Faeries

[Joe Iglesias]

On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, John Sullivan wrote:
> > Ben Brighoff writes...
> > > How 'bout this:  Faeries are the spirits of babies killed because they
> > were
> > > unwanted.  
> What this still doesn't address though is the objection from somebody 
> (I forget who but if might have been Greg or John) that any attempt 
> to make faeries out of killed/aborted what have you children means 
> there should be many more faeries now than at any time in the past, 
> which is counterintuitive.

It was Greg.

And frankly, considering that the game baldly says "there are no
zombies, vampires, or UFOs as such", I don't find it too outrageous to
suggest that most old "faerie tales" were just tales after all.

Counterintuitive?  *Lots* of UA is counterintuitive.  That's part of what
I like about it.  It's unpredictable and doesn't hew to the same ol'
ruts.
 
> I agree that the idea of having the spirits of dead children out 
> there is a cool one (I envision an army of angry chinese girls 
> waiting for the chance to take their revenge, perhaps by taunting, 
> seducing and ultimately murdering the generation of overly-pampered 
> only-child boys the Chinese are creating, who before long will be 
> climbing over each others' broken bodies to get one of the few 
> available mates.)

See, *that's* the kind of thing I'd be playing with.  I like that a lot.
Sins of the fathers lind of thing.

>   But I don't think it works to connect them to the fae.

Well, no, not if you insist on keeping the popular images a la Midsummer
Night's Dream and scads of bad novels.  Me, I feel perfectly free to chuck
them (mainly because I find most treatments of the fae painfully trite).
I don't think a game that includes Pornomancy as a major magical school is
necessarily obligated to stay close to "tradition".

Probably the thing that has most inspired me to play with the popular
perception of the Fair Folk is fellow list-member Ken Hite's great article
on the subject on Pyramid.

Joe
---
"Looking at my action figure, it occurred to me that that's not a bad way
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fellow pedophiles for your support." --attributed to Ross Perot |
Howling lunacy here: http://members.xoom.com/McGuffins/