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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WmRAllen67" data-source="post: 3145545" data-attributes="member: 20456">I'll second that, and add Feist's Faerie Tale to the mix... and Lisa Goldstein's Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon, if you can find it... for a literary analysis of how the cultural conception of faeries has changed over history, I'd recommend Diane Purkiss' At the Bottom of the Garden...Historically, the popular conception of the world was just what you describe-- though God and the Devil contended for human souls, in the day-to-day (especially in the country) luck, good or bad, and odd occurrences would be attributed to the work of spirits and fey, both good and bad...One way to develop a world in this fashion is to drop the "Tolkien-esque" elements of demi-human and humanoid races as "natural" beings, with cities, societies and a physical presence in the world, and move them back into the "strange and mysterious" category. You'll never adventure through an abandoned dwarven mine, but you might run across a small, bearded smith in a clearing in the woods next to a small hill-- but if he offers to repair your gear, the price may not be worth it...And if you look for him again, he won't be there...Elves living in tree-villages in the wood? Nope... but if you encounter a "faery rade", RUN!A lot of the standard D&D monsters have RW fey antecedents-- trolls, for instance, are in some stories dwarf-like instead of "big green and regenerating cannibals" and are capable of incredible transformation magics, stealing children and leaving a polymorphed log in their place...There's always the old stories and folksongs. I have a mental list of adventure ideas that I got from listening to this band (<a href="http://stout.hampshire.edu/~jcr00/span/index.html)" target="_blank">http://stout.hampshire.edu/~jcr00/span/index.html)</a>... "The Elf Knight", "Thomas the Rhymer", "Tam Lin" and "Alison Gross" are good to start with...</blockquote>

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