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Which Fey Court is involved in this?

Header image by Anton Novoselov on Flickr

1 – THE CONCRETE COURT. Who are in charge; who rule the high-rises, whose eyes are television, whose hair is a thousand flowing telephone wires, whose breath is choking exhaust, whose pulse is the thrum of traffic and the drone of air-con units, who are brilliant and terrible in their smog-caked majesty. They are of the City and they are the City, and they hold themselves with the bone-deep understanding that this is an unchangeable, self-evident truth. (Until it changes, of course.)

2 – THE COURT OF SPILLED WINE. Who coalesce at the end of a grimy party, summoned like foul spectres from the bottom of bottles and emerging blind-drunk and bloody from back alleys; drunks, louts, and vicious bastards the lot of them. It is generally accepted amongst fey society that, once the Court of Spilled Wine shows up to a party, the best is already over and it will soon be time to leave.

3 – THE COURT OF WAYS. Our Lady of the Underground was cast out of the Concrete Court after a failed takeover, and she dwells beneath the City in the tunnels, the subways, the metro systems, where only the faintest echoes of the neon racket above bleed down to remind her of her failure. She has fashioned a court of rat-things and the souls of trains, a cobbletogether fake, but they do her bidding – she is consumed with the idea of returning to the City above once more, and she is the ruler of ways, paths, portals and tunnels within the dark places of the under-city.

4 – THE COURT OF KNIVES. Who are the lords of division and separation. The Knives are obsessed with boundaries, streets, gates, walls – they have a keen sense of “inside” and “outside,” and can smell who is in charge of a given area if the wind blows in the right direction. They are uniquely fey in as much as they don’t do anything – they just love boundaries. Sometimes they stab people who disrespect them, but it’s not like they’re anything so gauche as guards. They’re just enthusiasts.

5 – THE LORDS MOTLEY. Who are a loose selection of gutter-born half-fey who huddle together for warmth in the cold depths of the City; cannibal elflings, ronin Knights from fallen courts, refugees from lost cities and abandoned timelines. They are desperate to hold onto any advantage they can get, but that desperation – and the lack of a proper leader – makes them easy to manipulate.

6 – THE DEVILS OF ABERNETHY STREET. Who make contracts with mortals in exchange for drugs, but only the inexperienced ones. The Devils can give you whatever it is you wish – in exchange for whatever they ask in return – and they can serve up brief happiness in whatever form they choose. There are many whose happy suburban families are mere illusions, patchwork things conjured up by the Devils, and who will turn back to old newsprint and cardboard boxes should the luckless fool not hold up their end of the bargain.

7 – THE FOREST QUEEN. Who, once upon a time, ruled this place when the trees stretched from horizon to horizon, when the dark, and not the light, was the real power. She is a withered old thing (although: she cannot die, not as we would know it) with pot-plant dryads and tired-eyed agent Knights who have been ensorcelled and mind-wiped hundreds upon hundreds of times, neither of which are enough to do her bidding with any efficiency.

8 – THE COURT OF RAIN. Who were the Court of Snow, long ago, and lived in great palaces of ice and frost when the city froze over in winter. Now: they are dreary, wet things the colour of rain-soaked concrete, hungry to recapture their past glories; they trade curious imports with humans for refrigeration units and walk-in freezers where they make their homes, and are hesitant to leave them, for in the humid modern City they will quickly melt from shimmering majesty back into their drab, lank selves.

9 – THE COUNTING COURT. Who are ghostly and pale collective of buttoned-down fey in masks and gloves (or – who have masks and gloves instead of faces and hands, it’s not quite clear) who, thousands of years ago, acquired the contract that allows vampires to sustain themselves with nothing but blood and thus gain eternal life. (Or: whatever it is this vampire takes, instead of blood.) They are owed a sliver of power from each drop of blood that touches a vampire’s lips, and they collect it solemnly, blood-letting each vampire once a year with the sombre air of a mortician.

10 – THE COURT OF GLITTER. Who are ephemeral, and to be honest stupid, sprites and wisps who are drawn to the city by cheap drinks, sex, dancing and cocaine. They are barely sapient, and they are fond of living inside the fever-dreams of clubbers or the fantasies of young lovers, and honestly they tend to leave a mess whenever they manifest fully in the real world, but they’re a Court nonetheless, and are offered a seat at the triannual meet, even if they never show up to claim it.


Glimmers is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create an urban horror world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[GLIMMERS.] The city is alive. The city is connected, with streams of light and noise and people, to every other city; they are all the same being, all branches of the same concrete-and-glass tree. There are streets between them, forgotten streets, with secret names and grim inhabitants. (And: there are wild-lands, dark places, the Spaces Between, where nothing seems right. Airport waiting rooms. Churches, at night. Backwater villages.)

There is vast power in the thrum of machines and the buzz of traffic, and it can be yours, for a price.

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What does this “vampire” feed on?

Header image by BenGrantham on Flickr

1 – LUCK. It absorbs good luck from people and spends it to stay alive, because the gods cursed vampires many years ago and this is the only way they can get around the hex. (Without regular luck-feeding, most vampires would be killed by a traffic accident or lightning strike in a matter of days.) Some own casinos; the less-fortunate ones just hang around and try to siphon off fortune from gamblers. (They can gather it through skin contact, however brief.)

2 – IDENTITIES. They build shrines to people out of secrets and discarded (or stolen) clothes. They listen for social security numbers, birthdays, mothers’ maiden names; they impersonate voices over the phone and copy signatures. For each part of your identity they steal, you become weaker, and they become stronger, until you become a hollowed-out vampire yourself.

3 – BLOOD. But – only blood that’s been freely given, else it turns to ashes and pitch in their mouths. Blood banks are great; others run goth nightclubs or fetish parties to try and latch onto people who’ll willingly give up some of the red stuff.

4 – DISEASE. They feed on diseases, ripping them out of people. They’re a positive influence, for the most part, but they look more horrific the more “powerful” they become, resembling withered, rash-covered corpses. Which is all fine until they’re killed by some do-gooding vampire hunter, and all the diseases they’ve absorbed are cast out into everyone nearby.

5 – NOISE. They absorb noise, sucking it out of nearby events, reducing them to silence; they can ruin concerts. They’re bastards, too, the lot of them – mainly it comes from a lack of social interaction, as no-one can talk to them – and so they make a lot of enemies. Some hunters keep one on their books as an aid to infiltration; for others, the last thing they’ll hear is absolutely nothing, as the vampire descends upon them and rips them silently apart.

6 – CORPSES. But – the whole corpse. It doesn’t stop feeling hungry until it’s eaten every part of the corpse; when it’s digested the last hair, gummed down the last spoonful of ground-up molars, sucked the marrow from the bones and swallowed the intestines. It can take a vampire several weeks to get through a full body, and if they are denied their prize, it was all for nothing.

7- EYES. They feed on eyes, fresh and hot and wet out of the sockets. They select eyes that have seen beautiful, remarkable or unique things; if they can’t find anyone with interesting experiences, they’ll make those experiences for them. They have lairs full of beautiful art that they don’t (and physically can’t) care the slightest about, and heavy chairs with leather straps for viewing parties.

8 – MEMORIES. Their lives are agony, and they cannot die. (Should they try and end it all, they awaken at the next sunset, in more pain than ever.) Their only hope of escape is to track down everyone from their life before they were turned and suck out every memory that relates to them using a long, barbed tongue or probing finger; once they disappear from the world completely, they are allowed to die.

9 – MAGIC. They drain the ability to perform magic out of their targets, storing it within themselves and using it to fuel their unnatural powers. They hide in mage’s sanctums, pressed tight in the gaps between the walls, and leech their powers while they sleep – or they run in gangs of three to five, corner guttermages and hedge-wizards, and wrench the auras off them in back alleys.

10 – COLOUR. They were kicked out of the fey realm for some unimaginable crime, and now they traipse through the mortal world looking to recapture their glory days. In doing so, they leech the colour and vibrancy out of everything that surrounds them, leaving people like sun-bleached salon photographs; their lairs are greyscale-monochrome, and they will gladly talk of their time amongst the fair folk in exchange for a bright red scarf, or the blue of your eyes.

Glimmers is a series where Chris and Grant, the creative leads behind Rowan, Rook & Decard, create an urban horror world through the use of Dx tables. Because who has time to read a full setting book?

[GLIMMERS.] The city is alive. The city is connected, with streams of light and noise and people, to every other city; they are all the same being, all branches of the same concrete-and-glass tree. There are streets between them, forgotten streets, with secret names and grim inhabitants. (And: there are wild-lands, dark places, the Spaces Between, where nothing seems right. Airport waiting rooms. Churches, at night. Backwater villages.)

There is vast power in the thrum of machines and the buzz of traffic, and it can be yours, for a price.