[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Perhaps it would be better to say that the local humans perceive the local fay according to the customs and ideas those local humans have. The fay have a mirrormask that reflects aspects of the person viewing the fay back at them. Thus each time someone sees a fay they've really only seen an aspect of themselves distorted out of shape.

I don't know that it's a "better" way to say it, so much as it's a different way to create an in-game justification for making the Fae vary so widely from one set of stories to the next, while retaining them as, recognizably, fairies.

In point of fact, fairies are just a way to anthropomorphize -- and thus give the illusion of influence over -- nature and natural forces. I know you know that, but I'm building a case, here. :)

What we used to call the "human experience" consists largely of thoughts and emotions that human have in common, albeit filtered through widely variant environmental, social and cultural conditions. As such, the stories of nature spirits appear in all human cultures, but the behavior of those spirits differs a lot.

The humans who created the fairy stories we've inherited based them on their own experiences. Humans don't just create gods in our images, we also create fairies in the same way.

In the Desert Southwest of North America, lack of food and water posed the greatest threats to survival, as did violent sociopaths who damaged close-knit tribes whose members had to live and work together, in close proximity to one another. So, fairy stories included nature spirits such as nunnupi and zips (food and water); monsters who hurt and abused people -- including children (tsiants); or highly functional sociopaths capable of pretending to respect cultural traditions, but actually causing so much harm they damaged relations within and between entire tribes (skin-changers).

By comparison, the natural environment of most of Europe has always been far more benign than the Desert Southwest. So, while the nature fairies could be scary, the ones that truly terrified were the lords and ladies of the fae courts. They showed up out of nowhere and took away people's children for inscrutable reasons of their own and, while the young person might return as a fortunate prodigy, that was highly unlikely.

Far more frequently, the children simply disappeared forever, or returned horribly maimed in either body or mind (or both) from the violence and abuse inflicted on them. As a projection of human fears, this one is pretty clear -- many people who created European folklore considered royalty and nobility as the most dangerous of the powerful and fickle forces that required propitiation lest they do terrible and lasting harm.

So, for our purposes when we create campaign settings, one way to explain fairy behavior is to say the human minds around them mold their personalities. That works, and it makes fairies less "nature spirits" than they are "thought form spirits" such as Prince Charon chose to use for his "Five Earths" setting.

They don't reflect nature as it is but, rather, nature as humans perceive it. That actually has a solid foundation in how fairy stories actually started.

Alternatively, we can make fairies manifestations of natural forces that are fundamentally other than human, and therefore display behavior that humans find decidedly odd, and perhaps dangerous for incomprehensible reasons.

That's what I went with because I liked the challenge it posed, and that's why I have "Wild Fae" unaffiliated with either of the fae courts. Hops About and Twirls Thrice are fairies, but very much not even as human as fae lords and ladies. They do stuff that kinda weirds out the party, sometimes, because it's bizarre to see cute, human-shaped creatures doing things that animals do, for reasons that make sense to the conditions in which they live.

Rebecca, when she still played Sunmi Jones, found the whole thing with the ants particularly disturbing (lots of birds allow ants to crawl on them, as a way to clean their feathers -- but it creeps people out). Sam -- Doc Bascher's player -- freaks a bit when they display their appreciation for dead things (magpies are opportunistic scavengers, and Hops About and Twirls Thrice reflect that part of the natural cycle).

Part of the reason for that has everything to do with the acculturation of those two young women. They grew up watching Disney movies, which have no fairies who represent the reality that nature is red in tooth and claw, and life must feed on life to survive.

To drag this back to Icelander's setting, I'm not really sure how he defines fairies. However, some of his more horrific creatures are definitely informed by Lovecraft. who found most horrifying the notion of a universe of natural forces, roamed by predator gods inherently incapable of even understanding the notion of caring about anything other than their own needs and appetites.

The universe of the Lovecraftian Mythos reflected a view of modern scientific thought held by a man with considerable artistic gifts, but so physically weak and sickly the notion of Natural Selection filled him with existential horror. It's about as profound a rejection of modernity as one can possibly find.

To his credit, Icelander has backed it down a bit, because some of his forces, the Cold Ones, seem capable of grasping the notion of a mutually-beneficial business arrangement. That gives them at least some comprehensible motivations -- which makes the opposition to them (and their partner-patsies) more dramatically meaningful, and that's really good for an RPG setting.