be a sign of the changeling wanting to have a “skilled personality” to handle specific situations. The masks will almost certainly stick around if the Changeling finds success with them; a mask that’s a female bandit that seems to strike a chord with a noble nearby will probably come around more than once.

Changelings differ largely based on their relationships with others and their own masks. This might cause multifaceted self-loathing, where the changeling never truly feels like they’re making friends. Or, they might see their masks as tools, and shun relationships made as a result of their masks entirely. How a Changeling interacts with their masks is super important, since that might change how they name their masks entirely.

Examples of Changeling Names

Changelings pick up names like many people would pick up sticks. Different masks may deserve different names, and the Changeling themself might change their name as their life continues onwards.

Unsurprisingly, Changelings have an incredibly fluid interpretation of sex and gender. Thus, they don’t consider names to be gendered in any way, shape, or form. Their masks tend to have names that make sense for their races and places where the races come around from.

The true name of the Changeling is monosyllabic but has a specific accent to it. It’s rare for non-changelings to understand this accent, but the accent contains details about a specific, favorite part of their body that is expressed by shapeshifting. Jin might mean Jin-with-silver-eyes or Jin-with-brown-shoulders to a shapeshifter used to the language.