Unseelie Faerie [Sprite]

Evil twins of the seelie, they are hideous and dark-skinned, with ragged insect wings, long skinny arms and wide, big-nosed faces, often with claws, fangs or bulging monstrous eyes. Like their cousins, they grow or shrink at will between an inch and a foot.

Where seelie faeries merely tease, unseelie faeries delight in pain and murder. They go invisible at will to shadow, frighten and finally ambush their prey, and simply seeing one affects ordinary mortals as a fear spell. They carry tiny swords (1d2) and bows (1 point), sometimes smeared with the same sleep poison their cousins use (save vs. spell or sleep 2d4 hours), and victims often awaken tied up amid dozens of gleeful tormentors. Some ride bats or stirges and attack with small lances (1d4), also sometimes poisoned.

Each knows a single fixed spell usable once per day, of any level and chosen by the DM, nearly always cruel and destructive, such as monster summoning, cloudkill, lightning bolt or magic missile. No noble or royal unseelie faeries are known.

Tribes dwell in grim places such as gnarled trees, bleak swamps and weedy meadows, and keep black, spiked demiplane palaces adorned with carved skulls and monsters. Each does as it pleases or obeys whoever has the strongest magic; such bullies style themselves king, queen or emperor and are toppled just as often.

Their war with the seelie never ends, and wherever both share a forest the fighting rages across it, perilous to anyone nearby. Travelers caught in unseelie land after dark suffer terribly, tortured before being killed. Even survivors may be left polymorphed, perhaps with a goat's head and beetle legs, or doomed to dance, itch or laugh without stopping.

Though fed by their demiplanes, they ravage nearby lands for sport: slaughtering animals, fouling glades, felling trees and assaulting travelers. Wise woodsmen avoid any place showing their signs: blackened, withered plants, rotting carcasses, smashed trees and poisoned water.