The Fey

Fairies and nature spirits abound in the world of dungeons and dragons, but for the most part they are either go unnoticed, or are ignored. To get some idea of why the society of the characters is so reticent to accept fey in the way that they might accept a halfling or even an orc, one must realize that though the fey are not stupid, they are also not sane--not by human standards anyway. A conversation with a fey involves references to events and features of the world that simply do not exist to humans, humanoids, demi-humans, etc.. The fey, some argue, are more aware of the battles conducted in nature than are humans and elves. A human sees a tree, a fey sees an ancient citadel that has stood for centuries as a bulwark against the evil forces of some army of whose existence only the fey seem to know. At the same time, the events of the large world of human affairs often have little or no reference to the fey. What use is it to talk about the next town over to a Dryad that has never been more than fifty feet from her tree. At the same time, a human is unlikely to realize the drama that takes place in that area, and much less likely to see it in terms of political, social, and moral struggle. To the fey, plants, animals, the weather, and the elements are characters just as much as a merchant or a dragon is to a human being...or so they claim.



Investigations into the fey's "stories" are likely to turn up little in the way of corroboration. Perhaps the toad over there is, in fact, working for the dire tyrant tree the next glade over, but for all intents and purposes to humans, it's a toad: it acts like a toad and it never does anything peculiar to suggest allegiance to anything greater than its normal animal instincts.



What makes matters worse is that the fey seem to feel the same way about human affairs. Situated in the middle of a city, they are uncompelled to see the setting as a site of human drama. They may see it the way other people would see a tree. It's a tree, maybe it's nice to look out, but how long can you look at the same tree before it gets boring. For the fey, the question might be: how long can you look at the fight between the high ranking paladin and the evil power mad sorcerer before it gets dull.



Within the realm of normal society then, humans and humankind are likely to see fairies as no better than talking dragonflies prone to a world of intense make believe who may become hostile for reasons unknown but who normally ignore the presence of humans entirely.



There are a few points of contact that make this just a bit more complicated. Druids and fey share a similar world view, and as such, Druids tend to understand the fey way of looking at things a bit more than others. Even in these extreme circumstances, however, the druid understands only an inkling of the fey world. They are able to glimpse into its motivations and phenomena occasionally, normally through spells, and such, but they are always anchored in their comprehension of the normal world and also by their inability to fully immerse in the fey's. A druid probably wouldn't think that the fey are insane, but he or she wouldn't really understand what they're talking about, and probably knows that no amount of explaining is going to help.



Through interaction with the fey and the world of nature, druids commenly know that the fey divide the kingdom of the world up between the courts of the seelie and unseelie fairies. Where the seelie are insane and somewhat playful, the unseelie are insane and mischievous, if not downright psychotic. In the fairies stories, it is always the seelie court that plays the hero and the unseelie court that plays the villain. However, if this denotes a true battle between good and evil or whether this is just the way the fey play their games is inconclusive.