Fair

How do you like your Fairies? Plucky tricksters that love harmless jokes? Amoral monsters? Isolationist assholes who hate anything unnatural abd trespassers? Or just another race living in the world?

cum dumps

Larvae for eternity.

Plucky trickster mostly, always feel like they should represent the beautiful and playful part of nature.

There should always be a dark side though,
like locusts, as soon as food become scarce or the environment becomes contaminated they start eating things they shouldn't and BOOM you got an entire swarm of flying mini-vampires breeding like there's no tomorrow and eating anything with a pulse.

Fried, with salad on the side.

I tend to go for the "powerful, innately aware of some advanced concepts and features of the world, but childish and naive" route.

Pure fucking evil.

Purchasable as living lanterns and emergency rations.
Failing that, semi-sentient pests that need collecting and refining into ether drinks for mad sorcerors beforethey grow to become something worse in the spirit-fae-daemon hierarchy shows up.

I tend to go with Victorian fairies, so, blue-and-orange morality.

I like them crudely fit into "normal" society
Almost nothing's their size, there's special, semi-legal work allowances that allow a fairy to be paid less than minimum wage for the little work they can do, which is fine because a bag of carrots feeds their family for a week, they have flight, maybe some petty magic tricks, but really nothing to put them on the map
Families of Faries form partnerships with human households, such that they get a roof and food in exchange for doing small tasks and minding the children
Their life cycle doesn't really mesh well with humans, living about 30 years, having a 6-8 year development period, and not really getting "old" until about 26
Their economy is borked, since some work for their shelter, food, and gifts alone, some make it work using their human pittances to buy tiny apartments and miniature feasts, and the occasional fairy able to actually work on-par with a human doing intellectual/desk work makes so much money that they, their immediate and secondary families, and their neighbors could never spend it all
Faries as a whole don't add up to anything significant in human society. This means they have little in the way of either great love, or great dislike from humans, beyond those that they immediately associate with
Many humans have fond memories of the fairies that loosely looked out for them as children, so there is a broad, kind-of background appreciation for them.
It's a sad event when someone accidentally steps on one, but it's also the sort of thing that might not ruin your entire day, even if you think about it before bed for a few nights.

As a whole their society greatly resembles a population of refugees, albeit a stable, dully warmly received refugee population. Little they do will ever really amount to actual influence, and their lives are kind of awkwardly perched upon human society, but they aren't exactly unwelcome. People are broadly pretty okay with them, so long as they aren't bothering anyone

Invincible children led by ever-wise adults, who form a society based on always living in plenty with magic coming out of the air they breathe. They're powerful, sometimes amoral, and their rules don't make sense as often as not, but they're mostly friendly and playful as long as you pay your respects. They're very dumb about things that should be common sense as they've never had problems in their life.

Like this

Those are wood elves.

A mixture of the first and second to varying degrees that depend upon each individual fairy. Either way, they should be at least somewhat alien in regards to how they view the world and respond to human society's standards.

My party is currently adventuring in the fey wild.
Except it isn't adventuring, we are literally being forced by a demon to stay here until we kill a dragon.
Except it isn't the fey wild, they keep saying it is, but it's more like fantasy/fairy Catachan.

So far we've been
>Ambushed by psychic mushrooms
>abducted
>threatened to be lobotomized and sold into slavery
>nearly raped by old greg
>and much, much more...

Whenever we walk anywhere that isn't a settlement with the party ranger not showing us the EXACT footsteps to take, he rolls on an ambush chart about every kilometer.

But there is a lot of magic stuff and gnomes who can tinker almost any clock work invention your character can explain into existence, so that's pretty sweet.

Oh, and to actually answer the question, I like them dead. Really dead.

Sentient and able to converse, but not sapient. Strictly bound to the rules of the Fae, compelled to act out their "role", as dictated by stories and archetypes, in whatever situation they find themselves in, no true free will of their own even if they're very good at acting like people.
Enormously powerful but completely bound by their nature.

I'm currently in a homebrew campaign with some friends where I'm playing a race he came up with that's like hybrid dragonfly-fairies. Theyre pretty interesting in that their innately evil and grow to be 10,000 years old, though very few live that long because they're fragile fucks. I've kind of modeled his personality after Puck from DotA because I'm pretty sure that's what he's based off of, so more amoral trickster than outright evil but still incredibly calloused and unsentimental.

>incredibly calloused
Now I'm picturing this fairy made entirely out of thickened, toughened skin.

Not quite.

The actual design was kinda up to me, because the DM didn't bother finding a references and they're fairly diverse looking. He's got pink semi-scale skin, hooked claw feet and hands, 3' 6" 40 pounds with 2 sets of dragonfly wings he can barely fly with, and two sets of eyes. A human set inside and a dragonfly set outside that he can expand and shrink at will. He despite his size he rolls most of the intimidation checks.

I'm proud of him.

I like different sorts of fairies/pixies having different sorts of traits, but being very magical creatures they're very narrow in their differences.
Like, literally all of one kind of fairy hate lies and liars to an extreme degree, while another sort might refuse to use anything made of metal as though allergic.

I'd really like to play a Pixie/Fairy character in a game but all my group plays is 5E and none of them want to GM except for me.

I was implying that you were using the wrong word. Calloused is having tough, thickened skin. Callous is having little regard for others.

Plucky tricksters that love jokes, but they're not at all harmless.

I was trying to joke but that doesn't work via internet text.

Weird creatures that people play with or dance with while drunk. Kind of like intelligent Pigeons or Crows.

Rude

Depends on what their purpose within the setting is.