Faeries

[rhinehrt]

Hello alll...first post

Well, here's the take on faeries for my game (which, while UA inspired is
cetainly no where near cannon).

    In my world, ripping wholesale from AM, faeries are realities refugees.
After a land gets conquered, the new people push out the old to make room for
themselves. Pretty soon these people (the conquerers) become the new natives.
Soon the old folks become pushed out of sight and out of mind. Then these
refugees are stuck with a choice, try to fit in with the new paradigm or
go...elsewhere, in to the darkness, into dreams.
    The transplanted indigenous cultures and the like no longer fit into the
new paradigm. So they have a choice, evolve into the new or fade away. My world
plays a riff on the Marduk/Tiamat myth. When Marduk killed Tiamat, she didn't
"die." Her lack of existence caused her to become the new worlds shadow. ("the
dark" or the tenebrae).
 Here is a place where the dispossessed can go to and emblaze themselves on the
human unconscious. Arcadia becomes a land of the forgotten. They are sort of
the massive shadow of the Godwalkers and the Invisible Clergy.
    This "Arcadia" then becomes the land of legends. The dispossessed turn away
from the world and enter into legend. They enter the legendary past/future (a
sort of cosmogenesis/cosmoterminus sort of thing). To quote AM, becoming a
dream means only giving up a life whose best pieces are already gone. But to
become a dream, they lose the ability to make anything real. They require the
influx of new stories and ideas to keep their fragment from becoming like the
core of Tiamat (who in the orgiginal story craved silence and quiet,
stillness...the void).
    They give up the trappings of mortality in the tenebrae. They give up the
constancy of being in the causal world (the power of creation) and live only in
this other place, forever dying and being reborn in the tenebrae. They slowly
lose their memories and just become part of legend. Seeing as how in the world
of UA the world has restarted a number of times, the tenebrae has grown quite
large.
    The result in my world are "exposed places" that connect to fragments of
this dream world/Arcadia. The tenebrae suffers acutely the slow darkening trend
of the universe as Tiamat slowly re-awakens. For every Godwalker that ascends a
group of people become displaced, becoming its mass shadow.
    This allows for such things as (among other things), a blood/wine dark sea
of sharks and bodies where slaves jumped from a slave ship (throwing themselves
into the tenebrae), as well as phantom Indian tribes and the like. Jonestown
takes on a whole new, disturbing, aspect. It also allows for individuals as
well, the "eternal soldier" begets the fallen vietnam vet who slips into his
own private section of the tenebrae...out on the street, broken, penniless,
powerless addicted and alone. Junkies (and perhaps the occassional broken
Dipsomancer) segue into shattered purgatories playing out their last days
before crossing over. In a lot of ways my faeries are like zeroes living in the
delusions that remain of their fragmented egos. A lot of the imagery here comes
from a Hellblazer piece in which Constantine enters an alternate New York.
    The idea is to suggest that unless something is done (ultimately beyond the
scope of the PC's in all but the most heroic of games), the Clergy will
ultimately mirror the darkness. And when that happens, when there is nothing
left but ashes and bodies floating in oil slick water under poisoned skies in
the new world, then Tiamat will awaken. (Yes, the phrase "the sleeper will
awaken" from Dune means something completely different in my world).
    For mages and would be avatars, they are a reminder that they are not the
clergy and exactly what happens to the losers in this little ascension war. It
is something to make the PC's realize that by entering into the world of magic
they face very real dilemnas if they don't ascend. Making them think twice
about getting on the path of ascension in the first place. In my world, mages
are MUCH closer to the tenebrae because of the choices they make, to follow an
ideology instead of making one. The tenebrae is always tugging at their
reality, inviting them to enter the dream, to cede out, and to take the OTHER
path to becoming a legend. When you have a PC wandering through the
hallucination of an eeirly familiar bombed out city and have the soft voices of
the survivors beckoning or when in Japan they walk through a city of alabaster
with chalk-ash statues in the street, quiet and desolate all pointing
towards...nothing, the effect can be quite remarkable.

Of course, you should see what I did to Alex Abel. (Although as an
African-American male, I'm bound to translate the concept a little
differently.)

Thoughts?
rhinehrt

P.S. the themes for my game are hope, rebirth, and "the reclamation of the
lost"