[Inky]

Humans, with sufficient weaponry and ill-will, can be pretty darn dangerous to other humans too. That doesn't mean that it makes sense to summarise other humans as "bad guys".

But anyway - I notice that this thread may have wandered off the original topic. It wasn't actually supposed to be "horror and fantasy based on pre-Enlightenment legends", but "horror and fantasy set in pre-Enlightenment times, based on whatever". It could be both, but, for instance, it could be something like Vampire: the Masquerade Dark Ages Edition, which is very much modern-style "alpha-predator" vampire fiction but showing what they were doing in mediaeval times.

As for how to justify the "actual facts" in your game being different from what was generally believed at the time - why, for instance, if "elves" and "fairies" are separate and unrelated in your game, nobody at the time knew the difference between them - well, don't underestimate how inaccurate mediaeval ideas of natural history could be. I'm sure that in a world where elves were commonplace the bestiaries could manage to be at least as wrong about them as they were about weasels ("It conceives at the mouth and gives birth through the ear (though some say it is the other way around)").