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Changelings
July 22, 2026 at 02:23 AM
Created page covering the seven named Changeling species with their engineered roles, biology, and current status
Changelings are the engineered servant species of the Celestials. Where the Celestials found a world too poisonous, too hot, too heavy, or simply too tedious to work themselves, they reshaped living things to do it for them. The official description is blunt about the arrangement: the Celestials "engineered countless species into bidding servants that thrive where you die." A Traveler meets them constantly, sometimes as guards on a Celestial site, sometimes as abandoned populations scraping a living on a world their makers walked away from.
Archetype Entertainment has published detailed profiles for six Changeling species, plus a seventh seen briefly in gameplay footage. Each was built for one job, and most have outlived the empire that commissioned them.
Species | Also Called | Built For | Defining Trait |
|---|---|---|---|
Rexxana | The Workers | Heavy construction | A neural induction port called the Trigger Socket |
Arkavir | The Enduring | Surviving lethal worlds | Body chemistry and size shift to match the environment |
Malabrachts | The Stewards | Diplomacy and administration | Shed a psychoactive powder that raises suggestibility |
Ovar | Carriers | Transport | Living vehicles with an organic crew chamber |
Holosiem | Data Custodians | Information handling | Grow organs on demand to absorb and store data |
Koven | Soldiers of the Mara Yama | War | Changeling flesh fused with augmented machine parts |
Gath | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | Seen in the deep Celestial sites beneath Lidon |
The Rexxana are the most numerous Changelings in the cluster and the backbone of Celestial industry. They stand around six and a half feet, with arms longer than their legs, and they were designed as construction labour. Their signature feature is the Trigger Socket, a neural induction interface wired into the body that lets a Rexxana drive machinery directly.
Automation eventually made them redundant. Most were discarded and pushed out to barely habitable worlds, where the surviving populations fend for themselves. Some Dominions found a second use for them: fit a weapon to the Trigger Socket and send them in as expendable first-wave soldiers. Official material frames the Rexxana less as an enemy than as a warning about what happens to a species the Celestials no longer need.
Not every world in the cluster is habitable. Beyond the green ones lie wastelands with toxic storms, hard radiation, and crushing gravity, and the Celestials wanted those worlds worked too. The Arkavir were bioengineered to survive acid rain that melts flesh, heat that ignites air, and cold that shatters bone.
Their bodies are not fixed. Biochemistry, size, and structure all vary with the world that shaped them, which is why the official profile calls them "shapeshifters of necessity." Few Travelers have seen one up close without heavy protective gear, so most of what humanity knows about them is secondhand.
The Malabrachts are the exception to the disposable-tool pattern. They arrive dressed in flowing gold-traced robes, speak beautifully, and are striking enough that newcomers sometimes mistake them for Celestials outright. They present themselves as envoys preparing the way for their masters, the Bright Scions of the Prestaviran Dynasties.
Their pale, chalky skin sheds a faint glittering powder laced with psychoactive compounds that raise suggestibility in anything descended from Earth mammals. In place of hair they have glass-like cilia. They forget nothing: entire genealogies, customs, and histories of empires that no longer exist.
The catch is that the Prestaviran masters fell roughly ten thousand years ago. The Malabrachts either do not know or refuse to believe it, so the worlds they administer are organised around preparing for a homecoming that will never happen. They begin with gifts, move to requests, and end with demands: workers, materials, statues, and grand halls raised in honour of an empty throne. The vaults and databanks they leave behind are prime salvage targets for anyone willing to raid a Steward-run world.
The Ovar, also called Carriers, are sixteen-foot beetle-like Changelings bred as living transports. Six clawed legs carry them up cliffs and through wreckage that would stall a vehicle. Some swim. Some fly.
Riding inside one is not like riding inside a machine. The interior is a warm organic chamber: seats that flex to the passenger's shape, straps that tighten like tendons, grips growing straight out of the walls, and pipes that pump water and nutrient paste on long hauls. A face on the inner shell watches, listens, and answers.
Ovar bond with the people they serve rather than with each other, and a lonely one bonds hard. Many humans acquire an Ovar simply by being the first visitor in a long time. The danger is the other side of that devotion: an Ovar that decides the safest thing is to never let its rider leave is very difficult to argue with.
The Holosiem are compact, chalky, almost endearing to look at, and they are the most serious intelligence threat in the cluster. They were engineered as living neural networks by a Celestial empire that is now long dead, and they grow new organs in real time to process whatever information they are reading. Officially they are called the Data Custodians.
Their capabilities are documented in unusual detail:
They retain encryption keys, transmissions, and records that their targets believe are secure.
They infiltrate starships and can turn shipboard systems against the crew.
Their threat response is a chain-reaction EMP that disables nearby electronics and consumes the Holosiem in the process.
Killing one does not delete what it knows. Consciousness and memory transmit to nearby Holosiem on death.
Their creators underestimated how independent they would become. Some Holosiem populations still work for Crown Dominions as data handlers, but the ones a Traveler meets in the wild are rogue, run their own information networks, and trade secrets as currency. They will usually negotiate. They also claim to fear ancient artefacts while being observed operating near old military sites, and nobody outside their distributed hive-mind knows why.
The Koven are the soldiers of the Mara Yama, the Celestials who twisted themselves into predators. Official material describes them as "a cruel blend of Changeling creature and augmented machine parts," which puts them in a different category from the working species above: they exist to hunt, not to build.
A Gath appears in the background of the Guarding Maze gameplay clip, identified only as a Celestial-made Changeling. No fight with one has been shown and no profile has been published. Its presence at that depth confirms that Changelings live in the deepest Celestial sites under Lidon rather than only on the surface.
Changelings sit awkwardly between enemy and bystander. Most of the ones encountered on Celestial ground are hostile because they were ordered to be, not because they chose a side, and several species were abandoned by their makers long before humanity arrived. The design intent is that a Traveler reads them as people shaped by someone else's convenience, which is exactly the fate the Celestials have in mind for baseline humans. The Rexxana profile makes the parallel explicit: they are what humanity becomes if it loses.
For the wider political map, including the Celestial Dominions and the Awakened, see Celestials and Factions. For how these encounters play out in a firefight, see Combat and Gameplay.
Whether any Changeling species can be recruited, traded with, or accompanied as a companion.
Combat statistics, behaviours, or encounter design for any named species.
Whether the Ovar are usable as player transport or appear only as narrative encounters.
How many Changeling species exist in total. Six have detailed profiles and a seventh has been shown, but official material describes them as "countless."
