Coure [Lesser Eladrin]

A coure looks like a minute, slender elf with long, filmy wings streaming from its shoulders. Coures come in all sorts of unlikely colors and favor loud clothing in dubious taste. Whenever it likes, a coure can become a small globe of faerie-light about 6 inches across.

Fighting is not what coures are good at, and they will usually fly rather than face anything but the feeblest opponent. The great exception is imps from the hells or the Abyss, their sworn foes; they have little love for mephits, either. When cornered, a coure uses tiny weapons made to its scale, preferring short swords and rapiers that count as daggers +1. Like the bralani, it is a startlingly good archer, gaining +4 to hit with its little bow, and its silver arrows count as darts +1.

If it wins initiative, a coure can attack and then shift into its light-globe form in the same round. As a ball of light it is AC 0 and flies at double its usual speed, but it cannot make physical attacks. In elf form it has a magic missile it can cast thrice daily.

Each round, at will, a coure may employ faerie fire, sleep, cantrip, audible glamer or dancing lights. Once a day it can play a magical joke that works like hideous laughter. Ordinary weapons can hurt a coure, and cold iron deals it double damage. Unlike its larger kin, it cannot gate in others of its kind.

When evil shows itself, coure mischief hardens into real guerrilla warfare: swarms of them sting and retreat to wear the enemy down while others race off to fetch stronger help.

Coures are the smallest eladrins and the most common, found all through the plane of passion as messengers, scouts and incorrigible tricksters. They pester travelers and solemn eladrins alike, never out of malice, and even the most dismal doom-preaching philosopher struggles to keep a scowl while a cloud of them dances about his head.

Most live among the wild woods and steep gorges of the plane's first layer, gathered in bands called faerie circles or faerie courts. They are bound more tightly to the land than their kin, lingering for centuries in a beloved grove or on a favorite mountainside before drifting elsewhere, and a circle will stand up to invaders far stronger than itself to defend its enchanted home. Coures mind their own business as most eladrins do, but whole swarms also attend the courts of the firre and tulani, serving as heralds, pages and couriers.

They are creatures of starlight and shadow. During the day they mostly sleep, wrapped in their own gauzy wings.