It took the fey quite some time to find their place in D&D.
While stories of a “fairyland” or “realm of the fey” go back for centuries, D&D’s traditional Great Wheel cosmology didn’t really have a place for them. In fact, it wasn’t even clear if the fey were supposed to come from the planes at all, since they were quite often portrayed (usually by implication) as beings of the natural world, with dryads being denizens of the forest, nixies dwelling in rivers, gremlins living in caves, etc.
AD&D 2nd Edition tried to square this circle by making the Seelie Court into its own pantheon, with Titania and Oberon as its chief deities, around which gods of various fey creatures such as unicorns and leprechauns gathered. The Unseelie Court was essentially the realm of a singular evil fey goddess, the Queen of Air and Darkness. Both were placed among the Outer Planes.
That this solution was found by many to be inelegant can be inferred by how, in the D&D 3rd Edition Manual of the Planes, there was presented a “Plane of Faerie” as an example of planes that might be found in alternative cosmologies (along with heretofore unknown planes such as the Plane of Mirrors and the Elemental Plane of Wood).
The idea must have been popular, because Pathfinder 1E and D&D 4th Edition both availed themselves of it when putting forward their cosmologies. Pathfinder had “The First World” as its fey realm, while 4E had the “Feywild.” To date, both are still being used in the latest editions of both games.
Looking at the presentation of a fey-specific plane in the context of the d20 System, however (i.e. 3E’s Plane of Faerie and Pathfinder 1E’s First World), I think that there’s an unintended consequence (albeit a very minor one) that I think has gone overlooked.
If the fey come from a different plane of existence, shouldn’t they have the Extraplanar subtype?
Now, this is far from an unsolvable problem. While the various entries in d20 System monster books are all written from the standpoint of encountering the listed creatures on the Material Plane (hence why some have the Extraplanar subtype in their listing, since no one has that subtype on their home plane or one of the Transitive Planes), it’s fairly obvious that you can have creatures that are traditionally the denizens of one plane living on another; it’s why the various summon monster spells are populated with terrestrial animals that nevertheless live on the celestial or fiendish planes.
By that same token, it’s not much of a stretch to say that there are fey who’ve “gone native” with regard to the Material Plane, and consider (for the purposes of spells and effects) it to be their home plane now.
But this presents a mild inconsistency in that something like a celestial tiger or a fiendish gorilla has a template to indicate its otherworldly origin, allowing the rules to reflect that their not quite the same as their terrestrial counterparts. Shouldn’t fey who live on the Material Plane, rather than the Faerie Plane/First World/Feywild have something like that?
Which brings us to Grundylow Games’ Race Pack Two: Visitors.
In this product, a new subtype is presented: Indigenous, meant specifically for those fey who’re denizens of the mortal world.
The full text of the subtype can be seen in the product’s preview, but to summarize, a fey with that subtype is vulnerable to spells and effects that target humanoids (e.g. charm person), but cannot take feats, traits, or other options whose prerequisites include being of the Humanoid type.
Personally, having all fey have either the Indigenous or Extraplanar subtype (depending on whether their home plane is the Material Plane or the Fey Plane, respectively) strikes me as a fairly easy way to square the circle of where the fey come from, without removing any existing options. If anything, it allows for even more options than before, since Extraplanar fey can be overcome with a successful banishment or dismissal spell, while Indigenous fey can be hit with hold person or dominate person, all while fey-specific options such as charm fey and hold fey work on either.
The one issue under this rule is that a GM will need to figure out if a particular fey is Indigenous or Extraplanar. This includes monsters with the Fey Creature template (whereas those with the First World Creature template, however, will always be Extraplanar). But given that this would only matter in a few specific instances, that can probably be decided on the fly.
Overall, Grundylow Games came up with an elegant way of letting the d20 System rules differentiate between those fey which come from their own alien realm, and those which live alongside mortals.
Which one your PCs meet in their next campaign is up to you.
Intelligence Check 