Faeries

What kind of fey folk do you put in your setting? Do you have both seelie and unseelie? Benign spirits or malicious little bastards? Or both?

All of those. Faerie are weird and diverse sort and can afford every kind to be about.

I make a distinction into three groups: seelie, unseelie, and house spirits.

Seelie include the spirits like nymphs, dryads, spriggans, and harmless little sprites, including something like the little white tree spirits from Mononoke. Very benign unless you really fuck with their habitat.

The unseelie are subterranean assholes who will try to get you killed. There's a type of underground spirit that will try to bury you alive, a water naiad who will drag you under, and small will-o-the-wisps who will lead you astray into a patch of quicksand or a murky swamp. It's not that they're super aggressive, but they hate trespassers.

House spirits form a bond with families. Kobals disguise themselves as cats, and live in the walls of rural homes. They need to be fed, otherwise they will start knocking things over, breaking things, and throwing around pots and pans. Best to keep them fed and happy. Vestials live in the hearths of homes and protect against evil spirits. They won't become a nuisance if they are ignored, they will just leave.

...

...

I have every kind I can pack in, from helpful bookas to psycho redcaps, ethereal sidhe and magical gnomes.

...

...

...

Went with a more Artemis Fowl approach, though they detest magic as befouling the natural order. They divide into four courts based on the seasons.
Summer: Militaristic expansionists want to claim the universe that, in their minds, is rightfully theirs.
Autumn: They believe crowning a new King is paramount, as the last one fell saving the universe from cosmic dragons.
Winter: Rejoining the four planes back into one, possibly destroying the demiurge that did this and the gods it created.
Spring: Exploring and enjoying the way things are now, seeing it as a grand opportunity to assuage the boredom of immortality.
Currently, the BBEG in this homebrew are the Summer court. They slew the sort of "merciful conqueror" so the Summer Dukes have deigned to assign a new general who isn't above pulling some Eclipse Phase shit to bring the feral natives to heel.

Why, the kind that tells no lies, child.

The best kind of Fae are the ones that will suck your dick if you're polite enough about it.

3 different flavors, depending on the players:

1st is making them not agents of chaos, per se, but making them magic beings incapable of understanding other life around them. Just on the cusp of sapience, but still merely sentient. They offer their strange ways of helping, but ultimately can't comprehend what's helpful to mortals, since they're essentially ambient magic trying to wear skin and interact with the world around them. Will o' wisps, pixies, etc.

2nd is Mxyzptlk style cosmic entities. Creatures that walk planes without effort, they're culturally sterile, and fear and envy the Material Plane's ingenuity, art, and music. They'll frequently reveal themselves to be actual cosmic bodies, astrophysical plasma contained in a mortal shell. Incapable of complex emotion, and therefore can only be trusted as long as you can entertain them. Will eventually get bored and stop pranking Superman for a decade so they can be a cosmic evil instead for a change of pace.

3rd is where i meld the Underdark and the Feywilds into the Feydark: a place broiling under the surface where monsters escape at twilight to the surface to have fun however they can manage. Swap kids with some farmers for a week without telling them, planting mushrooms in circles, seduce men at sea to coral reefs, etc.

Fey are funnest when they're wholly untrustworthy and worthy of caution regardless of the alignment of the players who stumble upon them, but they're similar enough to bait the players into trying to talk to them first.

I had an idea about including seasonal-based fey as npcs/potential antagonists in my game. The spring and summer fey aren't outright aggressive but are extremely mischievous, they'll build up puzzles and mini quests for the players to follow through with.

I want the autumn and winter fey to be more hostile though. Winter's fairly easy, but how do you make autumn intimidating or unpleasant?

>3rd is where i meld the Underdark and the Feywilds into the Feydark: a place broiling under the surface where monsters escape at twilight to the surface to have fun however they can manage. Swap kids with some farmers for a week without telling them, planting mushrooms in circles, seduce men at sea to coral reefs, etc.
What about fomorians?

More like autism fairy
Perhaps give them absolutely no value for human life cause something something mayfly

dead sidhe tell no tales

Autumn is the season of reaping. If you can't do something with that I don't know what to say to you, user.

Seelie are faeries and elves who maintain a sense of social decorum by clinging to the pretenses of nobility. They have not yet been completely consumed by their passions or desires.

Unseelie are anarchists who are essentially dark Eldar. Seelie roughly translates to 'correct' or 'sane'. Unseelie is, by that token, un-correct NOT incorrect, but un-correct. Incorrect would imply wrongness, Unseelie just aren't right.

The four courts are a combination of political party, social club, and general mindset.

Springs are focused on beginnings, making people happy (social services), celebrations (keepers of sacred days), childbirth and healthcare, etc. Tend to be the most liberal

Summer is all about war, expansion, commerce, rulership. Tend to be pragmatists.

Autumns are recordkeepers, explorers, scholars. They focus on preserving things and maintaining status quo. Tend to be conservatives.

Winters are for ending and all things that end. Funerary services, executioner's, ending projects, trimming fat, etc. Tend to be dissenters, skeptics, pragmatic conservatives

Faeries are not really defined in my setting. The thing is, there are fey in the world, but they come from another reality called Fae, and those who migrated to the moral world in the past have changed and adapted to their new surroundings, so now they're "half-fey"; some of them, like goblins and elves, have become completely mortal (while at the shame time shedding most of the negative aspects of being fey, like vulnerability to iron), while others (like hags, trolls, gremlins, pixies and selkies) are still more or less fey, but not completely. The moment to portals to Fae open again, my players will have to face what a trule faerie can do.
But mostly, the fey folk in my setting are both good and evil. The good ones just want to live their lives like most mortals, trying to satiate their natural curiosity in the way, while the evil ones are, in fact, trying to turn the mortal world in a sort of reflection of Fae, but with them in the top of the food chain instead of those things that made them flee from their world into the mortal plane, and free to sow havoc and fear into the hearts of the non-fey creatures.