What do Fair Folk want and need? Why do they interact with humans at all?

[Scalenex]

I'm trying to thread a needle. On the whole, I like hard settings (my magic fits certain rules, my economies make sense, and I never create a creature or nation if I cannot justify how they feed themselves), but I also believe the best modern and classic Faerie Tales rely on soft magic settings. Coraline, Spirited Away, Alice in Wonderland, The Spiderwick Chronicles, even Artemis Fowl's universe would probably be considered a soft magic setting but it is a bit harder than most.

I want to keep Fae unpredictable and mysterious so that they are difficult for characters to predict what they will do, but not impossible to predict.


Beasts want food, shelter, safety, and to reproduce.

Mortals want food, shelter, safety, and to reproduce. They also desire wealth, power, love, popularity, glory, purpose, and other more complicated things.

The Restless dead, aka ghosts seek to fulfill their emotions.

Non-puppet undead want to feed on the living.

Spirits (my equivalent to outsiders) want to serve their patron god or goddess.

Elementals, when pulled to the material plane and aren't controlled by a summoner just act, they don't think and they don't want. "Wild" elementals show up in areas where lots of magic spells were cast in a short period of time then disappear. They will loosely mimic the emotions of the spell casters that accidentally summoned them.

What do [B]Fae [/B]want and need? I still need to figure this out.



In my world at least, a primordial evil god named Turoch created the universe because he wanted to eat souls and he used the material plane as a giant farm. He created a bunch of demigod servants to help him manage this soul farm. Then a bunch of his most powerful servants rebelled and killed him and his few loyalist followers. The nine most powerful of his servants gained a portion of Turoch's power (because if D&D taught me anything it's that killing things makes you stronger!) and they are now known as "The Nine", each embodying one of the nine alignments and imprinting their values on the universe. The tiny number of mortals that fought beside the gods and lived to tell about it also gained a tiny piece of Turoch's power becoming the first dragons.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of Turoch's lesser servants chose to sit out of the rebellion neither aiding the Nine nor aiding Turoch. They became the ancestors of the Fair Folk in my world, aka the Proto-Fae.

I got five planes in my universe so far.

The Material Plane where most adventures and stories happen.

The Aetherial Realm (where the Nine live and set up an afterlife for the Honored Dead.

The Void (where Turoch's corpse went and morphed into something resembling the Negative Energy Plane in a typical D&D world but it occasionally spawns Lovecraftian monsters out of Turoch's essence)

The Elemental Plane (where elementals chill 99% of the time)

Fae Home (where the Fae live in what used to be Turoch's planar home palace and estate before it was rendered into ruins).

The Nine were collectively stronger than the hundreds of Proto-Fae and could have won if the two groups fought, but the Proto-Fae were strong enough that in such a fight, the Proto-Fae could damage the Material Plane enough that the Nine would not have much left to rule over, so the Nine gave the proto-Fae the Realm of Fae Home to use as their personal sandbox provided they didn't interfere with the Nine or their worshipers.

Then the Nine and mortal-kind largely forgot about the Proto-Fae.

The Material Plane entered the First Age, or the Age of Dragons. Dragon kingdoms ruled the world, traded and fought with each other.

The realm of Fae Home was cosmologically adjacent to the Elemental Plane so the Proto-Fae adapted to use the cosmic essence of the elementals as their power source, building material, and sustenance. As the Proto-Fae became true Fair Folk, they set up four courts, Fire, Earth, Water, and Air. Each court set up mighty citadels over fonts of elemental power from their chosen element, but about 95% of the realm of Fae Home was elementally neutral. If a bunch of fire fae occupied a piece of land, that piece of and would take on fiery traits, but if a bunch of earth fae evicted them, the piece of land would take on earthy traits.

The Four Elemental Courts all independently had the brilliant idea that their element should rule supreme, so they fought to try to terraform Fae Home into their favorite element. The war never abated because if one elemental court ever gained the upper hand, the other three would form a temporarily truce to topple the leader. If one of the four courts fell into last place, they could retreat to their home citadels to regroup, and their home citadels were essentially invincible fortresses against the other three elements. War never ended and the alliances were made and broken all the time in a perpetual state of war, manipulated by the Faerie elites similar to the eternal war set up in George Orwell's 1984.

The only Fair Folk that entered the material plane in this era were criminals, rebels, or outcasts from the elemental courts looking for somewhere to hide. Fair Folk like this were pretty rare.

Meanwhile on the Mortal Plane, The First Age of Mortals was the Age of Dragons. Dragons were the dominant race. Some lesser races were made to either assist the dragons or harm them, but the status quo remained in place, dragons were large and in charge.

The dragons formed competing kingdoms and fought escalating wars. Seeking a magical edge, a foolhardy dragon queen tampered with forces beyond her ken and tried a massive magic spell to harness the power of the Elemental Plane and accidentally summoned millions of rogue elementals which went berserk creating floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes while also creating new mountains, rivers, volcanoes and more exotic geographic features like flying islands or clouds that rain down fire. The elemental chaos killed 90% of all living things. This event was called the First Unmaking.

The Nine called a mulligan. Rather than trying to rebuild society with the surviving dragons (who were now mostly xenophobic misers in isolated lairs jealously guarding their treasure hoards), the Nine opted to create Eeves to be the new dominant race for the Second Age.

But flipping back to the the Fair Folk. Fae Home was powered and sustained by the Elemental Plane. When the elementals went amok, this severed much of the connections between Fae Home and the Elemental Plane. This indirectly made food, building materials, and magical power sources much more scarce in the realm of Fae Home.

The four elemental courts wanted to keep fighting, but for the first time ever, a large portion of their foot soldiers told the court leaders to stick their war plans in their rectums. Where once, court-less fae made up roughly 5% of the Fae population, it quickly swelled to roughly 20%. Even the Fae that didn't abandon their courts outright started obeying their lords' and ladies' edicts in a less than enthusiastic manner.

With their elemental resources throttled, many Fair Folk were forced to enter the Material Plane to make up for the shortfalls, but I'm not sure what they need from the Mortal Plane exactly.

Do they feed on the life force of mortals?

Do they feed on the emotions of mortals

Do they need mortal breeding stock?

Do they need something else?

I want the Fair Folk to have a reason to interfere clandestinely in mortal events for mysterious reasons. But even if the mortals don't know what the Fair Folk want from mortals, I want to know what the Fair Folk want from mortals. Ideally something that occasionally result in Fae Warlocks because I think Fae Warlocks are cool.

I like the idea that Faeries are tied to the Tweens. Tween times include things like doorways, bridges, national borders, coastlines. Any spot between two things. Also Tween Times would be dawn, dusk, noon, and midnight. Most portals between the Mortal Plane and Fae Home would be located in Tween places and only be open at Tween times though every portal has different methods of opening and closing and these systems are not always obvious. Based on the ancient Celts, I also created four Tween holidays that are exactly the midway points between the Solstices and Equinoxes.

In the real world, the Ancient Celts had Imbolc, Beltaine, Midsummer, and Samhain. Modern Americans turned these holidays into Groundhog Day, May Day, nothing at all, and Halloween. I created fictional variants based on these days and during these days Fair Folk can travel to the Material Plane very easily.

Flipping back to the mortal plane, the various Elven nations, grew and expanded and eventually large scale wars became common place. A foolish elf king tampered with forces beyond his ken and accidentally breached the barriers that kept the realm of the Void at bay causing millions of soul sucking monsters (aka Void Demons) to flood into the material plane killing about 95% of all mortal life and 50% of all animal life. This event was called the Second Unmaking.

A lot of the Fae in the Mortal Plane were devoured by Void Demons but the Fair Folk were available to avoid most losses in the Second Unmaking by fleeing to Fae Home and locking the doors behind them. They sat out of mortal events as the Nine created humans to replace the elves as the new dominant race.

The Fair Folk came back to interfere with humanity the way they once interfered with elvenkind.

I figure in the Third Age, the four elemental courts are metaphorical paper tigers. I figure about 20% of the Fair Folk are true court loyalists, about 40% are token loyalists, and about 40% are full court-less (or they form their own independent micro-courts). A lot of fae no longer physically resemble one of the four classic elements, but that is no guarantee of court. Lots of Fae with outward elemental traits refuse to cowtow to any elemental court and lots of court loyalists bear no cosmetic elemental features.

I still don't know what the Fair Folk want or need from mortals. I just like the idea that their interference is mysterious and slowly growing.

A lot of modern Faerie fiction states that Fair Folk are too good to demons but too evil to be angels. I took this as inspiration. In a similar way I want the Fair Folk to be similar to the servants of the Nine and the servants of Turoch but separate from them.

I like a kitchen sink approach to fantasy world building. I'm trying to draw influence and creatures from Graeco-Roman myth, Celtic folklore, Native American folklore, classical Chinese and Japanese folklore, and African folklore. Recently, I've been dipping my toe into the folklore of Australian aborigines. Given how weird and dangerous the real animals of Australia, imagine how weird and dangerous their fictional monsters are!

If I come across a fantasy creature I want to include, if it mostly obeys the laws of physics (other than dragons), I make it a denizen of the mortal plane. If the fantasy creature is REALLY weird, I make it a Fair Folk, whether it be Celtic monster Fachan or the cucumber loving Japanese kappas with their spill-able bowls of water on their heads. Japanese Yokai folklore is a gold mine for exotic creatures.

[brian 333]

Joy, lust, fear, rage, passion, misery: they are all absent in the realm of the fey. The nature of their home destroys them, imposing a sameness of neutral emotion which makes life boring beyond endurance.

Those few mortal spirits judged to be unworthy of an eternal reward are tossed there, to be ground down and siphoned away into nothingness.

When the fey had easy access to the elemental planes, they could induce emotions in their elemental cattle and siphon it off for their use. This is how they began to take on elemental essences in the first place. Without this emotional energy, the fey themselves begin to merge into the uncaring sameness of their plane. Their eternal war was less about territorial gain than it was about maintaining goals to achieve and passions to be experienced.

When this access was made more difficult, the world of mortals became the less difficult food source. Fey lurk in the cracks of the mortal realm, seeking victims to exploit.

The weakest of them all are tricksters, gathering the spikes in emotional reactions from the victims of their practical jokes. More powerful ones seek to trade power for power, granting knowledge for emotional reactions. Secret teachers and guardians, they seek to experience the emotions of those they exploit, slowly draining their victims of the very thing that defines life. (The place of the incubus/succubus is filled by fey who take the joys of conjugal passion as food.)

Changelings are fey which steal infants and carry them away to the realm of the fey, then usurp their place. Since the changeling knows what it is, it can only mimic what a baby should be as it 'grows', siphoning the normal emotions that parents and their community has for children. These children leave bland, uncaring victims behind, after a time, and go on into the mortal realm, often from places of mortal authority, to create upheaval and strife so that they can feed from the emotional reactions of their victims.

Greater fey openly bargain or trick the victims into willingly surrendering mortality to become cattle they can take to the fey realms where many fey feed on the ever decreasing emotional reactions of their victims until they become empty shadows which are themselves starved and seeking emotional food. These undead are sometimes returned to the mortal realm to suck up food before being brought back and 'milked' of what they manage to steal.

Few mortals know anything about this, other than through fables and half-forgotten folklore. Elves were beginning to learn, but their knowledge was scattered to the winds in their apocalypse. The gods know, but part of the bargain they made with the fey is a non-interference pact: fey cannot interfere with the gods' farming plans either.

[Dienekes]

In my setting, the Fair Folk are in search of new emotional experiences. They want to love as they have never loved before, eat the most delicious meals that they have ever tasted, cry the most profound tears, and scream with a rage that mere mortals cannot comprehend. And not just for them. They want everyone to experience such things.

As such their priorities are not, or are almost never "what is good/bad?" or even "what is beneficial/unoptimal?" It is "What can I do in this instant to create the greatest cacophony of emotion?"

They are the eternal drama queens and kings. If they think doing something completely evil will in that instance cause the largest outpouring of emotion, they will do it. Usually not up to the point of complete genocide. What good is emotion if it is cut off completely? But when the Fair Folk fought and defeated the dwarves in a battle, they made a point to capture some children and throw them from tall towers before their family members, simply to experience the utter despair of their defeated opponents.

Why do the Fair Folk deal with mortals? Because new emotional experience require new people. Even the most wonderful of person loses their luster after a thousand years. They need to see someone new experience these emotions. The Fair Folk don't really have new ideas. They have perfected some very old ideas. You want to hear the most dynamic and powerful orchestral piece ever composed? Look up the Fair Folk, they have literally mastered that craft. But, they're stuck there. Every artist had their period of experimentation and self-expression a millennia ago or more.

They crave the new. If the Fair Folk were around when Jazz was invented, they would have gone berserk and kidnapped all of New Orleans just to play for them.