Hmmm...it turns out, after some discussion with my wife, that there's a key weakness with my take on fae. Namely they're not outsiders. If they were these planar critters like genies or elementals who wander from plane to plane serving courts affiliated with the various gods (which I still love, darnit!) they would be outsiders.
Personally, there's been a pretty fair while that I've considered just dropping the Fey creature type entirely and having Fair Folk and their ilk just be outsiders, or native outsiders, to denote their spiritual link to the land... or to their Twilit Realms.
Also... in reference to the take on fey being embodiments of human emotion or belief brought up earlier in this thread... I'm kind of a wee bit weary of the whole, 'We exist because you believe we do," motiif for supernatural entities. It's been done well and done cool (see The Sandman, a lot of other Neil Gaiman works, Terry Pratchett,) but it makes them feel less... real in their own context, which doesn't generally work for me in Fantasy. And I think it's been overdone in general.
Sometimes I just want a spirit, fey being, or god to be an ancient and nearly timeless being who doesn't need mortals' justification for existing.
Also... in reference to the take on fey being embodiments of human emotion or belief brought up earlier in this thread... I'm kind of a wee bit weary of the whole, 'We exist because you believe we do," motiif for supernatural entities. It's been done well and done cool (see The Sandman, a lot of other Neil Gaiman works, Terry Pratchett,) but it makes them feel less... real in their own context, which doesn't generally work for me in Fantasy. And I think it's been overdone in general.
Sometimes I just want a spirit, fey being, or god to be an ancient and nearly timeless being who doesn't need mortals' justification for existing.
Fair enough. The whole "we only exist because of you" thing is pretty well hackneyed I agree. What I meant was more that the Fey and the other intelligent races exist in tandem, sort of like a set of twins with the Fey being the evil twins of the mortals. A kind of spirit world/mortal world sort of thing like in Oriental Adventures. The Fey are chaotic echoes of the mortals, or maybe the mortals are diminished echoes of the raw chaos of the Fey.
OK I don't know if that even made sense. The pixies are addling my wits...
I am not sure if anyone here has read "The Hound and the Falcon trilogy." The trilogy is historical fiction. One of the main characters is a Christian monk named Alfred. He is an elf raised by the order. By Chrisitan belief, he has no soul and cannot be saved, yet he struggles to be a good monk. The other main character is a young boy named Jehan, who becomes an adult (and a crusader knight) as the story progresses.
Alfred's journey eventually leads him back to the realm of fey. As he comes to accept his elven nature, he becomed dedatched from the mortal world (with the exception of his friend Jehan). The trilogy does a good job of showing how non-human fey can be.
Wolfgang Baur describes...
He also has some shadow fey his latest Open Design project, Castle Shadowcrag. Very cool.
Has anyone else read Raymond Feist's "Faerie Tale"?
Has anyone else read Raymond Feist's "Faerie Tale"?
Yeah I just read it a couple of months ago. That's the sort of thing I think of when I think of Fey, not pixies and dryads.
Smurfs are fey!!!!!!
As any Belgian will explain to you, at nauseating length: their only contribution to world culture except waffles and abbey ale (hmmm... pancakes and sausage and coffee; waffles and smurfs and ale... winning breakfast combinations!). But yes, Smurfs are a prime example of the "cutification" of Fey that has so annoyed so many people on these boards. Bruce Galloway presents an excellent timeline for this decline in "Fantasy Wargaming" (1981). His game mechanics suck, but his Dark Ages and Medieval history lessons I found very enlightening (but be sure to avoid this book if you hate the "Pasturage for pigs and goats" thread).
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but it might be an interesting experiment to give elves the Fey type (DR 5/cold iron, SR, etc.), "often CN" alignment, and a level adjustment. This would both placate the Tolkien fanboys and also make elves less like annoying hippies... in short, it would make them more like elves (or Sidhe, if you prefer). Gnomes could be fey as well, rather than just another PC race: replace "bard" as a favored class with "druid," eliminate the stupid Warcraft-ripoff tinkering stuff, and go from there. Would anyone else go for this, or am I totally alone here?
Actually its a DragonLance rip off thing.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but it might be an interesting experiment to give elves the Fey type (DR 5/cold iron, SR, etc.), "often CN" alignment, and a level adjustment. This would both placate the Tolkien fanboys and also make elves less like annoying hippies... in short, it would make them more like elves (or Sidhe, if you prefer). Gnomes could be fey as well, rather than just another PC race: replace "bard" as a favored class with "druid," eliminate the stupid Warcraft-ripoff tinkering stuff, and go from there. Would anyone else go for this, or am I totally alone here?
As KnightErrantJr alludes, tinker-gnomes were around in D&D before WoW came about. If memory serves (somebody please correct any inconsistencies), gnomes were initially illusion-centric characters (in 1e(?), early 2e). Then Dragonlance turned them into tinkerers (in later 2e). Now, they've become bards that speak to burrowing animals (in 3.5e). What a schizophrenic race.
I don't dislike the tinkerer gnomes, but they are not my favorite version, and I think that extreme archetype has done more harm to gnomes than good. It is a niche that needs to be filled, and perhaps by a subset of gnomes, but in my opinion, not the whole of them.
I don't dislike the recent bard influence (there's got to be some reason to play a bard right?), but the remainder of the current "gnome" is too Disney-like (talks to chipmunks?).
Gnomes will likely remain illusionist/thieves to me, though I'm not opposed to something else. A more druidic and fey influence could be interesting--play up gnomes' mythical association with earth (better than talking to chipmunks anyway).
I'll leave the elves for someone else to care about. ;)
If memory serves (somebody please correct any inconsistencies), gnomes were initially illusion-centric characters (in 1e(?), early 2e). Then Dragonlance turned them into tinkerers (in later 2e). Now, they've become bards that speak to burrowing animals (in 3.5e). What a schizophrenic race.
1e gnomes could be Illusionists, the only race other than humans able to do so until the original "Unearthed Arcana" errata'd that (iirc). They could "speak with burrowing mammals" even way back then, maybe to link them with the cute pointy-red-hat gnomes from the picture books that we all know and love.
...maybe to link them with the cute pointy-red-hat gnomes from the picture books that we all know and love.
We love those? Really?
Also... in reference to the take on fey being embodiments of human emotion or belief brought up earlier in this thread... I'm kind of a wee bit weary of the whole, 'We exist because you believe we do," motiif for supernatural entities. It's been done well and done cool (see The Sandman, a lot of other Neil Gaiman works, Terry Pratchett,) but it makes them feel less... real in their own context, which doesn't generally work for me in Fantasy. And I think it's been overdone in general.Sometimes I just want a spirit, fey being, or god to be an ancient and nearly timeless being who doesn't need mortals' justification for existing.
Have you tried Rosemary Edgehill's (I think that's the right author) fey novels Ill Met By Moonlight and This Sceptered Isle?
Set in Tudor England, it features two group of fey -one Seelie, one Unseelie - fighting over the existance of the future Elizabeth I while at the same time going to all possible lengths to prevent humans in general from learning that fey still exist.
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Hmmm...it turns out, after some discussion with my wife, that there's a key weakness with my take on fae. Namely they're not outsiders. If they were these planar critters like genies or elementals who wander from plane to plane serving courts affiliated with the various gods (which I still love, darnit!) they would be outsiders.
The description of the fey descriptor in the MM says they are bound to nature or to a certain locale and have powers that dervive from that place. So yeah, keeping that requirement that they be native and bound to certain places or aspects of the material plane, I'll rework some things and see what I can come up with.
Hmm..type: Outsider (native) perhaps? I am a huge fan of the Faerie Plane of existance...(see Gary Gygax's Mythus setting for Dangerous Journeys as an example). Too often I feel fey have recieved too much attention on the whimsical side of their nature, turning them into some kind of joke or parody.
I like to think of them as the children in "Lord of the Flies"...its all a game *TO THEM* (fey), but it is a very deadly and serious game to the *ADULTS*(non-fey). Leprachauns and pixies are feared...not because they WANT to hurt you, but because their games usually result in non-fey getting hurt.
Indeed. Extending this further, you could have seelie (the responsible kids) and the unseelie (the crazy kids), but I think such divisions should be avoided...they are supposed to be CHAOTIC afterall. Better yet, imagine the elf vs. orc rivalry (Corellan vs gruumsh) as a game of "catch the arrow" gone bad (Why Gruumsh is upset is odd...he did win after all, I mean gosh, its not Corellans fault he caught it with his eye).
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I was wondering if anybody had some ideas or refrence sources (fiction, RPG, or otherwise) that I could use for incorporating the Shadar-Kai found in the Fiend Folio.
I ask because I had this idea for using them in an adventure set in a Greyhawk adventure based in the Dim Forest in pre-liberated Geoff. I thought that the whole Shadow Dragon and portal to the Plane of Shadow would be a good fit.
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Also... in reference to the take on fey being embodiments of human emotion or belief brought up earlier in this thread... I'm kind of a wee bit weary of the whole, 'We exist because you believe we do," motiif for supernatural entities. It's been done well and done cool (see The Sandman, a lot of other Neil Gaiman works, Terry Pratchett,)
I have always been a fan of Neil Gaiman's works, specifically Books of Magic & Books of Fairie. And I don't want to hear the Harry Potter comparisons. Books of Magic was published in 1990.. Potter didn't come out until 1997.
Trent
I'm of the opinion that Fey are the manifestations of the extremes of the mortal condition itself. Fiends and celestials are personifications of base, abstract concepts of morality and alignment, immortal and divorced from mortality. Fey are considerably more poignant, because they're the best and worst aspects of the mortal condition taken to their extremes in oftentimes nonsensical, bizarre fashion.