Advantage on Arcana

Making It Fey, Making It Wild

Karl_Wilhelm_Diefenbach_-_The_fairy_dance Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, The Fairy Dance, 1895

For better or worse, my main 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign tends to shy away from overly fantastic setting details. Of course it is kitchen-sink fantasy using staples from the franchise: dragons and drow, snake cults and aboleths, half-elves and half-orcs, ogres and ettins, and so on. There's a teleportation circle is most cities and, in retrospect, frankly too many magic shops. But I still skew to a certain groundedness that may not be to everyone's tastes, even if it is to mine. Now, though, my players are adventuring in the Feywild, and I didn't want the Feywild to feel like just any other place. I wanted it to feel, well, fey, and a little bit wild. Unfortunately, I don't think 5th edition provides quite enough guidance on that front, especially as The Wild Beyond the Witchlight focuses so much on a particular Domain of Delight and not on the Feywild in general. Besides, I've only skimmed the book. Looking at what I needed and wanted, and looking at what I had available, I realized I was going to need to get to work on homebrew.

This month KJ Davies is hosting the RPG Blog Carnival at their blog In My Campaign, with the topic "Other Worlds."1 This seems like a perfect opportunity for me to share some of the specific details I'm using to give D&D's version of Fairyland a distinct atmosphere, to really make it feel like another world. The downside, though, is that this post is perhaps a bit premature: we have only just begun exploring the Feywild, and I can't yet claim that these ideas have all been fully tested at the table. Maybe a follow-up post will be in order in a few months' time.

I don't think much of what I have here is all that original, either in the initial concept or its execution. This particular combination of elements is probably unique, though, and even if it isn't, I think it might still be worth recording in case any of you reading this find something in it that's new to you.

1. Paths and Landmarks

Did I get this detail from The Wild Beyond the Witchlight? Did I half-remember something and recreate it imperfectly? I don't remember, though I'm bringing up the possibility in case I did. At any rate, in the Feywild as I'm running it, roads won't always take you where you hope to go, even if the road passes by it. You have to bargain with the road if you plan to walk it successfully. Toll-keepers will negotiate on your behalf; the difference between toll-keepers and highway robbers isn't only a matter of style, but it's not much more than that, either. Different roads have different temperaments and motivations. The same is true of rivers, though their trickery and misdirection can be more direct: they might start to flow backwards if you don't satisfy them or if you renege on your agreement. In either case, neither roads nor rivers talk under ordinary circumstances, so if you've made an offer to the path, you just have to hope that it's accepted. (That's why the fey tolerate reliable toll-keepers, even when they are little more than extortionists: it's so much easier to pay someone who has an arrangement with the road than it is to guess what the road wants.)

On top of all that, nothing stays in the same place in the Feywild. Landmarks are always wriggling around. If you travel from the Court of a Thousand Boughs to Knotburrow Market, you might pass the Tree of Apple Pearls, a grove of hazel trees, the Ormer Tower, and a brigganock mine, in that order; if you travel from the Court to the Market again a few days later, you might not pass all four landmarks the second time, and you certainly won't pass them in that order. This time, though, you might also pass the Cast-Off House. And that's not just a function of the path's odd sense of humour. Even the same route off-road will turn up different results.

In practice, this will be a variant on a hexcrawl, where I roll on a table to discover what landmark each hex contains. (Each hex will have a stable biome, however, and I have different tables for each biome; for transitional hexes, I'll roll first to determine which table I'll use.) Each hex keeps the landmark I roll for it until the party spends one night or more in a fairy court, at which point I will empty all the hexes and roll again as the party re-enters them. If the party is travelling along a road or river that isn't pleased with them, they won't always move on to the next hex, but might start travelling backwards along it or down an incorrect sideroad or tributary.

2. Promises and Speech

Before travelling to the Feywild, the party did some research about it, visiting a library and talking with some other royal adventurers. Those colleagues gave them advice like the following:

Is this something else I stole from The Wild Beyond the Witchlight? Or was it from a Reddit thread? I don't recall, though I do have the idea of the Feywild as a promise-keeping place lodged in my head pretty firmly, and it seems appropriate for my purposes here. It makes the Feywild feel like a magical place rather than just a place with magical things in it.

To emphasize this feature of the Feywild, I narrated a well-dressed goblin approaching the Feywild as soon as the party arrived, saying, "Excuse me, may I please have your attention for just a moment?" When one of the party answered, "Yes, of course," the goblin said, "Thank-you. I will collect that at a convenient opportunity," and ran as quickly as he could into the forest.

Now the PCs are very careful with their speech.

I have no single mechanic to handle this aspect of the Feywild, but I can use a variety of tools if needed. First, spells like geas are supercharged in the Feywild if the person they are cast on verbally agreed to receive the spell: a willing target of geas takes damage every round that they don't comply with its instructions, instead of every day. Second, I'll selectively impose advantage or disadvantage on rolls to enforce or avoid something a character has promised. Third, I'll use GM fiat, as appropriate, to make the PCs keep their word, but only when it seems within the realm of reason and there's no other way to do it. Although I'm hesitant to take away player agency, it seems reasonable enough here: if a PC in the Feywild says to an NPC, "I will never stop hating you," I think it's fair for me to insist that, in fact, they will never stop hating that NPC, at least not so long as they stay in the Feywild, even if the player feels the character ordinarily would. After all, it was the player's choice to say such a thing in the Feywild, knowing what they know about promises made there.

3. Archfey

If the Feywild is undersupported in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, then archfey are more or less unsupported as a concept, as far as I can tell. I still do not really know how Wizards of the Coast means for us to run them, so I came up with rules and fiction for them myself.

I based the fiction, in part, on White Wolf's Changeling the Lost. In Changeling the True Fae, also known as the Gentry, hold Titles and to some extent are the Titles they hold. I decided something similar would be true of archfey in the Feywild: what makes a fey an archfey is that they have a Title. However, unlike the True Fae, they can only hold one Title, and their Title is not the only way they can interact with the world. Each Title is also the bones of a story, and any resident of the Feywild that sufficiently conforms to enough of that story's details will suddenly gain the Title, provided no one else is holding it already. No one confers the Title upon them, except perhaps for the Feywild itself. That Title also invests them with considerable magic, not least of which is that, should they be killed by any means except one dictated by their Title's story, they will just come back within a few hours.

Mechanically, I treat Archfey as a template that I add to a pre-existing NPC stat block. The original NPC can have any challenge rating, though of course an archfey that starts with a higher challenge rating will be a more potent combatant.

Archfey Template
The following characteristics change or are added to a creature that becomes an archfey:

Because an archfey made with this method can be, and most often is, based on a low-CR creature, it can hit very hard but has relatively few hit points. It's also likely to bear one or more rare-to-legendary magic items, making it terribly lopsided. That feels appropriate to me, however, especially as they can be very difficult to permanently kill. Perhaps you can behead that fairy knight in a duel, but don't expect it to go well for you in the long run: she's liable to true polymorph you into a caterpillar the next day.

(Obviously, tactically, if you want to make an archfey antagonist that challenges your players, you should try to ensure those spells use a mix of actions, bonus actions, and reactions, and perhaps a few that can be cast before initiative is rolled, to maximize the number of spells that the archfey can bring to bear in combat. The spell list should contain some high level control or damage-dealing spells, of course, but it should also have some substantial healing or other damage mitigation spells to keep them in the fight despite rather their low hit points. It's also important that the archfey can bring allies into the encounter to take advantage of the action economy. Fortunately, in my case, the players accidentally gave the arc villain the teeth of Dahlver-Nar, so she'd have little trouble getting some allies on the field even if she had less time to plan than she does.)

There's no single version of the story associated with a Title; not only do changes in detail and emphasis naturally occur through transmission, but also the various things subsequent fey did to get a Title become a new iteration of the story, or get subsumed into tellings of older versions. Learning what's involved in a Title isn't just a case of learning one story with a canonical telling: it requires learning many different versions and seeing what they have in common. Storytellers, who remember and understand all these different versions, hold vital information about Feywild geopolitics, and it's important to know which storytellers to trust.

4. Passion

Many sessions ago, the PCs befriended an eladrin warlock named Adrie Amakiir, visiting from the Feywild, and they learned a few things from her as she has dipped in and out of their adventures. For instance, when one of those PCs started expressing romantic interest in Adrie, she confessed that she had also developed feelings for that PC – and for the other two PCs, as well. In the Feywild, she said, it was expected that a person will fall in love with multiple people at a time and seek a relationship with each of them, and it was also just as expected that most people will want romantic exclusivity from all of their partners. This isn't seen as hypocrisy, so long as everyone accepts that everyone else, especially one's own romantic partners, will try to achieve the same thing. The inevitable conflicts this produces are resolved (or sustained) mostly by fighting about it; duels are common, as are various intrigues.

This piece of information has been confirmed, and exaggerated, now that the PCs are visiting the Court of a Thousand Boughs. They happened to arrive during a party which features three duels, one per night over three nights. These duels came about when the Lady of a Thousand Boughs stumbled upon the March Lord of Periwinkle, her husband and the master of the Court, in bed with his retainer the Knight of Sunshowers. Based on her furious exclamations, the March Lord realized the Knight was also sleeping with the Lady and so, still in bed with him, challenged the Knight of Sunshowers to a duel. The Lady promptly challenged the March Lord to a duel and, not to be outdone, the Knight challenged the Lady to a duel. Those are the matches the party have arrived in time to witness, and which many other fey in the region have shown up to watch. Archfey fight to the death, which would among mortals prevent the third duel, but there's no such impediment for the immortal archfey.

Part of the point, here, is that passions run high in the Feywild, and as a matter of principle the fey expect people to act on their passions and appetites. This expectation leads to a somewhat chaotic, destabilizing, conflict-rife society, sharply contrasting with the ways most cultural norms in the Prime Material tend (however imperfectly) toward stability and conflict resolution. The intended effect is to create circumstances that are both amusing and tension-generating: the PCs can never be sure a powerful archfey won't cause them trouble out of a surfeit of feeling. There's a reason those other royal adventurers gave this piece of advice:

5. Etiquette

The Feywild is held in tension between stabilizing and destabilizing forces; I think of it as being Chaotic Lawful (or perhaps Lawful Chaotic). On the chaotic side are its squiggly geography and its residents' passions; on the lawful side are its enforcement of promises and its residents' keen sense of courtesy. The fey, particularly archfey and the members of the fairy courts, have strict rules of etiquette, as reflected in various other pieces of advice given to the party:

I am not, however, terribly interested in coming up with elaborate rules of etiquette and enforcing them at the table, so I'm trying to suggest that any rules beyond the obvious ones above are inscrutable to visitors from the Prime Material. This means that the party will break a hundred small norms without knowing it; they should assume by default that the fey courts will find them uncouth. They'll be reminded of this partly by their own behaviour (they carefully follow that first piece of advice, apologizing for their ill-manners), and partly by all of the concerns about etiquette they do perceive.

There are three hoped-for effects here, besides just conforming with what most players will expect from the Feywild:

  1. to explain how all those frank quarrelling passions don't disintegrate fey society, in that norms of courtesy and chivalry keep the chaos within certain bounds;
  2. to keep the PCs on the back foot a bit, making each social encounter at least a minor challenge with real stakes; and
  3. to create a certain atmosphere, where both passion and restraint are exuberant, opening space for situations that are both amusing and dangerous.

I have not yet decided how to handle this in less aristocratic locales, like Knotburrow Market or the Forgebowers.

6. Fantastic Beauty

Finally, if the Feywild is a place of remarkable excess, it should also be excessive in its beauty, filled with remarkable and fantastic sights.

At time of writing, the party is currently staying at the Court of a Thousand Boughs, a manor built across the canopies of many trees, with trunks and leafy branches clearly visible inside as they make up parts of walls, floors, joints, and so on. What's more, the trees themselves all have a few copper leaves – that is, leaves made of copper – interspersed among the usual ones. Dryads make up much of the court's staff, often travelling throughout the manor by stepping into one tree trunk and out another. And the hall's inhabitants and guests are all strange and beautiful as well: the handsome Knight of Sunshowers is always surrounded by a glittering mist, as though seen through rain on a sunny day, while the Maid of the Murmuring Mire's pretty swamp nymph retainers wear dresses made of reeds, cattails, and lilypads, all still fresh and dripping.

I also mentioned above the Tree of Apple Pearls, which bears apple-shaped fruit with pearlescent skin and flesh, and the wandering Ormer Tower, which is panelled inside and out with abalone. Altogether I am trying to create set pieces and images reminiscent of fairy tales; Arthuriana; Magic the Gathering's Eldraine; paintings and illustrations by artists like Arnold Böcklin, Alexandre Cabanel, Herbert James Draper, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Warwick Goble, Heinrich Kley, Hilda Koe, Arthur Rackham, Henrietta Rae, and John William Waterhouse; and Victorian and early twentieth-century children's literature like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Altogether it is a place where nature and art blend, neither fully separable from the other.

psyche-alexandre-cabanel-1
Alexandre Cabanel, Psyche, 1881

  1. I was tempted to simply say one of October's Lakelands setting posts is my contribution to the carnival, but that didn't seem right: surely I would have to use something like the introductory post or the geography post, and I didn't have anything like that planned this month.↩

#DnD #for GMs #fortunes of ewistar campaign #high fantasy #worldbuilding