D&D 5E What exactly is Feywild in your campaigns?

[Hriston]

I agree in that I think of the Shadowfell and Feywild as immaterial as thought is immaterial. The Feywild is preserved within the memory of the world, whereas the Shadowfell is that which must be forgotten and cast into oblivion.

The fey, to me, are outsiders who have “gone native” in the Prime Material.

I think of the Shadowfell as something like the land of the dead that Odysseus sails to, and I think of the Feywild as the continent of Aman in the Silmarillion — a reflection of the earthly paradise, or the Garden of the Hesperides, but fallen as the world is fallen, and preserving a spark of renewal from the beginning.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So, we have the announcement of two new 5e books, Witchfire and Strixhaven. I am super-excited about these two.

The first one is an adventure in the Plane of Feywild. The second one is from the Magic The Gathering multiverse, likely a setting. As a Potter-esque plane of wizard colleges, Strixhaven is pretty much how I have already been running the Feywild since 4e.

What exactly is Feywild?

4e and 5e have written a number of conflictive descriptions about the Feywild. The concept of the Feywild seems to still be evolving. I emphasize the themes that resonate with me. I make the Feywild my own.

• Feywild and Shadowfell are "echoes" of the Material World.
• Fey and Shadow are polar opposites of the Material. In some sense they are opposites of each other. But exactly how seems unclear.
• The Material Plane is matter.
• Inferably, the Fey and Shadow are both immaterial "spirits".
• Shadow spirits are something like ghosts. Fey spirits are ... this is one of the questions.
• We have a clearer concept of the Shadowfell, more familiar with the concept of ghosts, and maybe with Hel or Hades or Sheol.
• Shadowfell is something like memories about the dead.
• The realm of the dead is a gloomy place of rest. The dead mainly rest, but can be restless.
• The opposite of the dead in Shadowfell, is not the living people of the Material. But rather, the opposite of dead is Fey.

• For me, Shadowfell is about the past, and oppositely, the Feywild is about the future.
• The Shadows are the memories of yesteryear, slowly being forgotten within the oblivion.
• Oppositely, the Fey are oracles about future years to come, the possible timelines that clarify as their time approaches.
• The concept of timelines corresponds to the concept of "Fate".
• The term Fey is a variant of Fay, from Faie, meaning ‘Fate’.
• A Faie is literally a spirit of Fate. Fairie or Fairy is the realm of the tapestry of Fate.
• Because the Fey can foretell the future in prophesies, there is also the sense the Fey can change reality by means of words.
• Thus, the Fey are personifications of magic words.
• The word "Fairie" literally means "magic", and is synonymous with the later term "magic" (from Magi).
• A Fairie creature means a "magical creature".
• I view the Fey as made out of magic itself.
• I view the immaterial Fey spirits as living constructs made out of arcane energy.

• I view both the Feywild and the Shadowfell as different "frequencies" sotospeak of Ether, and the Ethereal Plane as arcane energy.
• The Feywild is the aspect of the Ether that the Plane of Positivity energizes.
• The Shadowfell is the aspect of the Ether that the Plane of Negativity unravels.

• In ancient times, some Fey Eladrin chose to materialize into the Material Plane, magically taking on bodies of flesh and blood, whence Elf.

• Some times D&D describes the Feywild as "arcane", unnatural wizardy − other times as "primal", natural druidry.
• For me, the Feywild is unnatural, and is more about arcane magic.
• The main reason for the unnaturalism of the Feywild is its disconnect from the features of Material nature.
• The Shadowfell closely overlaps the Material, to the extent one can navigate the Material accurately despite the gloomier version of it.
• By contrast, the Feywild overlap warps extremely: time, distance, and even places, often lack a Material counterpart.
• Consequently, there is little or no link between a specific natural feature like a rock or a tree in the Material and a Fey spirit in the Feywild.
• For example, there is little feeling that a tree in this world is actually a specific Dryad in the spirit world.
• Thus, the Feywild works less well for a reallife animistic worldview, where each rock is a mind, and each tree is a mind.

• I personally use Psionic to represent any animistic traditions, in the sense rocks and trees exhibit mental influences forming communities.
• Animism is always about the Material world, and is never about somewhere else.
• The aspect of Psionics that focuses on the minds of the features of nature, rather than the minds of humanoids, is what Primal is.

• I am happy to focus on the Feywild as an unnatural realm of magic and a place of magically potential realities.
• The Eberron setting has an excellent version of the Feywild, corresponding to Thelanis.
• Thelanis focuses on the theme of fairytales, where like in a Twilight Zone, the stories that humans tell take on life of all their own.
• Thus the Feywild is literally made out of words and stories. Fey creatures are characters, who repeat a story.
• However, the Eladrin and a few other spirits have some autonomous reality to them, as tellers of tales.

• Eberron Thelanis lacks a sense of future timelines, in the sense of Fate, but it portrays well magic words becoming reality, in the sense of Fairie.

• In terms of adventure encounters, I emphasize magic.
• All Fey creatures are spellcasters, or similar. Fey are especially arcane, but out of curiosity about magic itself, might be divine or psionic.
• There are no Fey who have levels in a martial class, unless they learned them while in the Material Plane.
• I tend to run the Feywild as moreorless the Potterverse Wizard World. Everyone is different kinds of mages.
• The Fey culture revolves around the academic life of the magical schools.
• There are Fairy Courts, including the seasons, where magical power is social power.
• Different courts evolve different governmental structures, some are monarchy, some are democracy, but all are magical meritocracies.
• Plus I add courts for Norse Alfar in the sky, Scottish Sith in the glens, and English Shakespearean Fairy (who are mainly children with some teens).
• When Strixhaven arrives − cant wait! − I will probably add these colleges as courts within the Feywild.



I have other musings about the 5e Feywild. But this is probably plenty for now.

How do you make sense of the Feywild Plane in your campaigns?

What kind of themes do you run for Fey adventures? Do some of you play up the comical aspects of some fairytales, the alien aspects of severe ettiquette of some encounters with the Fair Folk, the things-are-never-quite-what-they-seem of some folktru encounters, or your own thing?

Great stuff. I’m at work so for now I’ll just paraphrase Tolkien. The Fey are supernatural in that they are the most natural. They are part of nature in a way and to a degree that mortals cannot even fully imagine, much less understand. A dewdrop fairy literally is the moment when dew settles on a flower petal or leaf, and is also a creature who makes the dewdrop.

 

[Fenris-77]

I tend to index the fey a little more to mortals than some of you guys do. I mean yeah, natural world whatnot, but I find the dreams/nightmares vector a little more rewarding at the table. YMMV.

 

[Xeviat]

Would you mind expanding on how that works in your setting? I'm a fan of simplification, and combining these (and perhaps the Ethereal) is a step further than I've gone. What would a long trip within this plane be like?

Oh, sure!

So, I do an animistic spiritual system. Everything has a spirit. The spirits of bigger, more important things are more powerful than the spirits of smaller, less important things (mountain vs Hill, river vs stream, forest vs tree). Worship and veneration empowers the spirits as well, so that the sling stone that slew a giant and is now enshrined is likely host to a more powerful spirit than the spirit of any other pebble (whose spirit is probably not sentient).

"Deity" is a title given to spirits generally more powerful, more important, or more active than others in the area, but this can vary. "God" is used generally to refer to deities that people worship to out of reverence and to gain their blessings. "Demon" is used generally to refer to deities that people worship out of fear, to appease, or to direct their wrath.

Furthermore, spirits can be nature spirits or ancestral spirits.

More pure areas of the spirit world are more like the Feywild. More corrupt areas are more like the Shadowfell.

That's kind of the gist.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Honestly, I don't have a feywild. I don't use fey as enemies (unless they are specifically called for by a published adventure). In my mind they are wimpy, whimsical, and don't really feel appropriate for the type of fantasy I run. Probably my least favorite creature type.

Oh, I think of the Fey as much more dangerous than that, perhaps the most dangerous of all.

 

[Yaarel]

Oh, sure!

So, I do an animistic spiritual system. Everything has a spirit. The spirits of bigger, more important things are more powerful than the spirits of smaller, less important things (mountain vs Hill, river vs stream, forest vs tree). Worship and veneration empowers the spirits as well, so that the sling stone that slew a giant and is now enshrined is likely host to a more powerful spirit than the spirit of any other pebble (whose spirit is probably not sentient).

"Deity" is a title given to spirits generally more powerful, more important, or more active than others in the area, but this can vary. "God" is used generally to refer to deities that people worship to out of reverence and to gain their blessings. "Demon" is used generally to refer to deities that people worship out of fear, to appease, or to direct their wrath.

Furthermore, spirits can be nature spirits or ancestral spirits.

More pure areas of the spirit world are more like the Feywild. More corrupt areas are more like the Shadowfell.

That's kind of the gist.

It is spot on that more important things are more powerful.

Generally, there is no "worship" in animism, regarding hunter-gatherer cultures. Worship implies a master-slave (lord-servant) relationship, and these didnt start coming into existence until cultures started to build towns and form bureaucracies.

Animism is more about families. There can be "veneration", but it is in the same way as one venerates ones own grandparents.

That said, a polytheistic spiritual system that involves nature worship often continues various customs from the more-ancient animistic past.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've stolen the name of the Feywild from 4e Dark Sun for my Dungeon World game, but given it a completely different concept/structure.

I haven't nailed down all of its cosmology yet--an intentional effort on my part to keep it mysterious and, more importantly, not purely my idea, because it makes me lean into the ideas of my players more.

So there is a Land Between the Winds. To that place, the ancient El-Adrin went, long ago, just before the world was "changed" as a result of the coming of "the Burning Eye," some kind of entity that was imprisoned on their planet long ago. They referred to this being/entity by a title which, when translated from their language into the Common Tongue of the Tarrakhuna, reads as Azimech al-Saqqit: "The Uplifted And Fallen One." The seers of the El-Adrin had foretold that, when Azimech al-Saqqit came, it would spell the end of their civilization, because the fundamental nature of magic and the planet's cosmic essence would be altered somehow. Rather than accept that their civilization would come to an end, they undertook a great work to--somehow--translate their entire civilization, or at least their capital city and its surrounding territory, into a different reality: The Land Between the Winds.

The party has discovered a few of the lingering bits of infrastructure from the El-Adrin capital. They've also found a...thing, which is sort of, kind of like the magical equivalent of an extremely advanced "Virtual Intelligence" from Mass Effect (or, if you prefer, the non-sapient but vastly intelligent computer of the Enterprise-D), the "Guardian of the Threshold," which awaits two things: the destruction of Azimech al-Saqqit, and the return of the three "keys" that will signal the El-Adrin to return from the Land Between the Winds: the Sword, the Jewel, and the Mirror. Our party Battlemaster started with the Sword, the legacy of his elven forebears (which we now know to be the "changed" descendants of those El-Adrin who remained in the mortal world). He has received the Jewel from a trusted ally, who found it while on vacation in his distant homeland with his fiancee (who is a Tarrakhuna native). Now, he seeks the Mirror, which the party has reason to believe may be found in a swampy area near the northern border of the Tarrakhuna region, where it begins to verge into the jungles further north.

The El-Adrin were apparently very magically-inclined, and trafficked significantly with planar creatures--including celestials, which up to this point have explicitly never been documented as seen (that is, not seen within the last 2000 years, when mortals of the Tarrakhuna threw off the yoke of the genie-rajahs who ruled them...and, not-so-coincidentally, about the time when the Burning Eye/Azimech al-Saqqit was imprisoned in their world.) The party has previously met exactly one celestial being, a couatl, who very expressly was there without proper "authorization" so to speak, but she couldn't be specific about how or why. Unraveling these mysteries and discovering the lost history of the El-Adrin is an important plot-point, both for the group overall, and the half-elven Battlemaster specifically.

I'm extremely excited to see where it goes.

 

[Islayre d'Argolh]

For me, Feywild is "Fey + Wild" so Faerie + Lost World, Oberon & Titania meet King kong & dinos

The Feywild is "the begining", a place of light, action, youth and ambition when the Shadowfell is "the end", a place of shadows, apathy, old age and lost memories.

 

[Laurefindel]

• For me, Shadowfell is about the past, and oppositely, the Feywild is about the future.

That’s an interesting twist. “Traditionally”, the realm of the dead is where people looked to to divine the future (the initial meaning of necromancy) while fairies were stuck in the past, unable of progress to the point of being allergic to iron and “new” monotheist religions, able to perfectly recreate art but unable of imagination (and therefore had to abduct humans for that).

both places are timeless, but if you asked me, the realm of the dead is where knowledge of future lies while the faerie realms is were the past survives modernity.

but all this is probably post-Napoleonic wars, a pivotal period in history where past and modernity were being redefined.

 

[Yaarel]

That’s an interesting twist. “Traditionally”, the realm of the dead is where people looked to to divine the future (the initial meaning of necromancy) while fairies were stuck in the past, unable of progress to the point of being allergic to iron and “new” monotheist religions, able to perfectly recreate art but unable of imagination (and therefore had to abduct humans for that).

both places are timeless, but if you asked me, the realm of the dead is where knowledge of future lies while the faerie realms is were the past survives modernity.

but all this is probably post-Napoleonic wars, a pivotal period in history where past and modernity were being redefined.

Heh, I am surprised about the other way.



For me:

• Fey = fate ( ≈ future)
• Dead = fading memories ( ≈ past)

When I saw the reverse, I could see where they were coming from, but it surprised me

• Fey = pristine nature ( ≈ past)
• Dead = threat of destruction ( ≈ future)



Regarding traditionally, in Norse lore, when shamans want to know the future they themselves are psychic and can foresee the future. Now there are stories, where a future was particularly difficult to discern, so a shaman went to consult an other shaman to see if they can discover it. Sometimes, the other shaman is Alfar. Sometimes the other shaman is a dead Jotnar. And so on. But it is always one psychic getting help from an other psychic.