A fae question: has anyone done fae from a non-Western European perspective? I’m thinking about setting a game in a city where the major fae powers are in an ethnic enclave (not sure if it’ll be Chinatown, Little Baidoa, or somewhere else) and I wanted to know how other people approached non-European fae.
A fae question: has anyone done fae from a non-Western European perspective?
A fae question: has anyone done fae from a non-Western European perspective?
I’ve used South Asian, Persian, and First Nations fae in the past. Depending on how much you’re willing to dig into it, and how much you already know about a given culture or mythology it can either be really awesome or a really big miss.
Like, when I did a game set in Toronto (which has a large South Asian population) I used the Danava as my fae. It worked really well, as a lot of the source material has them being interested in promises, honor, art, and illusion. And they have similar ancient roots to a lot of the psuedo-Irish fae we’re used to.
(Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danava_(Hinduism) )
But it was also pretty easy for me, as I’ve got a lot of background in the area so I was able to make up all sorts of stuff about their courts and kings and such off the top of my head.
I also did a bit with First Nations (mostly Ojibwe) myth in the same game, with Mishipeshu (water panther) and Thunderbird having their own courts, which sometimes got along with and sometimes fought with both each other and the Danava.
It kept the groups from being easily turned into “fae are Indians” or “Fae are Tamils” or anything — fae were a lot of things, some of which were familiar to some people and not to others, and they couldn’t ever be pinned down as one thing.
I did, however, find the Ojibwe parts harder to ad lib. So there’s that.
(Oh, more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_panther)
Are there any specific groups or motifs you’re thinking about using?
Wasn’t 100% sure yet.
Was thinking about a game in Washington, DC. Part of my concept is that, for reasons including that in the early days the city was run by a combination of Freemasons, Deists, and Puritans (and supernatural purges associated therewith), there’s no significant community of “English” faeries in Washington. If you swear loyalty to a Queen of Summer or suchlike, that Queen lives no closer than Philadelphia.
The fae community is mostly made up with fae who arrived with later immigrant communities as the nation’s capital got too large and diverse for a small group of committed wizards and hunters to purge – possibly Chinese, Persian, Korean, Somali, or Ethiopian. It wouldn’t be that all the fae one encounters are from a particular mythos, but, with the exception of any Chinese entities hanging around the Verizon Center, they’d be more centered with the groups they arrived with.
Oh, one more quick link, because I talked about Persian fae:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peri
Not in US but the Fae in a Fate game of mine were a specific collection of the various sorts of immortals in the world so you could be dealing with a vampire, demon, magus, blessed or shifter and they’d still refer to themselves as fae.
In Divine Blood the Faerie Court was a specific political organization ruled by supremacist sidhe at some point the supernatural means the two immortal rulers used to keep everyone loyal and toeing the party philosophy fell apart. The non-sidhe jumped ship first and then most of the sidhe mortals followed but sidhe are pure breeding (sidhe + most other species = a sidhe version of that species) with other mortals so they represent a fair variety.
For the Japanese the yokai are similar but are slightly less alien on average. (Exceptions get just as alien as European fae). Given that a lot of yokai used to be human and when yokai help a person it almost always is actual help as adverse fae “help” which is occasionally worse than the curse.
I played in a Chicago-based game where a PC was a Caribbean loa and the local fae culture was predominantly Ojibwe, dominated by the Mishipeshu spirit of Lake Michegan.
No, but I saw two interesting Western interpretations. One was a Norse Fae type, a Frost giant. The other was Anna from Frozen as Fae princess, and the gate to the Fae world was in the Disney store.