How would I run the Feywild? || D&D w/ Dael Kingsmill

Oh. I thought this was going to be like "If I were Queen of the Feywild, boy there'd be some changes over there."

“You raise your sword to attack the fairy. Make an intelligence saving throw.” “Uh, 12.” “You swing your baguette at the fairy & the baguette turns to liquid.” “I try to scoop up the liquid” “Make a charisma saving throw” “20!” “You’re holding the liquid in your hands, a great big chunk of it” “I uh, squash the liquid into a ball” “Make an intelligence check” “17” “The bread decides that it was more fond of being a sword than a ball & is upset at you - you notice the fairy is gone at this point” “I chase after my bread & try & find the fairy” “You find a forest of bread, looking around you unsheathe your fairy, worried about what dangers lurk here”

For me in the feywild everything is the original version where our world feels like the copy of a copy, a fey tree is just more treeish than a material realm tree.

My favourite succinct depiction of Faerie magic comes from Doctor Who, of all places. “Humans do all sorts of things with numbers - you split the atom! Well, [witches] do that with words.”

I also like the twist Terry Pratchett had on the Fae/Elves (on their morality, or lack thereof): Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

When it comes to getting INTO Faerie, or the Feywilds, I am always reminded of a line from PotC: At World's End - "For certain, you have to be lost to find a place that can't be found, elseways everyone would know where it was." I also like the idea that certain geography has a natural connection to the Feywild, and that the two might bleed together. So a party that is lost in a Forest would more likely find Faerie, as opposed to just being lost on the plains. I might even go so far as to include the idea of twilight, since I have always envisioned it as being constant twilight there. It comes from my love of the Courts - Seelie/Unseelie, Summer/Winter, and the constant balance between light, dark, warm, cold, night, day.

That low-key minion cosplay tho

If you had a T-Shirt with "Vague & Evocative" on it, I'd probably buy it. Just saying.

"The nature of Fey is that often what you look at is hard to describe, and the idea is more pervasive than the physical appearance. When a fairy has clothes the color of a mid day storm. How cloudy? How rainy? Lit up by lightning or over the ocean? Snow storm? Blizard? Thunder? These things are answered by the observer because the ideal is more important than the physics of shape light and color, and the constant of its appearance isn’t what it looks like, but what you think when you look at it." My DM describing why Fey are so strange so we stop asking questions about what the color of clouds means

Dael’s book recommendations: - “On Fairy-Stories” by J.R.R. Tolkien - “Surprised by Joy” by C.S. Lewis - “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel” by Susanna Clarke - “Irish Faerie and Folktales” by W. B. Yeats - “The Crystal Cave” “The Hollow Hills,” “the Merlin Trilogy” and others by Mary Stewart - “Faeries” by Brian Froud; Allen Lee

The thing I'm most excited to do in a Feywild campaign is to put the party against a lich inspired by Koschei the Deathless (who is actually one of the oldest, if not the oldest lich in human folklore history). Koschei hid his death in a needle in an egg in a duck in a rabbit in a chest locked away in a box on a remote island. I think it would be so funny/cool to have a fey lich who has hidden their phylactery so tediously and randomly.

"Earthy and alien" seems like an apt description for the Feywild.

I would run that if the players go into Faerie with cold iron the world starts to reject them, they don't see anything as the very light shies away from them, they don't hear anything because the sound avoids them, even the very ground crumbles at their feet because it fears the cold iron.

On the nature of fairies: There was a great reddit post that I have since lost on the morality of fairies. It took the approach of creating an axis (similar to our good/evil x lawful/chaotic axis we use for character creation) and came to the conclusion, based off various stories mentioning fairies, that fairy society would value the natural over the constructed and the spontaneous over the methodical. Essentially it was that a fairy believes it is virtuous to keep with ones place in nature. This doesn't mean that like civilization is evil, but more of a "don't rock the boat" mentality. If you're a beggar or a king, be content with your place in the food chain. And then on the other hand, they would also believe that it is virtuous to be spontaneous. The fairy who seeks to control the future through careful planning is foolish. To do what is dramatic in the moment, what is interesting and fun, is most noble. Sticking to plans that have since become dull is nonsense. Anyway, it was an interesting thought and has definitely influenced how i view Fairy behavior. If i ever find that post again I will link it here.

I love all of this. Personally, I go the exact opposite with cold iron, largely due to my being a massive Dresden Files fanboy: Any old Iron will do. a steel sword, a lump of iron ore, a handful of nails, you name it, if it's ferrous, fey can't abide it (except ones like Annis Hags and Redcaps who explicitly have iron elements in their lore and statblocks, and that just inspires all sorts of fun questions like how they got their iron immunity and how other fey feel about them), and merely the touch of iron is unpleasant to the fey. But, they're preternaturally good at avoiding contact with the stuff. Good luck sneaking up on a faerie to stab it with a steel dagger or hack it to bits with an iron axe. I don't have explicit rules for any of this, I would probably deal with it on a fey-by-fey basis, but off the top of my head, I would suspect contact with iron would screw up what the fey is best at, so a caster might have difficulty concentrating on spells, while a warrior might become frail and clumsy after touching iron. I also think that glamours are interesting. I love the idea that the beauty of Faerie isn't even skin deep. Like, I love in The Sandman when Nuala comes to stay in Dream's realm and he strips her of her glamours and she's just this frail, plain creature. Or in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies when you get hints (or at least, I did the first time I read it; probably due for a reread) that underneath the sophisticated illusions that the Elves wore into Lancre were just primitive warriors dressed in hides killing their victims with stone weapons. I love the idea of Faerie glamours being like illusions, but better. Like, there's a solidity to them, an appeal to all the senses that eludes even the greatest of mortal illusionists while being like child's play to the fey. Ooh! That's a third thing. I think part of what makes the fey so interesting and alien is the reversal of what comes easily versus what is difficult compared to the experience of humans and other mortals. Like, humans need to go to all this work to use magic, whether it's a lifetime of worship in a temple, or of study in a magic school or bardic college, or of servitude to an otherworldly patron (with sorcerers as the exception), but creatures of Faerie are creatures of magic through and through; they cast complicated spells as easily as a mortal makes a sandwich. On the other hand, things like lying or using iron tools are so easy that any mortal can do it without thinking, but would stymie a faerie creature to no end. These are just my favorite examples, but it's a neat shorthand to illustrate their alienness: What's hard for mortals but easy for the fey, and what's easy for mortals but hard for the fey?

I really like the "getting out" part. " - Oh sure, you can go home easy, just dive into this pond. As long you didn't eat anything or said "thank you" to a fairy or bow to anybody here, you'll be perfectly fine. - huuuuuu... about that..." And the classic "I'll take you to a gate. But it's dangerous. And you have to take me with you to the mortal real." With all the troubles that keeping (or breaking) the promise might create. The concept of finding a friendly/dangerous/trickster/oblivious/whatthehellareyou "guide" in the fey land is a classic, always nice.

A thought I had, watching your always excellent videos, was to utilize PCs Behaviors, Ideals, Bonds, and/or Flaws as things that manifest in people/places/things in the Feywild. Do not, as a DM, inform the players of this, but rather introduce it on the sly and wait to see when players start to resonate with these aspects that they themselves chose for their characters, but often get overlooked (such is the nature of the game). Example: Flaw - I'm a sucker for a pretty face. As the players enter the Feywild they continuously encounter (and accrue) fey that are simply infatuated by the PC with this trait. It matters not what this PC's charisma score is, or how attractive they have described themselves, what matters is that this is a manifestation of their reality in a way that is almost like a mirror. Alternatively, the same flaw could manifest as a nymph who consistently appears for everyone but the PC with this flaw, or perhaps only for them, and threatens to lure them away. The ultimate goal of such is to give the players some soul searching to chew on as they see their own aspects reflected as if in fun house mirrors. Warped, but still identifiable, and perhaps not to their liking. The only other thing I wanted to mention was that the endeavor to describe Faerie was highly entertaining and eye-opening. I came to realize that Faerie is the embodiment of that inability to explain Faerie with our limited human terms. It is the feeling, plain and simple. The state of recognizing something as more natural than ourselves and the painful longing to abandon that which is human in us so that we can be a part of it. Like abandoning your day job to live in the woods and build a cabin with nothing but a stone axe. The need to forget language so that you can accurately describe a sunrise, and yet the frustration of having forgot the very means by which you can share it to another. Ultimately, the need to bear witness to nature personally, and not through the limited shared consciousness that language affords us mortals. Thanks, Dael!

sail into a mist, wait untill the food runs out and the players are giving up or going to panic and want to go back. then their boat will hit a shore in the mist with a high white cliffside and a path up it.

As a gameplay mechanic and a bit of fun narratively - what if the creatures in the Feywild are resistant or immune to magic weapons but non-magic weapons do damage to them? Should this happen after 8th level or so it could become a neat challenge