Musing: Fae

I never liked the idea of Fae was happy cute critters that prance around the forest and play tricks on you and giggle. Maybe it's because overly cute things make me want to kill a puppy just to even up the world or maybe because as a DM, I don't want to play a cute high pitched thing. I may come across as elitist, but I like to run games that aren't overthetop goofy and stupid. There will be humor, of course, the object is to have fun, but, in the end, I try to tell tales that are on par with epic novels, not absurdest humor.
So Fae in Deminar, like most things, are a bit different. For me, I wanted to bring the fae back to their more medieval roots, where they were aloof, mysterious, and oft times very powerful. I mixed that with a bit of the Changeling: The Lost vibe from nWoD, to get the idea of fae I now have.
The Fae come from their own plane, but many are trapped here because they were visiting when the world shattered and were cut off from their home plane, others like it here, despite it's differences from home, there's new things to explore and play with. Others are only here visiting, but shall soon return to the plane they call home. The plane in which the Fae come from is a vibrant natural world, however it's very morphic, things don't stay the same for very long and the Fae are the untold masters of this plane, they rose to intelligence amongst the chaos, and many can control it.
The Fae are alien in thought, they don't think like the other intelligent species on Deminar do, nor do they hold onto the morality. They are used to everything around them being their playthings, and they take that mentality into the floating lands with them. An area with a fae in it will start to show signs of it's influence. Places begin to warp and look out of place, two animals may have been crudely stitched together and survive, in pain, by magic. Fae seeing the "friendly species" in its lands may leave them alone, may kill them swiftly, or may torment them with magic, trickery, and invading their dreams. A Fae will gut another intelligent species and feel the same remorse that we do when we rip a leaf off a tree. They'll keep a creature alive as they flay off their skin just as readily as they'll take a creature as a sexual conquest. It's not that they're malicious and mean, it's just they don't think in absolute terms like we do and that makes them far worse.

One last thing, while the standard Fae creatures that are iconic to LL will be present, Dryads, Sprites, and the like, they'll not look the part.

Where as the standard D&D fae may look like this:




The ones on Denimar look more like this:






With much thanks and respect to Gullermo del Toro's twisted mind...