Fairytales

Question: Could you explain how are organized the two faerie courts(winter/summer) in your games?

Actually, we run with four fairy courts, one for each season, so we have a Spring and an Autumn court in addition to the Winter and Summer kingdoms.

At the moment, the fairy courts are slightly in disarray, thanks to several PCs sort of stomping their way through them and blowing a lot of things up. The current politics look like this:

The Summer Court: Ruled by Draconia, the Summer Queen, following the death of her husband at the hands of John Doe, who she had sent to retrieve him but who instead punched him to death and then had noisy sex with Vivian in his remains. Thanks to Aurora's interference, Draconia does not know who killed her spouse, so she makes it a policy to hunt any Scion in her territory while she slowly builds up her army. The troops were led by her son, a half-fairy child of John Doe himself until he was later kidnapped by PCs and released into Muspelheim, and they are heavily based on the Nazi regime. Manannan mac Lir is currently very pissed off at them for blowing up a lot of Ireland proper, and has been sending PCs to try to stop them.

The Summer Court is burgeoning with life and filled with delights, but it is also very hot and surprisingly violent. Its inhabitants are brightly colored and easily noticeable, and value strong emotion, anywhere along the spectrum from romantic passion to rage to grief. They're big on shouting and rioting.

The Autumn Court. The most mysterious of the fairy courts, no PC has ever actually visited there, and judging by the horrible creatures they've seen come from it, they don't want to. It is ruled by the Autumn King, a terrible being whose true name remains unknown, and is the source of the Wild Hunt, most recently enacted in downtown Paris to prey on a hapless Gaulish Scion who escaped only through the actions of Aurora's band; whether or not the Autumn King has some connection to Odin, another reputed leader of the Hunt, remains unknown. The other fairy courts are usually underfoot, causing trouble for Scions and shifts in the World's atmosphere, but the Autumn Court has been ominously silent. No one is sensible enough to be worried about this.

The Autumn court is the source of fear and dread, creeping creatures that snatch children and night terrors that lurk in shadows. Its inhabitants are usually fearsome and nightmarish, and they trail noticeable fear in their wake wherever they go. They're fond of terrifying mortals and being kind of douchebags.

The Winter Court. Ruled by the child-queen Wyra, the Winter Court is currently undergoing something of a regime-change; opportunistic fairies attempted to keep the queen drugged and docile enough to make policy on their own, but Vivian's interference and ability to cure the queen's haze caused her to strike back against the traitors, and the court is currently a mess of backstabbing and accusations as everyone tries to sort out who's going down in flames with them. Wyra is grooming her prophesied son, who owes half his blood to Seamus McMann, for some great purpose as well, but no one yet knows what it is.

The Winter Court is a frozen hellscape of lethal ice, enormous snowdrifts and biting wind. The only things that manage to survive there are tundra predators, and the fairies themselves are sturdy and take a particularly malicious delight in watching unprepared intruders freeze to death. They tend to be the court most open to negotiation with outsiders, but they're no more predictable or less temperamental than their cousins.

The Spring Court. The Spring Court is currently but a memory; once as thriving as the other three, it was slowly squeezed to death by the onset of Fimbulwinter and the death of all its warmth-loving fairies. It was ruled by Noel, the Spring King, who spent a lot of time frantically trying to save it before impregnating Kettila Blomgren with twins in order to get divine blood into his line and ensure that the court had a future. He was finally killed by Aten after stalking and torturing various members of Kettila's band, however, and his death was the last nail in the Spring Court's coffin. His unborn twins were lost in an accident that nearly killed Kettila as well, and he has no known surviving progeny.

The Spring Court, when it wasn't just a sad graveyard of fairy bones, was warm and pleasant, possibly the most welcoming of all the fairy realms. Its inhabitants were concerned mainly with the creation of new things and with sexual reproduction, but not many of them are still around to mope about it. It's possible that, after Fimbulwinter finally ends, the court might be rebuilt, but for the moment its future is very uncertain.

So there you have it: all the dysfunctional inhabitants of our fairy world, ruining everything for everyone all the time. While they were serious big-time antagonists around early Demigod (Legend 5-7), they're no longer able to compete with the god-level PCs and are currently taking much less of a center-stage role. It's occasionally been suggested that the courts might have some connection to Alfheim, Tir na Nog or other magical lands with similar inhabitants, but so far nobody's bothered to go find out.