Native American Fae (Winter Court)

[Bruno]

The Underwater Panther or Mishipeshu, also called Gichi-anami'e-bizhiw (Fabulous Night Panther) have a lot in common with Chinese water dragons, which makes them good candidates as powerful fae creatures. Different cultures disagree as to whether there's one, or a whole tribe of them.

Underwater Panthers live (naturally) underwater, can conjure storms, are heavily associated with copper (they guard copper, have copper hair), and are sometimes protective and positive but mostly considered very grumpy and need to be bribed to not drown everyone who touches their water. One Underwater Panther is attributed to drowning (by wrecking ships) over fourty-five white people in the 1800s as punishment for copper mining.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by patchwork

The May May Gway Shi (multiple variant transliterations, including memegwesi), sometimes called Rock Fishers or Hairy-Faced, are fae-like and part of Algonquin culture; if they followed "their" humans, they're in Maine. Small, hairy men very good at swimming and hiding inside rocks.

This reminds me of the mimis of Australian lore, who are so thin they hide in cracks in the rock to avoid breaking in the wind. They're very fey like, but sadly from the wrong continent entirely.

Aside: They appear to be the result of later peoples seeing the rock-painting art style of an earlier culture and interpreting them as a different kind of creature - Australia's a little odd in that lots of multiple-thousand-year-old painted artwork is just sitting around in the open, and was regularly visited and appreciated. This caused interesting cultural cross-pollination over the distance of time, rather than space.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The Underwater Panther or Mishipeshu, also called Gichi-anami'e-bizhiw (Fabulous Night Panther) have a lot in common with Chinese water dragons, which makes them good candidates as powerful fae creatures.

And if you're using underwater panthers, the thunderbirds are their natural foes.

[tshiggins]

If you need a fae creature that isn't intelligent, the hodag fits right in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodag

The Agropelter works for deep northern forests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agropelter

You might want to throw in Bigfoot, as a winter fae, and possibly a snallygaster (although I'd make the Dwayyo, its arch-enemy, a summer fae).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snallygaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwayyo

Apparently, one type of monster that appears in the fun little game NEO-Scavenger (Bluebottle Games) actually was drawn from Michigan-area American folklore. It would be pretty easy to make them into goblin-like winter fae:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melon_heads

You can gets some more inspiration for fae creatures of North America, here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...dary_creatures

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Culture20

Pukwudgie and their equivalents are common trickster trolls in several native american cultures, usually in New England or around the great lakes. Small, gray, and possessed of magical powers. They kidnap people occasionally, but usually keep to themselves.

What sources would you recommend if I wanted to make them truly terrifying?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The Underwater Panther or Mishipeshu, also called Gichi-anami'e-bizhiw (Fabulous Night Panther) have a lot in common with Chinese water dragons, which makes them good candidates as powerful fae creatures. Different cultures disagree as to whether there's one, or a whole tribe of them.

Underwater Panthers live (naturally) underwater, can conjure storms, are heavily associated with copper (they guard copper, have copper hair), and are sometimes protective and positive but mostly considered very grumpy and need to be bribed to not drown everyone who touches their water. One Underwater Panther is attributed to drowning (by wrecking ships) over fourty-five white people in the 1800s as punishment for copper mining.

Uh, how is the Fabulous Night Panther not the protagonist of a steamy series of urban fantasy/supernatural romance novels already?

Sexy vampires? Bah. Even with all their glitter, they are not half the chic, glitzy loner predators of the forbidden night that the Fabulous Night Panther is. His very name name sounds like it was composed by the staff of a Hot Topic, Mad Lips style, exclusively from words that connote awesome, sexy, dangerous things.

He's got sexy anime hair, weather control powers for maximum cool poses on cover art and obviously a ton of body piercings for his ethnic art copper jewelry. His sexuality can only be quantified as omni-sexual, but he is afraid to get close to anyone because of his Dark Past and Inherent Scary Powers.

Throw in an environmentally-conscious, green message to go with that whole cultural-appropriation-lite Magical Native American thing and he's a SJW wet dream, even if you make him a snarky anti-hero*. Hell, put him in a comic and Hollywood would film it in a second.**

*Which, obviously, you would.
**They'd obviously cast someone white, but I'm sure Johnny Depp or Jared Leto could dredge up the possibility that they might have Native American blood somewhere in their ancestry.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

And if you're using underwater panthers, the thunderbirds are their natural foes.

And here we have our star-crossed love interest. Brandon 'Birdie' Donner, captain of the football team, drives his father's 1961 vintage Ford Thunderbird to school. His father, obviously, forbids him all contact with the mysterious and flamboyant transfer student with the red hair and piercings.

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What sources would you recommend if I wanted to make [Pukwudgies] truly terrifying?

Unfortunately I don't have sources, but there are relatively modern stories of people seeing little wrinkled gray men in the woods who do inexplicable things like stand on a trail and look at you like you're the first human it's ever seen, then walk off a cliff, continuing to walk in mid air as if it were solid ground.
There are stories from Indiana where they're much less civil but also less eerie, rushing en masse from below the ground to attack a farmer who was chopping a tree with an axe. And in New England, they're said to push people off cliffs. A google search used to turn up old native stories, but apparently now they've been portrayed in Harry Potter, so that's what I'm seeing a lot of.

I'd say to strike terror in your players and keep to the purported nature of the pukwudgie, use some Hitchcock style storytelling with a smidgeon of paranormal; require a lot of perception rolls and tell them they fail or just catch something out of the corner of their eye. Have a flurry of attacks that cease almost immediately, and then have a pukwudgie "stalk" the party, obviously staring at them from a medium distance. Have one steal items important to another quest, and the party finds the items resting on the edge of a cliff in an obvious trap. Expecting one pukwudgie, the party is faced with a whole tribe that lunges to push them off the cliff, and disappear if any of the players survive. Then more stalking until the players leave the area.

[The Colonel]

Didn't they - or something like them - appear in the Karl Edward Wagner story ".220 Swift"?

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Culture20

A google search used to turn up old native stories, but apparently now they've been portrayed in Harry Potter, so that's what I'm seeing a lot of.

In case you don't know, searching on
Pukwudgies -"harry potter"
should exclude many of the Harry Potter hits.
(minus sign for excluding, quotes to exclude Harry Potter as a complete phrase, but not other people named Harry or who work with pots.)

But actually, I only got one HP hit on the front page of my search, so maybe Google has decided that Harry Potter hits are more relevant for you and responded accordingly.

And the first video that comes up purports to be a pukwudgie possession, it looks like.

[Tuk the Weekah]

The Cannibal Basket Woman is a Salish myth of a giantess who carries children off in her basket to roast them over hot rocks.

Luks is a Mik'maq spirit being, associated with the wolverine (and occasionally the badger, but this is probably a translation error).

Kukwes are bear-headed ogres.

Skadegamutc are ghost-witches, with similar behaviors to weetigos and European vampires.

The Mikumwess were fae of varying orders; sometimes they are portrayed as being tiny; sometimes as half man height. This one behaves like a lamia or undine, and is apparently otherwise of normal appearance.