[3.5] What exactly are the fae?

[RndmNumGen]

Every now an then I come across a reference to the fae in D&D, usually related to pixies or nymphs, seelie or unseelie, and I must say the topic really does interest me. However, aside from those occasional references and odd creatures in the monster manual, it seems that information on the fae is extremely limited, nothing like the demons, devils, formians or archons where I can find entire pages devoted to them and their societies.

So, does anyone have a good compilation of information on the fae in D&D? In particular, I was looking for the following, though really just about any good sources would be fun to read:

Fae Races/Species
Fae Societies
Fae Religion(Do they have this?)
Common Festivals & Celebrations

[Caliphbubba]

Fae are basically anything you would think of as a Fairy. It's based on the mythology of the Celts, primarly I believe.

I've found that this is an excellent resource:

http://dicefreaks.superforums.org/viewforum.php?f=13

[dsmiles]

Yeah, Celtic and Middle English primarily, but all cultures have a reference to something of the same sort. Here's the wiki on faeries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy).

[Aharon]

By WotC:
Fey Feature (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/fey), a series of online articles dealing with fey-specific PrCs, their culture, etc.

From a mechanical viewpoint, it is lackluster (no strong PC-options), but the fluff is ok, and some of the monsters are nice.

[Thurbane]

In D&D (at least pre 3E), the words fae and fey are somewhat interchangeable. It could be argued that every creature with the fey type is a fae, and belongs to either the seelie or unseelie court.

The Wild Soul PrC (CM) is strongly affiliated with either the seelie (good) or unseelie (evil) courts.

[Prime32]

The Wild Soul PrC (CM) is strongly affiliated with either the seelie (good) or unseelie (evil) courts.It's more like the seelie (completely alien) or unseelie (completely alien and mean) courts.

[Knaight]

It's more like the seelie (completely alien) or unseelie (completely alien and mean) courts.

The seelie try to help, and have an altruistic streak. The issue is just that being completely alien gets in the way, but intentions have to count for something as long as they aren't causing too much harm. Consider Puck, he's a pretty nice guy really, if delusional.

The unseelie meanwhile try to pull pranks that they consider hilarious, and the rest of the world considers atrocities. Like the good natured fun of baby stealing (TM).

[Mulletmanalive]

There are a bunch of very varied quality 3rd party books on the subject, several available on places like RPGnow or Paizo at the moment.

The ideas of Seelie and Unseelie exist only in Paizo's Dragon and Dungeon contributions [beyond the Fey Feature articles] and are...inaccurate to the folklore to say the least. Knaight gives a good representation of the 3rd party line while Prime32 gives what amounts to the Dragon Compendium line.

The link in my sig has stuff for 3.5 that's based on a mix of Welsh and [oddly] Chinese myth to add in an imminent spirit world.

You can also find nifty stuff in Songs of the Sidhe (http://dicefreaks.forumz.cc/viewforum.php?f=13) by Mythmage, which is basically giving the Dicefreaks treatment to the fairy world. Note that the power levels here gives the fairies powers well beyond what anything but a queen can do in the myths [most of them have trans-wish power levels].

4e has some very nice stuff with the Feywilde idea and have relatively recently introduced the Feydark [the underdark in the fairy world]. I suggest checking that out too.