D&D 5E Primeval Awareness and other hidden gems

I presume that D&D's fey are the fey of myth. Otherwise, what's the point?

I mean how they act.

The fey of myth loved to be in the business of the mortals and didn't all hide from them. They didn't move when people settled nearby nor attacked them.

The fey of D&D are secretive and hide from humaniods. They're curious ad might spy on them every once in a while but in the village doesn't sent a druid/driud/ranger/shaman/warlock to speak with them, the fey will stay away from them, move to the feywild, or burn down the village before they set up.


In myth, you know the fey are around. In D&D, you don't unless you seek them out or if they want to kill you.
 

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The point is D&D is it's own universe, built over 40 years, just like, say, Middle Earth, Star Trek, or the Marvel Universe. The fact that some terms are shared with common mythology is incidental at this stage.

My point is that I've been playing D&D for about 35 of those years, and never at any point felt like I was necessarily evolving my conceptions away from D&D.

For example, I would argue that the fey of D&D are intended to be the fey of myth and have the traits and qualities of the fey of myth. Yes, perhaps sometimes the implementation was lacking and imperfect, in the same way that the implementation of Ranger, Hobbit, or Ent is lacking somewhat considering its obvious inspirational source material. But looking back on early adventures and monster manuals, I think I can be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that the fey as presented were meant to be the fey of myth and legend. Yes, when medusa or pegasus becomes a race rather than an individual, then you know that there is a departure from the mythic source material (to say nothing of the occurrence of such beings in universes without Greek gods), but that would have required conscious effort to depart from D&D. My central point is that the power as written is useless outside of a very narrow range of settings, including IMO a fairly typical D&D one.

The truth of the matter is less that D&D fey aren't assumed to be in the background, as it is that being in the background there is generally no need to mention them. My suspicion is that the many DM's could not tell you what was within a mile of any particular location, and would generally answer 'nothing' unless it was a feature salient to the plot because only then might he have a ready answer. As such, the power of this 'gem' would appear to be, "Detect prepared encounter" or "Detect plot significant location." But little consideration appears to have been paid to someone who'd happily paint the background in when anyone paid attention to it.
 


As an example of a fey themed adventure, please read the text of UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave. Or really, any actual encounter with fairies.

Yes.
D&D fey don't invade your home like the fey from the myths. D&D fey keep to themselves and either hide or freak out if you meet them.
 


Even if you play in a very different setting than Celebrim... the ability is a joke.

Lets say you are 'lucky' enough to be going about your Ranger business in your favored terrain.... and the nearby wise woman had a vision that the dead were restless and would soon walk the earth again. Hmmmm... better check it out

So you burn a spell slot and find out "Yep there are undead"

Where? Well somewhere in a *113* sq mi area.... and it might be one zombie still stuck in his coffin, or it might be 12 liches leading 12 deathnights and their 1000 wraith army... they might be north, or south, or east, or.... well they could be all over.

You could travel several miles and try again... and you get the undead 'ping' again.... but you don't know if it is the same undead, or a new one, or some of the same ones, or..... And lets not forget, in the hours it took you to travel that distance, the undead may have also moved....

You are looking for a cult, you come across a village, and 'ping' you detect a fiend. It *might* even be in the village... or a mile in a different direction... or a warlocks familiar that is just passing through....


With no info about numbers, nor direction, nor strength.... its just not useful except in some rare and contrived situations. And in you 'favored' terrain, it is *worse*.
 


Isn't D&D's default cosmology just such a setting? Or at least, isn't it generally said to be and described to be just such a setting where the supernatural is pervasive? D&D has been set in settings like 'Masque of the Red Death', where the supernatural is an invasive force and not necessarily present everywhere, but that's the exception rather than the rule. The usual setting is more like Forgotten Realms, where magic does in fact pervade everything.

Let's see:

Sprites are scarcely less common than rats, and household faeries, quiescent dryads and hamadryads, and meadow spirits are all over the place. Rarely does a pond not have at least 1 nixie in it, and every single brook, stream, or spring that doesn't completely dry up every year has a nymph or similar creature.

it would be equally rare for their to be no undead within 1 mile of location that had ever been habited.

Dragons would provoke all sorts of false positives, as you'd be picking up mini-drakes, wood drakes, spire drakes, and dozens of other species that are scarcely more important to know about than owls, minks, alligators or bears.

the answer to, "Are their evil spirits in this city?", is almost certainly, "Yes." Whether it's a demonic cult or simply a pact bound fiend guarding the ancient altar to some blood thirsty god of commerce or revenge in the glade of yews in the temple district

"Are their any rocks larger than a bread basket within a mile?", if so there are certainly elementals quietly slumbering and dreaming dreams of solidity and stone.

I don't think any of the above accurately describes the Realms, Dragonlance or Greyhawk, for starts. It doesn't describe any homebrew I've known either. It's a very cool depiction of a fantasy setting, but saying that the implied setting of D&D accounts for this kind of supernatural activity is arguing for the sake of arguing. It clearly doesn't. It's a game where the presence of fey or elementals is the exception, not the rule. You can call it a "small world" perspective, but in 5E, even some PC races are described as being uncommon. Elementals live in their home planes and are brought to the material plane through magic, as described in the Monster Manual, they're not sleeping under rocks.

I can envision my own setting where there's no undeath, but then I cannot argue that the turn undead feature is useless or designed with an eye toward a "small world" where heroes must fight undead. As a DM, I get to make my own choices, but when the classes are designed to an implied setting, as D&D classes usually are, I can't complain that they're not working as intended when I go to far from what's implied.
 

Let's see:

First of all, you aren't denying my assertion that Oerth, Faerun, Aebrynis, Athas, Krynn, Planescape, or Realmspace is a setting that is pervasively supernatural. You are just deflecting and saying that as you envisioned them, they don't seem like what I described. And in certain cases, obviously they aren't. Athas is a supernaturally dead world, the victim of a pervasive magical apocalypse - so we wouldn't expect it to be full of animist life in its present state. But Sigil in Planescape is even more pervasively alive than what I described, as presented in the books and in games like Planescape:Torment. In the situation I described, the animist beings are present, but largely hidden and sleeping, so that while present you don't normally encounter them. But in the Outer Planes, the spirits aren't just present, but awake and - for lack of a better word - mundane.

Nonetheless, the degree to which the animist nature of the world is highlight may very somewhat from setting to setting, all of them basically have the same assumptions. As someone else pointed out, familiars would generally ping on such an ability, and they are in most settings rather common place, as rare is the setting for D&D where a hedgemage or minor hermit sage doesn't exist in practically every hamlet and village - if only for gamist needs at a minimum of providing someone to identify magic items and similar services.

What I just described is in the context of my game play, just background on the setting. It comes out in various small ways, but you don't normally see it highlighted in published works any more than you see discussion of the role of oozes in ecologies, or the pervasive presence of crickets. There is a vast body of things that perforce must be true about the setting if it is as described, that aren't generally explicitly discussed because there are more pertinent bits of information that have to be communicated to run the game. If you only have 32 or 64 pages of text to get your point across, you don't talk about the ghost unrelated to the story that appears only on nights of the new moon during the spring and forces her 'lovers' to dance all evening and disappears at the cock's crow - even though it can be presumed that in any setting where you have ghosts, such things exist, because such things exist in ghost stories that inspired the ghosts.

When I say "small world", I use it in a very specific sense, and you clearly aren't understanding it. The "small world" technique is a conscious or unconscious technique where you appear to give the players free will to roam wherever they will and do whatever they want, but in point of fact their actions are actually highly constrained because the only things available to investigate (and to do) are those few things you consider important to the story you want to tell. A group that chooses to not investigate those important things, finds that it can do nothing so the choose is either do what the DM wants us to do, or be bored. This can be done artfully or artlessly. Done artfully many groups will never realize its a "small world" and will instead get the sense that its large and vibrant, solely because the small area they explore is lavished with detail and the things to look at are so interesting they never thing to look elsewhere. DMs adopt the small world technique either consciously, or through unconscious habit. It's essence is, "The only things in the world are the things that I prepared." If you are using the small world technique, everything I described about the pervasive magic of the world is a distraction that you don't want to raise because it derails the plot on trivialities unimportant to the adventure. And that's all well and good and is often justifiable, but what I've discovered is that many DMs have only played in a "small world" style, and so unconsciously come to assume that only what they've prepared or only what is prepared in the adventure they bought actually exists. That is to say that they come to believe that the 64 pages of text they have represents basically everything there is to know about the immediate setting, and instead of seeing the text as merely a summary of the important points with everything else left to their imagination, they see the text as the bible for all that is and whatever isn't mentioned doesn't exist. That can also happen simply because if the PC's do go looking off the page or off the path, DMs without experience painting as they go can panic. I certainly did at one time. In my first attempt at DMing, my players tried to leave the B2 wilderness map. I panicked and invented a impenetrable glass barrier that prevented them from leaving the map, and had a magpie come and tell them to go the other way.

The actual experience of play is that monsters are common. Try to walk anywhere and you'll find some. Presumably, monsters are actually more common than that, since the only ones you actually encounter tend to be ones that want to fight to the death rather than hide or run away.
 

When I say "small world", I use it in a very specific sense, and you clearly aren't understanding it.

I understand, I just disagree. That's not how I envision the implied D&D setting and that's not how the books describe it either. Also, that's not even how I run the game, since my preference is sandbox, either of my own design or adventures that play more like a sandbox. There are a thousand ways of designing settings of which your animistic approach is only one, and it doesn't make everything else "small world", it's just that other "big worlds" are full of humans doing human things. My cities are full of cultists, wizards, guilds, and scheming nobles that players never get to interact with, if they don't want to. You don't need to fill your setting with things that fall under the Primeval Awareness radar for it to be alive, that's only your choice of style. If D&D designers thought D&D settings existed in the situation you describe, I don't believe they would have designed the feature as they did. Designers there clearly believe that "there's a dragon somewhere within a mile" should be a meaningful information for the typical party. At least good enough to spend a spell slot on it. I agree with them.
 

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