D&D General Faerie Blue / Orange Morality Systems

[Baron Opal II]

I've been thinking on how to put a more interesting framework for Faerie and their kin. At the moment I only have two solid things; they must follow agreements literally and have little conception of time.

Agreements are always followed as spoken, literally, but usually non-maliciously unlike with infernals. They won't necessarily twist wording to the other party's disadvantage. However, they certainly can if they are upset with you. Because their nature compels them to fulfill their part of a bargain, they have difficulty not understanding when mortals break their word, unintentionally or not.

Faerie time-blindness can play into this as well. When the Lady of Summer Revels does not get her promised offering at the special well on Midsummer's noon, she rightly appears at the side of the mortal who agreed to do so. To her great surprise he's been dead for a few years, and the kids forgot to do the otherwise meaningless ritual dad performed. While the fae are aware of human mortality, their concept of the passage of time, both personally and between realms, is sporadic at best.

I can see a difference between the Seelie and Unseelie courts is one of respect. The Seelie initially have some baseline respect for mortals and the Unseelie don't. However, by mortal actions and Faerie's inscrutable rules this respect can be lost or gained without necessarily knowing the trigger.

What do you all think?

 

[Charlaquin]

I very much like the idea of fae time blindness. I mean, any immortal creature should struggle to understand mortal timescales, right? In a lot of ways, human social systems are built around the exchange of time, as the only resource that can never be recovered once lost. A being that has an unlimited amount of this resource would be deeply alien to us, and so many social behaviors would be confusing to them.

Fae and contracts have a long and storied history together, so I’m onboard with them being very important. And I see what you’re going for when separating them from devils by making them not necessarily misleading, but I do think misunderstanding the terms of an agreement with the fae is an iconic trope one wouldn’t want to lose. Where I would differentiate it is that a devil’s contract is misleading because the devil is so intimately familiar with the conventions of contracts that they can cleverly hide loopholes and exploit technicalities. Whereas I feel like the misleading nature of a fae contract is more likely to arise out of naivety than out of intentional deception. Where the devil tricks you into agreeing to terms you didn’t fully understand, it never even occurred to the faerie queen that you wouldn’t know what she meant when she asked if she could “have your name.”

 

[Mind of tempest]

I've been thinking on how to put a more interesting framework for Faerie and their kin. At the moment I only have two solid things; they must follow agreements literally and have little conception of time.

Agreements are always followed as spoken, literally, but usually non-maliciously unlike with infernals. They won't necessarily twist wording to the other party's disadvantage. However, they certainly can if they are upset with you. Because their nature compels them to fulfill their part of a bargain, they have difficulty not understanding when mortals break their word, unintentionally or not.

Faerie time-blindness can play into this as well. When the Lady of Summer Revels does not get her promised offering at the special well on Midsummer's noon, she rightly appears at the side of the mortal who agreed to do so. To her great surprise he's been dead for a few years, and the kids forgot to do the otherwise meaningless ritual dad performed. While the fae are aware of human mortality, their concept of the passage of time, both personally and between realms, is sporadic at best.

I can see a difference between the Seelie and Unseelie courts is one of respect. The Seelie initially have some baseline respect for mortals and the Unseelie don't. However, by mortal actions and Faerie's inscrutable rules this respect can be lost or gained without necessarily knowing the trigger.

What do you all think?

seelie sharing a root with the word silly tend to prefer for it to end like a comedy, the unseelie do not care at all but are still easier to work with than feineds