If Half of Asia has no Stewards of the Dreaming...

[Konradleijon]

Nope they where a real tribe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatan

[Erinys]

Hmmm. Thank you. Clearly the Werewolf writers didn't know about them either (and/or nobody was legally acknowledged under that name in the1990s).

[Konradleijon]

But the real tribes existence was known in the 90s

[Dataweaver]

But in the 90s, game designers didn't have ready access to the Internet, which made research much harder, and missing details such as this much easier.

[Damian May]

If it was nobody told the creators of almost every genre show airing at the time. All the ones I can recall describe the written word Croatoan at Roanoke as being of unknown origin.

[Konradleijon]

That makes sense to get back to he point in my opinion the Hsein are a completely different type of creatures compared to Changlings as seen in the book. Where the fact that it’s a changling sourcebook is false advertising With a few similarities .their are Asian Changlings as a different type of creature from the Hsein but they keep to themselves

[TrueMrMultiverse]

I wonder what the Ten Thousand Things in ShadownEssence was like, when I checked the page had an error. The idea of Eastern Changelings that aren't Hsein are very interesting.

[monteparnas]

I wonder what the Ten Thousand Things in ShadownEssence was like, when I checked the page had an error. The idea of Eastern Changelings that aren't Hsein are very interesting.

Look for it in the Way Back Machine, ShadowEssence is still working there.

Personally I don't even count the Hsien as fairies, I consider them as Angels from DtF.

[TrueMrMultiverse]

Huh, I’ll try to use that. Also, that’s a fair take on Hsein considering their origins and how similar that is to DtF angels.

[wrxsv]

They're your dudes, do what you want.
That said, there were a couple of things.
One, by my understanding, the Umbra initially split into three copy Otherworlds roughly with the proto-Vedic-Persian mythology influencing the Bronze Age. That's basically where the Hsien step in, they've got parts of incompatible Umbras, and so get booted from either, and they have their own mythology to explain it nice and pretty. Going by DA Fae, the Dreaming didn't split from the Umbras until the Shattering in the late Iron Age, which is to say the Hsien are Fae, just as much as say the Nunnehi are, they just split off from the Euro-Fae before they changed into what they are now.
Two, I'm not at all familiar with East Asian/Oceanic mythological timelines, but I would not be surprised if the Korean and Japanese traditional mythologies of today came from Iron Age cultures, rather than Bronze. In the real world, the collapse of the Bronze Age into Iron brought profound changes in how humans related to the natural world. Which is probably a big reason we ended up with Celtic/Germanic spirit folk and Pakistani Jinn both fearing Iron. It's a very good reason also for the Shattering propagating with human cultural contact rather than some quantum-instantaneous-universal-state shift.
Three, Freeholds need a physical connection point on Earth. Every splat has their own words and mythologies for those, but the Asian books call them Dragon Nests. In Changeling terms, they're the Glades that Freeholds get built on top of, and those are very much guarded, claimed, and "Steward"-ed. If the European Kithain really want to fight for control of them, let them. The Dreaming may cover or extend over the physical terrain of East Asia, just as the current Umbras each cover the Kithain strongholds of Europe and N America. There's nothing keeping a French Boggan from building a Homestead in the Dreaming location corresponding to central China, any more than a Garou is prevented from hunting in the Umbra corresponding to the Boggan's current Freehold in Dijon. Anchoring a connection to Earth however, requires finding, or creating a Node/Caern/Glade/Dragon Nest, and those usually get claimed and defended.

[monteparnas]

That said, there were a couple of things.

1- Interesting theory but not backed by the lore. There is no canon about how or when the Umbrae formed and much less where the Dreaming fits in there. Even more important, every fae are connected to the Dreaming, including the Nunnehi and Menehune, even when they also have other spiritual connections. The Hsien are an exception.

Saying they're fae because they were linked to some Umbra before is the same as stating they are spirits and all spirits are fae. This isn't what's in the lore at all.

2- The point isn't just the mythologies of each region, but legends and myths that work better in a Dreaming context than in other contexts. The Hsien represent not any kind of spirit, but specifically a role from Chinese mythology that I will explain at the end. Suffice to say, this role holds far more relation with the descriptions of the Angelic Hierarchy in Demon: the Fallen than with any Changeling theme.

3- Not every splat is referring to the same thing when they talk about their places of power, as not all of them work in the same way. Dragon Nests are a catch-all term used because the "Asian" splats mix a lot more among themselves, so they know and respect Caerns and Nodes as the same thing and also tend to generally treat all of them as sacred. But they are still distinct in their own ways.

But Freeholds aren't build on top of Nodes and Caerns, and Glamour Glades are far easier to form. Freeholds are few to the Changeling population's needs, but are still far from being a rarity. And the Dragon Nests of the Hsien are unlikely to work as Freeholds, as their traditionally strict care makes then a little higher on Banality.

Hsien specifically can't collect Glamour. They collect Faith. Their requirements to collect it from their Dragon Nests is linked to belief, not creativity. They share no Glamour-gathering method with Changelings or fae of any kind, but do have methods similar to what is described in Demon as the access Angels have to Faith. They don't share any mechanic with the fae, no link to Glamour or the Dreaming, no weakness to iron or Banality. Even their way of assuming a mortal body is markedly distinct from the Changeling Way. The only reason the Hsien aren't Angels rules-wise is because they're far older than DtF, but they fit the role perfectly.
_______

In Chinese classic mythology, many "lesser" spirits of nature are regarded as gods in the Celestial Bureaucracy. Those spirits are wildly different in powers, forms and temperament, but they are all bound to their roles in service to the Heavenly Hierarchy. Such gods are limited, but manifestations of the higher principles. By the way, it is from Chinese Mythology the idea of the Jade Emperor, the unitary manifestation of God that governs the Hierarchy.

When the Hsien are called Little Gods they are a direct reference to those beings, and described as intermediaries between the inhabitants of Creation and the higher spirits in the Celestial Bureaucracy, transmitting mortal prayers to the Heavens and receiving instructions on what to do. There are many other similarities between them and DtF, that have nothing to do with CtD whatsoever.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

There's a bit of a complication in D:tF neither knowing nor caring about any Umbra but the Dark Umbra, though. Where the little gods risk life and limb to go, D:tF treats as a flat out no-go.

[monteparnas]

There's a bit of a complication in D:tF neither knowing nor caring about any Umbra but the Dark Umbra, though. Where the little gods risk life and limb to go, D:tF treats as a flat out no-go.

That's more an interpretation on the shallow descriptions of the Umbra in DtF than a hard description of their lore. DtF never went on a deep description of how any Umbra fit in it, and the description of time before the imprisonment in their Abyss is quite evocative of they interacting with the Umbra. Even if Demon's lore is wrong they have a concept of the spirit realms.

In my reading it seems more likely that either they interact normally with other Umbra, but the book shied from explaining them to Demon players, or their initial lack of access was due to their lack of understanding about the Gauntlet, that was a posterior development to their imprisonment.

Either way it wouldn't change the problems with the Hsien, in the sense that they definitely don't match the concept of Changeling in any way. They are more divorced from Changeling than any other "Asian Splat" from their respective equivalents. I'm currently running a Changeling game where the Gallain have a strong role, but it is simply impossible to find any reason to treat the Hsien as Gallain instead of Prodigals except for the "we can see you" aspect.

And guess which splat have a natural resistance to magic concealing and immunity to mind control that could, taken together, be interpreted as natural ability to bypass the Mists...

[Windthin]

I admit, I've done a bunch of Asian Kiths, scattered about the region and conforming more to local norms. It's fun to play with.

[Windthin]

I read somewhere that the Shattering came to Hawai'i with Captain Cook. If that's canon, it would suggest it spread with European colonialism, which makes the most sense to me.

I can believe the Shattering spread with the Black Plague, as far as it went in Asia and Africa (unless there were areas with a low death-toll). 1350 is also, coincidentally, when the Mississippian civilization got destroyed/genocided by angry Croatan werewolves, so that could support the Shattering, or at least the Sundering, coming to the southeast States area. The Uktena wiped out a chunk of the Anasazi around 1300, too.

Based on the books, the Shattering definitely did not move at the same speed everywhere. I've played with that myself on my site, looking at facets of when and where and how it spread, and the reactions of local fae to it.