Kingdoms: Creating the Court

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The King Dreams, The Court Serves

The King Players are responsible for creating their Courts. The Queen Players can offer advice, but ultimately it is the king who gets final call on who is part of his court.

There is one specific exception to this - the Queen Player always gets to generate the character sheet for the Queen. While the king can say what he would like, the Queen is a self-made woman!

The in-game explanation for this is this is as follows:

Every son of royal blood is a conduit for Glamour - the raw stuff of dream that comprises and maintains the Fae Realms. The whole of Fae Reality owes its existence to Glamour. As a young princeling grows up, he literally dreams his Court into reality. It is his subconscious and his Glamour that gives them form and substance. Once formed, the greater of these creations will gain independent sentience, but they still owe their existence to their King.

The exception to this is the Queen. She is a sorceress and outsider who was dreamt into being by secret cabals and ancestor spirits in the Outer Realms. At the appointed time she arrives and presents herself to the Court, ready to take her place at the new King's side, and to make his Court complete. She is not of the King's creation, but she binds herself willingly to his destiny.

It's also worth noting that while the Adjudicator oversees the creation of the Courts, the two opposing Kings dream their creations separately and secretly from each other. At the start of the 12 years the Courts will be revealed to the public eye, in all their glory, but each King must prepare for war without knowing what his opposite is doing.

The Dreamform

Every Court has a Dreamform based on the way that each King visualises himself and his kingdom. This Dreamform creates a unifying style and theme for the entire Court.

The Seelie White Kings normally dream of unified kingdoms with strong hierarchies and rigid societies. Often, their peoples will be of a single race, and with a single shared culture. For example, a Seelie White King might dream of a desert kingdom where he is the Undying Sun Pharoah, and where legions of skeletons serve him. Alternatively he might dream of a theocracy land ruled by its Church, where he is the Godhead to a million human worshippers.

The Unseelie Black Kings usually reach into the wilder and uncontrolled depths of the Dreaming for their visions. Their people will be diverse, passionate and prone to wildness. One Unseelie Black King might see himself as an Orcish Warlord, with a feral horde of trolls, nightspawn and greenskins at his command. Another might see himself as a Giant Spider, controlling a sprawl of "independent" city states through blackmail and influence.

Because the Dreamform shapes the King himself, and because Seelie or Unseelie nature plays a part, there is little reason for the two brothers to be similar in any way. Genetics and inherited traits have no place in the Fae Realm - the imagination of the subconscious mind is the only limit.