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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Banshee16" data-source="post: 3972958" data-attributes="member: 7883">I don't mind the idea of a Blackwoods Dryad, if there's also a regular dryad.  I guess, given my own preferences, it's something I can envision as a corrupted dryad, a member of the nightmare or unseelie court, or whatever it's called.My favourite books on the Fey have largely been non-D&D ones.....I really liked the Sidhe Book of Nightmares for the Swashbuckling Adventures setting, as well as Van Richten's Guide to the Shadow Fey, and Castle Falkenstein.  I think back to novels like Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist, where the White Ladies existed.  They were heartachingly beautiful, but that beauty hid a terrible inhumanity, and they were pretty horrifying to mortals who actually encountered them.  It's not like they were ugly, but the book left the implicit understanding that they might look really pretty, but they had some kind of power that made them lethal to mortals.  That can be done through Supernatural Abilities and spellcasting, rather than turning into a tree creature.Now that's a departure from the mythological roots which I've already brought up, and I'll acknowledge that.  I think I'll have a big sigh of relief if the Blackwoods dryads are the dangerous, corrupted versions of normal dryads.  I guess we're going to see if that's the case.In many of those books I referenced, Fey weren't really physically powerful....they were magically so.  They typically had extra powers that made them dangerous to mortals, even if they weren't tough in a toe to toe fight.  In Feist's novel, they manifested an aura that basically was almost like a "confusion disease"....mortals would get confused, feverish, and wake up in a circle of mushrooms somewhere, if they survived.  It had the Wild Hunt, the White Ladies, Puck the trickster, Thomas the Rhymer.......yet there were still pixies and sprites and such.  They might be friendly to humans, but they could be dangerous simply by not realizing that a mortal can't get up if you break his legs.  They might toss him off a cliff, because hearing him scream is neat music, figuring that he'll just get up, because, well, they can, since they're energy beings.   A nereid charms a man into the water, thinking he's so handsome, and wanting to play with him, and just takes it for granted that he should be able to breath underwater, not realizing that she's drowning him.....and now that he's all blue, why won't he get back up after she lets him out of the water?  They don't realize they're causing harm, because their frame of reference is so different.If WotC did something like this with the Fey, I think that would be very cool.  That's my personal opinion of course.  If they were going to depart more typical depictions of Fey, that's the kind of thing I'd love to see.Banshee</blockquote>

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