image by Charles Edmund Brock, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Table of contents

Roleplaying the Feyfolk Redux

The Feyfolk Roleplay Toolkit

More Fey For You

Folklore of Faerie(You are here)

Before we close out this Zine, I want to share some worldbuilding for the Feengrenze, including Faerie, the courts of the Twin Queens, and Feengrenze’s half-fey. This is supplemental material to fill in the gaps in the lore in the main chapters of the zine, to serve as canonical lore for the Feengrenze, and to inspire you to create your own Fey plane. You are free to build off of mine or steal it wholesale if it gets you and your party to the table. 

Faerie

Faerie, as mentioned previously, is the Metauniverse of Growth, Life, and Change. It is a higher-dimensional realm, an infinite expanse of the most pristine and arcadian nature in all of creation, from which life and growth pour into the Manyfold’s many universes like a mighty river. Towering ancient forests cover vast expanses of land, interspersed with sparkling blue lakes, majestic mountain ranges, and mist-choked swamps and moors. Everything in the plain is larger than life, breathtaking, and overflowing with nature’s bounty, be it fruit, vegetables, edible fungus, or animal life.

The Eccentricities of Faerie

However, despite its seeming similarity to many places in our world, it does not behave like anything in our world or any other world. There is a sense of whimsy to the whole dimension that defies logic, explanation, and, to a degree, mapmaking. The following features are generally true in Faerie.

Space

Metauniverses only obey the common laws of physics as much as the Prime Aspects of that Metaverse want, and the Twin Queens couldn’t care less. As such, the Metauniverse is in constant flux with features drifting about at the whim of the High Fey or often their own whims. Maps of Faerie generally read like the ramblings of an insane person rather than helpful tools.

Logic

Causality is one of the other things the Twin Queens do not care much about, and as such, Faerie does not follow strict laws of causality or logic. It is entirely possible and relatively common for effects to come before their causes or not have causes at all. Faerie is full of paradoxes and metaphysical conundrums like these.

Life

Faerie is overflowing with life, so much so that everything in it is full of life. As such, anything and everything can be alive in Faerie, and those things already alive can have extra life bestowed upon them in the form of intelligence and magical powers. Awakened animals, rocks, plants, and other things are as common as gnats in Faerie.

Death

Does not exist in any meaningful context in Faerie; nothing that is killed remains dead for long.

Time

Faerie is timeless; there is no past, no present, no future in Faerie, just now. The sun does not move in the sky, clocks stand still, and nothing ages beyond the prime of its life. As such, timekeeping in Faerie is impossible, and the fey do not care one bit about time. That can cause problems for mortals who enter into Faerie unaware, for days, weeks, or even years can pass without one noticing. At the table, you should treat time as passing at 1/200th the speed of most mortal universes.

Construction

Faerie abhorts construction and civilization. Anything more invasive than a nest or burrow built within the metauniverse will quickly crumble away unless protected by a powerful fey or built by hobgoblins.

Faerie Roads and the Faerie Forests

When a metauniverse’s influence in a particular spot in a mortal universe reaches a critical threshold, it will open up a portal between the universe and the metauniverse. When this happens between a universe and Faerie, the resulting portal is called a Faerie Road. Faerie Roads always appear like a well-worn trail through some form of gate, be it a dolmen, a cave, or a briar in the shape of an arch. 

Once formed, a Faerie Road becomes a permanent link between a mortal universe and a part of Faerie. Many of them are well known by the fey folk who use them to go freely come an go from the mortal realms as they see fit. Goblins are particularly acute at finding them, seeing them as a shortcut to new victims… or new customers.

A Faerie Road is more than just a portal; it is a breach through which the pure aspect of Faerie flows. The area surrounding the faerie road will begin to take on Faerie-like qualities, forming a Faerie Forest. The area within a Faerie Forest will display some of the eccentricities of Faerie, but on a lesser scale. Usually, space, time, and logic will be the only things bent, and never to the same extent as in Faerie. However, it is close enough that full Faerie folk will be comfortable within the bounds of the forest and will retain their immortality.

High Fey and Domains

High Fey is the name mortal folk give to the kings, queens, nobles, and great heroes of Faerie. The term is convenient but imprecise—“High Fey” encompasses an enormous range of beings, from Sidhe monarchs older than mortal civilizations to common pixies who have clawed, tricked, or danced their way into power far beyond their peers.

A domain is a region of Faerie of indeterminate size that a high fey holds almost complete authority over. A domain can be as big as a mountain range or as small as a single tree, and its borders do not respect cartography or geometry; a domain’s border expands and contracts as its lord’s power waxes and wanes. 

Within a domain, a lord can reshape almost every aspect to their whim. Unconsciously, the geography, weather, and even the general mood of their domain can change drastically. They know all that occurs within their domain and can travel to any point in it instantly. Only the twin queens of the Fey can supersede the influence of a Lord in their domain.

No mortal (or fey) has succeeded in cataloging how many Domains exist. Faerie is infinite and ever-changing. Domains drift, split, merge, vanish, or bloom like flowers overnight. A wandering brook may be the edge of a Domain one day and the heart of another the next. Some Domains are no larger than an anthill or a single tree; others span landscapes that could cradle entire mortal kingdoms.

Most travelers realize they have crossed into one only by feel. Crossing a Domain boundary produces a subtle tingling—like stepping across a threshold of static or waking from a half-remembered dream. Some mortals describe it as walking into a story. Others say it feels like someone is watching.

Both are correct.

The Seelie and the Unseelie

When Niamh died in the process of sealing her husband away, Niamh’s essence as the prime aspect of growth as life was split equally between her daughters, Fionnuala, and the twins Titania and Mab. Each daughter inherited the element of life that best fit their personality and interests. Fionnuala would shortly thereafter leave Faerie, having sworn an oath to her mother to be her father’s warden, leaving the then 5-year-old twins as the inheritors of the crown of Faerie. 

But the twins were too different in temperament and interests to rule together. Hence, they decided to divide Faerie between themselves and make a game out of ruling it, a game intentionally designed to have no winner, no end, and no purpose other than it would be fun. 

Eons later, the queens might have grown outwardly into maidenhood, but they are still the same little girls on the inside. The game continues to this day, both queens having too much fun to end it, and the game is still played in the spirit of good-natured competition. All conflict between the two courts is prohibited outside the highly ritualized competition or the duels their knights fight when their paths cross. However, the fey know not to take these competitions too seriously; they know the queen still loves each other as only twin sisters can. Titania and Mab shared a cradle in childhood, and whenever chance reunites them, they still sleep curled together like the children they once were.

All of faerie owes allegiance to either Titania’s Spring Court or Mab’s Autumn Court, and often both. However, calling these factions courts is a misunderstanding perpetrated by mortals and fey alike. While High Fey kings and queens rule domains, usually called courts, the Twin Queens do not rule through laws or decrees. Their power is ambient, spread across the metauniverse like sunlight. Wherever their influence touches, they perceive all things; they can rearrange vast parts of Faerie on a whim, bestow boons and curses subconsciously on those who please or vex them, and send out their followers to enact their will with a thought. They are seldom directly aware of the influence they have on the Metauniverse, for such things rarely spark their interest.

In this way, the Queens are closer to goddesses than mortal rulers, and the feyfolk and mortals across history have treated them as such. All fey are instantly aware when the queen’s influence is afoot.  The fey will often ply their teenage goddesses with gifts and tithes so that they might bestow their blessing upon them, their children, or their communities.

Titania

Titania, aka the spring queen or the sun queen, rules over the so-called Spring Court of Faerie, better known to mortalfolk as the Seelie Court. Having stopped aging at 19, Titania is considered the elder of the two queens and the fairer of the two; she was born with fair skin, fair features, and long, beautiful blond hair. She bedecks herself in the finest fashion that Fairie can provide and lavishes herself with makeup and hair treatments. 

Since she was a little girl, she has loved balls, parties, and ceremonies, and all the things that such events came with: pretty clothes, fine food, sweets, and lots of interesting people. Thus, it was no surprise that the aspect of Life she inherited from Niamh was dominion over its patterns, structures, lineages, and cycles : all things that repeat, refine, and return

She has always been prone to wanting—and in Titania’s case, wanting and taking are nearly the same thing. As a little girl she would sneak from the palace to steal sweets, trinkets, and—on rare occasions—mortal children whose beauty or laughter pleased her. She meant no harm; she simply wanted new friends for her games. Since she ascended, it has only gotten worse. She is known to send her knights out to the mortal worlds to steal and abduct what she wants, be it sweets, baubles, or people. She is especially prone to kidnapping pretty mortals to liven up her eternal ball or act as pretty servants.

The Seelie Court

Titania’s court proper is a massive, never-ending ball in her palace of Bailenagréine. Here she surrounds herself with a rotating selection of handsome men and beautiful women, whom she leads through elaborate rituals, games, and dances. Her courtiers revel in the repetition and the tradition—every dance, toast, and flirtation has been performed a thousand times before and will be again, perfectly executed with ornamental precision, each interaction governed by a baroque and byzantine code of etiquette. All Seelie fey follow this code, and to make faux pas in their presence will result in humiliation and ostracization.

Titania considers herself the patron of civilization and craftsmanship in Faerie. Hobgoblins and leprechauns hold honored places among her lesser followers for their ability to tame wildness and shape beauty from stone or living wood. Her high fey vassals rule domains reminiscent of mortal kingdoms, each a reflection of her love for symmetry and order.

Titania’s own vast realm of  Réimse na Bláthanna (Realm of Flowers) is considered the most civilized realm in Faerie.  It is a vast, picture-perfect expanse of rolling, flowering meadows dotted with lakes and groves of willows and other flowering trees, always in full bloom. In the shadows of the groves and along the lake shores are quaint villages and palaces, set along dirt tracks designed to be pleasing to the eye from a distance. At the center, the towering spires of Bailenagréine rise from the intersection between 4 mirror-like lakes.

Mab

Mab is known as the autumn queen or the twilight queen, although she resents the title and its implications of decay and civilization that come with it. Mab is no spirit of dying leaves; she inherited from her mother dominion over the drives that all creatures feel. To leap, hunt, mate, fight, howl, and transform, that is her dominion.  At 18, she is a wild child, always has been, always will be. She loves the outdoors and hunting, and all the animals of the woods and fields are her friends. 

She looks much like her sister, but where Titania glimmers, Mab tangles. Her hair is long, knotted, and full of leaves; her skin is sun-kissed gold and dusted with mud; she dresses herself in a rough leather tunic she stitched herself and the skins of mortal beasts she has slain, proudly rejecting all courtly fashion. Animals follow her not because she commands them, but because they recognize one of their own.

Where Titania covets, Mab flees stillness. Boredom is her greatest foe. As a child, she would race through the wilds with her animal companions, playing games that would seem cruel in mortal worlds—ambushes, mock hunts, chases through briar and bog—but in deathless Faerie were simply expressions of boundless energy.  Her inheritance has made her all the more impulsive, and she spends her days constantly hunting and waylaying the unwary with her court.

The Unseelie Court

Unseelie Court shares Mab’s love for instinct and freedom. Its members revel in the primal urges of life: to eat, to run, to lie beneath the stars, to chase and be chased. Her inner circle is made up of beasts and fey who share her interests in all things primal. Hunters and trappers count themselves among her followers, as do some of the more beastial dragons and intelligent monsters. Bugbears and hags are considered first among her lesser followers. Unlike her sister, she travels the half of the metauniverse that she considers hers, hunting and running with the beasts, and her closest followers follow behind her.

Her followers despise civilization in any form. While Mab does not tear down the homes or other constructs of the ‘civilized’ feyfolk, it would be against the rules of the game; her followers do like to make the sort of mischief that scares settled fey out of their wits and vandalize their property.

Mab’s domain is known as Tiarna na nDorchadas, the realm of dusk. It is an endless ancient twilight forest occasionally punctuated by moorlands and meadows. It is here that she leads her endless hunts, with half her court serving as the hunters and the other half the hunted. 

The Half Fey of the Feengrenze

There is precisely one Faerie road in the Feengrenze; it starts in a desolate and abandoned woodland of dead trees in Faerie and terminates at the so-called Crack in the World deep within the Wyrdback, the biggest of all the gaps in Faolan’s cell. The road is seldom walked; only the desperate or the mad dare use it. For it is not a true Faerie road at all, but the single strand of Faerie still connected to Faolan: an umbilical cord as thin as thread and infinitely long, yet the journey down it takes a few steps. It was never meant to exist and those who descend it hear Faolan’s maddened ramblings echoing all the way down. Few travel it now, and only High Fey have the strength to climb back into Faerie.

There was a time when the Feengrenze was new, and the fey traveled down the road frequently. As her final gift to her eldest daughter, Fionnuala received dominion over the destiny of life, the tenancy for life to form narratives and stories. They thought that since Fionnuala was now a Prime Aspect, the Feengrenze would become a lesser version of Faerie, a Faerie forest the size of a world. So the ambitious, the adventurous, and the free-spirited fey flocked in their thousands to Feengrenze, hoping to seize their own destiny and forge their own realms in the service of Fionnuala.

What they found was no Faerie forest. The powerful wards Niamh and the Manyfold placed on the Feengrenze were designed to blunt Faolan the Mad or anything powerful enough to free him and were applied indiscriminately. Fionnuala’s newly inherited powers were among the things that were rendered impotent, and the vast wellspring of growth that should have flown out of her was reduced to a mere trickle and only the faintest essence of Faerie’s Growth seeped into the Feengrenze from Faerie. Worse still, the fey quickly discovered that in this place they were subject to age, decay, and death for the first time. They could grow old. They could fall ill. They could die.

They tried to go back—tried to climb the single Faerie road that had brought them here. But the wards barred passage outward as surely as they blunted power inward. A few reached the road; fewer still reached its end. And once Wyrd magic began leaking from Faolan’s cell and the Gyre in the center of the Wyrdback formed, only beings strong enough to survive Faolan’s warped reality could even approach the road at all. The Feengrenze had become the perfect trap for these unfortunate fey

The Feyfolk of the Feengrenze are the half-fey descendants of those initial settlers, many millennia removed from their origins in Faerie. They are scattered across the whole of the world. They live in what few pale imitations of proper Faerie forests exist, where a slow leak of Wyrd Magic from Faolan’s cell bubbles up to the surface and decays into the Essense of Faerie, in normal forests living off what they can forage or in mortal lands doing what they can to survive. 

After untold ages, the half-fey have become shockingly mortal-like. Their customs, rituals, and laws have undergone enormous cultural drift. Faerie has become a distant myth to them, a half-remembered origin story wrapped in stories of Niamh’s sacrifice—now a religion not unlike Wicca in temperament and symbol with Faolan serving as a temperamental sun god and Niamh the maternal earth goddess. Their once-timeless worldview has bent to the slow grind of seasons, hunger, aging, and grief.

Full fey are rare in the Feengrenze, and it is suspected that fewer than 5000 exist worldwide.  It is a common belief among scholars and feyfolk that none of the original colonists have survived to this day, except for Fionnuala, of course, most falling to accidents, illness, and violence. All the full fey who live in the Feengrenze are recent arrivals, exiles, outcasts, and adventurers. Like their kin on other worlds, they retain their agelessness but not their immortality. As a result, they tend to be a bit neurotic about their health and safety, investing in elaborate measures to protect against injury and disease. Even common Faries like Countess Rósín Dubh of Pixiewood in Sliberberg, known for their childlike nature, are not immune to these anxieties and, in Rósín’s particular case, acts both like a timid little girl who stays close to big brother Fredrick and a carefree five-year-old at the same time.

Several High Fey from Faerie also reside in the Feengrenze, most of whom are exiles like Sultan Zahak of Many-Grottoed Qualdria, once of Titania’s court before his behavior became… excessively unbecoming even by Seelie standards, or Ailénach, the one-time Queen of Enchantments, whose Betrayal of Edward Von Mountainheart rallied both queens to chase her down into the Feengrenze and maybe a dozen or so others. Also and its beyond rare, but  a whimwhirl can elevate a normal creature to the status of a High Fey almost instantly, Frederick and Aoibheann von Mountainheart being the most notable cases of this occurring

While the nature of the Feengrenze means their power is significantly reduced, high fey are still formidable and, more importantly, still immortal, if just barely. High fey are the only beings capable of leaving the Feengrenze at all—either by mustering enough power to ford the Gyre at the Wyrdback’s heart, or by wielding the rare teleportation magics strong enough to bypass the wards. Even then, the journey is perilous.

The Folks of Faerie.

The fey of the Feengrenze descend from Faerie—a metauniverse of boundless growth where life takes on forms far stranger than in mortal realms. To help you translate familiar D&D creatures into this setting, here is how the common fey species differ from their forms in the Feywild of worlds like Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms.

Fomorians

Fomorian is a catch-all term for a class of large, misshapen, and brutish folk of Faerie. They are not a species per se but a class of giant and ogre-like creatures that share a set of traits: they have big, strong bodies, lumpy, mismatched features, low cunning, and a fondness for pushing around smaller folk. 

Almost all fomorians are followers of the autumn court. Mab’s dominion over the primal urges of life aligns well with their desire to eat, bully, and waylay. The moors and ancient forests of her half of Faerie suit their kind well, perfect for ambushes, crude traps, and forcing tolls from unwary travelers.

In-game, you can represent Fomorian by reskinning ogres, trolls, and giants.

Eladrin

The Eladrin of other settings do not exist in the Manyfold. In their place stand the Sidhe, the ancient high-fey aristocracy of Faerie, whose lineage gave rise to elves and elfkin in the mortal worlds. They fill the same conceptual niche—season-touched, emotion-wrought, elegant—but with a far stronger grounding in Irish myth.

Elves

Elves are the distant descendants of Sidhe who were cut off from Faerie long ago. Whatever fey spark they once held has gone dormant; elves are no longer considered fey by either side of the veil, though echoes of their origin still shape their grace, longevity, and magic.

Fairies

Common fairies sprout from budding flowers, growing into childlike, elfin beings with butterfly wings who never age past early childhood. They act exactly as they appear—bright, capricious, distractible, prone to mischief that ranges from charming to disastrous. In Faerie, they are as abundant as blossoms.

Gnomes

Gnomes are a true fey species, not mortal folk. What mortal worlds call “forest gnomes” are known in Faerie as leprechauns, the keepers of clever craftsmanship, secret paths, and hidden caches of luck. Their curiosity pulls them into bargains, riddles, and the labyrinthine politics of the lesser fey.

Goblins

Goblins are a mercantile trickster species—traders, gamblers, and chaos-brokers. They delight in swindles, pranks, and harmless mayhem rather than malice. They are also the only full-fey who willingly wander far from Faerie, always hunting rare curiosities and exotic goods to sell back home.

(See the Goblins Roleplaying Guide for more details.)

Hobgoblins

Hobgoblins are naturally Seelie-aligned and hated by most other fey. Of all the feyborn peoples, they are closest to Faolan in temperament: creatures of progress and change. Unlike Faolan, however, hobgoblins can be satisfied with what they build. They are a species of architects, shapers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and engineers obsessed with society, structure, form, and purpose. Every road, bridge, and settlement in Faerie bears hobgoblin craft. They serve as the master builders, the armsmakers, the captains and soldiers, and the tax collectors for the High Fey who align with Titania’s spring court, who value their ability to bring order to the raw whimsy of Faerie.

Most fey find the Hobogoblin’s obsession with society and progress vaguely horrifying—an affront to the wild, shifting whimsy of Faerie—so nearly everyone quietly despises hobgoblins. Even those who align with the Spring court find the hobgoblins’ need for order unsettling. Only the Sidhe tolerate their presence, treating them as useful servants but never as equals.. 

When they departed for the mortal worlds, they brought the same impulses with them—only this time, with no Sidhe to restrain them, they built empires from the raw material of conquest.

Pixies

“Pixie” is a catch-all term for any fairy smaller than the common flower-fairy, including true pixies and sprites. They are social butterflies—gossips, fashion obsessives, rumor-collectors, and chronic meddlers in the affairs of both mortals and fey. They drift through the courts of the queens in glittering clouds, carrying news, favors, secrets, scandals, and occasionally snacks.

Unicorns

Unlike in Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons, Unicorns are considered fey.

Bugbears, Centaurs, Dryads, Hags, and Satyrs

These species function exactly as written in the Monster Manual or Monsters of the Multiverse; Faerie’s versions differ little from their mortal-realm kin and require no special adaptation.