How do we make faeries interesting again?

blenders?

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like cyber-elves in Mega Man Zero series?

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Sort of, but they are physical beings instead of being made of pure energy.

Fuck the fae.

That's pretty much the attitude towards them. They're a force of nature as much as we might say we hate the heat or are scared of gale force winds knocking down our shitty huts. Only they can be warded of by church bells and iron horseshoes and nails, like I'm sure you can do something about that heat and those winds, like the old cunning man told you.

It's all magic, user, and it's all terribly mundane for it.

Consequently, calling them fae fools nobody, but people seem to think it sounds cooler than fairies.

>people seem to think it sounds cooler than fairies.
Because it does.

I'm interested but shes gotta be scaled 8x than what she is if I'm going to be satisfiyed

Just always bothered me. It's still fairies, everyone knows that, it just seems like an ill attempt to cover that up, you know? I can never take any of it seriously, especially when they're given 'cooler' names.

I dunno, I grew up with this stuff, used to be my job at one point, it's just not exciting for me since the stories are terribly samey and the fairies, or daoine sidhe (dee-nee shee) if you want to be pedantic, just come off as self-obsessed, overly-nostalgic narcissists who really aren't capable of more than a serious bruise, whose bark is way worse than their bite. Still, there's farmers out there who won't plow into fairy territory. I met a guy once who warned me and my dad away from a fairy tree, it was kind of cool to hear that outside of a story.

>It's still fairies, everyone knows that, it just seems like an ill attempt to cover that up, you know?
I disagree, but maybe that's because I grew up purely Murrikan. To me, fairies are little winged folk who flit around and teach children to fly by wishing really hard. Fae are murderous baby-snatchers.

Clearly none of you have played "Fairy Meat", which is hilarious, because Veeky Forums introduced me to the game.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_Meat

I'd say "Make them more like WoD Fairies", but that doesn't appeal to everyone. At the end of the day, some people still like them for what they are and not what they used to be or what they are in specific settings.

Calling them "Fairies" then subverting the viewer's expectations and reverting to weird shape-shifting inscrutable little buggers that live in dead king's barrows and kidnap or enchant unwitting folk is part of the charm.

WOD goes into too much detail.

Ironically, the more you know about the structure and motives of any given fairy court system, the less mysterious and ethereal it seems.

You have to allude to a higher power structure whilst only showing the tip of the iceberg, to maintain the sense of the sublimely unreal.

Make them scary. I love the stories some people have about entering the fairy world and having all noise of the woods go away. If you eat anything while you're there it is supposed to trap you inside forever.
In that reddit thread on r/nope that is top of all time about stairs in the comments some guy was talking about hunting with his brother and experiencing something similar (albiet nothing to do with eating anything)

You know, in all of the fairy stories I've read, I've never actually read of fairies just killing people. Curses, changelings, overnight enslavement into battles or sports games, plenty of weird shit, but very rarely mentions of outright death. I think they've danced people to death before, before but that's the extent of it, because fairies love to dance. Leprechauns have a monopoly on the fairy shoe repair market, it's where they get their gold. If someone's read about fairies just killing people in mythology, let me know.

They're really just like the Irish themselves - overly-nostalgic and generally bitter about their overall situation in life. Fairies live underground because humans pushed them there, it's pretty much why they fuck around with us.

The distinction you have is really interesting, though, it shows just how much of an influence that Victorian-era nonsense really had on the world. The Cottingley Fairy photographs (I think that's the name), that's the little winged people shit. But that was outed as a total invention, yet it's the norm now.

Depends what you count as a fairy.

Neck's (Also Nixies or Nicor) are renowned drowners of germanic folklore; the Kelpie is another water spirit, this time Scottish in origin, usually takes the form of a horse that when you touch it, you cannot let go and it drags under the surface of a deep river to eat you at leisure.

The Irish Dullahan, (certainly an Unseelie fairy) though more a herald of death than a killer is actively malevolant, and is known to blind mortals who observe their passage; either by flinging blood in their face or by striking their eyes out with a whip.

Kelpies are fucking dicks

I read somewhere (in a ravenloft forum I think) about using faeries as the living embodiment of something, like a physical object like a tree or a stream (ex. Dryads) or like an abstract concept like murder or greed (ex redcaps).

There was also a part on them as a Narrative entites, that draw power from the stories about them, so a fey that is connected with the woods and stuff can start emulating the stories about dryads, gaining power from them.

yeah in Western folklore it seems if a monster is part horse they're usually a complete and utter bastard, like the Nuckalevee for example(the Pegasus and Unicorns seem to be rare exceptions to this)

Faeries are plenty interesting, go fuck yourself.

Just play them as the original Gaelic mythology intended. Sidhe are great.

Powries. Powries are proper little assholes who just stab the shit out of anybody they find on the road with an iron pike, because they literally have a bloodstained cap that needs to stay wet or they die.

The hell you need her that small for? You'd hardly see her! You got a micro dick?

>How do we make faeries interesting again?
>again

When were they not?

I like this older notion. Make them an ingrained, inextricable part of the setting. Maybe replace the elemental themes so ingrained in a lot of RPGs with seasonal fairy courts. You don't summon a Fire Elemental, you call on part of a fairy's true name and command them to fulfill their role, perhaps with a cost or sacrifice called for in return later on behalf of the court at large.

Why is there magical stuff all over? Fairies left stuff over from visiting the mortal realm in a physical state.

Hell, if you're looking at later eras, like an industrial setting game, fairies might want to protect some old environments, but I'd imagine they'd make sure that they have their own places in the world as it changed. Why do the trains run on time without fail? Because the Autumnal Court owns the rails and slow/speed up time to make sure that the trains arrive when they're supposed to even if they take a while longer or run early.

Don't go down to the docks after sundown on week days; Winter Court handles its more private business; nothing illegal, they make sure of it to avoid mortal intervention, but you can expect a Horrible run of bad luck if you see something they don't want you to.

Pic related; mining isn't what it used to be, but damn if we're not making a killing on the gold speculation markets, all for the good of the Spring Conglomerate.
Good luck trying to sort out where all that money's going though. Rather, don't. Ever. You may find out more than you ever wanted.

How do you make the fae interesting in a setting already filled with other quirky, immortal races with non-human mindsets and morality?

I run Planescape games where the PCs are celestials, fiends, celestial-fiend hybrids, and stranger creatures still (like avatars of constellations), and the fae simply wind up being "the mortals of the Prime Material Plane, only immortal," because there is not that much to differentiate them from actual outsiders.

Make them just close enough to being human that they're comfortable to be around and can be apparently reasoned with initially, but the longer you stay with them, the longer it becomes clear they operate on a seperate morality and world view. The fact they're sort of mundane makes them rather surreal to outsiders, yet all their fae quirks make them seem crazy, or at least immature to mortals.

But also super cute

I've always like the idea of spirits keeping up with humanity rather then being vestiages of days gone by. Maybe you might have a few who try to hold true to the good ole days but then you have everyone else who's all into the modern shit that humans have come up with.

So you walk around in a slumy part of the city and you see the bag head kids running around with smart phones; they glow but the numbers and letters are all out of place and move differently when they aimlessly tap away at the screen. It doesn't serve any real purpose but they just like it because it looks cool.

And then you have some fae like creatures that are really in tune with man and technology like some sprite or whatever that goes about travelling on the internet pretending to be a random facebook user trying to see how many friends it can make hence why you have seemingly random people asking you to be friends with them or pretending to be robot callers just so they can hear people talk to them.

Make them what they originally were: tiny little fuckholes who preyed on people for their own sick amusement and sometimes went as far as maim and kill them in freak "accidents" they staged in order to push out a few more laughs from themselves.

In the video game Recettear, fairies are secretly a serf-race to humanity in exchange for indefinitely delaying their total annihilation.

They were originally the prankster dickbags you know them to be.

So humanity went out and systematically eradicated them like talking bugs. Racial Cleansing, ho!

Now fae breed/raise a special caste of fairy to be able to function in human society, hold jobs, talk to others, do business, and make it look like faeries are good boys and girls... and not instinctively revert to being miniature-Loki and break all their treaties.

Yes, this is part of some kawaii-desu-money-management-jrpg with a loli as its main character.

>Kelpie
DELETE THIS

Glad to see this thread still alive after the night.

I'm talking about Irish fairies, really, I'm not terribly accustomed to continental little people, although I know they're certainly fiercer sometimes than Irish little people.

Funny thing is I've always read of the Dullahan as a ghost, a malevolent spirit, not a fairy. The headless horseman on a headless horse with a spine whip and heavy metal soundtrack blaring around just doesn't have the same hallmarks of appearance fairies have. And ghosts in Irish folklore tend to be way more violent and murderous. Take for instance the particularly nasty Dublin urban ghost, the Dolocher, a huge black pig that raped and killed women and was the spirit of a murderer. That thing didn't mess around.

Ooh, that's a Red Cap, he English I believe, never heard the name Powrie before. Where does it come from?

Make them all look like Frankie?

Didn't Yeats lump the Dullahan in with fairies?

Was it like this?

Yes!
Thank you user for delivering

Play up the mythology of the Fey. There is a ton you can do with before it all got fucked up for some reason.

Fucking Victorian era did terrible things to Fey.

I think he may have dumped everything in with the fairies. I personally don't agree with that, since it's just so completely different to how fairies have appeared in the stories and myths, it's appearance isn't in line with how even the more grotesque fairies appear.

To me, it's far more akin to a ghost, and the ghosts are usually worse, in my opinion, far more singular in aspect. Stuff like the Fear Gorta (far gore-ta), the Hungry Man, a hideous, skeletal Famine ghost that begs for alms at doors, or the truly weird Hungry Grass, a place where a Famine victim died and if you walk across it, you suddenly feel an intense hunger which must be sated there and then or you'll die.

Plus, the fairy realm already contains a harbinger of death, the Banshee. Her name is the Anglicization of Bean Sidhe (bawn shee), literally, Woman Fairy. She wails and moans for those about to die. She isn't a ghost at all.

But then again, I suppose to some people, denizens of the Otherworld needn't have any particular distinction, it's all weird shit from the spooky lands, so who cares, which I understand. Yeats and his contemporaries who went around collecting stories were getting their material either translated from Irish or from people for whom English was more than likely a second language.

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Eh, I was pretty sure he grouped ghost stories separately from fairy stories, but lumped the Dullahan in with the fairies for some reason. I've read somewhere that there might be some connections between the Dullahan and Crom Cruach/Dubh, so maybe that was his reason? Not sure.

There's also always been a bit of a fuzzy line between the dead and the fairies; it's often been theorized that the Otherworld evolved from the Celtic concept of the afterlife.

Okay user.

I feel it's the capricious nature a lot of modern takes on the "fae" seem to miss. Fairies do whatever the fuck they want and what they want often makes no sense. Sometimes it works out really well for humans, other times it doesn't.

You base the plot on Die Hard.

My uncle had a book on English, Scottish and Irish faeries that I would sometimes read when I was a kid, it called them Powries.

Not certain where the name comes from, but a quick google search later and I would suspect they're named after Castle Powrie in Scotland.

I would guess that's the difference between Fae and Faeries. All faeries are fae, but not all fae are faeries. You might think fae is simply a shortened version of faerie, but it's actually taken from the word fey, which can either mean 'doomed' or 'otherworldly' and so in fact was the other way around.

So while Yeats wasn't ENTIRELY incorrect for calling a Dullahan a faerie, he was disregarding the etymological basis of the term.

>Make them just close enough to being human that they're comfortable to be around
Outsiders are not human themselves though, and would not hardly "this person is close to human-like" to be a noteworthy selling point. Someone who is literally a celestial embodiment of passion, emotion, liberty, and self-determinism (eladrin); or a concordant reification of preserving natural and societal balance at all costs, starting a genocide one day and helping bring peace and prosperity to a different war-torn land the next (rilmani).

If anything, they would be more comfortable around other living manifestations of concepts.

>but the longer you stay with them, the longer it becomes clear they operate on a seperate morality and world view
Operating on separate moralities and world views is what *every* outsider does. Every baatezu's world view upholds tyranny, oppression, ambition, bureaucracy, and unflinching devotion to law as a prime world view. Even members of the planes' mortal factions operate off strange morals and ethics as well, like the Doomguard who worship the cosmic force of entropy and the impending apocalypse, yet host everyone from virtuous paladins to the vilest of demons, all united in their faith in entropy.

>The fact they're sort of mundane makes them rather surreal to outsiders, yet all their fae quirks make them seem crazy, or at least immature to mortals.
Would this not just place them in an awkward "Not quite mundane mortals but not quite quirky outsiders either"? Admittedly, "mundane mortals" has a fairly high bar in this multiverse when those mortals include space-fleets of magical elves and talking penguin-bureaucrats who ride "deathsquealer" space-pigs.

The 2e Planescape multiverse just does not give much room for the fae to have a distinct niche.

Which mythologies?

I really need to read more Artemis Fowl, I only read The Opal Deception and liked it.

>Eh, I was pretty sure he grouped ghost stories separately from fairy stories

Honestly, he might have, but I just can't remember. I have, or had, a collection of his fairy stories, I'd have to have a good read of them again. But I personally prefer to think of them as ghosts as there's just more of a ghostly feel to them for a lot of reasons. But even if they are supposed to have been fairies, they don't actually kill, they just warn of death. Fairies, Irish ones at least, don't seem to be terribly bloodthirsty, just massive pricks.

I've seen that Crom Cruach connection thing before, but what it could be stumps me. We don't actually know much of anything about that deity except for the badass story where St. Patrick destroys its golden idol on a hilltop with a sledgehammer. Sounds like Christian pulp action.

Which I also think is enforced by a language barrier and very specific cultural beliefs, the syncretic nature of Irish belief with Christianity is a convoluted but interesting one. The Otherworld wasn't always another realm, sometimes it was literally underground (fairy mounds and fairy trees being access points to these underground kingdoms) which is where the many waves of human colonists drove the Tuatha de Danaan, the Celtic gods, who became the fairies. But that's getting into the heavily mythologized creation story of Ireland. It's a weird relationship, to be sure. I'd put it that be whatever they are, denizens of the otherworld don't need any distinction, they're all weird spooky whatevers.

This is very true, especially in the wake of the Victorian traditions and later onto misconceptions reinforced by Peter Pan and Disney films, etc. But I also think sometimes people try and go too far in the other direction, turning fairies into bloodthirsty monsters. They are just, as you said, capricious. They have a different set of rules they exist by. That's all.They are, to an extent, amoral.

So, it's basically just they're another denizen of the Otherworld, ghosts or spirits of some kind, along with all the other weirdness. They're just something else, not humans. Which I can understand. But would they be called daoine sidhe, though, that's the question, because those are the descendants of ancient Celtic gods driven underground by conquering waves of humans. And in that case, I'd prefer to call the Dullahan a ghost, just on the virtue of its appearance as it differs vastly from the appearances of the little people themselves.

I'd heard the Crom connection was in the sacrifice of heads, IE the stuff at Magh Slécht where supposedly infants heads were bashed against his idol, which supposedly somehow has to do with the Dullahan being headless? Although smashing skulls against a rock isn't exactly the same as beheading people. I've also seen connections drawn with the actual name "Crom Dubh" since "dubh" means "head." It's a very tenuous connection no matter how you look at it.

Then again, you can have otherworldly beings that might be classified as "fiaries" but aren't the Sidhe. Consider the Firbolgs and the Fomorians.

Shadowmoor.

I've never heard that detail, I know the idea was that Crom Cruach/Dubh was propitiated by human sacrifice, or supposedly was, that very well could have been a later invention by Christian scholars to demonize the deity.

Now here's the funny thing about the name, he's known both as Crom Cruach, Crom Dubh and Cenn Cruach. Crom is meant to mean 'crooked' or 'bent', Cenn meaning 'head' or 'chief', Cruach meaning 'bloody' or 'gory' and Dubh being the word for the colour black. Really, he isn't coming out of this in any positive light.

And the last nail in the coffin is the unfortunate tendency for the Irish to never write anything down, for all this to be oral tradition, only later recorded by Christian scholars.

You know what, I can buy that. Although just for personal tastes, I like the Dullahan being a huge headless horseman ghost. I just like it.

user, you know the phrase "that's how they get you"?

...that is literally how they get you.

You retarded, son?

My dad has a book on Little People. Fairies, sprites, and the like.

There was one creature who lived in the water and sang. It was characterized by saggy breasts that would be thrown over their shoulders. It would sing, and any fishermen passing over would pick it up as it surfaces near their boat. But it doesn't kill the fisherman, it instead just dies.

what the fuck is the point of that creature, then? It dies the moment it's picked up and has breasts you could toss over its own shoulder? What's that about?

Faeries are weird.

The WoD faeries are cool.

Fuck if I know.

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The Opal Deception was the last good one, you don't want more. The prior ones are okay though.

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I know 7th Sea gets a lot of not un-deserved criticism, but I did like their initial take on the Sidhe: that they were beings that had no emotions of their own, and upon encountering humans they were completely at a loss, and so decided to try and imitate our emotions in order to understand the concept.

So a fairy might be your mortal enemy or your passionate lover, but both are a farce. The emotions are surface level, just like clothes the fairy has put on as a fashion experiment, and can shed at any moment. They might switch from being your enemy to being your friend, or vice versa, or they may just lose interest and go away without explanation.

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god dammit why does frankie got to be so fucking perfect

legit I never watch cartoons, I don't even watch foster's home, but fucking frankie, god fucking dammit

Sounds like you're suffering from underexposure to ideal waifu material.

I perscribe 100 cc's of pre-2000's anime OVA's, stat.

/ss/

Was waiting for this post

Was she a nazi?

Well you get your elves, and they're really more like the sidhe, but some of them are called dwarves and look like short drow, still act like extra spiteful dwarves though. Except for the dwarves in Scandanavia, those are more beardy and possibly made of stone like the cute little trolls, that are also close relatives to huldra, and from there they almost get back around to elves. Or maybe dryads but those are really a class of nymphs, who are all very minor deities from Greek myth, so we should head back North and/or West to find ptoper fey again. The fey lands are also the land of the dead, beneath the hills, so lots of ghosts get mixed up with them too. Some fey are kind, others cruel, or capricious, or creepy but harmless, or helpfull but only warn of death, or... yeah, don't bother trying to make sense or lump them together. In some places the Fair Folk are nicer, like Ireland, and the Norse had theirs as almost semi-divine, which Tolkien borrowed from. Other places... just never go to Scotland, okay? They seem to have plenty of horrible things just waiting to drown you, or not even wait that long and start chewing the moment your feet hit the water.

Notably, for all that fairies are called capricious or chaotic, they seem to follow all sorts of strange rules, that make little sense to mortals and are utterly ironclad. Do not eat food they offer, nor take what is theirs or try to cheat them. They have their morals, but it tends to be strange to us. Smoke vs polka stripes rather than good vs evil.

By posting stupid images for /aco/ and swapping the noun.

Weaponize them.

If no one gives enough fucks about fairies to the point where a thread was made to make them interesting again, then weaponize them.
Imagine a warrior, he finds a fairy and then thinks "hmm, this is a magical thing, maybe it will make my sword magical and also strong" so the warrior catchs it, calls his wizard buddy and the wizard puts the fairy into a magical orb and the orb is glued into the sword and now the sword has extra +3 damage points. Yay!

Or in the case of the setting being in something like shadowrun, fairies become the new hotness in the weapon industry, where the fairies are ammo for special weapons.

Sounds like an idea for a shadowrun/ebberon campaign, using fairies to power all sorts of magitech. Like the steam engine powered by fire and water elementals, only now with cute little sprites. Some of them are bound for low draw, long term stuff, like a single staff or necklace sort of item. Others are rapidly drained by the torturous demands of being used in place of generators that power whole cities. Only fairies don't die, they just become gremlins.

If i had to expand on that idea, i'd add something like taking care of the fairies, like feeding them, giving them shelter, making little dresses for them, whatever to keep their moral high. They are the perfect unlimited and recycleable ammunition in the world, but it has a price, you don't want your fire fairy ammo fly away after you treated it like shit. Think of them as pokemons but on guns.

I imagine there's a gap between those who treat fairies fairly, and others who seal them in place and throw them out once used up.

One thing is certain, i wouldn't like to pull off the whole "if you treat them like children, they will grow stronger!" bullshit trope, its just to keep their moral and loyalty strong, not to make them weapons powered by love. And the ones on the bad side of the spectrum would rather cybernetically augment them over dumping them away, shits expensive, might as well make sure it still works on the long term.

use the original use of farriers in northern European tails. playing pranks, turning milk sower, spoiling food, causing as much harm as they can short of out right killing, ext. also don't make farriers have human morals but rather there own sense of order / law code that cant be broken even if they try.

this is only a latter distinction that only happened recently.

Their vaginas are natural Bags of Holding.

>The Otherworld wasn't always another realm, sometimes it was literally underground (fairy mounds and fairy trees being access points to these underground kingdoms) which is where the many waves of human colonists drove the Tuatha de Danaan, the Celtic gods, who became the fairies.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Ancient and medieval peoples didn't talk about shit like parallel dimensions. Their conceptions of Fairyland, Heaven, Hell, Jinnistan, the Underworld, etc, are often described as if they exist in the same world as us, just in unusual places. In the sky, under the earth, far across the sea, in some strange uncharted land at the edge of the known world, etc. At other times they seem to be talking about a place more removed from our world, but you often have to infer that from context. More frequently, people looking back on this stuff with a modern perspective are the ones who talk about other worlds and dimensions, because we assume without thinking about it that of course there aren't countries under the sea or in the clouds, and if such things existed they'd have to be on another plane of existence.

Jesus christ stop typing while drunk user.

This guy gets it. Throw in some Asymmetric warfare and Guerrilla tactics. Boom. Nasty threat motivated by who knows what (because humans cannot into fae psychology).

Double down on the cute

We must free her then