V. The Customs of the Courts – Foundry Campaign Compendium

Obligations, Duels, and the Wyld Hunt

The structure described in the preceding sections is cosmological and political. This section is practical: the specific customs and obligations that govern behavior within the Seasonal Courts and Revels, carried in oral tradition rather than written in any single document.

These customs are not the same as the customs described in the Old Ways. The Old Ways are a mortal tradition, accumulated wisdom about how to navigate Fey dealings from the outside. What follows is the internal grammar of Fey court society, the customs that govern how Fey relate to one another within the structure they have built.

The Trial by Three

When a court Fey is contracted to act against another party, the obligation is not open-ended. The convention of the Trial by Three governs how such contracts are discharged: the contracted Fey must make three genuine attempts, each constituting a recognized trial, and the completion of all three exhausts the obligation entirely. After three trials the contract is met, regardless of outcome. The contracted Fey is free.

The three recognized trial types are Trial by Arms, Trial by Wits, and Trial by Spirit. The convention does not require that all three be of the same type, nor does it require any particular order. What it requires is three: three genuine engagements with the target that the structure of Fey contract law recognizes as legitimate trials.

The critical word is genuine. The convention requires real attempts, not performances. A Fey who goes through the motions of three trials without genuine effort has not met the convention’s requirements, and the contract remains binding. What constitutes genuine effort is subject to interpretation, and the interpretation is ultimately the contracted Fey’s own, which is one of the reasons the convention has enough flexibility to be navigated by a Fey who is looking for a way out while remaining within the letter of their obligation.

The convention applies to court Fey: those who belong to a Seasonal Court or a Revel that operates within the court structure. Fey who stand entirely outside the structure, who hold their Crown alignment but answer to no court authority, may dispute whether the convention binds them. Whether it actually does is a matter that Fey legal tradition has not resolved cleanly, and the dispute itself becomes a negotiating position in the specific situations where it arises.

What the Trial by Three illustrates about Fey contract law generally: the obligation specifies what must be done, not what must be achieved. A contract that requires three trials requires three trials. It does not require three victories, three defeats of the target, or any particular outcome from the trials. Outcome and obligation are different categories, and conflating them is an error that benefits the contracted Fey and not the party who wrote the contract. If you want an outcome, specify the outcome. If you specify an effort, three efforts exhaust it.

The Duel

A duel issued between Fey within the court structure must take place within one week of the issuing. The duel is to the death. No substitution, no proxy, no postponement beyond the week’s grace. These are not rules the courts enforce through external authority: they are the accumulated weight of what an unanswered duel means within the specific social architecture of Fey politics. A Fey who issues a duel and allows it to expire without resolution has made a statement about their own commitment to the structure they claim to inhabit. The consequences are social rather than legal, but in a society as long-memoried as the Fey courts, social consequences outlast any legal ones.

The single exception: the week’s deadline does not apply when the ruler of the relevant court has decreed otherwise. This exception is narrow and rarely invoked, because invoking it is itself a political act that other courts and Revels attend to carefully.

The duel as an institution reflects something fundamental about how Fey society manages the tension between its chaotic nature and the structures built to channel that nature. Formal violence with agreed rules is an accommodation between the Fey impulse toward immediate, total expression and the court requirement that conflicts be resolved rather than merely escalated. It is chaos given a container.

The Knight and the Call

Within the Seasonal Courts, certain Fey hold the status of Court Knight: a formal acknowledgment of both power and obligation. The Knight’s primary obligation is this: they must always answer their ruler’s call. Failure to answer is not merely disobedience. It grants the ruler the authority to punish the Knight by any means the ruler judges appropriate, without the protections that would otherwise apply to a court member in good standing.

The weight of this obligation is not incidental. A ruler who cannot call their Knights cannot coordinate the Court in moments of genuine need, and the Courts have survived for as long as they have in part because their core obligations are simple, clear, and consistently enforced. The Knight system is the court’s mechanism for maintaining reliable capacity in a society whose fundamental nature is unreliable.

Revels do not have Knights in the formal sense, but long-lived Revels develop analogous structures: inner circle members whose obligations to the Revel’s leaders function similarly, though without the formal title or the ruler’s formal right of punishment.

Children of the Court

Any child born of a Court ruler, whether the Seasonal Court’s monarch, a Queen of an established Revel, or a Knight of significant standing, is considered a child of the court. This carries both rights and responsibilities that attach at birth and do not require the child’s consent or acknowledgment to be operative.

The rights are real: a court child carries the full standing of the court into every interaction, is owed the courtesies owed to the court itself, and is protected by the court’s network of obligations. The responsibilities are equally real: the court’s conflicts are the child’s conflicts, the court’s debts are the child’s debts, and the child’s actions reflect on the court whether the child intends this or not.

This is one of the mechanisms by which the Seasonal Courts have maintained continuity across the millennia despite the chaos of their nature: the obligations of court membership pass through bloodlines in ways that other social obligations do not, binding the next generation to the structure before the next generation has developed opinions about whether to be bound.

Succession

When a court ruler dies or is lost beyond reach, the succession is not the subject of extended debate. The Queen’s position passes immediately to the Court Lady who stands next in the court’s hierarchy. This transition is expected to be executed without delay, because the interval between rulers is the interval during which the court is most vulnerable to internal fracture and external pressure.

The Courts have learned this the hard way, across enough succession crises to have made the lesson part of their operational fabric. A court without a ruler is a Revel: mutable, dissoluble, no longer entitled to the permanence the Seasonal Courts claim. The speed of succession is the thing that preserves the court’s status as a court rather than a Revel waiting to dissolve.

The Wyld Hunt

Fey of the Wyld Crown who hold no membership in any Seasonal Court and belong to no Revel do not answer to the court structure at any level. They answer to the Wyld Hunt: the oldest organizing force in Fey society, predating the Seasonal Courts and existing independently of their politics.

The Wyld Hunt is not a court. It is not a Revel. It is an expression of the Wyld Crown’s nature as the raw principle of Fey existence before it has organized into anything: the chase, the wildness, the thing that runs and the thing that runs after it, distilled into a recurring event that the Wyld Fey participate in as an expression of what they are rather than as a political obligation.

Those who have not encountered the Wyld Hunt and are informed that it exists tend to ask what it hunts. This question reveals a mortal assumption about purpose that the Hunt does not share. The Hunt is not organized around a quarry. It is organized around the act of hunting: the pure expression of the Wyld Crown’s nature as something that pursues rather than waits, that moves rather than holds, that is constituted from desire in motion rather than desire fulfilled. What happens to be in front of it on any given occasion is, from the Hunt’s perspective, incidental.

Mortals who encounter the Wyld Hunt in progress are advised to consider carefully whether they wish to be in front of it.

The customs documented in this section are carried in the oral tradition of those who have had sufficient contact with the Fey court structure to observe their internal workings. They are not complete. What is complete is the underlying principle from which all of them derive: the Fey built a structure from chaos, and the structure requires maintenance that the chaos itself will not naturally provide. The customs are the maintenance.

The structure described in these pages is the most comprehensive account currently available of how Fey society organizes itself. It is not complete. The Fey are chaos, and chaos does not organize itself into any framework so thoroughly that exceptions cannot be found. What is documented here is the rule. What exists at the edges of the rule is, by definition, harder to document, and harder to prepare for.