View Full Version : DM Help Fey Horror: inspirations and ideas
I like the idea of the wilderness and especially the spiritworld being feared and dangerous places because the spirits that inhabit them are very strange and incomprehensible beings that either don't care about the wellbeing of people or are outright hostile.
Unfortunately, spirits in fantasy RPGs are usually pixies and dryads, which are generally well meaning and cooperative once they are willing to talk. There's not really anything threatening or hostile about them.
When I think of hostile spirits, the main examples that come to my mind are Hellboy and even more so BPRD. But then it gets thinner very quickly. Pretty much all horror works are either about undead or demons. Wights and banshees sit on the border between undead and spirit, but other than that? I don't really have any ideas how to make creepy nature spirits.
JeenLeen
2016-05-20, 03:31 PM
Generally, I've found nature-spirits to be the most horrifying when an alien nature and mindset is emphasized. They may even want to be helpful, or at least just play, but their concepts are so different that they don't realize the harm they are causing (or at least don't recognize 'harm' as a concept or 'humans' as deserving of non-harm enough to care.)
For example, I could see a tree spirit watching a family with curiosity. A member of the family becomes very sick, and the spirit approaches to try to heal the person. To figure out what's wrong, it starts to flay the person, since to get to the disease in a tree you have to get look under a tree's bark.
A woman is pregnant. A spirit takes the baby from within her (gruesome surgery or magically, as fits the story) and buries it alive so it can grow properly like a plant should.
More common are not understanding the need for sleep, food, air, or water. Children are swimming in a local pond, and a water spirit decides it wants to play. It's sad and confused when the children stop moving.
The village's crops are failing (or turn out poisonous) because an earth spirit decides to season them by causing strange poisons to grow within them. It gets offended and attacks if the people insult his 'cooking'.
I could see a real sense of shock to the players if a spirit that is causing death is the 'quest-giver'. It did everything it could to help, but everyone wound up dying, and it is sincerely confused.
Princess Mononoke has a couple great ones. The wolves should be damn terrifying if they chose to attack you.
And the army of boars is even worse.
And then there's the creepy apes. "Give us the human. We eat human."
And of course the whole mess with the headless Nightwalker. :smallbiggrin:
I also love Koh the Facestealer and Wan Shi Tong from Avatar. They are both super creepy, very dangerous, and their motives are completely unconcerned about what happens to humans.
And everything having to do with the witches in the bog from Witcher 3. Those would fit right in in Silent Hill. Again, absolutely no regard for mortals. Yet they help the locals and protect them if the sufficient sacrifices are being made. And no, they don't care for either gold or fruits. :smallamused:
Interpret these
Slithy toves
Borogoves
Mome raths
Jabberwock
Jubjub bird
Bandersnatch
The source is obvious
Discworld's elves is the to go to see how dangerous and terrifying elves are. To quote.
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
I have heard Jabberwock and Bandersnatch but don't know what they are. Nor heard of any of the others.
Ninja_Prawn
2016-05-20, 04:04 PM
I don't really have any ideas how to make creepy nature spirits.
If you value your sanity, don't click this link (http://www.inuitmyths.com/ijirait.htm). "One thing seems to be certain: After an encounter with the Ijiraat people tend to experience memory loss and quickly forget the details of what happened. If you ever encounter an Ijiraat, remember to talk to as many people as possible before you memory begins to fail and you forget the experience."
I think fey are scariest when they're on the fringes of reality - the personification of your innate fear of the dark. Like, sometimes when you're out on your own and you feel someone watching you... something moves in the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look, it's gone. Of course, there are great rewards for anyone who can master their fears (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%BAca).
SethoMarkus
2016-05-20, 04:12 PM
Read up on the Unseelie Court (not D&D but the real-life myths) and some of the Irish Aos Si. Kelpies (fuath) are vengeful and hateful water spirits that live in rivers, ponds, the sea, etc and drag unwary travelers to watery deaths. There are Red Caps who hate humans, killing them and dipping their hats in the blood, becoming stronger. Even the "friendly" Fae are notorious for being alien and quick to anger at perceived slights or insults.
Unfortunately, a lot of traditional spirit/Fae creatures from myth fall over into non-Fey subtype in D&D. Banshees, for example, aren't seen as undead creatures in most Celtic mythology, rather they are heralds of death and misfortune, warning those that heed their wailing. The Sluagh are the restless spirits of the dead, not welcome in any afterlife and forced to walk the mortal realm.
I think the best way to convey a horror theme with Fae, Faeries, and Nature (Spirits) is to emphasize how alien they are to typical Humans (and human-like fantasy races), emphasize how much more powerful they are (or at least portray themselves) whether through magic, immortality, or raw strength. Make them the primary opposition, and make them a force to be avoided or appeased, because they cannot easily be reasoned with and are very difficult to defeat (at least head on). Give them some sort of weakness or taboo that must be followed, but other than that keep them mysterious.
Segev
2016-05-20, 04:16 PM
Take a look at the Fair Folk from Exalted; they're a good place to start. The Silence, from Doctor Who, also have some useful elements, though they're not so "fey" in general. (As soon as you look away from one, you forget everything that happened while you could see it...including having seen it.)
The fae are creatures which do not have human cares, and care not for human needs.
They are terrifying because they are powerful and alien. Unlike Cthulian horrors, they're not unknowable; they're almost too human. Their beauty is uncanny, and their actions are nearly explicable...and then they invoke rules and behaviors that are utterly monstrous and terrifying, made all the more so by how much they seemed to be understandable.
I have heard Jabberwock and Bandersnatch but don't know what they are. Nor heard of any of the others.
They're all from the jabberwock poem, and all are actually nonsense words. He meant for you to use those nonsense words to conjure images of weird creatures from your head.
I once played a changeling rogue/warlockish type who was a servant of a minor fey god. I once convinced a rice paddy full of tiny little rice pixies to start a "tripping party", tripping and entangling anyone who crossed them, (except me, because I was part of the party!), and they told their neighbors, who told their neighbors...
Long story short, the witness to our parties activities didn't make it very far.
What I mean to emphasize here is that if there are fey creatures in big things, why not the little things? Enough little things, working together, can be a mightily horrifying concept.
Makes me think of meenlocks, which certainly qualify as fey. Strange little humanoids that live under the ground and paralyze victims. Then drag them to their homes under the earth and turn them into one of themselves.
Jermlains can also be nasty. Little weak guys, but they come out of their holes when the party is at its weakest after a barely succesful escape. They think they made it succesful into the forest and only have to wait for the morning so they can get healed and have their spells back, and then those mean little guys surround their camp and harass them throughout the night. They are small and they are weak, but attack when their victims are defenseless.
If you value your sanity, don't click this link (http://www.inuitmyths.com/ijirait.htm). "One thing seems to be certain: After an encounter with the Ijiraat people tend to experience memory loss and quickly forget the details of what happened. If you ever encounter an Ijiraat, remember to talk to as many people as possible before you memory begins to fail and you forget the experience."
Oh, this sounds like a great idea for an adventure. The party arrives in a new village where the locals are not happy about seeing them, with some elders telling them they should not have come back. They should have done everyone a favor and stayed away.
I think the best way to convey a horror theme with Fae, Faeries, and Nature (Spirits) is to emphasize how alien they are to typical Humans (and human-like fantasy races), emphasize how much more powerful they are (or at least portray themselves) whether through magic, immortality, or raw strength. Make them the primary opposition, and make them a force to be avoided or appeased, because they cannot easily be reasoned with and are very difficult to defeat (at least head on).
I think a good approach is that once everything is said and done, the players should still not be entirely sure what exactly just happened, what exactly they just encountered, and what exactly it wanted. To maintain player agency, the players should understand which of their actions led to the spirit ceasing its troublemaking, but not necessarily why it worked. For example burning a wooden idol might banish a spirit, but its better to not explain through what mechanism the idol had maintained the spirit's presence. Or they learn that the spirit will end its attack if offered a bear's heart, even if they don't know why the spirit attacked in the first place or what value the heart has for the spirit. The local shamans and witches might not know either, it's just traditional knowledge handed down from their teachers.
They are terrifying because they are powerful and alien. Unlike Cthulian horrors, they're not unknowable; they're almost too human. Their beauty is uncanny, and their actions are nearly explicable...and then they invoke rules and behaviors that are utterly monstrous and terrifying, made all the more so by how much they seemed to be understandable.
A method I use to bring NPCs to life in a Sword & Sorcery game is to make everyone at least a little bit mad. This might work really well with spirits to. Except that all of them would be completely insane by human standards.
I think quite a lot has been written about Fear of Insanity in horror fiction. With fey NPCs this might perhaps be the most efficient approch to horror. It's not the savage violence or gore that makes them scary, but that you have to be super careful when being around them, or they might just instantly explode and kill you. And they might even do so without you accidentally provoking anything.
Blackhawk748
2016-05-20, 05:27 PM
Theres a Fey in DnD that is always invisible and apparently eats people. The problem is i cant remember what its called or what book its in. Also, Red Caps. Those suckers can be very creepy if done right.
Arcane_Snowman
2016-05-20, 06:16 PM
I'd say drawing on mythology for inspiration should provide quite a diversified set of options, and all "standard" fantasy fare can be incredibly terrifying if you actually play it out to it's full potential.
Let's take someone like Raijin from Japanese mythology, who is said to eat the bellybutton of children during thunderstorms. Now whilst this might very well be a cute superstition in the real world, if suddenly a string of dead children were found with devoured abdomens, I think we've got the grounds for some incredibly creepy stuff. Though using this in an actual game might be a bit ham-fisted, I think the point still stands.
While I agree that they should be portrayed as thoroughly other, I don't think it's necessary to do so through making them superior in their raw capacity, rather making them completely alien in behavior. The fey do not do what they does out of a sense of amusement, but rather because it's as natural to them as breathing is to us. That this might be ripping the sinew from anyone who offends them to spin yarn is completely incidental and the side effects not at all their concern.
They're all from the jabberwock poem, and all are actually nonsense words. He meant for you to use those nonsense words to conjure images of weird creatures from your head.
Yes, sort of.
They're from the Jabberwocky poem (available from an internet near you) which is from Alice through the Looking Glass. This is also the, only, literary source for the term Vorpal sword - FWIW.
The poem is full of nonsense words and descriptions.
TeChameleon
2016-05-20, 11:58 PM
Wellp, I'm pretty sure that this (http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/l_fairie.htm) is a decent spot to start.
The biggest thing I've always found for making the Fae horrific is that they just don't get it it. They are entirely innocent... of malice and compassion equally. Most of them have no intent to be cruel, but they have no understanding of death, or even conception of it, nor time either- not really.
That being said, there are a fair number of fae that are just raw, distilled jerk. The Redcaps, as mentioned, of course, but there's also Jenny Greenteeth, some versions of the Kelpie, the Fachan... the list could go on for rather a while.
Mind you, if the fae do 'get' any part of what's going on, expect them to be startlingly petty about any part that they don't like, with vengeance for any slight, supposed or otherwise, blown so far out of proportion by any human standard that you end up on the equivalent of trial before the Hague for saying 'good morning' with the wrong inflection.
Or just murdered on the spot, I suppose.
One rather interesting take I saw on the Fae was that they were basically what you'd get if you made HAL 9000 with magic; an ancient race of AIs made broken and insane by their own intrinsic programming. The parallels worked rather better than you'd expect :smallconfused:
kraftcheese
2016-05-21, 12:21 AM
The ideas of a big set of rules that they're waiting for you to break so they can devour you/steal your eyes/etc. but that they are also constrained by.
Like the whole "vampires can only be invited in" thing, leaving milk out to appease local spirits or a djinni's 3 wishes; if you can best them using their rules you'll get a great boon, but if you insult them or break a Fey Law...
The Combine from Half-Life 2 could also be a good example of aggressive spirits. They arrive at Earth through portals and declare they now own the whole place, and within a few hours destroyed all active resistance. And now they just do their things without explaining anything to anyone. They don't even seem to have a real leader. They enslaved some humans to be the local police on Earth and herd the remaining people to where they want them, but these also don't seem to know anything more about what their higher-ups want, or are, either. Occasionally they are accompanied by huge alien cyborg creatures that provide heavy firepower, but those seem more like machines that don't really communicate. (Except howling when angry or hurt.)
All the aliens you get to see are big, very powerful, destructive, and never explaining themselves. They clearly have a complex plan for taking over and stripping a whole planet, but their goals are pure guess.
T GMan could also make for a great spirit. Even more than a demon. He looks like a human and talks quite a bit, but he clearly isn't anything even remotely human. He knows almost everything and seems to be one of the masterminds, but he's not explaining anything either. His mind is something quite alien.
zebaroth
2016-05-22, 12:36 AM
not horror but still a good isperation for fey basd games is Labyrinth also are four manga books that are a sequel to it
Kami2awa
2016-05-22, 02:21 AM
Scottish myth should give you some ideas. You have the kelpies, monsters who disguise themselves as women or fine horses to lure men to drown. You have the Redcaps, vicious creatures with iron claws and perpetually bloodstained caps who live in ruins. You have the Grey Man who guards the mountains.
English fey can often be a bit less violent, but there are the black hellhounds who guard crossroads (and get associated with ley lines). Then there is the actual changeling myth, which is horrifying - especially if you have children. (Even more frightening were the abusive methods used to exorcise children thought to be changelings.)
Consider that these are personifications of forces of nature, with all that that entails.
quinron
2016-05-22, 02:59 AM
Then there is the actual changeling myth, which is horrifying - especially if you have children. (Even more frightening were the abusive methods used to exorcise children thought to be changelings.)
The season 3 episode of Supernatural played a bit fast and loose with the actual mythology, but it accurately captured the horror of changelings. They work better for "paranoia-induced nightmares" horror than "horrible beings from beyond man's ken" horror, but if you make changelings even a minor physical threat and establish them in an area, it's easy to drive the players mad wondering who around them is a human and who's really a changeling.
Ninja_Prawn
2016-05-22, 05:06 AM
Scottish myth...
English fey...
Why is it that everyone defaults to British/Irish fairy stories? Okay, don't answer that.
But like, every culture in the world has fairy stories. Some of the German ones are super creepy, and the Ijiraat I brought up earlier (which are a great example of fey horror) come from inuit myth. And don't get me started on the hidden people of Iceland!
I'd also consider some Japanese yokai (plenty of nightmare fuel there!) to be fey. The usual translation is 'demon', but there's definitely some parallels with what D&D considers 'fey'. I mean, compare the zashiki-warashi with the Russian domovoi or Scottish brownie (which are unarguably fey). There are clear similarities.
SethoMarkus
2016-05-22, 11:58 AM
Why is it that everyone defaults to British/Irish fairy stories? Okay, don't answer that.
But like, every culture in the world has fairy stories. Some of the German ones are super creepy, and the Ijiraat I brought up earlier (which are a great example of fey horror) come from inuit myth. And don't get me started on the hidden people of Iceland!
I'd also consider some Japanese yokai (plenty of nightmare fuel there!) to be fey. The usual translation is 'demon', but there's definitely some parallels with what D&D considers 'fey'. I mean, compare the zashiki-warashi with the Russian domovoi or Scottish brownie (which are unarguably fey). There are clear similarities.
I think it's a combination of two things.
The first is that the term Fay/Faerie comes from the English corruption of Latin "fata" (fates) and early French "faerie". It started off, in the original languages, referring to mythlogical sub-deites and enchantment, respectively. The words were adopted by English and later came to represent a being or person rather than a concept. I think the strong prevalence in anglo-saxon and celtic/gaelic mythology has created a bond between the British Isles and fay/fae, as opposed to Elf for Germanic/Slavic, yokai for Eastern Asian, Djin for Arabic, or Native American (not sure of any collective term used there other than "spirits"). Now, I'm not saying that this is correct or accurate, but I think it has a lot to do with the frequency Irish/Scottish/English myth being used in inspiration for faeries and fae.
The second being that, in the Western World (esepcially eastern USA), there is a lot of British/Irish heritage. I think this creates a fascination with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures and myths. Obviously not everyone has this heritage or an interest in these cultures, but it is prevalent enough in Western society to create some familiarity. I'm particularly thinking of St. Patrick's Day in the United States, where it is a bigger celebration than anywhere else (even if they do miss the point of it). Again, I'm overgeneralizing for sure, but my experience in north eastern USA seems to support this.
Segev
2016-05-22, 12:54 PM
I'm particularly thinking of St. Patrick's Day in the United States, where it is a bigger celebration than anywhere else (even if they do miss the point of it).
We do not! It's the day we celebrate the patron saint of engineers by skipping classes and getting drunk! ...or maybe that's just Rolla.
solidork
2016-05-22, 01:07 PM
One of my favorite parts of the Chronicles of Darkness is their spirit world, called The Shadow. It exists as a twisted reflection of the real world, and is populated by spiritual reflections of literally everything except for humans. Car spirits, fear spirits, hope spirits, murder spirits, etc. They must constantly feed to survive, which means eating other spirits like themselves or feeding when events in the real world reflect their nature. They can also use their powers to influence the real world to help bring about the things that they feed on, and if left alone can eventually possess people they have been influencing.
Vereshti
2016-05-22, 04:35 PM
The movie Pan's Labyrinth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0457430/?ref_=nv_sr_1) is also a good source of inspiration. The Fey are quite otherworldly and often straight up nightmare fuel (the Pale Man, certainly).
The Vord from Codex Alera come to mind. They're aliens rather than fairies, but the effect is ultimately the same. Despite having humanoid appearances, they're more like insects than anything else, driven by a constant thirst for conquest- and since the Vord work as a single-minded hive, they simply can't grasp the implications of losing one, ten, even a thousand of their own, an attitude that is reciprocated towards their enemies. They work on biological instinct instead of rational thought, which is a trait a lot of well-known English and Celtic fae share. Their actual biology is pretty weird too- their primary foodstuff is a crimson, sentient grass, for one thing. And their leaders are so close to humanoid you could probably mistake them as such, if there wasn't something so damn off about their appearances and mannerisms.
Honestly, looking at what I've just typed, having fey (or any other creature, really) behave more like insects than humans is a good way to ratchet up the creepy factor. After all, one of our biggest flaws as a species is our instinctive fear of anything that doesn't think and act like ourselves.
Traab
2016-05-22, 06:49 PM
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but when I think Fey Horror, I think old school faerie creatures, so I picture tons of illusions that make you question reality. You can never be sure that anything you are seeing is real. Anyone you are talking to may be a faerie creature looking to trick you in some way. Is that monster really there? Is it really what it looks like? Maybe its your best friend? Maybe its leading you to a cliff edge. The horror there is revolving around not being able to trust anything. The paranoia level would be through the roof. (Assuming the roof is real)
Honest Tiefling
2016-05-23, 02:13 PM
If you value your sanity, don't click this link (http://www.inuitmyths.com/ijirait.htm).
Is...That supposed to look like that? It was less creepy and more 'So the Inuit have vagina face monsters? Well, okay then.'
Anyway, the problem with fey is that they are natural. The worst nature can offer is a painful death. Which is bad, but demons and aberrations do far worse, even in the lingering death department. You could play up the repeated death or the prolonged death, maybe toss in the idea that such pain over and over erodes the self until the people experiencing the horror truly believe they are nothing more then prey species.
You could also steal from the Eldritch's Horror's book, in that the fey mess with the mind. People love the fey, they can't help it! They will do anything for the fey, even mutilate themselves just to see them smile or laugh. Being separated from the fey is painful, and drives people to suicide or killing others to bring the fey back. The fey also molds them until they are what they want, until what the person was originally no longer remains. Memories, taboos, beliefs, desires, all warped to suit the fey.
And well...Elves do steal children, so there's that.
Fey probably can't do anything to you that will last beyond death. But they can do a lot of unpleasant and undesireable things before you're dead.
Not sure about other European spirit beings, but I think in the German tradition the main threat of fey is that they destroy your self. They are associated with madness and turning humans into animals that forget about their former life. They don't kill, they destroy your identity.
Ravens_cry
2016-05-23, 04:13 PM
Interpret these
Slithy toves
Borogoves
Mome raths
Jabberwock
Jubjub bird
Bandersnatch
The source is obvious
Nah. I know for many people Wonderland think of as being related to Fairy, but, to me, they're almost as different as you can get. Wonderland may be logic turned on its head, but it's still there as the basis, just in an opposite way.
Fairy is more . . . Other. It's not black is white, it's blue and orange too. It's whimsy, it's terrifying, it's capricious, it's alien. It is the shadows beyond the fire, flickering and dancing on the edge between real and not.
Segev
2016-05-23, 04:48 PM
Anyway, the problem with fey is that they are natural. The worst nature can offer is a painful death. Which is bad, but demons and aberrations do far worse, even in the lingering death department. You could play up the repeated death or the prolonged death, maybe toss in the idea that such pain over and over erodes the self until the people experiencing the horror truly believe they are nothing more then prey species.
Fey are of WILD nature. There is something of loss-of-self in the wilderness. Man becoming animal is an old, old horror trope, older than most written languages. Fear of the dark, fear of the forest, fear of the jungle; these things run deep. The fey representing an almost malign intelligence, an embrace of wildness and loss of civilization in a way that is not the nurturing co-existence of the ranger or the druid, but rather the subsumption of all that makes us who we are to base animal instinct, can be very terrifying.
The old stories of the Wild Hunt having mortals join it...but as mindless hounds...is not a comforting one. It's Man vs. Nature in the mind as well as the physical world.
Ninja_Prawn
2016-05-23, 04:55 PM
Is...That supposed to look like that? It was less creepy
Clearly you've just become desensitised to horror, Honest. That image gave me nightmares for weeks the first time I saw it...
There is something of loss-of-self in the wilderness. Man becoming animal is an old, old horror trope, older than most written languages. Fear of the dark, fear of the forest, fear of the jungle; these things run deep.
Reminds me of this guy:
http://i.imgur.com/tqGlUmC.gif
A new idea I just had is that places that are hostile environments for people are actually actively hostile. Because they are the home of spirits who attack intruders. When people die in such places, they don't just die from natural heat, cold, thirst, drowing, or disease and so on. They became victims of a hostile spirit.
Shouldn't be too different to create a good number of hostile fey from this principle.
Ninja_Prawn
2016-05-24, 06:21 AM
A new idea I just had is that places that are hostile environments for people are actually actively hostile.
Equally, the homeworld of the fey should be totally alien.
For example, in Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle, there is no passage of time in the Fae; and only two compass directions: 'nightwards' and 'daywards'. If you walk one way, it becomes night, and if you go the other, it becomes day.
I drafted some additional rules for the Feywild in my fey expansion for 5e; I'm particularly proud of the one that slowly turns you into a tree if you're not careful!
Also: the world needs more malevolent hedge mazes. Bonus points if they're patrolled by animated topiary minotaurs!
I made a realization that I should have made years ago. It would have helped me a lot with my spirit focused worldbuilding.
Western European spirits are not animistic. At least in modern interpretation, the fey are weird people from a crazy parallel world. But they are still people who live in houses and wear clothes and have parties with a lot of food and drink.
They live in the world of spirits and have magic powers, but they are people.
In contrast to that there are the spirits of the land who often appear as creatures of flesh and blood, but are really geographical features or forces of nature.
When you look at really old sources they are often hard to distinguish, but I would say as modern audiences are concerned there's a fundamental difference between the two. And they are creepy in different ways. The fey people are cruel tricksters, while the spirits of the land are territorial predators. The former are madmen, while the later are truly alien.
Gizmogidget
2016-05-24, 09:51 AM
I heard that the precursor to the headless horseman was a fey-like creature in their mythology that was a lesser death god. This creature would howl and those who heard it's howl would die, and it had a giant whip made out of a spine.
Honest Tiefling
2016-05-24, 03:53 PM
Clearly you've just become desensitised to horror, Honest. That image gave me nightmares for weeks the first time I saw it...
Maybe. I'm still trying to figure out if she shoots blood from her 'eyes' once a month.
I heard that the precursor to the headless horseman was a fey-like creature in their mythology that was a lesser death god. This creature would howl and those who heard it's howl would die, and it had a giant whip made out of a spine.
Um...Whose spine? Or did you mean a whip made out of multiple spines? I'm pretty sure that the average human spine isn't long enough to make a proper whip, so you'd just be waggling some bones in people's faces.
Also, I guess the important question is, which fey are we now going with? The people who are cruel tricksters who sculpt minds, or the incomprehensible forces of nature? Through for some reason the forces of nature thing reminds me of Wendigos, given that the victims start to become predators.
Blackhawk748
2016-05-24, 04:47 PM
Clearly you've just become desensitised to horror, Honest. That image gave me nightmares for weeks the first time I saw it...
The picture was kinda creepy, but the more i looked at it the less creepy it was. Mostly i found what they actually do to be horrifying.
I heard that the precursor to the headless horseman was a fey-like creature in their mythology that was a lesser death god. This creature would howl and those who heard it's howl would die, and it had a giant whip made out of a spine.
That would be the Dullahan, who was formerly a Celtic Fertility god who demanded human sacrifice. Eventually they stopped worshiping him (cuz he was a jerk) and then he rode out to get his own sacrifices.
Um...Whose spine? Or did you mean a whip made out of multiple spines? I'm pretty sure that the average human spine isn't long enough to make a proper whip, so you'd just be waggling some bones in people's faces.
Also, I guess the important question is, which fey are we now going with? The people who are cruel tricksters who sculpt minds, or the incomprehensible forces of nature? Through for some reason the forces of nature thing reminds me of Wendigos, given that the victims start to become predators.
I believe its made out of his victims. So its multiple spines.
Also how did i forget Wendigos? Those things are totally fey like, also extremely creepy.
Randomguy
2016-05-24, 11:06 PM
Have you ever read the web serial "Pact"? They had some pretty creepy fey.
The fey in Pact technically never lied, but manipulated the truth to absurd extents. They enjoyed tricking mortals essentially out of boredom, and liked to see how far they could take things.
In one chapter, a mortal goes to the world of the Fey to meet with an ambassador. The ambassador promises her and her familiar safe passage. Not included in the promise for safe passage is the mortal's unborn child.
In another of the chapters, a faerie offers Maggie Holt a magic ring in exchange for something from her backpack. She accepts the deal, and he takes a piece of paper with her name on it. He uses this to steal her name, and with some glamour he steals her identity as well. And the magic ring? The deal was that the ring would go to Maggie Holt. That was his name now.
This same faerie invited a girl to the Faeire House, with the promise that she would be unharmed and could leave when the clock struck midnight. Then he manipulated time in the house so that midnight never came. She was trapped there for years while he took her place in the outside world.
That would be the Dullahan, who was formerly a Celtic Fertility god who demanded human sacrifice. Eventually they stopped worshiping him (cuz he was a jerk) and then he rode out to get his own sacrifices.
Gorgons appear to have been guardian spirits in the older sources. That whole idea of being a cursed priestess comes only very late from a Roman fiction writer.
Joe the Rat
2016-05-25, 09:46 AM
A lot of old spirit and monster tales can be (re)worked as Fey.
For my world they are (among other things) taking the place of Genies in stories - or more specifically the high-ranking Court Fey are Genies, mechanically. This gets creepy when you deal with their other elements. Djinn - Air - Dark Court - are not Nice. They are hunters and thieves, but if you can steal a wish from them, they have to grant it. Dao - Earth - Autumn Court - are big on wealth and trade. They are the easiest to acquire a boon from, but you may not understand exactly what you were asked to give. They take trade very seriously. The strongest of them can decide not to accept trades at all. You will be unable to speak in their presence if they do not wish to exchange words with you.
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