[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

I agree, wholeheartedly.

That's one of the more compelling aspects of the fae in his setting, yes.

We also agree, here. Tim Burton provides an example of someone who definitely took it too far in the film, Mars Attacks!, and wound up with wholly unappealing aliens.

You've gotta back it down enough that, although the creatures seem strange -- even bizarre -- they give the audience (or the players) a way to maintain an emotional investment in the outcome of the story.

Just so.

Thinking about it, I've not used inhuman entities a whole lot as onscreen villains in any campaign set in some version of this world.

In Boston Mystic, there were Sumerian spirits like Enmenluana and Pazuzu, but the PCs never really interacted with them 'in person'. They were a source of power and motivation for Dr. Mahmoud Ganoush, the blood magus whose magic was powered through sacrifice, with the response of the spirits enhanced the more pain, degradation and terror he managed to subject his victims to before they expired.

The PCs investigated a murder where Enmenluana, through spiritual possession, was the murder weapon, and they witnessed the acts of horror Dr. Ganoush committed to call up Pazuzu and forge with him a pact, but there was no doubt in their minds that the villains of the campaign were Dr. Ganoush and his cult of graduate students. The spirits and the power they could grant were merely what made them more dangerous than the ordinary deluded cultist worshiping imaginary demons.

In the same campaign, there was a fae mirror, which acted as a gateway between Faerie and Earth, but it didn't allow physical travel and the PCs never met a real-life fey creature, let alone fae with speaking parts. Instead, the mirror had a subtly corrupting influence that would eventually result in a person's mind becoming trapped inside the quasi-dimension of the mirror, halfway between Faerie and Earth, while releasing a fey spirit to possess their bodies, making them a twisted Changeling.

The mirror was an Unseelie artifact created during the war, designed to take over important human leaders, but after the Accords and the eventual Sealing Off of Faerie, it had lacked any conscious direction or control and passed through the hands of humans without much influence, like Jessie Pomeroy and Lizzie Borden. Without a noble fae sorcerer to control the Changeling for some strategic purpose, the mirror expressed its own personality, a puckish, warped sentience that had no goal beyond impersonating its owner and brutally murdering anyone the owner disliked, no matter how petty the reason.

The PCs never spoke with a fae and their 'conversations' with the Sumerian spirits of blood, degradation, disease, pain and terror were confined to trying to resist possession and escape to a place such beings could not as easily affect the physical world. I don't imagine the PCs distinguished between Enmeluana, Pazuzu and the many minor spirits used by Dr. Ganoush and his students. They certainly didn't learn much about the original creator of the mirror or its true purpose.

But almost ten years later, the players sure remember the man they kept referring to as 'Baba' Ganoush, and the way one of the PCs kidnapped, tortured and murdered a foolish young graduate student to gain information needed to fight him. And how that PC almost killed the rest of the PCs after finding the mirror and disagreeing with them on what to do with it, not because he was possessed (the PC was too strong-willed for any kind of mental domination through force by what amounted to a tool of the fae), but because the Changeling entity in the mirror could skilfully play on his guilt, the fact he had kept his act a secret from the other PCs and the need for reassurance and justification the PC felt.

Every time PCs in one of my modern secret magic campaigns have come across inhuman entities, it's been pretty much the same story. The demons, fae, loas or spirits have been McGuffin, motivation or murder weapon, but the true villains have always been human.

In 'Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle', a campaign set in Iraq at the end of US military efforts in 2011, the 'Men of Misfortune' or the Army of the Men of the Naqhbandi Order, were the villains, not the djinn they controlled to create a sandstorm that almost killed the PCs. Well, they, and behind the scenes, Dr. Ganoush, now a powerful player in Iraq's occult scene, as he used archaelogical digs in old Sumerian sites to obtain ever more powerful spirits in his service.

And in Götterdammerung on Walpurgisnacht, the Cold Ones were the impersonal menace behind the occult faction around Heinrich Himmler, but the villains were definitely such Black Knights as a reanimated Reinhard Heydrich and company, not to mention Oskar Dirlewanger, a man who appalled even the architects of the Final Solution.

Similarly, in Cold Night in Maine, the PCs never spoke with the chenoo, understood its motivations or even necessarily considered it interesting in itself. They were concerned with the human murderer, Victor Dufresne, whether he'd had accomplices and to what extent the murders were supernaturally motivated, and to what extent the chenoo had allowed a human serial killer or killers the power he wanted to be able to prey on other humans.

I'm not sure if I can have the PCs meet and talk to otherworldly horrors and avoid them becoming merely humans with different backgrounds.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

(And, wow, you're up late. What time is it, in Iceland?)

At the time of the post to which you refer 02:40. Now, it's half past nine.

I'm bad at sleeping nights. I was watching Community for most of the night.