Unseelie Faerie

The Unseelie Court is a grim host of evil faeries, both living and undead, each as unique in form as any seelie. Corruption shows on the living ones: ashen skin, eyes sunken or burning with malice, bodies shrunken or swollen. Their horns twist, their wings are leathery, their tails barbed, and cloven hooves and taloned hands are common. Undead faeries are incorporeal phantoms of what they were, with pupil-less eyes that glow white-hot with hatred.

Unseelie faeries are glad to fight hand to hand, and peaceful meetings are rare. They always try for surprise by turning invisible; after that, tactics vary.

The living ones cast spells until foes are close, choosing five a day from any 1st- or 2nd-level charm sphere spell or from this darker set: badberry, barkskin, bestow curse, destroy water, entangle, faerie fire, obscurement, produce flame, protection from good, putrefy food and drink, pyrotechnics, shillelagh, speak with animals, spike growth and warp wood, plus the seelie spell of forgetting at will. In melee each wields a +1 short sword sized to its body, whose enchantment works only for a faerie. Against nonfaeries they lean constantly on glamour, as seelie faeries do, to confuse and frighten; against the Seelie Court they know it is wasted. Charms and illusions have no effect on them, but iron weapons deal 3 extra damage per hit and salt blocks their invisibility for 1d4 turns.

Undead faeries rush straight into melee. Their touch chills the blood and fogs the mind, dealing 1d8 damage and draining 5 points of perception score per hit. Only iron or +1 or better weapons can hit them; holy water deals 1d6+1 per vial, and they are turned as spectres.

Evil fights dirty, and even an apparently friendly encounter often leaves a traveler cursed.

The court is a funhouse-mirror version of the Faerie Queen's, set in the most haunted, warped forest of the shadowy faerie realm. Its faeries torment travelers for amusement, from petty spite to lethal cruelty, especially anyone they take for an ally of the Seelie Court or an agent of good, and victims may never learn who attacked them. Because evil seeks its likeness and treachery breeds suspicion, they see enemies nearly everywhere. Their ancient war with the Seelie Court can sweep adventurers into the crossfire, recruit them by force or choice, or give them a chance to turn both courts against a larger threat: the shadowy Frost Horseman, assuming it does not win over the Dark Queen first.

The court never lacks recruits, since faeries with evil leanings banished by the Faerie Queen mostly drift to her daughter.

Vesperine, the Dark Queen, is the Faerie Queen's daughter. Once she was unimaginably lovely, but also envious, ambitious and ruthless. Her plot to depose her mother failed, and the Faerie Queen, unable to order her death, exiled her instead; enraged, Vesperine gathered followers and crowned herself over a court of her own. A survivor once described her as a deadly, eternally sulking teenager.

Her beauty is gone, but she keeps a black widow's allure: any male who sees her must save vs. spell or be charmed, though she seeks converts to her war, not lovers. She demands total loyalty and executes even for harmless carelessness, convinced her own survival proves mercy is folly. She is neutral evil, 4 feet 4 inches tall, with 14 Hit Dice, 81 hit points and 50% magic resistance; like her mother she is immune to charms and illusions, invisible at will and able to sense alignment. Her glamour score is 78 and her perception 90, and her Charisma is 19 (XP 15,000). Iron deals +2 damage per hit, salt suppresses her invisibility for 1 turn, and holy water burns her for 1d6+1.

She casts priest spells only, six each of the first three levels, five of 4th, three of 5th, two of 6th and one of 7th per day, drawing on the entire charm and necromantic spheres, the unseelie list, and create food and water, detect good, detect magic, false seeing, hallucinatory forest, the 10-foot-radius form of protection from good, reflecting pool, sticks to snakes, tongues, tree and undetectable charm.

An undead faerie is born when any faerie, of whatever alignment, dies in battle between the courts. The horror of kin killing kin ripples through the glamour and keeps the spirit from dissolving into it. Trapped and stripped of its magic, it wanders the realm as a mindless thing raging at the living, kept in check by the Dark Queen alone. Imps and gremlins have also been sighted among her courtiers.