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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6670358" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, following up on my prior post where I explained there is no single definition of fairy, if you actually go back to the myth what you'll find is that there is no single definition of Tengu either.   Just as the stories about fairies in the West evolved over the centuries, gradually changing what fairies were conceived to be and the roles that they had in the stories, stories about Tengu in the East likewise evolved over the centuries and the roles and origins that they had in the stories changed over time.   You could make a parallel and say that this means the Tengu are fairies of Eastern mythic origin, but to my mind that's inherently Eurocentric and is getting in the way of actually understanding the Tengu myths.  If you want to fit Tengu in to a D&D campaign that is Eurocentric, it's not at all clear to me where you end up fitting them and where you end up fitting them probably depends as much as anything on which Tengu stories from which era of history you end up counting as definitive.  If you go by the original Tengu stories, then the best fit for Tengu is as tempter deities which make them Outsiders (and probably demons) rather than Fey.   Tengu don't start to take on traits that parallel a part of the mythic evolution of fairies until relatively late.And above all, when comparing Tengu to Elves, you can't ignore the role Tolkien has in the evolution of the terms Fairy and Elf.  Tolkien's legerdemain absolutely revolutionizes what people think of when they hear the world 'elf' so that the pre-Tolkien 'elf' has absolutely no relationship to a D&D elf at all.  By the same token, I don't think you can ignore the effect RPG's and Gygax have on how people think of all 'monsters'.  Gygax's elves are now more definitive in the popular imagination than even Tolkien's, so much so that Gygax's elves and what people know about them tend to make it difficult for readers to understand Tolkien's elves that actually inspired the Gygaxian PC race.  Quite a few monsters have been morphed by Gygaxian consensus fantasy, so you really can't grumble too much if a particular D&D monster has little to do with its mythic inspiration.  If you try to reconcile all the different mythic traditions, you'll inevitably end up losing nuances from some of them.  They only way to avoid that is play an RPG within a single mythic tradition from a single era.But let me ask you this; why does it bother you that Elves and Tengu aren't fairies, when it apparently doesn't bother you that Orcs aren't fairies?</blockquote>

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