Nymphs, sometimes generically described as fey spirits, were a kind of fey magical awareness in the feywild. They were known for their playfulness, magical affinity, and often extreme or morbid sense of comedy.

Manifestation and Creation

Nymphs were, at the core, an immaterial consciousness native to the Weave's feywild fugue. How they developed consciousness is not known, but nymph-spirits in this form were not capable of interacting with the world outside the Weave without outside intervention. Spellcasters with the ability to see the Weave described nymph-sprits as

Substantiation

In a process known as Substantiation, nymph-spirits could take a physical body and become proper individual beings in the physical world.

For Substantiation to work successfully, a willing corporeal form had to open itself willingly to become a host. If there was a nymph nearby, it could enter the host body. Any mortal spirit in the body would be removed and the nymph would take over, forming a nymph-instantiation. The nymph-spirit retained the same memories and personality across all its instantiations, and could live for as long as it wished in its host bodies - some nymphs were known to be millennia old. However, once a nymph-spirit left its instantiation, the body died permanently and could not be reused; a nymph could not jump several times between the same hosts. The original soul also did not naturally return to its vacated body.

In order to properly offer itself for Substantiation, an individual had to possess some measure of sentience. Though some beasts were known to be nymph-instantiations, these were all endowed previously with a measure of self-awareness. Accordingly, the vast majority of instantiations were of humanoid form, typically elven or faeling, and other organisms were relatively rare.

Though nymph-instantiations were inherently still the same organic life form as they had been before the Substantiation, the nymphs' strong magic and special connection to the feywild fugue changed their instantiated bodies somewhat. Nymph-instantiations were often described as less substantial, almost ephemeral; many instantiations gave off a light, colored glow. Sometimes, facial traits and the like grew softer, more rounded; and fey characteristics such as pointed ears grew even more apparent.

Elven Substantiation-Rituals

The process of Substantiation was quite popular among the elven feywild population. When elves turned old and drim-ur approached, most decided to ascend; however, certain individuals with a close connection to the feywild and its spirits instead decided to offer themselves for Substantiation, and allow their bodies to continue living on as an extension of the feywild's soul.

In some cases, when elves still far from drim-ur decided they should not remain among the living - perhaps because of crimes, failures, or great tragedies - Substantiation was used as a respectable and painless form of suicide.

Personality

Nymph-instantiations retained no personality of their host's late soul; instead, they were a pure manifestation of the nymph-spirit inside. In general, nymphs were very playful - even more than the average fey - to the extent of being dangerous to mortal beings. Their instantiations were virtually immortal and immune to pain, and they were generally careless of causing pain to others, as long as it happened in a "funny" way. Some tricks played by nymphs included brutal deaths.