Fairy Godproblems
March 28th, 2011
It's officially Fey Week now, here at Necromancers of the Northwest, and that means that for the next 5 days we're going to be bringing you a full bounty of articles relating to these mysterious and otherworldly creatures. Of course, depending who you talk to, fey aren't really otherworldly at all, but are, in fact, inherently tied to this world, and are amongst the most natural creatures imaginable. In fact, when you get right down to it, there are nearly as many visions of what, exactly, faeries are like as there are, well…people with opinions on what faeries are like. By way of example, there isn't even really an accepted spelling for faeries (at least, not in fantasy). Faerie, fairy, fairie, fayri, fey, fay, etc…
Of course, this isn't all that new. Faerie legends and lore are hardly uniform, and, in fact, often contradict each other (for example, faeries were once said to be scared off by the crowing of a cock, and yet are also said to have kept poultry, etc). Faeries have been said to be otherworldly spirits, nature spirits, relatively mundane earthly creatures, and even the spirits of the dead. The common image of tiny people with butterfly wings is far from universal, either, and doesn't really date back more than a couple hundred years.
In modern fantasy literature, fey tend to vary a little less than they do in folklore, but there are still some major points of confusion. One such point is the typical faerie alignment. They vary wildly on the good and evil axis, but, in D&D, at least, they tend to be decidedly chaotic creatures. There are exceptions, of course (they aren't outsiders, after all), but generally speaking it's a safe bet that any given fey you encounter is probably going to be chaotically-aligned.
On the other hand, if you go out and read any modern fantasy literature about fairies, you often find that they are actually damnably lawful. They are very frequently portrayed as having an almost slavish devotion to ancient custom and rules, and though they may do everything they can to betray the spirit of those rules, they always obey the letter. Again, this isn't all faeries: some, for example, are just airheaded little balls of light that fly around and talk about how pretty things are (of course, even the balls of light can be pretty lawful. Case and point: Navi, from Zelda, and her incessant nagging to get back on task). Though they are often mischievous and frequently malicious, they always seem to have a strict code which they are never willing to break.
Why, then, are they listed as chaotic? Well, for one thing, even if their strong sense of custom is frequently seen (or at least hinted at, just beneath the surface), the idea that faeries love mischief seems to be nearly universal (nearly universal), and so that may have just been the simplest way of expressing their outlook. After all, the dual-axis alignment system may not be the worst way to express a character's outlook on life, but it's far from the most expressive, too. Still, I'm not sure that I could ever accept a chaotic neutral alignment from a creature that is physically incapable of telling a lie (even if it can still dissemble).
Really, when you get right down to it, I think that fey creatures should probably exist largely outside of alignment conventions, in any place. From their obsession with polite customs and etiquette to their general disregard for human welfare and well-being, one of the only things that can be said to be as pervasive in faerie lore as their penchant for mischief is the fact that their world view—their priorities, their thought processes, their whole general mindset—are very far removed from our own. In fact, in that way, one could argue that fairies generally have more in common with aberrations than they do with humans (a viewpoint which has been growing lately in popular media, actually. Torchwood's treatment of fairies comes immediately to mind).
Generally, though, when a DM (or player) is having problems with fey, it's rarely because of an alignment-related argument. Usually, in my experience, at least, the main problem with fey is that they tend to have devastating effects on the campaigns they pop up in. Oh, sure, you could throw out an odd encounter with a grig just to be mean to your players (though, you forfeit the right to complain when they step on the annoying little nuisance, once they finally regain control of their feet) without too much worry, but the more fey you put in your game, the greater the likelihood of mayhem.
After all, fey do love mischief and, also, they don't see things the same way we do. To them, it might be funny to swap children, or to transform someone into a donkey (either partially or all the way), or it might make great sport to simply hunt people down like animals and slaughter them. And that’s just some of the more popular stereotypes. With the kind of mischief and complete disregard for human life that fey exemplify, dropping one into the middle of your campaign (especially if you give it any kind of real power) is a lot like having the Deck of Many Things drop in to say "hi." Faeries are like a force of nature: not in that they're usually associated with nature (though they are), but in that they're wild, destructive, and uncontrollable (unless, you know, you can trap them with their own devotion to rules and customs).
This is especially compounded by the fact that, in folklore and other fey-related media, faeries often have very potent magical powers, usually, in fact, so potent that they can only really be represented in D&D by spells like wish and miracle. DMs interested in including the fair folk in their campaigns will, almost inevitably, be seduced by the sort of faerie magic they've seen and heard from fey elsewhere, and want to replicate that by, essentially, giving the PCs a whole lot of rope and waiting for them to hang themselves with it (metaphorically speaking, that is).
By way of example, let me tell you about a little fellow known as "Glip." Glip was an NPC who showed up in a campaign I played in. Glip was technically a mephit (I forget exactly what kind), but he had the half-fey template, and, according to the DM "the omnipotent template," which, I suppose, was his way of saying that Glip had the ability to do all of those cool fey bargain things that you see in books and movies, but which D&D isn't really forthcoming with, mechanics-wise. Glip, then, as you may be gathering, was a very chaotic influence on our campaign (though, you will likely notice as the story goes on, that he was also very much in for fair play and following the rules).
If I remember correctly, Glip was first introduced as he knocked my character into a pit with his gust of wind effect (it came from the type of mephit he was). In Glip's defense, my character deserved it: I believe I was the only party member not in the pit, and I may or may not have been extorting the rest of the party in exchange for help out. Anyway, from there on out, the wishes were on. I remember a flurry of craziness as Glip accommodated all kinds of "deals" with the various PCs, including turning people into sheep, swapping appendices (or else selling appendices, I'm a little hazy), and all sorts of other craziness. One character in particular, who was always happy to "roll the dice" with Glip, wanted to be taken to some treasure, and wound up getting the whole party teleported to a small little island on a lake of acid, which contained a treasure chest we couldn't open. Not satisfied with that, he made some other deal which left both my character and his separated from our bodies (which promptly marched off of their own accord, under Glip's command). We got them back, eventually, through a painfully simple "deception" which largely involved cheating, but that's an entirely different story altogether.
The point of the story is that, ultimately, the only way for the DM to recover from the insanity he had unleashed on his own game was simply to teleport us all to another dimension, and basically start things over from scratch. It's not that he was a bad DM, either—I could just as easily have made the same mistake, and I'm sure many DMs over the years have. Hells, I let the Deck of Many Things land in one of my games not too long ago. At the end of the day, perhaps the ancient folklore is right: fey are best left alone, lest you incur their wrath.
I’ll see you all same time next week. In the meantime, stay away from faerie groves.