A Brain Dump of Fey Content

Over in Twitter, I decided to promote "Fey Gifts & Bargains" with a megathread - for each Like, RT, or new purchase of the PDF, I'd write one tweet of fey NPCs, story hooks, locations, magic items, or whatever. This is the work in progress - the tweet blown up a bit, so it's much less than halfway done. (Also the PDF just hit Electrum Best Seller!)

 I'm posting this here for the benefit of non- or rare Twitter users, and because I'm very unlikely to get another post up between now and the end of the month.

As I've talked about before in Tribality, the Night Collector comes from a character played by Angela Pearl in the Shattered Isles LARP. I'm doing some of my own stuff with her as a concept.

1. The Night Collector - an Archfey who loves secrets and dangerous treasures - has a black marble vault that stores everything she has gathered. Here secrets might be written on gilt scrolls, sung by caged birds, or woven on spider-silk looms by tiny, warped goblins.

2. The Night Collector’s fey-touched goblins know too much to ever be allowed out of her keeping. Extracting one of them is the key to answering a vital question that the PCs face - but who knows what the Night Collector might do in retaliation?

3. The Seelie and Unseelie each have their own embassies in the Courts of Hell and in many layers of the Abyss. If you want to recover a soul that has been made into a soul coin, bargaining with the Night Collector or the Queen of Air and Darkness might be your last hope.

4. It isn’t that the Seelie Queen won’t recover souls from Hell, for a price. Of course she will. The problem is aesthetics: a condemned soul needs a fresh coat of paint before she could think of passing it along. By the time she’s done, there aren’t many original parts left.

5. A fey named the Yew Lord became so fond of feasting and celebration that he withdrew to a place in the Feywild where time’s current is stagnant. At all times, his feast is beginning, ongoing, and ending. Invitations are traded around as rare treasures, among the fey.

6. In the course of this Festival Perpetual, the same events recur, because they are Fated, until a mortal causes a change. The PCs get involved when they learn that the magical harp they need was last held by the Yew Lord’s favorite minstrel.

7. Then, of course, there’s Robin Goodfellow - or maybe you know him as Reynard or Puck or a thousand other names. Is he truly loyal to the Seelie Queen and happy with his rôle as Court Jester? Or does he have... ambitions?

a. In a better world where none of your players have ever been hurt, the Good Fellow is the source of ridiculous, Noises-Off sex comedy. In our world, uh, that needs so much care and consent to run that it’s safer to give it a miss.

8. But when you, a rogue, get pinched for a crime you can’t possibly have committed, it’s a fair bet that Puck is behind it - and also in the magistrate’s court watching you try to explain your way out of this one.

9. That’s all a long game so he can twist your arm into joining his cult of burglars and grifters. See, he’s planning greatest heist of all time... robbing Nessus and Azzagrat in the same night, and pinning it on the yugoloths. Pretty sure this won’t come back to bite ANYONE.

10. The storyteller with the too-bright green-gold eyes comes to your village only in spring and fall, and they’re gone by morning. Once their tale is told, they offer a game of questions - secret lore in exchange for speaking painful truths aloud. Woe to the one who lies…

11. All fey are drawn to rivers, of course, but naiads and leech-fey most of all. Naiads care for the river, giving and receiving life from its waters, and speaking to one another through its babbling voice. Most of all they wait for the wisest salmon of each year’s spawning.

12. Leech-fey dwell on the water, not in it, poling along in small boats and traveling only by night. They gather all sorts of odds and ends in their travels, trading them to mortals in exchange for feeding the leeches a sip of your blood. You could even pay for passage...

13. The Stony Oracle is a fey that has joined herself to the earth in a deep crevasse. She welcomes visitors and provides clearer answers than most soothsayers, but only the quick-footed or silver-tongued can ever leave.

14. A hedge maze festooned with thorns guards the Hawthorn Palace. Even flyers may prefer to take their chances with the maze, rather than the scourging malice of the treants that tower over it.

15. Once inside the Hawthorn Palace, all things seem to be the height of refinement and luxury, so that none wish to leave. As long as you keep moving, enjoy it to your heart’s content, but if you rest, the thorns soon grow over you and hold you fast.

16. If it’s so dangerous, why even go to the Hawthorn Palace? IMC, the PCs had to bind and destroy the human cult leader who ruled there, to pay their debt to another Archfey. Maybe your PCs didn’t mean to go there, but it found them after they got lost in a primeval forest.

17. Maybe you’re going in after a friend who has been thorn-bound - and the longer you take, the more of your friend’s memories have been leached away and sold off to the Goblin Market.

18. The Hawthorn Palace has grand treasures, even if it doesn’t eclipse the Night Collector’s vaults. I’ll come up with original suggestions as well, but #themagnusarchives 171 has horrible, magical (?) flowers that are perfect here.

a. Other treasures you might find here: Loqui, the Golden Songbird The Ever-Growing Foundation Stone (aka Daern’s Eventual Fortress) The Seven Ruby Seeds The Lhyragyth Manuscript (a magic book to make your spells stronger against fey, especially Seelie fey)

19. In the Midnight Gallery, where the Queen of Air and Darkness displays her achievements, there is a statue named Brigid Honor-Bound. If you stand before the statue, Brigid can speak to you in the barest of whispers.

20. Brigid Honor-Bound was once a dwarf knight sworn to the Silver Knight, an Archfey of impeccable honor. Over many years the Queen ensnared Brigid in contradictory oaths and prohibitions, until Brigid was paralyzed into inaction and gradually petrified.

21. For the Queen, this was a game to steal one of the Silver Knight’s followers, and to show that Seelie honor is untenable for mortals. Brigid would be freed if she were released from even one of her many oaths - but she can’t bring herself to request that freedom.

22. Redcaps are the one kind of fey that it’s trivially easy for a mortal to *become.* People who are satisfied in their lives can’t understand why someone would go before Mother Merciless and seek her blessing. You have to be starving first - for food, justice, or other things.

Sidebar

This is a reminder that the Seelie aren’t GOOD and the Unseelie aren’t EVIL. It’s easier now than ever to see someone would reject the glamour and propriety of the Seelie in favor of rage and revenge, and be right to do so.

23. No one knows better than the Archfey that no matter how powerful you become, there’s always someone stronger. It is their Fate (fey ~ “fated”) that the Eldest among them will return, or escape, from their long Exile and tear down the vaunted glory of the Feywild.

24. What are the Eldest, and what are they like? TBH this isn’t a question I’ve really tried to answer for my campaign, much less yours, so I’ll just suggest a few different answers.

a. Primal beings of Creation - basically the cast of Hesiod’s Theogony, or your standard Nobilis PC. They want to complete the creation of the Feywild, into a form antithetical (or at least disadvantageous) to the Archfey, who they see as a minor misstep in their Plan.

b. The faces of primal chaos, especially if the standard demon lords and Abyssal cosmology aren’t part of your setting. These might be Excrucians from Nobilis, or they might have unusual names like He Whose Touch Rends the Word.

25. Though many fey shy away from iron, steel, and most forms of engineering, the Muse of Steel embraces metallurgy and related arts eagerly. She speaks most of all to people too passionate about their art for their own good; her bargains are the perilous compromises they make.

26. In Rhu-kel’s Hearth, mortals reign their dreams in steel, mithral, crystalvine, and the like. All it costs them is memories: of peace, of satisfaction, and most of all, love. More than a few come here to burn away memory and get something, anything, in return.

27. Rhu-kel’s Hearth brought many great weapons and armors into being, but it is Known that the greatest is yet to come. One of the Eldest will return long before the rest and be slain. That spirit will be shaped into a weapon, and its name shall be What-Thou-Must.

28. Some of those other treasures - Graelian's Guard, plate armor with a lion motif; grants a pounce attack. Crowfeather, a black-enameled buckler shield; lets you glide short distances. Lance of the Airy Gate, a mithral lance forged only to storm the Unseelie Queen's bastion.

29. A treasure made in Rhu-kel’s Hearth: Captain Jutic’s War Helm - Jutic, a rare satyr who fights in the war between the Courts, had a helm made to hold his pan flute by his mouth. He needs hands to play it, but doesn’t have to stow it when it’s time to fight.

30. In several parts of the Feywild, there are spiral staircases standing out in the open and seemingly leading to nowhere. During twilight (and solar eclipses, on which more later), the rest of the staircase appears, leading upward to a crystalline door.

31. Originally, there were as many keys as Archfey, fashioned out of twilight and dream-sand. Over countless years, each one has been lost or stolen, until only the Night Collector’s key remains. She didn’t take the others, but she certainly profits from their loss.

32. Getting to make other fey - even the Seelie Queen, once or twice - come to kiss the ring in order to climb the Twlight Stair has its perquisites. Though Unseelie, the Night Collector also stands outside the Courts at times. Which is no doubt how she met the true thief.

33. He has lived a thousand lifetimes in the wainscoting of the Feywild, sustained by the Twilight Stair and the power of the Feywild itself. He is Hygelac, the Thief of Five Fates (for whom the Eldritch Invocation is named). All he has left is a need to evade retribution.

34. What’s on the other side of the door of the Twilight Stair? It is a place outside, where hidden connections between disparate things become visible, granting the Archfey much of the secret understanding that lets them manipulate mortals so thoroughly.

35. Rhu-kel’s Hearth can make replica Keys of the Twilight Stair, though they are substantially lesser: each works only once, and you can only observe and analyze the connections for a short time before you are shunted back to the Feywild. These flaws may be deliberate.

36. The PCs encounter the Thief when they need to hide from an Archfey, or when they’re asked to track down one of the lost Keys. He’s much more protected against fey magic than mortal power. A bargain might be possible: one or more keys, in exchange for becoming an Archfey.

37. The toil of sowing, reaping, and milling are not part of life in the Feywild. Two reasons: Firstly, dryads, naiads, and pixies give the land a superabundance of fertility. Secondly, the Archfey do away with what would make the land less alluring to mortals.

38. Thus it is partly magical effort, exercised in ancient rituals such as the fairy rades and seasonal games, that delivers bounty. A cruel or greedy fey knight or lord often leads to blighted land. Many symbolic things of the Material Plane become actual in the Feywild.

39. But the story of the Seelie and Unseelie is the cycle of the year: the Unseelie are hunger and the dread thereof, winter, and loneliness. There are only a few places where growth and plenty are year-round - most of them traps for the unwary.

40. Queen's Farewell is a silvery-hulled ship with leafy sails. It has no visible crew, but sails by its captain's will alone. She never leaves her quarters, but sometimes she allows visitors or passengers inside, where she is swathed from head to toe in silk.

41. Queen's Farewell can plane shift, as long as it is out in open waters, between the Material Plane, the Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Dreamlands - but there are other ways to do those things. It *is* the only ship that can find the Island of Ang-Yr-Ban.

42. There are two creatures unique to Ang-Yr-Ban that might make you want to visit, and one to stop you from leaving. The Winterheart Falcon was the companion of six of the greatest rangers in all of elven, human, and fey history. He hopes to learn the ways of orcs next.

43. The Cerulean Toad also lives on Ang-Yr-Ban, croaking out a heady mix of aphorisms, witticisms, and such profanities as the day would quake to look upon. He eats things that do not agree with him - take that as you will.

44. There is a Lotus Serpent on Ang-Yr-Ban as well, whose venom stops the desire of the heart, not its pulse. He returns these wishes to the lotus-blossom with the tip of his tongue, so that the lotus can remember its first blossoming in distant shores.

45. One of the often-overlooked side effects of the memory trade is how it affects teleportation. Sell a memory of your youth, and you sell the ability to teleport to the room where it happened. Possession (of a memory) is nine points of the law.

46. That, then, is one reason PCs might seek out a Goblin Market or another memory trader. Do you want to teleport to a distant continent, or into the lich’s lair? Buy your way in! It probably won’t cost your WHOLE childhood.

47. Goblin Markets are one of my favorite ways for PCs to encounter fey content. It just happens that they're also hard to run well, because they're a shopping session where the players don't even know what they're looking for or hoping to find. To say nothing of the risks.

a. Some merchants you'll meet in the Goblin Market, then: Tamizand the Haberdasher, a balding goblin with a wide variety of solutions. Huqul the Masker, a fomorian who trades in names and faces. Akbe the Weaver, an elf who sells fey-woven cloth and tailored clothing.

48. Three more Goblin Market merchants. Itirri the Knife, a redcap who sells the best meat in the Market. This is fine. Bone-chewer, a redcap scrimshander. Also fine. Bitterling, a korred brewer. He works for the Good Fellow & gives away half his product. Zero cause for concern.

49. What is it that wears your long-lost uncle’s appearance on the same day that you visit the Goblin Market? Who is the Wild Hunter that follows it, and how does their hound know your uncle’s scent?