D&D 5E Prepping for The Wild Beyond the Witchlight -- The Witchlight Carnival

Umbran said:

Being caught cheating should have a significant negative impact on the mood.

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In general, I agree with this. However, I don't want to rule out a player coming up with some method of cheating one of the attractions in a way that's entertaining to the other attendees. In that case, it should improve the mood. I mean, people are there to be entertained and let go of stress.

RealAlHazred said:

In general, I agree with this. However, I don't want to rule out a player coming up with some method of cheating one of the attractions in a way that's entertaining to the other attendees. In that case, it should improve the mood. I mean, people are there to be entertained and let go of stress.

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Being entertaining kind of requires blatancy about it - your way of winning isn't entertaining if nobody knows it happened, right? At that point they aren't so much playing the games, as just goofing around in the Carnival, which is acceptable.

Umbran said:

Being entertaining kind of requires blatancy about it - your way of winning isn't entertaining if nobody knows it happened, right? At that point they aren't so much playing the games, as just goofing around in the Carnival, which is acceptable.

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Fair. I was specifically thinking of the "Outstare the Cyclops" attraction. I'm thinking of replacing the illusion of the cyclops with a real young fomorian, and then also having the "cyclops" have, like, hayfever or something, and the PCs can find out about it. If someone wants to outstare the "cyclops" while they're, just, completely covered in garish wildflowers, that would probably be extremely entertaining to the crowd (especially if it's the fighter or barbarian, say) while simultaneously skirting the edge of "cheating."

But that's me getting ahead of myself, I've had players come up with wildly fantastic suggestions that never occurred to me. It's one of the reasons I enjoyed running the "kids' table" -- they weren't constrained by "what has gone before."

Witchlight Carnival Expanded
Okay, this one is really good. It also provides an addition 12 Lost Things, so that you can roll a d20 and have more options. Several of the associated items are Uncommon, which is more appropriate and useful at the tier characters are likely to start finding them. It's a good list.

It also expands on the Big Top Extravaganza, turning it into an interactive event for the PCs.

The supplement includes good expansions on several of the attractions:

• Bubble-Pop Teapot (providing a competitive "bumper bubbles" minigame)
• Carousel (giving ways the Hourglass Coven Thieves can sabotage the unicorn puzzle, to prevent the players getting any information)
• Dragonfly Rides (giving a "ride the dragonflies through rings" minigame)
• Gondola Swans (giving it a "tunnel of love" mechanic)
• Small Stalls (all the ones in the core adventure get some expansion and suggestions for cheats. There are also two more small stalls --)
  • Face Painting (with eight designs and their minor magical effects)
  • Tinimand’s Temporary Tattoos (with eight designs -- with illustrations! -- and their minor magical effects)

And adds three new attractions. Each is given a spot to put it on the main map.

• Fortune Teller (providing an interesting NPC, and giving some ways to use her)
• Thunderdome ("fight" waves of very easy monsters and dodge mostly-harmless thunderwaves)
• Tower Tumble (a group vs. group "capture the flag" type minigame)

Speaking of maps, the supplement comes with battlemaps for all the locations with a competitive element. There is also a new background, "Party Crasher," with a way to tie it into the "Lost Things" hook mid-session, and a lot of expansion on the Witchlight Hand background from the main book; it provides a handout with information for the PC containing things they would know about the Carnival.

There's an expanded list of Carnival Prizes, bringing the total to 12. There are 12 scenes you can sprinkle throughout the Carnival.
It also provides a list of events to indicate the raising or lowering of the Mood.

Finally, there are listings of all the magic items described, and stat blocks for: Lion, Young Elephant, Elephant, Carnival Monkey, Flumph, Gazer, and Scary Clown.

This is $4.95 for 21 pages of content. It's well worth that in my opinion, and is so far the best supplement for this that I've come across. Highly recommended.

I'm using it as inspiration. I turned it into the carnival of souls. Blended it with rakdos guild ravnica.

Attractions are more noc based and they had to collect circus points.
. They were having fun but inadvertently ramping up the festivities.

The goal is survive the night.

Zardnaar said:

The goal is survive the night.

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That would probably be more appropriate with Isolde's Carnival. Check out the 2E Ravenloft supplement Carnival for more of those sorts of ideas.

I should mention my conception of the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

The way it gets put on there, the Feywild is just the reason of Faerie and the Shadowfell the realm of Shadows. Much like the Elemental planes are the real of Element(al)s.

I liked 2E's Planescape. I see it like this: when purple create stories on the Prime Material Planes, that reverberates. Particularly good stories get retold, and the reverberations pick up power, and the Feywild is where that every takes a form. The Feywild is the realm of Wild Expression. The reverberations take on a form based on the story; of enough people tell a story about an "ancient witch," when she forms in the Feywild, she is already ancient, with a history, based on the stories.

By contrast, I see the Shadowfell as the realm of Banality. As things lose their spark of imagination, they lose "color," both metaphorically and, to an extent, physically. Eventually, they "fall" into the Shadowfell, where the lifeforms that remain become desperate to consume the spark of life and energy to stay alive -- that's why there are so many undead and similar creatures there, they're desperate to drain the energy from whatever they can reach.

Ai, in my cosmology, they're practically opposites.

Part of the reason I'm mentioning this, is one of the alternate magic items for one of the Lost Things is a bag of holding, and I'm considering putting in the Bagman. I really like the Bagman concept, and if it's an urban legend that got told around a lot of Primes, then it will exist somewhere in my Feywild. I'm considering it because, in a regular game, the Bagman seems a little unfair -- it's really hard to defend against him. But if the bag of holding was made by a hag using a character's Thriftiness, I'd think that character'd have a "sixth sense" to such shenanigans, and it might make it more fair. In any case, it might also increase the creepiness factor...

The Witchlight Carnival - Erdan's Homebrew
This is a little PDF with 7 pages of content for the first chapter of WBW. It contains one DM's modifications to the chapter for his campaign, taking place in Daggerford in the Forgotten Realms.

The first page has a d8 table of new Carnival Prizes (one of which is a Fey Trinket, repeating the corebook table). Then there's a d8 table of "Local Trinkets" which is nice.

There's a lot of box text to establish the Carnival in Faerun. Then there's a couple of new small attractions: Tabaxi Trivia, and Out-play the Fiddler. They're given extremely basic descriptions and a single-roll resolution. I like the idea of "Out-play the Fiddler;" it uses a "Faerie Fiddler" stat block, but I would use a Grig, from Monster Manual 2 (1983) because I'm a grognard. Then there's 3 one-line descriptions of exclusive Big-Top acts for the Big-Top Extravaganza timed event. Once again, I shake my head a little at the lost opportunities in the core book for coming up with more for player characters to do at the Extravaganza.

There are a few new common magic items: the Potion of Delicacies and the Necklace of the Three-Leaf Clover. New common items are always fun. These are the prizes for the new events.

Finally, there are two new stat blocks. One for the aforementioned Faerie Fiddler, and then a repeat of the Witchlight Hand.

I mean, this is basically one DM's notes for what they did different in their Chapter 1. As such, it's not really a "product." It's PWYW on the DM's Guild. I'll probably be using the new Out-play the Fiddler event idea, with a great deal of expansion and some changes, so I'll absolutely can get more than my money's worth!

The Witchlight Beer Festival
This is another little PDF with 7 pages of content for the first chapter of WBW. It's supposed to be another location you can add into the Carnival, but it's weird. Like, I'm not a professional writer of RPG material, so maybe I shouldn't talk. But I buy a lot of RPG material, so I feel like I have the right to. This one costs $0, so at I can't say I didn't get my money's worth.

The supplement begins with the author talking about how you can integrate this seamlessly into "your Witchlight campaign or any other campaign by tailoring it to your specific needs." Then, he doesn't really go on about tailoring the material at all. The second paragraph copies the first paragraph word-for-word for a bit, then deviates. The author mentions he "incorporate[d] the festival... [by] placing it within the “Mystery Mine,” an attraction at the Witchlight Carnival designed for 1st level characters." Apparently, the DM wasn't happy with the Mystery Mine content, so his PCs just, one by one, vanished from the minecart and found themselves in the Beer Festival.

The whole thing is written in this weird way. I'm tempted to think it was created by AI. I could also see it created by someone for whom English is a second (or later) language. So, I try to be generous and assume the latter.

The backstory is weird. The Beer Festival is run by a family, who escaped from Sigil just ahead of a Mercykiller hit squad, which they ditched in the Witchlight Carnival, which they reached with the help of somebody named Zenish; "Zenish had a longstanding positive relationship with the Witchlight Carnival, evidenced by his magical Witchlight hand tattoo shimmering with a pixie-dust-like aura." Zenish, the Mercykillers, and, in fact, the rest of Planescape never get mentioned again.

The family that run the Beer Festival are not really fully fleshed out. One of the brothers has a unicorn head and three pixie fangirls who follow him around; it's not explained. There are 15 locations in it. The supplement helpfully comes with a map which looks like it came from Random Forgotten Realms Town #23, but there are at least both DM and PC versions, though I'm not sure why, since it's not really a dungeon -- this is a festival, people can go freely from point A to point B. I would have made just one map, and labeled the locations with actual names instead of numbers.

The locations given include a Brewery (of course), Lamilda’s Masks (which, confusingly, sells art mostly -- the masks are supposed to be a sideline), a Farmer’s Market, the Main Bar, Fish n’ Grapes (which sells fresh trout, bushels of grapes, and their homemade "Secret Stash" wine only), a Feywild Hookah Lounge, the Main Stage, and a Picnic Area. Many of these locations have NPCs briefly mentioned, either one of the family members or somebody else involved in the activity there. Most of the locations have one of the 7 brothers of the family running the event, each of which has his own homebrew beer that the PCs are supposed to be trying.

Oh, right, this is billed as an "adventure." There's absolutely no stakes in any of these locations besides the most basic ones (ooh, somebody's unconscious from drinking too much beer, make a DC 10 Medicine check to wake them; they are given a name and nothing else, so I'm not sure why you'd bother). The last bit is the "Dragon Encounter": "When the time is right for the epic finale", the DM is supposed to use whatever fears the party revealed before the ride, and they suddenly all show up, accompanied by a dragon (also illusory). When they are defeated, a unicorn emerges from a magical fog with a trophy dangling from its horn; it is then suddenly assaulted by a group of goblins equal in number to the PCs, who try to saw off its horn. When they are defeated by the PCs (no options given for what if the PCs don't fight them), then the best beer is judged.

Then the PCs find themselves back in the minecart, coming out of the Mystery Mine ride.

It's... certainly not how I would have incorporated a beer festival into the Witchlight Carnival. It introduces almost 20 new NPCs, none of which are really fleshed out to any extent. The locations don't even have as much detail as the side attractions of the carnival; instead many of them just sell items for money. I suppose, since there's not a lot of places to spend money elsewhere in the module, that's... okay? I don't know, it's super weird. But, like I said, it's free.