1. Javelineer

    Javelineer Active Member

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    Reawakened Faery Host vs Post-apoc/Dystopian Police State

    Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by Javelineer, Apr 10, 2021.

    Ok, so this one's going to be a little weird.

    Setting:
    Near future United States. Civilization's grip on mankind has grown is growing weak and arthritic. Dark forces seek to renew forgotten calumnies, and primordial beasts reclaim the wilderness. The dumb bastards who wrecked it all philosophers and nobility of the old order have marshaled a large and advanced military force to reclaim what once was theirs. A wide assortment of petty warlords and malcontents freedom fighters and adventurers must band together to resist them.

    Deep in the Appalachian Mountains, a renegade scholar and his band of followers delve into tomes of eldritch and forgotten lore. They, by menes of sorcerie, wichcraft and incantatioune most arcayne, hath opent ane portale and sommond forth ane armie of faery.

    (Don't worry, I won't be doing that kind of thing very often.)

    The faires were meant to assist the rebels, and they do almost immediately engage in raids and ambushes against government and loyalist forces. But it soon becomes clear that they have an agenda altogether their own.

    Still undecided on what exactly that'll be. Suggestions are welcome.

    My main source of information on fairies, as people historically understood them, is The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies by Robert Kirk, the The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans Wentz, and The Discarded Image by CS Lewis. And this blog about British Fairies. And while I'm not completely beholden to Medieval and Early Modern historical accounts, that will be my rough guideline.


    General attributes:
    Let's give them the Latin Name of homo faeus elfectus for now: humanoid fairy-elves. "Fairy elf" was a good enough term for John Milton, and it helps define the particular type of fairy that we're going for. And anyone who can improve on my Dog Latin is invited to do so.

    I'm not sure how many of them I want to start out with. Anywhere from as few as 300 to as many as 10,000. Enough to have a viable civilization and to pose a challenge to any factions of the Big Folk they come into conflict with, but not enough that they could just overwhelm their opponents. Maybe, in a nod to Plato, I could put the number at 5,040.

    They don't have wings.

    They're outwardly indistinguishable from normal humans, apart from being smaller. How much smaller? Seldom smaller than three-and-a-half feet, seldom larger than four-and-a-half (107 to 137 cm). Being semi-incorporeal, they can probably change their sizes more or less at will, same as angels were thought to do.

    They have longer lives than us, but they're not immortal. In fact, a lot of fairy sightings seem to take place during funeral processions. They're a bit tougher and harder to kill than us, but by no means invulnerable. They need oxygen like we do, they have similar tolerances to heat and cold as us, and they have the same basic needs and bodily functions as us.

    They're not as strong as us, though square-cube law does help a little. They are quite a bit faster and more agile than us, and that gives them an edge over humans in hand-to-hand combat. Still haven't decided if this is an advantage of magic, superior neurology, superior musculature, or some combination of the three. In all the accounts I've read, I've seldom seen a human getting in a fistfight with a fairy and coming out victorious.

    They have keener senses than us, though I'm still unsure as to how much keener and why. The fact that we seem to see them a lot at night seems to imply that they have an exceptional night vision (though not complete night vision, given their use of lanterns and torches). If they have tapeta lucida like cats and dogs, then their eyes probably glow and they have blurrier day vision. If they have some form of FLIR in their heads, then they probably can't see through glass.

    For hearing, simply not growing up in the noise of modern society would give them tremendously superior hearing. Studies of elderly residents of primitive societies have shown that they often have better hearing than American college students. Could be a problem for them in combat, at least if they don't acquire good earpro. No idea what their sense of smell, touch, or taste would be like.

    In terms of how moral/dangerous they are to humans. I'm thinking they're not much better or worse than the humans of this setting, which admittedly isn't saying much. They do have a basic understanding of humanity and whatever they do to us, good or bad, should generally serve a purpose.

    Magical powers and advantages:

    While they don't have wings, they do have powers of flight and levity (i.e. reducing their weight at will; think Legolas walking on top of soft snow).

    They can create illusions. They can make themselves look human-sized or like animals, or they can shape-shift into animals. They can also make themselves invisible. Some humans can always and all humans can sometimes see through these tricks, however.

    They can control the weather. They can summon fog, rain or storms (even though they don't like flowing water?). They also have some control over the earth itself: digging out tunnel networks with supernatural ease, turning dirt roads into muddy mires, forming sinkholes under pavement, even triggering landslides or earthquakes. I'll have to put some rigorous limits on this power, even though it would amusingly Formorian of them if they started throwing tornadoes at Washington DC or triggering earthquakes and tsunamis off the coast of the Eastern Seaboard.

    Some explanations for will-o'-the-wisp is that it's a form of ball lightning. If they can control it, then they can potentially use it to blow up, burn or electrocute their enemies.

    Will-o'-the-wisp is also sometimes explained as being methane. If they can harness methane, they might use it to make highly powerful fuel-air explosives. That would come in handy, especially since one of their common allergies would make certain forms of easily-produced explosive unavailable to them (see below).

    They can shoot their enemies with elf-arrows (or even larger, javelin-sized projectiles) which have an uncanny ability to
    get around or through armor. The wounds are debilitating painful and usually lethal if the right remedy isn't used to treat them.

    Weaknesses:

    These particular fairies have been asleep/in stasis/exiled to the Land of Fairy since either shortly after or since some time before the Roman occupation of Britain (haven't decided yet). As such, their technological level can best be described as Iron or Bronze Age, though they are willing to learn about modern human technology, and make use of it when possible.

    If they speak any human language at all, it's probably some form of Old Irish and Common Brittonic and maybe a little Latin. The humans who awakened them will be able to communicate with them, but few others will.

    They can't hope to win a conventional war against the full might of a modern military. They get nuked and they die. They get gassed and they die. They get forced into a pitched battle with a full-strength tank division and they die. Their only hope is to fight a guerrilla war as ambushers and raiders and, luckily for them, they understand that.

    They injure horses and other domestic animals if they try to ride them. They likewise have a bad effect on cars, machines and industrial technology. Rather similar to gremlins (which are a remarkably recent addition to Western folklore). Engines sputter and die around them, computers go haywire and crash, electronic circuits burn out, batteries run empty, and complex mechanical devices break and fail.

    This actually flies in the face of some accounts we have, but I take it as a modern variant of the fairy riding phenomenon. This might actually be a good thing if it's happening to the enemy's stuff I suppose, but a bad thing for the fairies since it makes technological advancement difficult and, if they want to travel, it forces them to either fly or rely on shanks' pony.

    They're allergic to iron, steel, and possibly all magnetic metals. And that could some very serious problems in the modern world. They can't use guns, for one thing. And if a horse-shoe nailed to a wood-frame cottage is enough to ward off fairy kidnappers, how would he react to one built with iron beams?

    They're allergic to salt. That's going to make a lot of modern, processed food inedible for them. And I have to wonder, is that just sodium chloride or does it include all chemical salts? That would take gunpowder and a lot of the other easier-to-make explosives off the table for them, and is a fairy going to poison himself from the nitrates and phosphates in the soil if he tries to walk barefoot across a recently-fertilized cornfield?

    (Even though they're often made from them, I don't think sulfuric acid, nitric acid, or potassium chlorate count as irons or salts. In that case, dynamite, gelignite and cheddite should be doable.)

    They can't cross flowing water. But does this mean all flowing water? Are they stuck in place if it starts raining on them? What if someone shoots one with a garden hose?

    Use of magic has certain drawbacks. It requires a lot of energy for one thing (which might explain fairies' reported fondness for butter, it being one of the most calorie-efficient foods). Flying, in particular, is very taxing. It puts off a lot of thermal and electromagnetic radiation, such that flying for too long or throwing around too many fireballs on a battlefield is not only a good way to cook yourself, it's also a good way to get an AGM-88 HARM dropped on you you.

    They smell bad.

    Ultimately, as they spend more time removed from the World of Fairy and permanently(?) bound to the World of Man, they lose a lot of their magical powers, while also losing a lot of their weaknesses and shortcomings. I'm not sure how fast this change occurs, but it will lead to some interesting evolution in their doctrine. Their elfshot isn't as potent as it used to be, but iron and salt are no longer painful so an SVD Draganuv works just as well. They can't use ball-lightning or methane bombs to take out enemy armor anymore, but a bunch of semtex packed behind an Explosive Formed Penetrator works too. They can't scry enemy positions anymore, but recon drones can do the job almost as effectively. They're no longer kidnapping kids to replace them with changelings, they're kidnapping them for ransom money to pay off their Chinese and Venezuelan arms dealers (I'm tempted to have the fairies learn about Pol Pot and go for him in a big way--I don't think I've ever seen anyone do communist fairies before). By the end of it all, they're little more than highly-athletic men of slightly-diminutive stature.

    What do you people think? Good idea? Completely idiotic? Any further suggestions?
     
    Last edited: Apr 14, 2021
  2. Javelineer

    Javelineer Active Member

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    On sober second thought, one reason no one's ever done that before might be because it's a stupid idea. :meh:

    Something that has the support of actual mythology, but which is seldom seen in fiction: fairies were often thought of as spirits of the dead, especially in the earliest accounts. I could definitely do something with that: souls of human sacrifices reanimated as a fairy host by the Druids, in an attempt to prevent/end the Roman occupation of their lands? But somehow the project ended in failure, leaving them in stasis until the events of our story take place?

    I'll have to be very careful to make sure no one thinks I'm talking about Thetans here... :D :meh:
     

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