Puck Fair

Question: How do you guys handle the Faerie Courts and figures like the Wild Hunt, the Oak and Holly Kings, the Green Man and the Erlking? You've mentioned the Faerie Courts before, but it's an area Scion is very light on.

Scion doesn't touch on fairies much, not even in Companion when they're talking about the Tuatha, which seems like a shame considering how largely the fey folk figure in the myths of Ireland and the other nearby isles. Ragnarok tried to throw out a sort of all-purpose umbrella with the Fairy Troop boon, but it did nothing to add to the general mythic landscape of the game (and was also kind of lame, in our ever-humble opinions).

We've gone with a mix of approaches for our games, usually depending on what we needed most at the time. For one thing, we crib shamelessly from another White Wolf game, the excellent Changeling: the Lost, which is a gorgeous compendium of fairy lore and suggestions for playing with them (and, quite aside from its usefulness for Scion, it's also a great game on its own - it avoids pretty much all the issues that its oWoD counterpart Changeling: the Dreaming was plagued by and is still one of my favorite horror games). Some of it is certainly tweaked for play in White Wolf's World of Darkness, so it's not all straight from the ancient word-of-mouth tales of Europe, but a great deal of it is accurate and what isn't is usually very well-done and eminently usable in a fairy-themed game.

Scion has various other options inherent in its premise; for one thing, you could easily incorporate the vast fairy kingdoms of Ireland and the British Isles into the Tuatha, who in some tales are said to have become the fairies themselves when they departed the world after the coming of Christianity. Running fairies as lesser immortals or even low-rung gods of the Tuatha gives you plenty of room for creativity, not to mention a lot of fun space to play with syncretization (for example, you might decide that since Nuada is king of the Tuatha and Oberon is king of the fairies, the two are actually the same person, that sort of thing). If you don't want the fairies to actually be Tuatha themselves, you still might enjoy the options of exploring how the two races share Tir na Nog or what kind of authority, if any, the fairy courts can exert when dealing with the Irish deities.

Outside of Ireland, most European cultures are kind enough to give us versions of their own fairies to work with (the Greeks are actually pretty well covered, thanks to things like dryads and naiads actually being explored somewhat in the Scion books proper). The Norse are the easiest; we've treated fairies and sprites in the northern lands as subspecies of Alfar in the past, meaning that Alfheim (or Svartalfheim, if you're feeling unseelie) is the place to go to deal with them and that the Vanir may have a closer connection to them than most Aesir. Trying the Alfar/Svartalfar to the fairies of the isles south of them also allows you to experiment with crossovers between the Norse and Irish cultures, which is especially useful if you have Scions of both pantheons in the same game. Germanic lands abound with fairies and fairy-creatures, and if it suits your game's flavor, you might even consider them (at least some of them) subordinate to Odin himself, as many scholars believe that the Wild Hunt is based on the older tales of Odin riding out to battle. I'm personally a big fan of Herne the Hunter as the leader of the Wild Hunt, and he has possible ties to good old Cernunnos, so you could also bring in the Gauls in their most terrifying aspects that way pretty easily.

The Erlking also has Scandinavian roots and can be easily tied to the Svartalfar, but we actually ran him as a very powerful, very specialized kind of troll, mostly to differentiate him from the fairies that we had previously used in other stories. He's most likely a sort of woodland elf, so you could easily fold him into whatever you decide to do to handle those, but he's a very strong figure in his own right and one of the few I'd recommend might actually make it up to the same Legend range as minor gods. Our PCs have not actually encountered him; every time he's been in the vicinity, they've just cut and run since they had infants with them at the time and didn't want to see what his reputation as a baby-stealer was all about.

We haven't really treated the Green Man as a separate figure in his own right - we usually assume that green men are representations of the local fertility god, from the Dagda all the way on down to wee little continental Celtic gods who are probably only Legend 9 or so. If we were going to claim him as a specific figure, it would probably be Cernunnos, but I'm a fan of the symbol being something applied to a wide spread of fertility gods who might appear in that form, rather than a single being of its own.

I'm afraid we really haven't bothered with the Oak and Holly Kings much; like the Green Man, they're more representations and archetypes than individual figures of their own, and are more likely representations of other dualistic or opposing figures. I'd have them more as aspects that related gods take on sometimes than as figures in their own right, but if you're already playing with the Seelie and Unseelie courts (or with the seasoned courts), they make excellent seasonal kings in that context.

Scion is kind of hit-or-miss when it comes to folklore below the god level; you've got all the Greek monsters you could ever want, but the fairies definitely get short shrift, so Storytellers usually end up needing to do a lot of research and legwork of their own to decide who, what and how to use them.