Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
The Fairies William Allingham
"What are ye doing, O Flesh and Blood,
And what's your foolish will,
That you must break into Minepit Wood
And wake the Folk of the Hill?"
The Ballad of Minepit Shaw Rudyard Kipling
Basic Information
Fairies are a type of supernatural being, possibly a spirit which, depending on which mythological source you ask, can be nature spirits, spirits of the dead, former angels who allied neither with Heaven nor with Hell, former pagan deities, and so forth. Others believe them to mystical races related to humans in some way or forming part of some previous world order.
They are generally said to be highly capricious but bound by the letter of their promises. Cold iron is said to repel them. In more modern times, they generally stay out of the sight of humans, but they can be very dangerous to trespassers and those who offend them, even accidentally.
They are said to vary from the inhumanly beautiful to the utterly hideous - although even the most humanlike will have some feature that gives them away on closer examination1 - and in size from tiny to larger than human. Their attitudes also seem to vary widely - some are violent and bloodthirsty, some light hearted and playful (although frequently with an unpleasant sense of humour) and others utterly solemn. All seem to be obsessed with custom, precedent and balance (although their idea of what is valuable is often widely different from ours) - and easily offended by people who trespass against them, knowingly or not.
Whilst they tend to be be resistant to change in most things, it is not unknown for them to be curious about mortal matters and or entranced by a talented or beautiful mortal. This rarely ends well, as being both ancient and immortal they have no sense of time, and a mortal brought to a fairy revel may find that years have passed in the course of what seemed to be only a single night…
Worse still, the fairies sometimes abduct mortal children - some say as slaves, others to study or use for breeding stock. Sometimes a fairy will take the child's place, becoming a changeling, either to cover up the abduction or to steal the child's identity and experience life as a mortal, although such infiltrators generally give themselves away sooner or later through their inability to stay in character.
Between the changeling phenomenon and the occasional disappearance of entertainers, the fey have been a pretty fair fit for the abductor in many mytheia.
Fairies are said to wield great magical power, although how much of their magic is merely illusion is open to question - gifts extorted from fairies are sometimes little better than witch boons and those freely given are sometimes not much better. Their gold, in particular, has a tendency to turn back into dead leaves at inopportune moments. So much of their "power" often turns out to be trickery, and whilst going toe to toe with them is unwise at best, anything so vulnerable to being warded off by cheap iron nails, or even fresh bread is not all that great a power.
In Scandinavia, the Fairy nations are represented by the Huldra … who are frequently also referred to as trolls.
List of Fairies
See Also
Sources
Game and Story Use
- Their capricious nature and supernatural powers make fairies great antagonists - especially if the PCs need to outwit the fairy instead of besting it in combat (which may be next to impossible).
- Fairies might approach a group of PCs for help - something important to them is under threat (say, a woodland threatened by developement) and they need mortal agents to save it. As employers the fey - wierd, capricious and with no sense of time, money or mortal culture - leave a lot to be desired and the payment may be even more trouble than the job.
- The PCs buy - or are given - a property or piece of land that seems extremely valuable, except that it's infested with fairies, who prove to be an utter nuisance and make it virtually unusable.
- A young mother insists that her baby … isn't her baby any more. Obviously some kind of postnatal pyschosis and a job for the social services. Except that wherever the baby goes, there seems to be a long trail of unfortunate accidents - how to stop the extremely unseelie changeling, recover the stolen child and reunite it with its institutionalised mother whilst facing harrassment from child protection staff who are far too clever to believe in fairies?
- The fair folk are notoriously promiscuous and fickle in their affections - what of a child, mysteriously fatherless whose wan, distracted mother still pines for an absent fairy lover? Or the young batchelor whose unremembered night in the woods one summer solstice comes back to haunt him when a baby in a strangely woven basket appears on his doorstep?
- They are the source of 'lost time' that predates alien abduction (but mirrors it very closely in other ways) - what strangenesses might come from an unexplained disappearance that the victim never quite remembers after his return?
- Alternatively the abductee might remember his sojurn all too well, with or without affection - like Thomas Rhymer or Tam O'Lynn. Either way he might have picked up some useful skills, allies or enemies in his time in faerieland.
- The PCs have sold something for a good price in gold - only to find themselves holding a bag of dead leaves
