green slime said:
I dunno, I disagree with fusangite's definition, as I do not see dryad's nor nymphs as having a complex heirarchical society at all, yet I'd regard them as fey.
The decision to make the hierarchical society a property of faerie required a heap of debate and thought. But I can totally see where you are coming from. My personal decision to exclude these guys from the faerie category came from the fact that most cultures believing in fairies did not have "nature" as an available category. Everything in the universe was natural (in my opinion, these cultures are/were right and we're all screwed up on this question). I think one of the things that crowds these creatures into the fey category today is the modern idea of fey as nature spirit.
My co-GM and I were attempting to design a definition of faeries that did not domesticate these ancient and/or non-Western traditions into our modern concept of nature. But we made that call, in part, because of the needs of our specific campaign in trying to manufacture some kind of global cross-cultural definition.
Most game worlds do have a concept called nature; the PHB certainly reinforces this. And the fey definition in the Monster Manual clearly sees this as the defining property of its fey.
As a result, I don't feel terribly attached to my definition because it is part of a project, reifying global cultural archetypes, that anthropologists, sociologists and historians have pretty thoroughly discredited.
I made my definition to get a job done. I'm happy enough with your definition if it gets your job done.
All I would caution against is making sure that your category excludes enough things. If it doesn't, its utility will be impaired.
In fact, I'd say that fey only had a loose, rather chaotic society.
That's a good point. Once again, the D&D alignment system's inability to represent most political orders, both real and fictional, becomes problematic here.
I cannot see how it is something that arrived to Europe from Persia through Muslim influence.
Etymologically, there is no dispute. "Faerie" comes from "Peri," a pre-Islamic Persian creature. (Although, at the time, Europeans claimed it was from "Fatum," the Latin word referring to the Three Fates of Greek myth.) As you know, the 12th and 13th centuries were times of massive influence by Middle Eastern cultures on Europe; institutions and ideas in Europe were radically changed. The gowns people wear for university commencements are still the same design as the robes Europeans imported from the Arab world when they adopted the institution of university from it.
And the Persian Peris did change European faeries a fair bit. For instance, the Celtic faeries who had, up to that point, been larger than humans became smaller, like the Peris. Similarly, the elaborated court structure was very much a Muslim import onto which pre-existing fairy lore was grafted.
More likely, the influence existed long prior to that age, and instead was spread with the movement of the Aryan people and their beliefs.
Believing that there are creatures who are neither human nor god but are intelligent is, I would hazard a guess, near-universal, stretching far beyond the reach of the ancient Aryans. But the idea of hierarchical societies of trickster creatures living in hidden places is of pretty limited range and not a range that is especially coterminous with Aryan migrations.
