D&D 5E Kobolds are also from the Feywild now?

[Weiley31]

this is some weird one-off comment possibly inspired by a personal campaign like that time Mike Mearls claimed all D&D gods used to be mortals.

Well, there was that one brief stint where all the DND gods WERE doing part-time as Mortals during the Times of Trouble due to Ao getting fed up with all of their "hits" or some crap.

And there was a Cleric prestige class in 3.0/3.5 that were basically the equivalent to Atheist Clerics and their whole thing was that they were preaching that the gods were just Mortals who pretty much leveled up high enough in life to Epic-Level jerks that falsely sell their image to their followers.

 

[steeldragons]

Soon Giants will be descendants of Elementals.

SHHHHH!!!

 

[TwoSix]

Again, I cannot emphasise enough that kobolds aren't fey or even fey-adjacent in the book. It's an error in the interview.

No time for that, we've got made-up interviews about made-up creatures to argue about!

 

[Willie the Duck]

D&D 5.5e: Now Everything is now from the Feywild.

If everything is fey, is anything really fey?

The real world mythological kobolds are pretty much 100% fae so it's within the same realm as moving goblins over. Just a bit weird to continue with the dragon aesthetic while doing so.

Everything that should be fairy should be fey.

Kobold is a bit weird tho because the D&D version is clearly not a house sprite, like the actual kobold.

I like to think of it as a nickname because this kind of dragon is small, lives in a cave, and is industrious, like some kobolds (house sprites) are.

On a somewhat more serious note " is there anything that SHOULD be from the feywild, that currently isn't?".

I prefer my kobolds as yappy canine types rather than dragons

Therein lies a problem -- looking at Germanic and British Isles cultures whose myths and folklore tended to have actual fae, the word gets used for a broad enough swath of things that pretty much anything super/preternatural from those tales can be lumped in there. I know in some of the Welsh myths I'm currently catching up on, exactly where the fae realm ends and the afterlife starts isn't hard and fast. By some metrics, ghosts and undead should be fae (no, WotC, that isn't a suggestion).

While it turns out that this might just be a misspeak in an interview, I do think that D&D might want to sit down and decide again exactly what it wants 'fae' to mean, how the feywild is supposed to interact with the rest of its' lore, etc.

We pretend to be elves in our free time.

That is always a good point.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Soon Giants will be descendants of Elementals.

They already did that in 4E. Godlike elementals created Huge elemental titans, who in turn created lesser Large elemental giants. Hill giants in particular were noted to have descended from earth titans but had somehow regressed to the point that they lost their elemental nature and became creatures of the natural world. 5E got rid of elemental titans and the 4E elemental backstory for giants, but also made them all Huge like the 4E titans were.

Personally I liked the elemental origin for giants and still use it. I should also clarify that in 4E "elemental" was an origin, while "giant" was a creature type.

 

[Yaarel]

Re what is Fey.

The ethereal plane is the same thing as the spirit world. The part of it that is energized by positivity is the feywild. The part of it that is dampened by negativity is the shadowfell.

Ghosts gravitate to the shadowfell because it is easier to rest there. Ghosts are an aspect of an individuals consciounsciousness, but not necessarily all of it. Much of the consciousness might be in the astral plane or reincarnating thru the material plane.

The ethereal plane is a broad spectrum from positive to negative frequencies. In the mid range, is the shallow ether, and is a mix of fey, shadow (like ghosts), and neutral frequencies.

The deep ether includes the feywild and the shadowfell, but also includes the neutral deep ether, the elemental ether, whose borders are between the shallow ether and the elemental planes of earth, water, air, and fire.

The shallow ether is the part that is actually inside the material plane. The elements in the material plane are the states of matter: earth (solid), water (liquid), air (gas), and fire (plasma). The plasma relates to the sun, stars, lightning, and similar, and is sometimes called the heavenly fire. The fifth element is ether, namely force.

Force is mysterious because where the other elements are states of matter, force has no matter but is physical. Natural forces like gravity and magnetism are made out of ether. But also the mysterious forces of souls, such as telekinesis and the vitual bodies of ghosts and fey and outofbody projections of living humans are all made out of ether.

All of the ethereal forces that are part of the material plane and that interact with the objects of matter, are together referred to as the "shallow ether". The deep ether is the rest of the ethereal plane that is beyond the material plane. The deep ether includes the fey, the shadow, and the elemental ether.

Note, that the elemental planes of fire, air water, and earth are immaterial, and are far away from the material plane. Rather, these planes are the "forms" of matter, but not matter itself. They are the plans, that the thoughts of the astral plane construct out of ether, to be the building blocks that will shape the forms of matter in the material plane. The elemental chaos is the border between the elemental forms and the intellects of astral plane.

The aster is the stuff of pure thought without matter or force. The astral realm is a dreamscape of symbols, archetypes, paradigms, logic and emotion. Astral objects are near or far from each other depending on how similar or different they are from each other, and how strong the associations and connotations are between them.

In sum, the astral plane is the realm of thoughts, the ethereal plane is the realm of forces and spirits, including positive fey and negative shadow, and the material plane is this world of physicality as we know it.

 

[TwoSix]

So, the impact of these lore changes become more pronounced. Before, we wouldn't change, say, hobgoblins to be fae. We'd simply make a new monster and they'd be variants. Fifteen thousand different flavors of elf for example. But, now, because we have such a MUCH smaller number of monsters to work from, and WotC doesn't seem to have any interest in banging out new monster books - it makes these changes a lot more pronounced than they would be before.

I'll be honest, I'm pretty OK with this. I don't need my settings to have dozens of variations of "scary monstrous humanoid" or "humanoid-animal hybrid." A few base templates, and then apply cultural differences and/or weird magical mutation will give me plenty of variety.

 

[Minigiant]

They already did that in 4E

That was the joke.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

But, that's my point. If you are connected to 2e'ish era lore, 5e has pretty much nothing for you. Virtually all monsters, settings and whatnot are so far removed from their 2e counterparts.

Thats a teeny tiny bit of hyperbole. Forgotten Realms for example still have the fundamentals, despite changes and cataclysms between editions. 5e has been lorepoor so far, but now the edition explicitly has no lore heritage at all. For some that doesn't matter, for my players that usually lean on lore when making backgrounds etc it does.

Once again, in actual play and prep it doesn't matter for me, since I don't implement the lore purge. But even if you accept the economic reasons for the current changes and are positive to the massive influx of new and younger players with other expectations from the game, one can still feel sad about WotC cutting ties to decades of lore heritage.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

(Picture from Munchies, 1987 serie B horror movie within of the subgenre of little creatures).

I don't like the detail of the black nose as dogs because this gives them a ridiculous touch. They are like the evil cousin of Wally Wator (Hanna Barbera's cartoon character).

I imagine kobolds in the origin like cousins of the goblins whith blood of "reptomammals", and later they were for a time living and looting/gathering in the feywild, until they weren't wellcome too much, because they caused a lot of damage to the ecosystem, and then they became thralls of the chromatic dragons (and if they were lucky, some metallic dragon). There is enough space for subraces, someone more "dragontouched" and other more "feytouchd". If they are options then it is right, you choose what do you want in your game.

I liked the look in the Capcom arcade.