Fey Society - Seelie and Unseelie

The Fey are a pretty big part of my campaign world (homebrewed 5e D&D), and a couple of things have occurred to me recently that I don't have great explanations for... Namely some issues regarding biology and society.

For the most part here I'm talking about the classic Fey - seelie and unseelie knights, kinda sorta like elves but not quite. There's no direct 5e Monster that encompasses that (although Kobold Press has some that I use in the Tom of Beasts). Shadow Elves and Eladrin are basically elves and have a normal biological cycle; birth, death, etc, but here I'm interested in ideas about the more immortal (ish) nobility of the Fey.

How do they (or do they) reproduce? In my view, a normal family unit, with normal birth, etc is ruled out. I'm leaning towards them being functionally immortal, barring a violent death (or poetically, a death from some kind of psychological wound). They can reproduce with mortals, probably. Perhaps they reincarnate upon a physical death, but maybe not in a predictable manner - if an Unseelie Lord is killed maybe a search must be made similar to the Dalai Lama where his new incarnation must be found and taken back to Faerie/Shadow - this could be a source for changeling legends. Maybe new Fey can only be "born" by taking mortal children and replacing them with changelings...

My reasoning here is partly thematic, but also partly to accommodate some classic ideas about imprisoning powerful outsiders rather than killing them - if the Unseelie Knight will reincarnate after X number of years, imprisoning them in a mystical tower makes more sense (and provides neat adventure options).

Any have any good ideas they used in the past, or thoughts on my ideas?

So fey are a big part of my campaign world as well (homebrewed 3.0e D&D) to the extent that 3 of the 10 or so PC races are fairies, the most common of which tends to be the Sidhe, and I can only give you my answers. I don't think there are any one right answers, but hopefully this will give you some inspiration.

How do they (or do they) reproduce?

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Fey can reproduce by biological means, but this is actually quite rare. One term for the fey is the unborn or never-born, because most fey are spontaneously generated as new creatures complete and whole having neither parents nor childhood. The mechanism for this is the figurative 'pollen' of the Tree of Life, which cast out through creation causes spontaneous generation of new life. The fey are also therefore called the small gods, in that they like the other gods are therefore direct descendants of the Tree of Life. Fey tend to incarnate in a small way natural processes, such as erosion, frost, the blossoming or fading of flowers, the changing of autumn leaves, the seeping of ground water, and even human processes such as the tilling, sowing, or planting of fields or the erecting of houses.

For a creature so little inclined to reproduce with its own kin, fey are supremely fecund and can reproduce with almost everything, and while the vast majority of fey are chaste and effectively asexual, there are enough exceptions (some quite strongly so) that pretty much every race has some members with fey blood in their heritage.

Fey in my game do not reincarnate, at least as far as anyone knows. They are immortal but bound by their material form and their spirit begins and ends with it. Fey are therefore in a sense both less and more spiritual creatures. It's possible that the life of a fey passes to another new born fey, but not in a sense that the new fey is the same fey or recalls its life and deeds, but in the sense that a drop of rain can by evaporation pass into the sky and become rain again.

Fey are truly alien creatures compared to the mortal free races. They have a logic or reason that is difficult for non-fey to understand. They are called 'the eldest and youngest', for though a fey may have lived since the dawn of time, time does not easily alter them and passes over them usually without reflection. They don't age in any meaningful sense, and they don't mark time or have a good sense of its passing. Fey have a tendency to live in an eternal now, with little thought for either present or past, acting as if they were creatures of instinct. They have strange and fell moods, and are changeable in the extreme and highly unpredictable. They are child-like in their innocence, in the purity of their hatred and anger, and in the clarity with which they see things untrammeled by preconceptions. They also tend to be quite self-absorbed.

As for your general thoughts about imprisoning one's enemies rather than killing them, this is something that applies in my game universally and not just to fey. It's far crueler and more effective to imprison someone or something than it is to try to kill them. Most spirits if slain will reconstitute over time. A slain mortal can be rather easily returned if anyone is of the mind for them to return, simply by resurrection. If you were to assassinate a king, he could be quietly restored to life (if doing so wasn't against the law) before anyone was aware he was dead. If you want to do away with someone or something that really matters, most methods that are sure to work don't involve killing, but instead involve some sort of imprisonment and hiding. At the very least, you are going to want to do away with the body, but doing away with a dead body scarcely puts the thing you want to do away with further out of reach than doing away with a still living body - and often puts it much further out of reach. It's as if the address of a dead person was well known and listed in a directory, but the address of a living one wasn't listed anywhere.

Kid Charlemagne said:

Any have any good ideas they used in the past, or thoughts on my ideas?

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I don't know how good these ideas are, but:

Back in the day, I reasoned, in my sophomoric teenage way, that if D&D elves lived like 1000 years (100+ times longer than humans, but are otherwise quite human-like), then they must gestate for like 100x as long, too, which works out to over 7 years. And 7's a nice mystical number.
Actually, I went through elven society/biology with an odd rule of thumb: everything about elves makes being an elf a little nicer for the individual, while ultimately dooming them to slow extinction as a species. I felt so clever, at the time.

… at some point, I may have grown up a little …

More recently I was mulling over the implications of the 4e version of Fey & the Feywild. PC fey, like Eladrin matured about like humans (clearly for game convenience), lived a good deal longer, and weren't remotely immortal. Yet, they had a rep as ageless, even immortal beings. The Feywild had an odd metaphysical attribute, too: in what is otherwise a multiverse of many parallel worlds, there is only one Feywild.
What I decided was that time in the Feywild was not like time in the rest of the multiverse. For instance, fey might leave the Feywild and visit a world in one era, then return to it centuries later, though no meaningful time had passed for them. A traveler from the world might visit the feywild for a long time, and return to his own world finding no time had passed, or that a great deal of time had passed (or even seemingly return to his own past). What could be going on, in addition to time being wonky in the Feywild, might be parallel-universe time-travel, that is, the World you go back too may seem just like your own in the past or future, but be a different world, entirely.
So Fey think of natural creatures as ephemeral, and natural creatures see the Fey as immortal, which the Fey, not known for their humility, go with and call natural races 'mortals.'

Tony Vargas said:

Back in the day, I reasoned, in my sophomoric teenage way, that if D&D elves lived like 1000 years (100+ times longer than humans, but are otherwise quite human-like), then they must gestate for like 100x as long, too, which works out to over 7 years. And 7's a nice mystical number.

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I don't know how sophomoric it is, or at least I don't want to think of it as sophomoric because I reasoned along similar lines (just with different math).

There is also canonical justification for this reasoning. According to the lore of the elven deities', they are long lived because Labelas Enoreth gave them the gift that time would pass slowly for them. Thus, it's a very major portion of my elvish lore that elvish pregnancy and childhood (and really all parts of a normal elven life) are things that last a very long time. A good deal of the writings on the culture of elves in my homebrew world is about this very thing. It's also one of the reasons that half-elves are so very rare in the lore of my game, and why both sides frown on such matches so extremely. Humans and elves just aren't very compatible, by inclination, culture, or biology. Most half-blooded infants die in the womb, often killing the full-blooded parent.

You may not have been nearly as clever as you thought, but everything about your reasoning is I think supportable from the lore. More importantly, to me its just a whole lot more interesting if elves are really different on multiple levels from humans and are forced by their biology to see the world differently.

Good replies! And thanks for chiming in, Celebrim - you're one of the people here who I know has put a lot of thought into this topic so your input is appreciated.

I'm leaning away from the "time flows differently" thing because, while its absolutely thematically appropriate, makes it tough to run in practice for me - I want to keep my Seelie and Unseelie working in the same time-line.

I don't know if anyone follows the Girl Genius web-comic, but one thing I'm taking from that is the idea that a long-lived creature may "offload" or abandon memories after a certain point; in the comic the Queen of England has a mystical oracle that can be consulted which is basically a backup of her memories that she didn't feel like keeping in her head any more. That idea helps me with why the really long-lived Fey can't answer questions about things that happened thousands of years before...

Kid Charlemagne said:

I don't know if anyone follows the Girl Genius web-comic, but one thing I'm taking from that is the idea that a long-lived creature may "offload" or abandon memories after a certain point; in the comic the Queen of England has a mystical oracle that can be consulted which is basically a backup of her memories that she didn't feel like keeping in her head any more. That idea helps me with why the really long-lived Fey can't answer questions about things that happened thousands of years before...

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I'm not familiar with Girl Genius, but I've encountered the concept in many other contexts.

I confess a lot of my internal ideas of how fey think is set by the portrayal of Tinkerbell in Barrie's 'Peter Pan' (and for that matter of Pan himself). For instance he has one comment about Tinkerbell to the effect of her mind is too small to contain more than one thought at a time which I find very evocative, and both Tinkerbell and Pan are noted for their ability to completely and utterly forget. So I think it's certainly in keeping with what I think of as a fey that they should not really recall anything from the past, and memory dump the whole thing. Indeed, I don't think they'd recall that they forgot anything from their past either. My imagination is that what is out of sight is (often) entirely out of mind, so that a fairy could forget that he ever knew something for 1000 years, and then when confronted with that thing, person, or place, continue as if he had never forgotten in the first place and no time has past between then and now.

Of course my other great influence is fairy tales, with their strange little men and fey creatures dispensing very unrestrained curses and blessings and operating according to their own strange logic and sense of justice.

When I think about feys the influence by the White Wolf games is too strong. And my suggestion is the classic and popular folklore from rest of Europe may be a great source of inspiration.

Check out Mad Sweeney and Hinzelmann in the book "American Gods". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods

Fey play a big role in my 3.5 homebrew campaign. In my campaign, druids are taken from their human parents as babies by other druids, to introduce them to the world of the fey. This creates an eternal bond between them and the fey, which means any fey would recognize them, regardless of the Druid's physical age. I don't deal with a seelie and unseelie court however. All fey are dangerous and can be benevolent or cruel at the drop of a hat. In my fey world, special hunters or knights do exist that can be sent out by the fey to do their bidding. The fey usually don't concern them much with the world of mortals, and live among them mostly unnoticed. It is only when grave crimes are commited against them, that they send out their personal troops to deal with the matter. These fey-warriors are often half fey, and closely tied to the nature goddess (you could consider them avatars of her). Some of these beings can be summoned by certain player-classes to fight on their behalf.

In my Last Lands setting the city of Aldea is ruled by the Sidhe, with other feys living under their rule. Every building in the city is actually a transdimensional space like a permanent Magnificent Mansion spell, built into a stone or tree, with just footpaths in the woods and circles of standing stones being the only evidence of the inhabitants. The city is ruled by Oberon and Titania, but I have not worked out the internal politics of the city. The Sidhe and my homebrew Liath Elf subrace are playable races from Aldea, I may make some other types of fey playable, I have not gotten around to working on that.