Jan 16

Fey



Most human children are told the stories, the stories of what lurks in the woods.  The stories of the leprechauns and their pots of gold.  The tales of the dryads, who live in trees and make slaves of men for seven years.  The stories of the satyrs and their pan pipes, the centaurs, the sylphs, the pixies and the nixies and many others.

Perhaps in other worlds such stories would be dismissed as fantasy.  But in The Known Lands, where gods answer prayers on a daily basis and every now and again a dragon in flight casts his shadow on the towns below, most children will grow up and spend their entire lives never seeing a fey, but their existence is not doubted.

Which is all well and good, since the fey are very real.

If you asked most commoners about the fey, they'd tell you the same thing: they live in forests, keep mostly to themselves, are very magical, like to play tricks, and shouldn't be crossed.  While this is mostly accurate, this is far from the entire story.

Where the Fey Live

It is true that fey live in forests.  Actually, they live in all manner of wilderness area - mountains, jungles, swamps, deserts, plains, even the ocean.  The only place fey are rarely found is underground; the fey themselves will tell you that they do not live in the Underdark, and few like subterranean dwellings.

People rarely encounter fey because usually they live in the remotest of these wilderness areas.  Other fey may live closer to humanoid civilization, but they are usually the smaller fey races, or the ones who possess magic allowing them to conceal themselves and their habitats.  But to be totally accurate, most fey actually do not live in The Known Lands at all.  They live on their own plane, known simply as the Plane of Faerie*.  For every fairy living in The Known Lands there are said to be a hundred or even a thousand living on the Plane of Faerie.

Planar cosmologists are not exactly sure where the Plane of Faerie lies.  The dominant theory classifies it as a "quasiouter plane," and places it somewhere among Heaven, Hell, and the Astral and Ethereal Planes.  About the location of the plane, the fey themselves seem to know about as much as they care, which is not one whit.  According to the fey and those few others who have seen it, the Plane of Faerie is much like The Known Lands - there is day and night, a sun and a moon, and seasons.  There is a variety of terrain and different types of climates.  But there are two major differences, the first being the lack of an ocean; while there are numerous rivers and lakes, there are no islands, for all of the land is connected.  The second difference is that the Plane of Faerie is quasi-infinite; if you could go east in a straight line, and you kept going east, eventually you'd end up in the west, and if you continued east you'd finally end up right back where you started.  The same thing happens if you go north or south.

The Fey Way

It is true that the fey keep mostly to themselves.  If a fey were to spot people in the forest, they may watch them for a while, but they would not make contact.  It isn't that fey are anti-social; far from it, fey are very sociable creatures.  The main reason the fey keep to themselves is that they have little in common with non-fey.

Fey live off of the land, both in The Known Lands and in the Plane of Faerie.  Fey do not farm, and those who eat meat only hunt as much as they need; some fey don't even need to eat at all.  They barter a bit among themselves, but they make no products to trade with others, and don't have a system of money (why leprechauns gather gold is a mystery even to other fey).  In other words, most of the time the fey live a life of idle leisure, working only when they have to, which is not that often.  Perhaps this is why the fey enjoy pranks and partying so much.  This idle life is known among the fey simply as "the fey way."  As one dwarf druid put it:

"I was invited to stay with a brownie blacksmith and exchange smithing knowledge; I'd been a smith before becoming a druid.  Well, the brownie woke up at noon, would get to his anvil around three, then heat up and pound on a stick of iron for maybe an hour.  By then it was sundown and he'd go off to get drunk and chase women.  It was like this every day... for six months.  At the end of it, I wasn't sure if I should give him a high five or punch him in the face."

The fey consider themselves tied closely to the land, and do their best to live in harmony with the environment.  They have rapports with animals, animal spirits, and spirits of nature.  Many fey can speak with animals and usually treat them as equals, or at least show them great respect.

When fey do interact with others, it is usually those who have share a similar lifestyle or set of beliefs.  Elves and fey have much in common; though pricks to most other races, elves grant the fey a grudging respect.  Druids, rangers, and shamans are also sometimes able to make contact with the fey.  Sometimes the fey will invite them to their meets.

To better understand the fey way it is important to know more about their origin, history, and way of life.

Fey Origin and History

The origin story shared by the religions of The Known Lands does not include the fey. Indeed, some early religious documents make mention of the fey, and seem to imply that the fey existed before the deities created the races of The Known Lands. The fey themselves have little to say on the matter, not because they have anything to hide or want to be secretive, but simply because they have no idea. The fey have racial languages and use Sylvan as a common tongue, and many of those languages have writing systems, but few fey can really be arsed to make paper let alone books for keeping records in. Many fey keep an oral history, but most of it seems to be concerned with who porked who at what party. As best as the fey can tell, they've been dicking around on the Plane of Faerie for at least ten thousand years, but time flows faster on that plane than it does in The Known Lands so no one is truly sure if the fey predate the Third Age or not. The fey themselves have little knowledge of Known Lands history; most have no idea that there have been three ages.

Fey and Religion

The fey on the Plane of Faerie don't normally worship any deities.  But they know of the existence of the gods.  Fey living in The Known Lands have a working knowledge of religion gained from elves, druids, and others, and being practical in a fey sort of way, many of them will worship a deity - Oeunin being most common - because, well, it can't hurt.  The fey know of Heaven and Hell and know them to exist, but fey believe in direct reincarnation - when they die they are immediately reborn as a new fey, or perhaps an animal if no fey are being born in that particular instant.  Or maybe if they did something really bad in life, they'll have to spend a life cycle as an elf or human.

Fey Government

The fey are interesting in that they are separated into very distinct races, but these all races all are unified under the same identity as fey creatures.  That said, racial tensions rise from time to time.  This is exacerbated by the fact that the fey races don't have distinct nations with geographical boundaries; races can and often do share territory, which increases the chances of disputes.  For the purpose of resolving these disputes - indeed, for seemingly only this purpose - the fey have a government.  This government is called the Seelie Court.

This court is not a court as in a court of law, but more like a king's court.  And indeed the fey have a King and a Queen.  But the court is really more like a council.  Each fey race has a seat on the council, taken by that race's leader.  That leader always has a very official-sounding title: the Prince of Pixies, the Duchess of Dryads, the Leftenant of Leprechauns, the CEO of Satyrs.  It is the duty of this council to settle disputes among the various races.  The fey have no taxes to collect, no laws to pass, and no drive to progress past the status quo they've kept for millennia.  But the single task set upon the Seelie Court takes up most of their time.  Disputes never escalate to actual violent conflict, but they can take years to properly sort out.

The current king is King Oberlin, a brownie.  His wife, a pixie, is known simply as The White Queen.  She is known for her streaming white hair, pale skin, and white dress.

The aforementioned titles beg the question, "do the fey have a noble class?"  To which the answer is a resounding no.  Every race has its clans and its families, and these subdivisions have their leaders, and while the leaders are highly respected they are rarely envied.  Leadership positions are often loathed, for leading and managing takes away from valuable puttering-around time.  It is said that the leprechauns chose their supreme leader with a massive strip poker game; whoever is the first to get naked becomes the Leftenant of Leprechauns.

Fey Magic

The fey are indeed magical creatures, and this magic confounds mages.  Every fey race has innate abilities, and they seem to be able to draw the power for these abilities from the Plane of Faerie.  This in itself is not so unusual; many creatures draw power from one plane or another.  What confounds mages is that only the fey seem to be able to tap into the Plane of Faerie and its magic.  The energy for the spells of wizards and sorcerors and other practitioners usually comes from the elemental planes and the energy planes, known collectively as the Inner Planes, with a few spells accessing the Astral and Ethereal Planes.  Warlocks tap into Hell for their powers, shamans draw power from various spirits, and divine casters gain their power from their respective deities.  But no non-fairy has ever been able to draw power from the Plane of Faerie.  Interestingly, the fey use this power unconsciously; fey who become wizards, for example, also are unable to create spells which use the Plane of Faerie, though their innate abilities do.

Fey Pranks

Fey have a lot of free time on their hands.  Many fey chose to spend this free time playing pranks.  Most of the time they play pranks on each other, but occasionally they'll decide to prank some non-fey.  Indeed, if a fey decides to interact with non-fey at all, it is usually to play a prank on them.  Some sages speculate that the leprechauns' infamous "pots of gold" is a running gag that has been going on for centuries.

Crossing the Fey

Since the fey rarely interact with others, they have few enemies.  Some fey are known to be territorial - the savage fey of Quon'lun is a prime example - but in most cases fey choose not to resort to violence.  The main exception to this is when the wilderness is threatened.  Races who despoil fey territory - savage orcs are a common example - face the full fury of the fey.  And while the fey are not particularly skilled in martial matters, their magic can be devastating.

Fey Meets

The fey party hard and party often.  But a fey meet is a different matter altogether.  Fey meets start as very serious gatherings where fey business is discussed - bartering, the arrangement of marriages, plans of attack and defense against threats, and so on.  Animals and spirits are freely allowed to attend these meets.  More rarely, friends of the fey - elves, druids, shamans, etc. - are invited.  During meets rituals are performed which open portals to the Plane of Faerie, allowing fey to move back and forth between The Known Lands and their native home. Once all that is taken care of, the usual debauchery ensues.

Fey and Dwarves

A special note must be made about fey and dwarves.  These two races do not hate each other.  Indeed, the fey love dwarves - well, love to play pranks on them.  For dwarves, probably the fact that many fey resemble elves in either appearance or outlook puts them off.  Indeed, some dwarves speculate that when the gods created dwarves and then Wyleven allowed them to assume any form, those who wanted to emulate fey became the first elves.  Perhaps most telling is the five insults most likely to cause a dwarven bar fight:

5. "You don't have a beard down there."
4. "Your mother's an oreless shaft."
3. "An elf's piss is darker than this ale."
2. "Who put sand in your vagina?"
1. "You are so fey."

Indeed, fey has become a loanword in dwarvish, and basically means "lazy" when used as an adjective and "get a job you lazy son of a whore" when used as a verb as in the phrases "fey off" or "go fey yourself."  Interestingly, in a cross-citadel survey the typically homophobic dwarves were more offended at being called fey than being called homosexual.  Incidentally, fey, which in Sylvan means "I," is also a loanword in elvish, in which it is a slang term meaning "great, awesome."  Many hundred-something elves when complimenting something can be heard to remark, "Yes, zat is so fey."

Telthor

From a human point of view, telthors are fey animals.  You've got your regular animal, you've got your dire animal, your celestial animal, and your fey animal.  How they came about and are related is anyone's guess.  Most human sages theorize that long ago the fey took some animals to the Plane of Faerie and those animals eventually bonded with the plane and became (some go so far as to say changeoluted) into telthors.

The fey explain it differently.  They say that a telthor is a telthor, and telthors are to animals what fey are to people.  A typically fey explanation, it does little to clear things up.  The fey are adamant that telthors predate animals and are unrelated to them; some sages agree with this stance and postulate that when Wyleven allowed people to assume whatever form they wanted many of today's animals were people who chose forms that emulated the telthors.  But even the fey cannot say for certain, for they don't have concrete proof due to their lack of historical records.

But the telthors have a say, since they can speak.  Telthors are sentient, and are on average about a smart as humans.  The Plane of Faerie is populated with fey, normal animals, and telthors.  The telthors themselves also have only their own oral histories to go by, which are inconclusive.  They are content to worry less about their origin and more about living their current lives.  Telthors look very similar to normal animals, but are sometimes larger and often have distinct coloration, or an obvious magical aura.  Like fey, they have innate magical abilities drawn from the Plane of Faerie.  Telthors live and work with the fey on the Plane of Faerie.  They rarely travel to The Known Lands, but have been known to go there at the behest of fey leaders.

The Kitsuune

Though most animal spirits reside in the Ethereal Plane (aka "the spirit world"), The Kitsuune is known to be found on the Plane of Faerie (it is debated whether it lives there, can travel freely between the Plane of Faerie and the spirit world, or exists in both planes at once).  A nine-tailed fox spirit, The Kitsuune speaks prophecies. The fey revere her in a way for her charm and her trickster spirit.  The Kitsuune often be found as only a smile and the brief shape of a fox head or nine tails; very rarely will the creature show its full form. Those who visit it will always be given four pieces of information - and then told that part of it is a lie - before being ushered away.

* - The word faerie comes from elvish.  In Common the word has become fairy.  Though spelled differently, they have roughly the same pronunciation.



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