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While appreciate you making an effort to help me figure out "what went wrong" I have a bunch of follow up posts in this thread that, if you had read them (or if you did, absorbed them), invalidates a good chunk of your response. I think maybe you are projecting a little bit based on your own...

What sort of physical skills are you thinking of that had a real impact on play?

Last week we had the Void finally come up and whisk away a PC's soul. The Death also came up but the bard who drew it stomped it in short order.

I would be curious to know what systems do this and how they manage it.

When I had a move a little over a year ago, I gave away a literal pick up truck bed full of RPGs (in legal file boxes) away because I could not justifying moving them. I also gave away a similar amount of comic book trades. (My long box collection was destroyed by water a year before). Now...

They even spent a bunch of time casting Divinations to figure out where they were and whether the Voided soul was also in the faewild (it wasn't). Then they teleported with vague directions and ended up face to face with dragons.

You are asking about the early game and what went wrong. Adding skills was exactly that. That is a different argument than "skills are a bad thing" generally in D&D, but for the game that D&D was when it was created, skills undermined one of the core tenets of play: the players' skill mattered most.

At the very least, I gave them their tuning forks back and then some. Now they can decide what to do.

The problem was the inclusion of skills at all.

The soul is not held in the feywild. It is elsewhere (they have since discerned where via Contct Other Plane). The Void situation is entirely incidental to the Faewild situation, in that it was a random draw of the cards. They went into the cabin knowing it was a bridge to the Faewild, and they...

This, and they admitted as much in follow up chat. But it doesn't necessarily mean that I had not railroaded them into the situation (even if the group of 13th level PCs laden with items and sporting 2 wishes should have been able to do something).

To answer part 2) myself: I don't mind the situation being clear and everyone being "in" for the adventure (I have been a player in a number of WotC 5E adventures, for example). The only time I worry about "railroading" from a player perspective when it is less about a plot that needs to be...

The more I read the responses, the more I think I definitely crossed the "railroad" line with the setup. I wanted to do a side adventure, which was also a call back in a few ways to previous campaigns with the same players, and so just did it. This was partially in response to how this group of...

You can do a lot with reskinning and curating options, but there is a limit.

It is neat how you can diagnose long standing player/GM/group problems with just a few posts. You should hire out and solve problems across r/dndhorrorstories.

In this case, the failure came with additional information: the spell did not fail, rather the caster discovered that their planar tuning fork was gone off their person. Another character (the replacement PC for the currently Voided one) confirmed that they were trapped in the Faewild too...

I don't want to get too into the weeds on this specific situation, but I really did not have a solution in mind. That is usually how I frame things. there is a situation ("You are trapped in the wintery Faewild taken over by a Winter Court coup, and you cannot simply plane shift out.") and then...

The Void happened when they were already trapped in the faewild. The PCs were looking for someplace that was out of the plane to do some stuff before the BBEG could locate them (long story, but they have the body of one of his major lieutenants). They found the Fae Cabin in the remote woods...

Probably because they are his only real character traits. The original stories are interesting mysteries but Holmes is essentially a cypher in them.