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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6670503" data-attributes="member: 4937">Outside of the context of an RPG, would there be a universally accepted way of distinguishing the concepts?&nbsp; If you look up 'fey' in a dictionary, it will read, &quot;Fairy&quot;.&nbsp; You might also get &quot;Obsolete: Feral or dangerous&quot; or &quot;Obsolete: Enchanted or magical&quot; depending on which obsolete period of the English language we are talking about, but that doesn't help you because if you trace the words back they are all the same thing: fay, fae, fey, fairy, fairie are just variant spellings.&nbsp; Technically, 'fairy' means 'land of the feys' and properly refers to a place and not the denizens thereof, but over time fairy itself also came to mean well... fairies.&nbsp; So, yes, fey = fairy.For me, even without resorting to lexicography and etymology and philology, in D&amp;D this is easy to work out by working backward from the end result.&nbsp; All the things that ended up being categorized as 'fey' in 3e, when the term first began to have real currency in the system, were things which fell easily into the category of 'fairy'.&nbsp;&nbsp; And conversely, none of the things that are in Western European myth of the same category as 'fairies' or are in fact subcategories of 'fairy', such as gnomes, dwarves, orcs, goblins, elves, and trolls, which had post D&amp;D non-fairy traditions were classified as fey, even though a gnome or a goblin is every bit as much a fairy as a pixie or sprite is.&nbsp; Only if you are trying to be Socratic about it.&nbsp; But D&amp;D didn't start out with a Socratic approach.&nbsp; D&amp;D started out with an Aristotelian approach - these things are fey because there are in my list of things that are fey - and only retroactively tried to create Socratic definitions of the term.&nbsp; If you trace Drow's history in the game, it's very clear why they aren't fey in the game, for the same reasons its clear why Orcs aren't fey in the game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6670503, member: 4937"] Outside of the context of an RPG, would there be a universally accepted way of distinguishing the concepts? If you look up 'fey' in a dictionary, it will read, "Fairy". You might also get "Obsolete: Feral or dangerous" or "Obsolete: Enchanted or magical" depending on which obsolete period of the English language we are talking about, but that doesn't help you because if you trace the words back they are all the same thing: fay, fae, fey, fairy, fairie are just variant spellings. Technically, 'fairy' means 'land of the feys' and properly refers to a place and not the denizens thereof, but over time fairy itself also came to mean well... fairies. So, yes, fey = fairy. For me, even without resorting to lexicography and etymology and philology, in D&D this is easy to work out by working backward from the end result. All the things that ended up being categorized as 'fey' in 3e, when the term first began to have real currency in the system, were things which fell easily into the category of 'fairy'. And conversely, none of the things that are in Western European myth of the same category as 'fairies' or are in fact subcategories of 'fairy', such as gnomes, dwarves, orcs, goblins, elves, and trolls, which had post D&D non-fairy traditions were classified as fey, even though a gnome or a goblin is every bit as much a fairy as a pixie or sprite is. Only if you are trying to be Socratic about it. But D&D didn't start out with a Socratic approach. D&D started out with an Aristotelian approach - these things are fey because there are in my list of things that are fey - and only retroactively tried to create Socratic definitions of the term. If you trace Drow's history in the game, it's very clear why they aren't fey in the game, for the same reasons its clear why Orcs aren't fey in the game. [/QUOTE]

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