Ok, there seems to be 2 classes of fey: satyrs, mites, redcaps and a few others; these are the shock troops. They physically threaten the players in some way, regardless of their methods or mindset, and present a good physical challenge. I can certainly envision a trap-filled goblin lair except remove the goblins and dogs/snakes substituting mites and insects in their place.
Then there's the truly scary fey; the mastermind types. Take for example the lowly Huldra. She alone, if used sparingly and played both with intelligence and the mindset of an immortal child, could conceivably dominate an entire party or run whole gangs of villains. She can charm or inflict deep slumber, has decent disguise skils, use magic device and daze monster...
Imagine if a Huldra got it in her head that she wanted presents for her upcoming birthday. She then disguises herself, comes into town, and charms shopkeepers into giving her their wares. She spots one of the PC's and thinks they'd make a great addition to her collection. She gives him a map to her lair and takes off. She then sets up an obstacle course using charmed goblins. There's woodland traps, goblin ambushes and worse. All to see if the player is worthy of her kiss.
He gets to her lair, finds her there and she kisses him...at which point he rebukes and -4 charisma and 7hp later she makes for the door. If he accepts her advances then she "plays" with him for a couple levels until she gets bored with him and drops some negative luck on him after charming an orc barbarian into "taking out the trash".
Does all this ring true w/your campaigns?
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I've also used a few more "scary" fey than normal (including one with this art).
Zak Sabbath's work?
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Ok, there seems to be 2 classes of fey: satyrs, mites, redcaps and a few others; these are the shock troops
...snip...
Then there's the truly scary fey; the mastermind types.
...snip...
Does all this ring true w/your campaigns?
This doesn't ring true for mine at all.
There are so many 'shock-troops' in the game already that using satyrs, mites and redcaps in that way is missing a trick.
Satyrs play music, drink wine, make love and care for the creatures of the forest. They're not shock-troops, that's orcs. Satyrs are CN and will probably meet adventurers when they seek one out for advice, when they are lost in the woods, or when the woods are threatened and the satyr needs help. A satyr might play tricks on them, or charm them into joining his revels when they should be off hunting down a dangerous foe. He's only going to be actively striking against your PCs if they're burning down the forest or something like that.
Mites are vermin-riding creeps who live in caves underground. I don't like them as fey because Paizo made them Lawful, which annoys me: all of my fey are inherently chaotic. So, in my game, Mites are CN. They're creepy because they live with vermin in dark caves underground and they might feed an adventurer to the giant spider when it has been starving and needs nourishment. Some mites are CE but those are not the core.
Even if you use the core description of Mites they're still not great shock troops: the giant spiders they ride are shock troops and they are just a creepy addition which makes the spiders organised.
Redcaps are proper evil fey but they're also mad little freaks. I play them as CE, slaves to their own mad desires. Normally my redcaps are fey who have turned to evil and been driven partially mad as the embrace the evil within, similar to pathfinder drow. I love that simply presenting a holy symbol can bend their brains and send them fleeing in terror.
Huldra are CN forest spirits who often aid travellers and form romances with woodsmen which turn sour in the end because their natures are so different. They get offended easily if people react strangely to their hollow backs and fox-tails but are otherwise quite charming. A scary fey mastermind huldra would require an alignment change and some serious motivation.
Don't forget your Grigs, Dryads, Nymphs and Pixies are all good. Paizo seems to have an obsession, a boring one, with evil fey. Maybe it's because JJ is such an ardent horror fan? Brownies used to be good but paizo made them neutral... they also dropped sprites (described as Neutral with good tendencies in the ToH)
When fey are antagonists it should be due to fundamentally conflicting natures and worldviews. The game is suffused with creepy evil, even more with Pathfinder's embracing of Lovecraft, so it doesn't need fay to be creepy evil.
How much otherworldly and strange with incomprehensible perspectives but non-evil, playful and capricious does Pathfinder have? Not a lot. That is what fey are for.
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I have an old adventure compilation somewhere with a charming level 1 adventure which would be perfect for introducing children to PFRPG if converted.
It features a spellcaster who is finding life hard and a struggle. When he is walking through the winter forest a bunch of little snow-fairies start pelting him with snowballs and his temper snaps: he shoves one in a birdcage and takes it home.
He's got it in his room but doesn't know what to do with it. All he wants is an apology and he doesn't know that the snowfairy will die if kept away from nature for too long.
The other snow-fairies decide this is an act of war and ambush some caravans in the snow, then they kidnap and human child.
The PCs have to solve this mess.
That is the kind of fey game you used to be able to have, it is more difficult now though, with Paizo tipping all of the fey over toward grim horror. Like we don't have enough demons, devils and daemons for that...
I like the Van Richten's Guide for fey. The only thing I don't like is that they can ALL create changelings. All the time. This seems unreasonable to me.
So I guess "shock troops" wasn't the right word. All fey are best used sparingly it seems, and their powers/skills/nature lend themselves to individual involvement such that you'll never see a horde of goblins supported by a cadre of satyrs on a raid against a town.
I suppose what I meant was there's lesser and greater fey. Not just in the respect that they have higher and lower CR's. Instead I mean there's a CR 1 Grig that wants to confront some evildoer entering her forest and usually takes a pretty direct, albeit hidden action against said evildoer, whereas you have a redcap slave to its own homicidal tendencies without all the glimmery powers of typical fey.
In this instance I could see the grig tricking the redcap into stalking and slaughtering the evildoer in its forest.
But on a larger scale, I guess I don't see mass hordes of fey as villains; not the way you'd have goblins or demons organized. No, I'm noticing that most of the stories involving them in people's campaigns involve singular fey entities with a specific purpose in mind (except maybe the redcap).
I think that's what I'll use them for. The party goes to the dungeon and finds a bunch of goblins horded around a weird fey shrine. A necromancer Sithe is using them and some undead for twisted experiments to awaken a fey spirit trapped within the shrine. That kind of thing.
Is that a V8 twin cam?
Found this old thread in my history, so I'll reply again, since as a dm I have been using them a bit more.
Fey have a number of areas in my setting that they pretty much control. They do not maintain this control, on there own. Fey and Gremlins are closely aligned, but Gremlins are more adventurous and closer to the standard goblin, which is removed. Gremlins are more evil, other fey are not always evil.
The fey lands, mostly deep primordial forests are patrolled by rangers. Most of these are evil, and kill tresspassers into the old sacred areas. These hunters do leave markers, but there is a language divide between the ancient brotherhood of rangers, and most "civilised" nations. Such that the markers are not always understood.
Fey are also strongly associated to a variety of shapechangers, which I put in similar camps. Werewolves will have their own hunting areas, but be far closer to fey and plant-kind than humans. Aranea I tied to the fey.
Sentient plant kind are all over and quite strong. Luckily they are not expansionistic except for a few notable exceptions like the "plant ogre" or weird plant serial killers that wander out (one of the players). I use wood woads a lot, treants are in there for sure.
One fey loving char got me thinking about this, and this was the eventual result.
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I like fey inspired by:
1. Changeling
2. Planescape
3. Elizabeth Bear's "Blood and Iron" and "Whiskey and Water" series
4. Neil Gaiman's everything
5. A whole slew of Urban Fantasy (Kim Harrison, Charles DeLint, Laurell K. Hamilton (before she got gross), Dresden Files, etc.)
6. CJ Cherryh's "Goblin Mirror" and "Faery in Shadow."
7. "War for the Oaks" by Emma Bull.
The 'fey' in my world are alien, amoral, sociopathic schizophrenics that pass, generally by accident, into our world via places of ley significance or through gates (that we tend to recognize as rainbows).
I've had a few fey encounters in my games, enough so that when my players see a rainbow they get edgy. =D
Their values are different and changing. They could sing and laugh with you one moment and then attempt to eat your face the next. The more chaotic and vibrant the fey, generally the more powerful. The more stable of the fey, such as elves, also wield only a fraction of the power of say nymphs or dryads.
My fey are largely based on Terry Pratchett (my megalomanic Elves for example) as well as Icelandic and Norse mythos fey myths.
Felt like this didn't quite deserve its own topic, so I figured I'd ask here...
So, I'm currently running a Kingmaker Campaign and I've come to the conclusion that I need to kill one of the PC's wife(well, the only PC with a significant other, and he actually asked me to kill her at some point so he could have himself an alignment change), death by troll attack.
What does this have to do with the fey you ask? Well I had the ridiculous idea that some relatively friendly fey the party knows, some how discover this and are some how able to discover her relationship with the PC and decide to recover the body and attempt to raise her. Of course being fey, its not that simple and the actually revive her as a fey creature(I'm thinking on purpose, but I could say it was an unfortunate side effect of a reincarnation spell).
Think this might be too much? And if not, what would be a good way to figure out why fey creature she would become? Sadly I don't know much about her other then she is an elven wizard who is very artistic. I've been looking at some fey creatures, and found a couple that sound like they may work(Brownie, Dryad, Pixie so far), but any suggestions would be nice.
Maybe a hob? They like to build or make things. Charles DeLint has a lot of stories and novels about artistic fey in modern times.
I had a campaign of fey, goblins, and trolls once upon a time, and it was really fun. Lots of MM3 stuff. The BBEG was a half-plant red dragon that had been slumbering for centuries.
I often use fey as one of my villain; typically an ambiguously evil character that mirrors one of the character's (usually equally ambiguously) good ally.
Most of the time, that fey villain takes interest in the PC somehow and want's it for his/her own. It's usually more about trickery and guile than brute force and open confrontation.
A Boogeyman who killed children in a big city. Not very creative but hey, it was fun watching them figure it all out before pulling an IT and descending into the depths of the city to face it.
Well I had the ridiculous idea that some relatively friendly fey the party knows, some how discover this and are some how able to discover her relationship with the PC and decide to recover the body and attempt to raise her. Of course being fey, its not that simple and the actually revive her as a fey creature(I'm thinking on purpose, but I could say it was an unfortunate side effect of a reincarnation spell).
Then, depending on the death, what you want is a rusalka, or a sluagh, both are faeries of unquiet spirits. A rusalka is in the Midgard Bestiary, and I've spun up a couple of unique sluagh, so if you want one, let me know and I'll adjust what I've got. I'll need to know how she died, though, that'll be important.
Side note, I'd suggest Ars Magica's _Realms of Power:Faerie, which shows how faeries exist as creatures of story-- acting out roles within stories, and either incognizant of that role, partially cognizant and able to grow in that role, or fully cognizant and able to shift their role. It puts a fantastic spin on them. I always think the fae look at people as toys, and some like to break their toys.
Good luck!
-Ben.
Got a different encounter with fey planned in one game.
The party have founded a new settlement near a river, cleaning out the monsters but there are a lot of fey, both good and bad.
A child will go missing, players will ask the likely suspects investigate around, they might split up.
They will find a cute little fairy lounging around, on a strange sort of bedroll. Fairy looks a bit fat. Bedroll is the clothes of the victim. Fairy will either lie if there are multiple heroes, praise fate and go into attack mode if there is only one of them.
Thus the carni-fairy will be revealed. Tiny, cute looking pixie girl. First use its special ability, cone breath attack that shrinks the pc/pcs to diminutive, no save if within cone. Lasts 1 hour. Its flesh then warps and it has a frog-like mouth, filled with terrifying teeth, and its arms bend to be like praying mantis limbs, but with clawed hands. Now they are fighting a tiny fey, as diminutive adventurers. So it is a giant compared to them. The fey will try to bite and swallow them whole and it has good combat stats. Death inside is slow.
Other problems, the cone attracts other carni-fairies, although there are not that many in the region which will attack before the hour is up. They also don't know when it will wear off, and home is 2km away and over a river.
If they kill the fairy, or any like it, it becomes a magic nut, which if eaten makes the adventurer diminutive for 8 hours.