The southwest corner of archais is completely undeveloped, and effectively unexplored. I've been casting about for something to put there for quite some time, but didn't have anything I really felt fit the bill until recently. This document attempts to outline the story and history behind the area and its late discovery.

The foreign cartographer says:

I currently view the quest progression to gain access to the area as follows:

• Player talks to cartographer, who tells him the background part of the story. (The background story is above. It's pretty long though, so it may not be suitable as direct quest text.)
  
  
• Cartographer has player do various quests to build up resistance to the ward magic. I've only got one idea for this right now, and we'll have to do a bit of iact/dproc stuff in an instance to make it work. Unfortunately, we've intentionally kept a large space between the fairy land wards and the rest of the island, so we can't really reuse areas that are nearby.
  
  
  • Follow/guard quest - player is to follow the cartographer to a specific location and protect him while they camp there. On the way there, the player occasionally finds themselves wandering away, and they have to scan/backtrack to find the cartographer and meet back up with him.
    
    When camping, they set up some cooking gear and build a small fire, with the player constantly having this urge to wander and random sends to recall out of boredom. They get attacked by a ghostly phantasm, because why not.
    
    After eating, the cartographer says something along the lines of "now that we've been here for a while, are you able to see that pillar of stones over there?". Player looks, sees nothing. Cartographer asks again, "Are you sure? It's just right over there. A bunch of squarish cut stones stacked into a pillar about as tall as you are?" Cartographer loads an object for it. This time when the player looks, they can barely see it.
    
    The cartographer says, "I'm going to walk over there near that pillar of white stones. Watch closely to make sure I don't get attacked." The cartographer points and you think you see something white, but you get bored and look back to the dancing flames.
    
    The cartographer says, "Well, that didn't work. Damn wards." The cartographer grabs you by the sleeve and practically drags you away from the fire. Your vision swims, then is suddenly clear! You see before you a pillar of white stone, with your hand firmly placed on one of them. The cartographer is still holding you by the sleeve and looking at you hopefully.
    
  
  
• Player (and cartographer?) eventually determine that the best option is to try to approach from the sea, via boat. The player and cartographer set sail in a prefab quest boat instance from seaside. (Note that the player can technically sail there in a player boat as well, which will make the quest resolution look weird, but probably won't break anything.)
  
  
• For the prefab boat, the cartographer would "send the player on ahead", then the instance would load a copy of the cartographer onto the boat after the player boards. The boat would then set sail to the southern part of the island similarly to Gandor's boat wreck near Naphtali.
  
  
• While sailing there, the player may have to interact with the captain via iacts to convince him to go to the right place or continue. Could be an interesting minigame.
  
  
• Eventually the player/boat finds a single spot on the southwest edge of Archais where they can make landfall. The land on an enclosed beach surrounded by tall, impassible cliffs. On the beach is a hideous black stone statue holding out a tentacle-hand-appendage thing as though in a handshake.
  
  
• If the player is strong enough of will, they will be able to shake the hand of the statue, which adds the player to the ward spell protecting Fairy Land. When that happens, the player realizes that the statue is really a white marble statue of a beautiful lady, and that the wards had obscured it and were protecting it too. The player is also given knowledge of where the secret entrance to Fairy Land is. The secret entrance is inland, near Vikings.
  
  
• Player sets sail again or recalls, and eventually finds their way to the secret entrance, gaining access to the areas in Fairy Land.
  
  
• Once the player has touched the statue and been added to the wards, they can come and go from Fairy Land as they see fit. For players who do not have the entry quest, they can be summoned or group summoned behind the wards, but cannot walk there themselves.
  
  

For convenience, I'm going to call our fairy zones Fairy Land for now.

• Fairy Land will be on the island of Archais, in the south-west corner.
  
  
• Fairy Land is big. We should be able to put at least four zones in it. Estimated area levels are between level 22 and 24.
  
  
• Fairy Land is big. It takes up pretty much all of the unexplored space south of Seaside and Gad's Landing, and all of the unexplored space west of the Viking village raid.
  
  
• Rack 65000 is used for the outer wall layout, and provides a rough boundary of Fairy Land in general. Most of the inner areas will be within that layout.
  
  
• The reason that nobody has heard of Fairy Land is because of the magical wards protecting it. People trying to explore it get bored and turn around, people trying real hard to find it end up back where they started, people forget to ask about it, people find it unexplainably uninteresting.
  
  
• The cartographer in the story above will be the key to entering Fairy Land. He will tell the player about it, and through a series of quests, the player will be granted access to Fairy Land and will be given the ability to get through the wards.
  
  

• The statue was intended to allow outside emissaries and those in the know to get access to Fairy Land, but since Fairy Land doesn't traditionally get many visitors, they didn't feel the need to make it easy to get to.
  
  
• The wards themselves only form a mental barrier outside of the wards, and don't affect people who have been keyed in or accepted by the ward system.
  
  
• The wards form a physical barrier in addition to the mental one, preventing most ordinary creatures from entering or leaving by other than the dedicated entrances and exits.
  
  
• The wards are blood wards, and are composed of mile upon mile of knee-high stone wall and bone. They are very, very old, and are protected by the ward itself.
  
  
• I'll probably have to add new code for handling the entrance to Fairy Land. We'll need a quest hook that prevents players from finding a given room unless they have a particular quest, and I don't think that can be easily done at the moment.
  
  

Past History

In the olden days, fairy land used to be a self-imposed werewolf preserve, and the stone markers marked the edges of werewolf territory. Recognizing population and other pressures, more markers were added and gradually an explicit fence of the white stone became the dividing line.

Originally, werewolf blood was used to mark the fence, primarily to signify ownership and strengthen the magical bond between the wolves and their land.

At a later date, war broke out among various creatures on the island, and the werewolf preserve became a contested area. Faced with extinction, they allied with a Fae tribe, and allowed the tribe to set up inside the preserve. In exchange, the boundary wall would be strengthened and made a proper magical ward, and the wolves and Fae would work together in common defense. The Fae were to only use a small portion of the land, while the rest would remain for the wide-ranging wolves.

For many years this truce held, but over time the Fae grew in number while the werewolf population remained essentially constant. Further, the ward wall began to shift allegiance to the Fae, forcing the wolves to effectively become subservient to the Fae on what was now Fae land.

Gradually, the Fae began to allow other groups into their land, ostensibly because it's not fun to rule when there's noone to rule over.

The Fae also began putting significant effort into strengthening the wards on the wall, both to prevent interference from the outside as well as to prevent residents from easily leaving. By the time of Gad's Landing, the wards had already reached their present strength. There have also been no new groups added to the Fae lands since that time.

Present Day

This implies that there's one central Fae court which holds pretty much all the power, and the surrounding communities owe fealty to the main court. The werewolves are still allowed to police the free lands, but are strictly controlled and not real happy with the situation (especially since they know that this was once their ancestral land.)

For this to work, the central Fae have to be -really- powerful. Perhaps three primaries, as in dresden files - mother, queen, and lady. Each of these would be considered fame, with a level spread along the lines of 31 for the lady, 41 for the queen, and 51 (!!) for the mother.

Killing the lady would just cause a successor to move up in rank, while killing the queen would promote the lady and cause a successor to move into the lady position. Promotions are fairly common, as it's uncommon to have a lady last more than a couple of decades. Queens traditionally have a lifespan of a couple of centuries. There's not been a change of mother in millenia.

The mother is the true stability of the land, and while she acts very infrequently, it's usually only as a stabilizing influence. The queen still occasionally gets involved in court drama (which is usually how the lady gets promoted to queen), but largely handles maintenance and stability of the realm. Lady is by far the most heavily contested position, and much court drama circles around her.

The primary thing that the Fae demand of their subjects is entertainment, with a secondary concern being military and administrative usefulness to maintain the territory and take care of incidental issues.

Entertainment is very subjective, and in this case is focused largely on politics - spats, drama, backstabbing, rise and fall of political coalitions and power players. Many of the main Fae quests could be fomenting dissent and throwing wrenches into the well kept plans of other groups in the area. This would definitely not win the player any favors from those groups, and could give pretty substantial scope for conflict and aggro mobs.

• 65000 - This is the current outer ward wall rack
  
  
• 38900 - Unk's compressed island/crater lake
  
  
• 67200 - Solen's Cliff Elf town/city overlooking the ocean
  NOTE - room 67200's long desc has a LOT of info in it.
  
  
• 13200 - Leprechauns
  
  

• HW style valley of fairies with a lake, good fairies in day time and bad at night?
  
  
• A small, concentrated werewolf colony somewhere, with lots of free-ranging wolves.