“You raise your sword to attack the fairy. Make an intelligence saving throw.” “Uh, 12.” “You swing your baguette at the fairy & the baguette turns to liquid.” “I try to scoop up the liquid” “Make a charisma saving throw” “20!” “You’re holding the liquid in your hands, a great big chunk of it” “I uh, squash the liquid into a ball” “Make an intelligence check” “17” “The bread decides that it was more fond of being a sword than a ball & is upset at you - you notice the fairy is gone at this point” “I chase after my bread & try & find the fairy” “You find a forest of bread, looking around you unsheathe your fairy, worried about what dangers lurk here”
@@PandorasFolly Thanks man. In my imagination, things in the Feywild both shouldn't make sense & at the same time, be whimsically dangerous. No one is going to stab you with a sword, or throw a fireball at you, but they'll turn you into a sheep & make the suggestion that you should pretend to be a cloud - then you end up floating into the sky for an hour until Polymorph wears off.
@@HeavensOfMetal exactly. Have you ever read any of the books from the Game "Mage of the Ascension"? You can find the pdfs online and if you haven't read them, they are totally blooming from this kind of trellis. Each book has about a PhDs worth of research in them.
For me in the feywild everything is the original version where our world feels like the copy of a copy, a fey tree is just more treeish than a material realm tree.
I also like the twist Terry Pratchett had on the Fae/Elves (on their morality, or lack thereof): Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
When it comes to getting INTO Faerie, or the Feywilds, I am always reminded of a line from PotC: At World's End - "For certain, you have to be lost to find a place that can't be found, elseways everyone would know where it was." I also like the idea that certain geography has a natural connection to the Feywild, and that the two might bleed together. So a party that is lost in a Forest would more likely find Faerie, as opposed to just being lost on the plains. I might even go so far as to include the idea of twilight, since I have always envisioned it as being constant twilight there. It comes from my love of the Courts - Seelie/Unseelie, Summer/Winter, and the constant balance between light, dark, warm, cold, night, day.
My favourite succinct depiction of Faerie magic comes from Doctor Who, of all places. “Humans do all sorts of things with numbers - you split the atom! Well, [witches] do that with words.”
Dael’s book recommendations: - “On Fairy-Stories” by J.R.R. Tolkien - “Surprised by Joy” by C.S. Lewis - “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel” by Susanna Clarke - “Irish Faerie and Folktales” by W. B. Yeats - “The Crystal Cave” “The Hollow Hills,” “the Merlin Trilogy” and others by Mary Stewart - “Faeries” by Brian Froud; Allen Lee
Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. Written at the height of his prowess. Cannot more highly recommend it, great folk and Fae encounters and truly mystical mad magicians, a joy. Dry wit with a light touch.
I'm running a game with an Archfey Warlock set at sea, and your discussion of liminal spaces and the blurring of thresholds reminded me of that shot in Pirates of the Caribbean where the perfectly still ocean reflects the stars, obscuring the ocean surface entirely. And then I thought about the surface again, as Jack Sparrow essentially shows us how to travel between the two planes when he inverts the ship and sails on the other side of the ocean's surface! I wouldn't have made all those connections if I hadn't seen you break the ideas down in this video first so thanks for the inspiration!
"The nature of Fey is that often what you look at is hard to describe, and the idea is more pervasive than the physical appearance. When a fairy has clothes the color of a mid day storm. How cloudy? How rainy? Lit up by lightning or over the ocean? Snow storm? Blizard? Thunder? These things are answered by the observer because the ideal is more important than the physics of shape light and color, and the constant of its appearance isn’t what it looks like, but what you think when you look at it." My DM describing why Fey are so strange so we stop asking questions about what the color of clouds means
On the nature of fairies: There was a great reddit post that I have since lost on the morality of fairies. It took the approach of creating an axis (similar to our good/evil x lawful/chaotic axis we use for character creation) and came to the conclusion, based off various stories mentioning fairies, that fairy society would value the natural over the constructed and the spontaneous over the methodical. Essentially it was that a fairy believes it is virtuous to keep with ones place in nature. This doesn't mean that like civilization is evil, but more of a "don't rock the boat" mentality. If you're a beggar or a king, be content with your place in the food chain. And then on the other hand, they would also believe that it is virtuous to be spontaneous. The fairy who seeks to control the future through careful planning is foolish. To do what is dramatic in the moment, what is interesting and *fun,* is most noble. Sticking to plans that have since become dull is nonsense. Anyway, it was an interesting thought and has definitely influenced how i view Fairy behavior. If i ever find that post again I will link it here.
I love all of this. Personally, I go the exact opposite with cold iron, largely due to my being a massive Dresden Files fanboy: Any old Iron will do. a steel sword, a lump of iron ore, a handful of nails, you name it, if it's ferrous, fey can't abide it (except ones like Annis Hags and Redcaps who explicitly have iron elements in their lore and statblocks, and that just inspires all sorts of fun questions like how they got their iron immunity and how other fey feel about them), and merely the touch of iron is unpleasant to the fey. But, they're preternaturally good at avoiding contact with the stuff. Good luck sneaking up on a faerie to stab it with a steel dagger or hack it to bits with an iron axe. I don't have explicit rules for any of this, I would probably deal with it on a fey-by-fey basis, but off the top of my head, I would suspect contact with iron would screw up what the fey is best at, so a caster might have difficulty concentrating on spells, while a warrior might become frail and clumsy after touching iron. I also think that glamours are interesting. I love the idea that the beauty of Faerie isn't even skin deep. Like, I love in The Sandman when Nuala comes to stay in Dream's realm and he strips her of her glamours and she's just this frail, plain creature. Or in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies when you get hints (or at least, I did the first time I read it; probably due for a reread) that underneath the sophisticated illusions that the Elves wore into Lancre were just primitive warriors dressed in hides killing their victims with stone weapons. I love the idea of Faerie glamours being like illusions, but better. Like, there's a solidity to them, an appeal to all the senses that eludes even the greatest of mortal illusionists while being like child's play to the fey. Ooh! That's a third thing. I think part of what makes the fey so interesting and alien is the reversal of what comes easily versus what is difficult compared to the experience of humans and other mortals. Like, humans need to go to all this work to use magic, whether it's a lifetime of worship in a temple, or of study in a magic school or bardic college, or of servitude to an otherworldly patron (with sorcerers as the exception), but creatures of Faerie are creatures of magic through and through; they cast complicated spells as easily as a mortal makes a sandwich. On the other hand, things like lying or using iron tools are so easy that any mortal can do it without thinking, but would stymie a faerie creature to no end. These are just my favorite examples, but it's a neat shorthand to illustrate their alienness: What's hard for mortals but easy for the fey, and what's easy for mortals but hard for the fey?
Anthony Sladky I do something similar with my fey/iron interactions. In my world, all fey are vulnerable to any iron based weapons. Imagine my young fighter’s delight when she discovers that her ordinary rapier is more feared by the Hag than the wizard’s firebolt or the Druid’s wildshaped bear attacks. Specifically addressing the Redcap issue, after they are slain, my players discover that Redcap bodies “revert” to what they actually are rather than what they appear to have been - Like Pinocchio being a puppet that was turned into a real boy by a fairy, Redcaps are “real old men” that were made from straw filled puppets. When they die, they turn back into the marionettes that they were. It turns out that the iron shoes are actually just thin LEAD cups at the ends of their footless legs. No wonder they are so clumsy. Fey will occasionally use other metals, lead and tin, copper, silver, and of course gold. But they will never willingly touch iron. Although some, like the Annis Hags, will create the illusion of iron teeth or nails, partly to hide their dread of the metal, partly just for the thrill of deception.
I played a character that looked like a goblin but was actually supposed to be a fey trickster sort of character (along the lines of rumplestiltskin or a bubbayaga, be careful about the specifics of the deal you make). Part of what was fun to play was having rules that the DM and I knew but the other players, didn't. For example, he didn't value most things, but precious metal, especially gold, were of extreme value to him, though not so quantity specific. The actual tangible coin was the valuable thing, not the promise of much wealth. (think paying the ferryman, you need the coin in hand to pay not a future promise) I had chosen a shadow monk class, so his fey aspects were greatly enhanced once he reached the early level where he can shadow teleport. The campaign started with villages having problems with nearby goblins having been attacking travelers and homesteads, so my character sleeping in front of the fire at an in naturally lead to hostility. Ended when a player (not the quest giver) trying to end the fighting by offered him a job helping them - and pulled out a few gold coins to visually communicate during the fighting. A bargain was immediately struck. (being fey, this was a binding agreement, though the terms are particular) At another time, the people we were with refused to give the goblin some of the food they were cooking. Having shown him offense, it would be returned mischievously. Having tracked down some of the enemy goblins, he took part of one and cooked it into jerky (nasty goblin-flesh tasting jerky) and then snuck it into their provisions for a nasty surprise later. (remember he is fey and only appears like a goblin, so this isn't cannibalism for him to give someone goblin flesh) Also, he would listen/obey to the person who payed him, because that was part of the bargain, be he would often ignore the other party members trying to tell him to do something unless they were willing to strike some deal with him.
I would run that if the players go into Faerie with cold iron the world starts to reject them, they don't see anything as the very light shies away from them, they don't hear anything because the sound avoids them, even the very ground crumbles at their feet because it fears the cold iron.
In many myths, it's cold wrought iron that affects faeries, rather than iron itself. That's iron that has been worked without heat. In DnD terms, cold wrought iron weapons would be rare magical items, specifically made to be effective against faeries.
The thing I'm most excited to do in a Feywild campaign is to put the party against a lich inspired by Koschei the Deathless (who is actually one of the oldest, if not the oldest lich in human folklore history). Koschei hid his death in a needle in an egg in a duck in a rabbit in a chest locked away in a box on a remote island. I think it would be so funny/cool to have a fey lich who has hidden their phylactery so tediously and randomly.
Had a campaign idea in my head for ages of a continent being taken over by the feywild as it bled through into the material plane. After abandoning the continent, a number of factions have joined forces to reclaim it, have established a fortress/town that expands as the campaign progresses, and are slowly exploring the area, discovering ruins, and trying to beat back the feywild.
I fell in love with your channel the moment you quoted Surprised by Joy, On Faerie Stories, and especially Strange and Norrel! This video is the main reason I became a DM. I had been frustrated with the existing D&D lore for the fey for years, and wanted to play in a feywild campaign that made the fey powerful and alien and scary, like Susana Clarke did! And your video gave me the tools and vision to make it happen, so I built my own setting and have since run 3 full length campaigns for my lovely and wonderful players. I'm now planning a 4th. Every time, I come back to this video to find my aesthetic bearings again. I owe you so much Dael, keep being you!
As a gameplay mechanic and a bit of fun narratively - what if the creatures in the Feywild are resistant or immune to magic weapons but non-magic weapons do damage to them? Should this happen after 8th level or so it could become a neat challenge
I'm not sure were it originated from but cold-forged Iron is typically seen as a weakness of Fey-Creatures in pop culture. It makes sense in a way, especially if you use a DND-twist to make it where you're literally forging the iron with ice rather than fire.
Bailey Higdon This is a common misunderstanding. In real life, iron is never “forged” cold. But in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, the term “cold iron” was used poetically, in literature, to mean a weapon made of steel - such as a sword. Much like we might say “Her words cut him deeper than any cold, hard steel ever could.” Some fantasy rpg’s have taken this misunderstanding and built it into their lore. For example, the Forgotten Realms wiki says “Cold iron was a type of iron. It was forged at a lower temperature than normal iron or steel, in order to preserve its properties. It was mined deep underground and famed for its efficacy against fey creatures.” So in the Forgotten Realms, “cold iron” weapons were specially made for that purpose. But in my homebrew, I just make all fey vulnerable to any iron based weapons. Imagine my young fighter’s delight when she discovers that her ordinary rapier is more feared by the Hag than the wizard’s firebolt or the Druid’s wildshaped bear attacks.
One interesting source of inspiration for fairies is the Lorwyn setting in magic the gathering: in it, fairies are mischievous insect-like creatures that go around in groups of 3, collecting informations and stealing dreams from all other races for pure curiosity, and then share them with their queen/mother Oona, that is a sort of giant flower-person that creates all fairies, and also the main villain of the story, but also one of the main heroes. At the same time. Without entirely knowing it.
Yes, this was vague, but as someone who is far more concerned with story progression and intrigue than with rules and dynamics; this was extremely helpful, gave me lots of ideas and I agreed with a lot of points, lore-based especially. To me, this is one of your best videos because it didn't focus to heavily on dynamics but also respected to another degree, the lore and feel that any DM wants to eminate. And that is to me, the hardest part to get USEFUL tips on. 20/10 one of my favorite videos thus far!
I've been fleshing out my version of the Feywild for my homebrew world, and this video was excellent! The use of fantasy authors and scholars really shows the care and research you do for your own storytelling, and I can't help but admire that!
A thought I had, watching your always excellent videos, was to utilize PCs Behaviors, Ideals, Bonds, and/or Flaws as things that manifest in people/places/things in the Feywild. Do not, as a DM, inform the players of this, but rather introduce it on the sly and wait to see when players start to resonate with these aspects that they themselves chose for their characters, but often get overlooked (such is the nature of the game). Example: Flaw - I'm a sucker for a pretty face. As the players enter the Feywild they continuously encounter (and accrue) fey that are simply infatuated by the PC with this trait. It matters not what this PC's charisma score is, or how attractive they have described themselves, what matters is that this is a manifestation of their reality in a way that is almost like a mirror. Alternatively, the same flaw could manifest as a nymph who consistently appears for everyone but the PC with this flaw, or perhaps only for them, and threatens to lure them away. The ultimate goal of such is to give the players some soul searching to chew on as they see their own aspects reflected as if in fun house mirrors. Warped, but still identifiable, and perhaps not to their liking. The only other thing I wanted to mention was that the endeavor to describe Faerie was highly entertaining and eye-opening. I came to realize that Faerie is the embodiment of that inability to explain Faerie with our limited human terms. It is the feeling, plain and simple. The state of recognizing something as more natural than ourselves and the painful longing to abandon that which is human in us so that we can be a part of it. Like abandoning your day job to live in the woods and build a cabin with nothing but a stone axe. The need to forget language so that you can accurately describe a sunrise, and yet the frustration of having forgot the very means by which you can share it to another. Ultimately, the need to bear witness to nature personally, and not through the limited shared consciousness that language affords us mortals. Thanks, Dael!
I have been deep diving into the content of Dael Kingsmill. And Thank You Dale! Such great content. But this video may be one of my favorites and possibly most favorite. Ps Dael Kingsmill has now become the name of a character in the DnD world I have built. Currently the PC`s are in a Swamp. Now because of this I will adjust the name of the northern part of the swamp that has an open rift to the Fey, it is know known as the, "Bog & Mire Forest of Forgotten Friends".
In my game, creatures of the feywild dont die. So eating another creature in the feywild is a decision made with that creature - an elk or fish of the feywild would be entirely aware of the whole process of its being eaten, and you wouldn’t cook meats in the feywild. One of my players was taken into the feywild during a one shot by a beautiful white bull that carried him through a wall. He lied to a few pixies that he was the god Dionysus, resulting in him being brought to a party in the court of an ancient fairie dragon. The dragon aided him in supplying the feast and performance that would be expected should Dionysus/Bacchus arrive as a guest, thereby cementing his pact - and continuing what he then learned was a longstanding family tradition. At some point he will return there to seek out his parents who have been elsewhere in the feywild for a long time. To me the fey crossings are - like you were saying about getting lost - places where the quality of the environment feels beautiful, serene, calm and safe. Disturbingly undisturbed. They are palces where you could not tell which side you were on at the time you cross. I think that reinforces the idea of having designated crossing times. A party decides to take a long rest there, and come morning you tell them the sun is just peaking over the horizon. But as the day goes on it never seems to advance so you never really know if it is night or day.
That sounds awesome. I especially like the idea of eating creatures you came up with. I might steal that at some point ;) I love the Feywild. It's such a unique setting
I really like the "getting out" part. " - Oh sure, you can go home easy, just dive into this pond. As long you didn't eat anything or said "thank you" to a fairy or bow to anybody here, you'll be perfectly fine. - huuuuuu... about that..." And the classic "I'll take you to a gate. But it's dangerous. And you have to take me with you to the mortal real." With all the troubles that keeping (or breaking) the promise might create. The concept of finding a friendly/dangerous/trickster/oblivious/whatthehellareyou "guide" in the fey land is a classic, always nice.
My favourite attempt to reach faerie is from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel in which Strange takes Mercury and various other dangerous curatives in order to induce madness. The faerie that he had been attempting to contact had been successfully summoned but didn’t wish to speak to him and was surprised at Strange’s success.
sail into a mist, wait untill the food runs out and the players are giving up or going to panic and want to go back. then their boat will hit a shore in the mist with a high white cliffside and a path up it.
I had adopted the rise of a cult of an Old One hiding at a paranormal gate between the Material Plane and the Feywild. The Feybound Warlock must tear down the hard to find gateway to preserve both the Archfey's desmesne and the nearby Material areas. Other party members have other reasons for this quest, but it plays well into my concept of D&D planes, magic, and cultures.
This is so good, you killed it. If you ever want to make a follow-up, delving deeper into how to really get into the mindset of the fey would be like a gift of a kumquat from the Lady of Hopeless Wishes. It’s one thing to talk about having worldview and frame of values that’s totally alien, but getting into that headspace and doing a great job RPing it is another kettle of stolen children altogether.
Something I'm doing currently is there's a place called faerie lake and the bottom of that lake is actually the top of a lake in the fey wild. And the shadowfell is a seemingly endless shadowed land
Feywilds in my campaign are essentially cloaked fey hotspots, but they aren’t just forest, some are taiga like a winter wonderland- others are an oasis in a desert that can only be accessed by running into the right mirage
Great video! Love hearing Lewis and Tolkien’s thoughts on this. And I love your description of your setting as pervasive magic. It’s deeper and more primal.
Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. Written at the height of his prowess. Cannot more highly recommend it, great folk and Fae encounters and truly mystical mad magicians, a joy. Dry wit with a light touch.
My late father bought a copy of Froud & Lee's "Faeries" not long after it was published, which would have been around the time I started middle school. I started playing D&D within few years after, so that book has always influenced how I think of the fey in RPGs. I bought myself a copy not long after moving away from home. My myth-obsessed daughter now has my dad's copy, which she discovered among the books I had asked Mom to keep for me from his library. (His collection also included some Froud's other faerie books, Huygen & Poortvliet's "Gnomes," and similar gems).
Norrell and strange was an amazing tale. Patrick Rothfuss King killer series has an incredible idea of the vagaries of different types of magic and some fey elements I believe (Been a while since I've read it) and Mark Chadbourn did an incredible job with two series involving the alien strangeness of the fey and their customs in The Age of Misrule series and the Dark Age series.
An idea that has proven to be really popular among my players is to fuck around with direction and time. Moving in a specific direction doesn't really change your physical position but it does change the time of day. North => night, south => day. You can play further with this by adding: West => summer, East => winter. This can be really fun, especially if you use the Seasonal Fey Courts.
A while back I ran a campaign with a lot of faerie creatures in it. I had iron weapons do double damage to fully faerie creatures (eg pixies, driads and unicorns, but not elves or centaurs). But iron weapons were only easily available to dwarves. Most other creatures used bronze weapons, though elves sometimes used titanium. Elves weren't available as a player race, as I was keeping them sinister, powerful and manipulative. In this campaign, I was using metallurgy of weapons and equipment as a large part of the culture for various races and also part of what made some weapons magical. Smiths were redsmiths (bronze) or whitesmiths (tin), only dwarves had blacksmiths (iron). If you look into it, there are a lot of interesting modern and historical alloys of copper or other metals. Some of which (e.g. spring copper: copper/beryllium) would make very effective weapons or armour. Another example: Tungsten has the same density as gold (about 4x iron). The dwarf fighter in the party had a tungsten battleaxe, as he had the strength to wield it. If anyone had got hold of a cold wrought iron weapon, it would have been especially deadly vs faerie creatures. Though it would have taken a great deal of effort by a very talented blacksmith to work iron without using heat.
I read a story YEARS ago. Someone put an iron ring on a faerie and it didn't harm the fae but it did bind them in sort of a pseudo marriage to the ring's owner.
Hurrah! Another Dale vid. How do we convince WOC to hire you as a creativity advisor. You bring a level of insight and originality wound through with mythology and mystery that would greatly benefit D&D products. Thanks as always 👍
I like the idea that cold iron is simply too "of the material plane" to even go to the feywild. Unlike silver, which hurts certain monsters because it has magic properties, cold iron is explicitly so ultra-mundane that it harms creatures like fairies and demons who are trying not to obey the material plane's rules. Because of this, the feywild doesn't even register cold iron's existence enough for it to be able to enter there.
When I think of the Feywild I think of the movie Maleficent. Also, the feywild is where you find your dreams and desires fulfilled but there’s a twisted catch to achieving them.
This is a great video for inspiration, from somebody who is putting together a Fey heavy campaign and finding the handbook and monster manual cookie-cutters to feel rather flat. I think it is interesting that faerie is, and fairies are, so alien to our way of being that there isn't even an effective way to use our language to describe their nature, perspective, and environment. I hope to capture that liminal mirror world feeling when the party falls through the map and proceeds to negligently break a grievous rule. Thank you for the further reading recommendations!
Oh hey, that Merlin story you mentioned. I had this really cool English class at my university where we studied a variety of ancient and modern takes on Arthurian lore and that series was one of the books we read. Ended up writing this huge paper taking in all the aspects of Merlin displayed in early legends and seeing which modern takes most accurately adapted him. It was a fun paper to write. Even if I hated having to watch Disney’s The Sword and the Stone.
I have a place in my setting that is like a very well known area, but it doubles as the entrance to the Feywild. It's called The Feylan Forest, this massive almost like "The Lost Woods" styled forest that circles of kingdom of the Fey Elves. The Elves are the only people that can navigate the forest from memory, and certain areas of the Feylan Forest will bleed in the Feywild during certain times of year. (I conduct this via a percentile roll that gets triggered whenever the party indicates that they change direction. Going straight just loops you back to the entrance no matter what.)
Amulets of cold iron, said to protect against the fey. But just like elements of the fey will bind you to the feywild (food, drink), the cold iron will anchor you in the material plane. Half the party will make it through the forest, the other ends up in the feywild.
The fun thing about faerie being the native realm of faeries means that when making a map... if that's even a possible thing... it can contradict ALL of the making-sense stuff. Maybe water can even flow, in places, reverse to gravity, or have oceans be somehow high places.
Coming back to this a year later, I get struck by this thought: when describing Faerie, you can't say what it is, but what it means. A necklace of broken promises and regrets. A lonely mountain. A palace made of light and music.
This is really fantastic and my highlights are the monkey comment and the trip recovery! Thank you. You crack me up, and I really love your take/approach in your videos.
It's interesting that you brought up Hades, because in *Slavic* legend, the equivalent of the fair folk are spirits of the dead (death and the afterlife seem to generally be a big deal in Slavic folklore), which would make the equivalent of Fairie Navia - the mythical realm of the dead, and certain, more chtonic-leaning gods. And the interesting thing is, storks are believed to be able to travel back and forth between Navia freely, which is even one possibility of where the idea of storks bringing children comes from - they transport souls back and forth between the afterlife
A little late to discovering your stuff but it is great! I'm arguably more into world building that any other aspect of the game and your videos have been very inspirational. In my setting of Somnia (usually when I write about it, it's because I have insomnia, so I'm... In... Somnia) I largely built it under the framework of 3.5 when considering the various planar locations. The feywild as described in 5e was a newer concept for me being a proper plane, but how I decided to incorporate it into my setting was that the material plane went untouched and unordered by the gods for a long time (a period called as the Primoridal Dark ) it was secluded from the other planes. When the gods first found it and Pelor released the first light, where this meeting of light and dark first intertwined it created the first links between the material plane and the feywild, allowing it to not only touch but spread a bit into the material. All of nature that now blooms on Somnia owes some tiny connection to the feywild, also this connection combined with the fey who had traveled too and from out of curiosity, is what spawned several of Somnian fey (native born on Somnia and more of a mix of the two worlds, I treat standard satyr as one of these species). The fey of the feywild though view our world something like we view a zoo, somehow contained and not as free. As if the leopard was viewing the world of a house cat. Seeing something familiar yet entirely foreign at the same time. Its exotic feeling coming from the tremendous mundane of it all. Where a mortal seeing the feywild would be the House cat viewing the world of a leopard.
A neat way to make the Fey’s sense of morality weird could be to write a set of social rules beforehand but don’t tell the players what the rules are. That way the fey are internally consistent yet will be perplexing and unsettling. Also maybe a neat way to combine the “no one knows their name” with “you can’t just fight a fey in their realm” would be to say that knowing a fey’s name doesn’t itself kill them but they’re invulnerable if you don’t know their name. I’d even apply that with fey v fey interactions so violence doesn’t normally have consequences in the feywild
I have played with direction for the feywild: West: Deeper into the Feywild, East, closer to the "border marches." North is towards the Unseelie, and South is towards Seelie. You can't *merely* head East to escape the Feywild, but if you don't you will surely remain. You can't avoid all Unseelie fae and the darker aspects of fae by going South, but it matters.
So excited about this! For me as a fan of D&D, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and Narnia I have been struggling with deciding on a setting for our games. I don't have the time to homebrew and have found many of the published worlds to be too familiar, lacking mystery. What better place to find adventure than in the perilous realm! Looking forward to reading your recommendations and creating a campaign where the characters will find themselves drawn into a land of mystery and peril, adventure and amazement. Into the Feywild we go! Thoroughly enjoyed your video - thank you Dael.
Thanks for some profound thoughts! I feel like Forgotten Realms kinda lost this pervasiveness and freshness of Faerie world. Glad to find it again in your approach!
When I DMed a campaign that had a section on the fey I took a lot of inspiration from Algernon Blackwoods 'The Willows' and a number of modern forest centered creepypastas. Like, the the creepypastas about forest rangers and finding pristine staircases in the middle of the forest. Stuff like Slenderman and the Rake, all which are basically modern fairy tales. Those were some of my best moments as a DM where logic and mechanics no longer held meaning to the player and watching them figure out that you need to THINK differently, and that you actually need to FAIL a survival check from getting lost to succeed. If done right Fey scenarios can be the most memorable in my opinion.
I got that Illustrated fairy book years ago. I loved it and thought it was creepy all at the same time. I got one that was similar about gnomes. These were so much fun to read!
This video inspired me to make a faewild faun melee class, this video and fearne calloway of course. Here is a bit about her. Shes been back and forth between the fae wild and the mortal plane quite a few times, dozens even, but because of the oddity of time, what was for her days between visits, could be anywhere from weeks to years to a lifetime, and, she doesnt quite get that the villagers were for the most part afraid of her, and she became a cryptid like figure for the small village, the sort of scary stories they'd tell their children to keep them out of the woods. "Hello, My name is Floralynn... Floralynn De LaFontaine. But when I visit my mortal friends, they call me Pale Oak Wendy, or Hanged Wendy when they are rushing... I'm not sure why, but they did always sound so excited when they said it, so I didn't want to ruin their fun... They hadn't ever asked me my name though... maybe someday they will?.... What is your name, and what do your mortal friends call you?" I want otherness to exude from every fiber of her being. The focused point between peace and chaos. A clash of a terrifying presence, tall, armoured, strong, with her mannerisms all slightly off, And, beautiful, calming, carefree, slightly whimsical
Thank you for providing a good summary with examples and suggestions for how to make the Feywild line up with the Faerie of lore and the mysterious and symbolic nature of magic in those stories over the more well-defined and "scientific" nature of magic in more modern fantasy, especially fantasy games (whether video or tabletop). So I think I've decided for sure then (or for now at least) on what would make the Feywild different from the Prime Material of what is already a fantasy world, and that is going to have to be the way magic works... Which I had an inkling of before since I've read lots of Faerie stories before, but hasn't yet articulated it for DnD. Pretty much by definition, normal magic in DnD is pretty orderly and structured... It's a hard magic system. You have a whole rulebook dictating precisely how magic works each and every time and who can have it with spell slots and preparation and memorization and component costs that all strictly define magic. Sorcerers, especially wild magic sorcerers, play with this a little bit to make it more innate and mysterious and random, but I think my idea now for both the Feywild and Shadowfell is a place where magic is innate to everything based on the mysterious power of the sentient mind and soul... The Feywild is a natural place where imagination and intent become reality, while the Shadowfell is where fear and anxiety are manifest. In this way both are more chaotic and mysterious "fantasy worlds" within an already magical fantasy world that happens to already contain some degree of order imposed on magic (usually by the gods in canon DnD lore), wherever your world falls in terms of baseline magic...
I live only a few mile away from Pity-Me in Durham. We also have a place called NoPlace quite close by too. Dael, I could listen to you talk about myths and mythology for hours, you have such a distinct style of story telling. :-)
Everything you said about C.S.Lewis on faerie reminded me of the Horse and his Boy. One theme of the book is “Northernness”. Shasta lives in the mundane desert land and wants to live in the faerie North where exist the talking animals, fauns, and dwarves. He longs to escape his dull life of abuse in the desert and live free in the cool northern vistas.
Tolkein and Lewis are the Kings of Elves and Fey. I would also posit this quote from Terry Pratchett. Always makes me think of the Feywild. "Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.”
I LOVE U I JUST HAD A SPLENDID IDEA FOR PACT OF THE ARCHFEY WARLOCKS. Thought that it would be interesting to have Titania's outsider name to be Fairy God Mother (instead of godmother since she is a godlike fey and mother because the fairy mother or because of stealing children) and take Once Uppon A Time's approach that fairy godmothers take children to raise heroes and with the pass of the years people misunderstood it for godmother. The roleplay potential.
This is incredible.Your ideas are so well researched and articulated in a way that could be practically implemented. I'm going to have to check out more of your stuff. Also, I get the sense that any players in your games get to enjoy an extremely vivid setting.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one of the few books I've read that really nails Fairies as "not good or evil just really alien". Its one of my favourite books.
So the Faewild appears to be a realm of fluidity that is based on whimsy and mischief with just a hint of wonder, the phrase "expect the unexpected" is heavily implied there, and it appears that laws and rules are bound by deals between two parties
This video makes me think you'd really enjoy parts of The Kingkiller Chronicles and how Rothfuss implies way more often than he explicitly tells in his storytelling.
Iv'e never heard of your channel before this, but I did want to run a quest in the feywild, where a tribe of pixies send the players to rescue a flumph that had been kidnapped by goblins.
A Wise Man's Fear is a book that describes the Fae very well. I would definitely recommend it, though it is book two in the King Killer Chronicles so read The Name of the Wind first.
This is fantastic. The only games I've played where the feywild comes up, have been run really well. I think the love of what Fairie is, only appeals to people who already get it, even if they can't understand why they like it. Their fascination with the feywild is as abstract and emotional as the feywild itself. Thank you for bringing up Jonathan Strange. It's my second favorite modern Fairie story after King of Elfland's Daughter.
Also, Ian McDonald's "King of Morning, Queen of Day" always sticks in my head as a way to discuss how the fey can passingly interact with multiple generations, with a history of Irish struggles.
No one gets it like Dael does. I'm currently writing a play about two people who get lost in Faerie, and I honestly learned so much from this video. It felt like a lot of things that lots of us might on some level inherently know and use in our stories or campaigns without understanding the factors influencing it - but this video puts them into words so well. Also, "Use the language of ideas to put non-pictures in people's heads." is possibly some of the best writing advice I've ever heard. It's that idea of the non-picture. Prompting someone's imagination to conjure something up that they can't possibly conjure up, and so they conjure up the absence of it, the shape of it, the outline; or in place of it, they imagine something completely different, completely unexpected even by the author. It's like directly triggering the part of the brain that contains and responds to the Uncanny.
I just played pathfinder: kingmaker, and it's version of the feywild: the old world, is like the god's first draft of the universe, where the laws of nature weren't physics, but everything was defined by emotions. ( they obvoiusly scrapped that idea and made the laws of physics in the second draft due to most of them preferring order to total chaos) This naturally affects the fey's behavior, for instance they might be very jolly and confident, because expressing doubt and fear might literally take them to a bad place. In that settings the creatures native to the feywild doesn't have the soul/body distinction where the soul goes to some afterlife, but they are instead reincarnated in the feywild in a new, weaker form, but with their memories and personalities intact. This would of course make killing someone more like a prank, than condemning them to hell, and explains some of the skewed logic the fey often express. Also, perspective and size can be played with if you throw physics out the window. Imagine being invited to a eladrin's castle, which he points out on a hill in the distance, but when you walk there, it comes closer, but never increases in size, so you end up at a castle the size of a sand castle. You still have to enter some way as not to be impolite....
Spot on, in your conceptual personal interpretation of faywild. Your were articulate and clearly welspoken too. You eloquently, hit the nail on it's head, you have amazing understanding of the material and I wish I had, had a DM with your perfect sense of meaning of the land of the fay and faeries.
I agree with the notion that defining the fae (or even game mechanics regarding magic and monsters - anything that is fueled on mystery and the unknown) is a slippery slope. Even referring to goblins as 'goblins' instead of describing features and mannerisms half seen in the gloom, each an individual rather than a species with set characteristics, in my opinion, is better to avoid. Vids like this one are really great for GM/DMs behind the curtain, tinkering backstage. Thanks for uploading. Dael, great stuff.
My plan for the Feywild is a "World that once was. Still full of beauty but the original residents are either gone or have become something frightening."
Love this video precisely because it's about the desired affect, not the steps to take. The Feywild isn't just another place. It's a whole different way of thinking.
This is such a good video to re-watch for ideas for my archfey warlock I'm planning. I love the idea of a human who somehow gets wrapped up in all of the high magic, low logic strangeness of a fae.
One thing that's helped a ton with establishing the vibe of the Feywild is to Never Refer To It As The Feywild. Maybe a dusty tome so analytic it borders on useless found in an old wizard's library uses the term, but anyone who's actually gonna be able to help a party without plane shift find their way into it (such as an ancient powerful druid) is going refer to it in a much more magical way. "Feywild" has always just seemed such a DND game-y kind of term and using it carelessly will ruin the atmosphere.
Oh.
I thought this was going to be like "If I were Queen of the Feywild, boy there'd be some changes over there."
i want that video too
like this was good lets hear the other video
“You raise your sword to attack the fairy.
Make an intelligence saving throw.”
“Uh, 12.”
“You swing your baguette at the fairy & the baguette turns to liquid.”
“I try to scoop up the liquid”
“Make a charisma saving throw”
“20!”
“You’re holding the liquid in your hands, a great big chunk of it”
“I uh, squash the liquid into a ball”
“Make an intelligence check”
“17”
“The bread decides that it was more fond of being a sword than a ball & is upset at you - you notice the fairy is gone at this point”
“I chase after my bread & try & find the fairy”
“You find a forest of bread, looking around you unsheathe your fairy, worried about what dangers lurk here”
Bugs Bunny energy in that last line.
Old Spice: D&D Edition
Dealing with the fae wild should feel like a dream....or a mushroom trip.
Congrats. Fucking nailed it.
@@PandorasFolly Thanks man.
In my imagination, things in the Feywild both shouldn't make sense & at the same time, be whimsically dangerous. No one is going to stab you with a sword, or throw a fireball at you, but they'll turn you into a sheep & make the suggestion that you should pretend to be a cloud - then you end up floating into the sky for an hour until Polymorph wears off.
@@HeavensOfMetal exactly. Have you ever read any of the books from the Game "Mage of the Ascension"? You can find the pdfs online and if you haven't read them, they are totally blooming from this kind of trellis. Each book has about a PhDs worth of research in them.
For me in the feywild everything is the original version where our world feels like the copy of a copy, a fey tree is just more treeish than a material realm tree.
Cool! The realm where the platonic ideals of objects and concepts actually exist!
That low-key minion cosplay tho
If you had a T-Shirt with "Vague & Evocative" on it, I'd probably buy it. Just saying.
Andrew Webb I agree.
I’d also wear “Zip-Zap-Boing”.
honestly i never had a word or phrase for the feeling until i started watching this channel so im obliged to buy one
I'd wear it.
Came here to comment this, black shirt, white lettering, maybe pseudo D&D font.
Vague and Evocative is my jam. It’s delicious on toast.
I also like the twist Terry Pratchett had on the Fae/Elves (on their morality, or lack thereof):
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
When it comes to getting INTO Faerie, or the Feywilds, I am always reminded of a line from PotC: At World's End - "For certain, you have to be lost to find a place that can't be found, elseways everyone would know where it was."
I also like the idea that certain geography has a natural connection to the Feywild, and that the two might bleed together. So a party that is lost in a Forest would more likely find Faerie, as opposed to just being lost on the plains. I might even go so far as to include the idea of twilight, since I have always envisioned it as being constant twilight there.
It comes from my love of the Courts - Seelie/Unseelie, Summer/Winter, and the constant balance between light, dark, warm, cold, night, day.
My favourite succinct depiction of Faerie magic comes from Doctor Who, of all places.
“Humans do all sorts of things with numbers - you split the atom! Well, [witches] do that with words.”
Dael’s book recommendations:
- “On Fairy-Stories” by J.R.R. Tolkien
- “Surprised by Joy” by C.S. Lewis
- “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel” by Susanna Clarke
- “Irish Faerie and Folktales” by W. B. Yeats
- “The Crystal Cave” “The Hollow Hills,” “the Merlin Trilogy” and others by Mary Stewart
- “Faeries” by Brian Froud; Allen Lee
I’ve only read the first one
Was looking for this, thank you
Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. Written at the height of his prowess. Cannot more highly recommend it, great folk and Fae encounters and truly mystical mad magicians, a joy. Dry wit with a light touch.
Thankyou
“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
I'm running a game with an Archfey Warlock set at sea, and your discussion of liminal spaces and the blurring of thresholds reminded me of that shot in Pirates of the Caribbean where the perfectly still ocean reflects the stars, obscuring the ocean surface entirely. And then I thought about the surface again, as Jack Sparrow essentially shows us how to travel between the two planes when he inverts the ship and sails on the other side of the ocean's surface! I wouldn't have made all those connections if I hadn't seen you break the ideas down in this video first so thanks for the inspiration!
"The nature of Fey is that often what you look at is hard to describe, and the idea is more pervasive than the physical appearance.
When a fairy has clothes the color of a mid day storm. How cloudy? How rainy? Lit up by lightning or over the ocean? Snow storm? Blizard? Thunder? These things are answered by the observer because the ideal is more important than the physics of shape light and color, and the constant of its appearance isn’t what it looks like, but what you think when you look at it."
My DM describing why Fey are so strange so we stop asking questions about what the color of clouds means
15:09 "remember how dreams work?" a truly dystopian question
On the nature of fairies: There was a great reddit post that I have since lost on the morality of fairies. It took the approach of creating an axis (similar to our good/evil x lawful/chaotic axis we use for character creation) and came to the conclusion, based off various stories mentioning fairies, that fairy society would value the natural over the constructed and the spontaneous over the methodical.
Essentially it was that a fairy believes it is virtuous to keep with ones place in nature. This doesn't mean that like civilization is evil, but more of a "don't rock the boat" mentality. If you're a beggar or a king, be content with your place in the food chain. And then on the other hand, they would also believe that it is virtuous to be spontaneous. The fairy who seeks to control the future through careful planning is foolish. To do what is dramatic in the moment, what is interesting and *fun,* is most noble. Sticking to plans that have since become dull is nonsense.
Anyway, it was an interesting thought and has definitely influenced how i view Fairy behavior. If i ever find that post again I will link it here.
Lawful Grumpy during Winter & Chaotic Merry during Spring & during Summer the courts are divided by Lawful Merry & Chaotic Grumpy during Autumn?
This for me was the most helpful video I’ve found on the Feywild thus far
I love all of this.
Personally, I go the exact opposite with cold iron, largely due to my being a massive Dresden Files fanboy: Any old Iron will do. a steel sword, a lump of iron ore, a handful of nails, you name it, if it's ferrous, fey can't abide it (except ones like Annis Hags and Redcaps who explicitly have iron elements in their lore and statblocks, and that just inspires all sorts of fun questions like how they got their iron immunity and how other fey feel about them), and merely the touch of iron is unpleasant to the fey. But, they're preternaturally good at avoiding contact with the stuff. Good luck sneaking up on a faerie to stab it with a steel dagger or hack it to bits with an iron axe. I don't have explicit rules for any of this, I would probably deal with it on a fey-by-fey basis, but off the top of my head, I would suspect contact with iron would screw up what the fey is best at, so a caster might have difficulty concentrating on spells, while a warrior might become frail and clumsy after touching iron.
I also think that glamours are interesting. I love the idea that the beauty of Faerie isn't even skin deep. Like, I love in The Sandman when Nuala comes to stay in Dream's realm and he strips her of her glamours and she's just this frail, plain creature. Or in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies when you get hints (or at least, I did the first time I read it; probably due for a reread) that underneath the sophisticated illusions that the Elves wore into Lancre were just primitive warriors dressed in hides killing their victims with stone weapons. I love the idea of Faerie glamours being like illusions, but better. Like, there's a solidity to them, an appeal to all the senses that eludes even the greatest of mortal illusionists while being like child's play to the fey.
Ooh! That's a third thing. I think part of what makes the fey so interesting and alien is the reversal of what comes easily versus what is difficult compared to the experience of humans and other mortals. Like, humans need to go to all this work to use magic, whether it's a lifetime of worship in a temple, or of study in a magic school or bardic college, or of servitude to an otherworldly patron (with sorcerers as the exception), but creatures of Faerie are creatures of magic through and through; they cast complicated spells as easily as a mortal makes a sandwich. On the other hand, things like lying or using iron tools are so easy that any mortal can do it without thinking, but would stymie a faerie creature to no end. These are just my favorite examples, but it's a neat shorthand to illustrate their alienness: What's hard for mortals but easy for the fey, and what's easy for mortals but hard for the fey?
Anthony Sladky I do something similar with my fey/iron interactions. In my world, all fey are vulnerable to any iron based weapons. Imagine my young fighter’s delight when she discovers that her ordinary rapier is more feared by the Hag than the wizard’s firebolt or the Druid’s wildshaped bear attacks.
Specifically addressing the Redcap issue, after they are slain, my players discover that Redcap bodies “revert” to what they actually are rather than what they appear to have been - Like Pinocchio being a puppet that was turned into a real boy by a fairy, Redcaps are “real old men” that were made from straw filled puppets. When they die, they turn back into the marionettes that they were. It turns out that the iron shoes are actually just thin LEAD cups at the ends of their footless legs. No wonder they are so clumsy.
Fey will occasionally use other metals, lead and tin, copper, silver, and of course gold. But they will never willingly touch iron. Although some, like the Annis Hags, will create the illusion of iron teeth or nails, partly to hide their dread of the metal, partly just for the thrill of deception.
I played a character that looked like a goblin but was actually supposed to be a fey trickster sort of character (along the lines of rumplestiltskin or a bubbayaga, be careful about the specifics of the deal you make).
Part of what was fun to play was having rules that the DM and I knew but the other players, didn't.
For example, he didn't value most things, but precious metal, especially gold, were of extreme value to him, though not so quantity specific. The actual tangible coin was the valuable thing, not the promise of much wealth.
(think paying the ferryman, you need the coin in hand to pay not a future promise)
I had chosen a shadow monk class, so his fey aspects were greatly enhanced once he reached the early level where he can shadow teleport.
The campaign started with villages having problems with nearby goblins having been attacking travelers and homesteads, so my character sleeping in front of the fire at an in naturally lead to hostility.
Ended when a player (not the quest giver) trying to end the fighting by offered him a job helping them - and pulled out a few gold coins to visually communicate during the fighting. A bargain was immediately struck. (being fey, this was a binding agreement, though the terms are particular)
At another time, the people we were with refused to give the goblin some of the food they were cooking. Having shown him offense, it would be returned mischievously. Having tracked down some of the enemy goblins, he took part of one and cooked it into jerky (nasty goblin-flesh tasting jerky) and then snuck it into their provisions for a nasty surprise later. (remember he is fey and only appears like a goblin, so this isn't cannibalism for him to give someone goblin flesh)
Also, he would listen/obey to the person who payed him, because that was part of the bargain, be he would often ignore the other party members trying to tell him to do something unless they were willing to strike some deal with him.
I would run that if the players go into Faerie with cold iron the world starts to reject them, they don't see anything as the very light shies away from them, they don't hear anything because the sound avoids them, even the very ground crumbles at their feet because it fears the cold iron.
In many myths, it's cold wrought iron that affects faeries, rather than iron itself. That's iron that has been worked without heat. In DnD terms, cold wrought iron weapons would be rare magical items, specifically made to be effective against faeries.
"a great way to get out of fearie is to sit down and wait until morning." nicely put!
The thing I'm most excited to do in a Feywild campaign is to put the party against a lich inspired by Koschei the Deathless (who is actually one of the oldest, if not the oldest lich in human folklore history). Koschei hid his death in a needle in an egg in a duck in a rabbit in a chest locked away in a box on a remote island. I think it would be so funny/cool to have a fey lich who has hidden their phylactery so tediously and randomly.
You got the overalls as a gift for being a guest?
... You're not making Holland sound _less_ fae, you know
They gifted her with Clothing so she could be free and leave?
Ken Huff Dael is a free elf?
As a Hollander, I can confirm
Had a campaign idea in my head for ages of a continent being taken over by the feywild as it bled through into the material plane. After abandoning the continent, a number of factions have joined forces to reclaim it, have established a fortress/town that expands as the campaign progresses, and are slowly exploring the area, discovering ruins, and trying to beat back the feywild.
I fell in love with your channel the moment you quoted Surprised by Joy, On Faerie Stories, and especially Strange and Norrel! This video is the main reason I became a DM. I had been frustrated with the existing D&D lore for the fey for years, and wanted to play in a feywild campaign that made the fey powerful and alien and scary, like Susana Clarke did! And your video gave me the tools and vision to make it happen, so I built my own setting and have since run 3 full length campaigns for my lovely and wonderful players. I'm now planning a 4th. Every time, I come back to this video to find my aesthetic bearings again. I owe you so much Dael, keep being you!
As a gameplay mechanic and a bit of fun narratively - what if the creatures in the Feywild are resistant or immune to magic weapons but non-magic weapons do damage to them? Should this happen after 8th level or so it could become a neat challenge
I'm not sure were it originated from but cold-forged Iron is typically seen as a weakness of Fey-Creatures in pop culture. It makes sense in a way, especially if you use a DND-twist to make it where you're literally forging the iron with ice rather than fire.
Bailey Higdon This is a common misunderstanding. In real life, iron is never “forged” cold. But in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, the term “cold iron” was used poetically, in literature, to mean a weapon made of steel - such as a sword. Much like we might say “Her words cut him deeper than any cold, hard steel ever could.”
Some fantasy rpg’s have taken this misunderstanding and built it into their lore. For example, the Forgotten Realms wiki says “Cold iron was a type of iron. It was forged at a lower temperature than normal iron or steel, in order to preserve its properties. It was mined deep underground and famed for its efficacy against fey creatures.” So in the Forgotten Realms, “cold iron” weapons were specially made for that purpose.
But in my homebrew, I just make all fey vulnerable to any iron based weapons. Imagine my young fighter’s delight when she discovers that her ordinary rapier is more feared by the Hag than the wizard’s firebolt or the Druid’s wildshaped bear attacks.
Mirko Polyak On top of this. Make only pure Iron affect them to add an extra sense of uncertainty.
One interesting source of inspiration for fairies is the Lorwyn setting in magic the gathering: in it, fairies are mischievous insect-like creatures that go around in groups of 3, collecting informations and stealing dreams from all other races for pure curiosity, and then share them with their queen/mother Oona, that is a sort of giant flower-person that creates all fairies, and also the main villain of the story, but also one of the main heroes. At the same time. Without entirely knowing it.
Yes, this was vague, but as someone who is far more concerned with story progression and intrigue than with rules and dynamics; this was extremely helpful, gave me lots of ideas and I agreed with a lot of points, lore-based especially. To me, this is one of your best videos because it didn't focus to heavily on dynamics but also respected to another degree, the lore and feel that any DM wants to eminate. And that is to me, the hardest part to get USEFUL tips on. 20/10 one of my favorite videos thus far!
I've been fleshing out my version of the Feywild for my homebrew world, and this video was excellent! The use of fantasy authors and scholars really shows the care and research you do for your own storytelling, and I can't help but admire that!
A thought I had, watching your always excellent videos, was to utilize PCs Behaviors, Ideals, Bonds, and/or Flaws as things that manifest in people/places/things in the Feywild. Do not, as a DM, inform the players of this, but rather introduce it on the sly and wait to see when players start to resonate with these aspects that they themselves chose for their characters, but often get overlooked (such is the nature of the game).
Example: Flaw - I'm a sucker for a pretty face.
As the players enter the Feywild they continuously encounter (and accrue) fey that are simply infatuated by the PC with this trait. It matters not what this PC's charisma score is, or how attractive they have described themselves, what matters is that this is a manifestation of their reality in a way that is almost like a mirror.
Alternatively, the same flaw could manifest as a nymph who consistently appears for everyone but the PC with this flaw, or perhaps only for them, and threatens to lure them away.
The ultimate goal of such is to give the players some soul searching to chew on as they see their own aspects reflected as if in fun house mirrors. Warped, but still identifiable, and perhaps not to their liking.
The only other thing I wanted to mention was that the endeavor to describe Faerie was highly entertaining and eye-opening. I came to realize that Faerie is the embodiment of that inability to explain Faerie with our limited human terms. It is the feeling, plain and simple. The state of recognizing something as more natural than ourselves and the painful longing to abandon that which is human in us so that we can be a part of it. Like abandoning your day job to live in the woods and build a cabin with nothing but a stone axe. The need to forget language so that you can accurately describe a sunrise, and yet the frustration of having forgot the very means by which you can share it to another. Ultimately, the need to bear witness to nature personally, and not through the limited shared consciousness that language affords us mortals.
Thanks, Dael!
The PC personality traits idea is genius. It would also serve well in a Lower Planes setting for tormenting PCs in true Dante fashion.
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What a well executed video, helped me a ton with my campaign in the Feywild. Love it!
"Earthy and alien" seems like an apt description for the Feywild.
I have been deep diving into the content of Dael Kingsmill. And Thank You Dale! Such great content. But this video may be one of my favorites and possibly most favorite. Ps Dael Kingsmill has now become the name of a character in the DnD world I have built. Currently the PC`s are in a Swamp. Now because of this I will adjust the name of the northern part of the swamp that has an open rift to the Fey, it is know known as the, "Bog & Mire Forest of Forgotten Friends".
In my game, creatures of the feywild dont die. So eating another creature in the feywild is a decision made with that creature - an elk or fish of the feywild would be entirely aware of the whole process of its being eaten, and you wouldn’t cook meats in the feywild.
One of my players was taken into the feywild during a one shot by a beautiful white bull that carried him through a wall.
He lied to a few pixies that he was the god Dionysus, resulting in him being brought to a party in the court of an ancient fairie dragon. The dragon aided him in supplying the feast and performance that would be expected should Dionysus/Bacchus arrive as a guest, thereby cementing his pact - and continuing what he then learned was a longstanding family tradition. At some point he will return there to seek out his parents who have been elsewhere in the feywild for a long time.
To me the fey crossings are - like you were saying about getting lost - places where the quality of the environment feels beautiful, serene, calm and safe. Disturbingly undisturbed. They are palces where you could not tell which side you were on at the time you cross. I think that reinforces the idea of having designated crossing times.
A party decides to take a long rest there, and come morning you tell them the sun is just peaking over the horizon. But as the day goes on it never seems to advance so you never really know if it is night or day.
That sounds awesome. I especially like the idea of eating creatures you came up with. I might steal that at some point ;)
I love the Feywild. It's such a unique setting
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I really like the "getting out" part.
" - Oh sure, you can go home easy, just dive into this pond. As long you didn't eat anything or said "thank you" to a fairy or bow to anybody here, you'll be perfectly fine.
- huuuuuu... about that..."
And the classic "I'll take you to a gate. But it's dangerous. And you have to take me with you to the mortal real." With all the troubles that keeping (or breaking) the promise might create. The concept of finding a friendly/dangerous/trickster/oblivious/whatthehellareyou "guide" in the fey land is a classic, always nice.
My favourite attempt to reach faerie is from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel in which Strange takes Mercury and various other dangerous curatives in order to induce madness. The faerie that he had been attempting to contact had been successfully summoned but didn’t wish to speak to him and was surprised at Strange’s success.
sail into a mist, wait untill the food runs out and the players are giving up or going to panic and want to go back. then their boat will hit a shore in the mist with a high white cliffside and a path up it.
That reminds me of a description from The History Of The Peopling Of Ireland
I had adopted the rise of a cult of an Old One hiding at a paranormal gate between the Material Plane and the Feywild. The Feybound Warlock must tear down the hard to find gateway to preserve both the Archfey's desmesne and the nearby Material areas. Other party members have other reasons for this quest, but it plays well into my concept of D&D planes, magic, and cultures.
This is so good, you killed it. If you ever want to make a follow-up, delving deeper into how to really get into the mindset of the fey would be like a gift of a kumquat from the Lady of Hopeless Wishes. It’s one thing to talk about having worldview and frame of values that’s totally alien, but getting into that headspace and doing a great job RPing it is another kettle of stolen children altogether.
Something I'm doing currently is there's a place called faerie lake and the bottom of that lake is actually the top of a lake in the fey wild. And the shadowfell is a seemingly endless shadowed land
Feywilds in my campaign are essentially cloaked fey hotspots, but they aren’t just forest, some are taiga like a winter wonderland- others are an oasis in a desert that can only be accessed by running into the right mirage
Great video! Love hearing Lewis and Tolkien’s thoughts on this. And I love your description of your setting as pervasive magic. It’s deeper and more primal.
Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. Written at the height of his prowess. Cannot more highly recommend it, great folk and Fae encounters and truly mystical mad magicians, a joy. Dry wit with a light touch.
My late father bought a copy of Froud & Lee's "Faeries" not long after it was published, which would have been around the time I started middle school. I started playing D&D within few years after, so that book has always influenced how I think of the fey in RPGs. I bought myself a copy not long after moving away from home. My myth-obsessed daughter now has my dad's copy, which she discovered among the books I had asked Mom to keep for me from his library. (His collection also included some Froud's other faerie books, Huygen & Poortvliet's "Gnomes," and similar gems).
This makes me very, very happy
Norrell and strange was an amazing tale. Patrick Rothfuss King killer series has an incredible idea of the vagaries of different types of magic and some fey elements I believe (Been a while since I've read it) and Mark Chadbourn did an incredible job with two series involving the alien strangeness of the fey and their customs in The Age of Misrule series and the Dark Age series.
An idea that has proven to be really popular among my players is to fuck around with direction and time.
Moving in a specific direction doesn't really change your physical position but it does change the time of day.
North => night, south => day.
You can play further with this by adding:
West => summer, East => winter.
This can be really fun, especially if you use the Seasonal Fey Courts.
Dael video
Drop everything and watch.
A while back I ran a campaign with a lot of faerie creatures in it. I had iron weapons do double damage to fully faerie creatures (eg pixies, driads and unicorns, but not elves or centaurs). But iron weapons were only easily available to dwarves. Most other creatures used bronze weapons, though elves sometimes used titanium. Elves weren't available as a player race, as I was keeping them sinister, powerful and manipulative.
In this campaign, I was using metallurgy of weapons and equipment as a large part of the culture for various races and also part of what made some weapons magical. Smiths were redsmiths (bronze) or whitesmiths (tin), only dwarves had blacksmiths (iron). If you look into it, there are a lot of interesting modern and historical alloys of copper or other metals. Some of which (e.g. spring copper: copper/beryllium) would make very effective weapons or armour.
Another example: Tungsten has the same density as gold (about 4x iron). The dwarf fighter in the party had a tungsten battleaxe, as he had the strength to wield it.
If anyone had got hold of a cold wrought iron weapon, it would have been especially deadly vs faerie creatures. Though it would have taken a great deal of effort by a very talented blacksmith to work iron without using heat.
I read a story YEARS ago. Someone put an iron ring on a faerie and it didn't harm the fae but it did bind them in sort of a pseudo marriage to the ring's owner.
It is interesting how faerie and the cthulhu mythos are similar. One is just the wonderous version of the other. Both are sorta incomprehensible
Hurrah! Another Dale vid.
How do we convince WOC to hire you as a creativity advisor. You bring a level of insight and originality wound through with mythology and mystery that would greatly benefit D&D products.
Thanks as always 👍
I like the idea that cold iron is simply too "of the material plane" to even go to the feywild. Unlike silver, which hurts certain monsters because it has magic properties, cold iron is explicitly so ultra-mundane that it harms creatures like fairies and demons who are trying not to obey the material plane's rules. Because of this, the feywild doesn't even register cold iron's existence enough for it to be able to enter there.
When I think of the Feywild I think of the movie Maleficent. Also, the feywild is where you find your dreams and desires fulfilled but there’s a twisted catch to achieving them.
Scp 4000 is an evocative distillation of the classic elements, good for getting the essence of it.
This is a great video for inspiration, from somebody who is putting together a Fey heavy campaign and finding the handbook and monster manual cookie-cutters to feel rather flat. I think it is interesting that faerie is, and fairies are, so alien to our way of being that there isn't even an effective way to use our language to describe their nature, perspective, and environment. I hope to capture that liminal mirror world feeling when the party falls through the map and proceeds to negligently break a grievous rule. Thank you for the further reading recommendations!
Oh hey, that Merlin story you mentioned. I had this really cool English class at my university where we studied a variety of ancient and modern takes on Arthurian lore and that series was one of the books we read. Ended up writing this huge paper taking in all the aspects of Merlin displayed in early legends and seeing which modern takes most accurately adapted him. It was a fun paper to write. Even if I hated having to watch Disney’s The Sword and the Stone.
I have a place in my setting that is like a very well known area, but it doubles as the entrance to the Feywild. It's called The Feylan Forest, this massive almost like "The Lost Woods" styled forest that circles of kingdom of the Fey Elves. The Elves are the only people that can navigate the forest from memory, and certain areas of the Feylan Forest will bleed in the Feywild during certain times of year. (I conduct this via a percentile roll that gets triggered whenever the party indicates that they change direction. Going straight just loops you back to the entrance no matter what.)
Amulets of cold iron, said to protect against the fey. But just like elements of the fey will bind you to the feywild (food, drink), the cold iron will anchor you in the material plane. Half the party will make it through the forest, the other ends up in the feywild.
The fun thing about faerie being the native realm of faeries means that when making a map... if that's even a possible thing... it can contradict ALL of the making-sense stuff. Maybe water can even flow, in places, reverse to gravity, or have oceans be somehow high places.
Coming back to this a year later, I get struck by this thought: when describing Faerie, you can't say what it is, but what it means. A necklace of broken promises and regrets. A lonely mountain. A palace made of light and music.
This is really fantastic and my highlights are the monkey comment and the trip recovery! Thank you. You crack me up, and I really love your take/approach in your videos.
It's interesting that you brought up Hades, because in *Slavic* legend, the equivalent of the fair folk are spirits of the dead (death and the afterlife seem to generally be a big deal in Slavic folklore), which would make the equivalent of Fairie Navia - the mythical realm of the dead, and certain, more chtonic-leaning gods. And the interesting thing is, storks are believed to be able to travel back and forth between Navia freely, which is even one possibility of where the idea of storks bringing children comes from - they transport souls back and forth between the afterlife
A little late to discovering your stuff but it is great! I'm arguably more into world building that any other aspect of the game and your videos have been very inspirational. In my setting of Somnia (usually when I write about it, it's because I have insomnia, so I'm... In... Somnia) I largely built it under the framework of 3.5 when considering the various planar locations. The feywild as described in 5e was a newer concept for me being a proper plane, but how I decided to incorporate it into my setting was that the material plane went untouched and unordered by the gods for a long time (a period called as the Primoridal Dark ) it was secluded from the other planes. When the gods first found it and Pelor released the first light, where this meeting of light and dark first intertwined it created the first links between the material plane and the feywild, allowing it to not only touch but spread a bit into the material. All of nature that now blooms on Somnia owes some tiny connection to the feywild, also this connection combined with the fey who had traveled too and from out of curiosity, is what spawned several of Somnian fey (native born on Somnia and more of a mix of the two worlds, I treat standard satyr as one of these species). The fey of the feywild though view our world something like we view a zoo, somehow contained and not as free. As if the leopard was viewing the world of a house cat. Seeing something familiar yet entirely foreign at the same time. Its exotic feeling coming from the tremendous mundane of it all. Where a mortal seeing the feywild would be the House cat viewing the world of a leopard.
First vid of yours I've seen - your mind is the greatest thing I've experienced in months. Thank you!
A neat way to make the Fey’s sense of morality weird could be to write a set of social rules beforehand but don’t tell the players what the rules are. That way the fey are internally consistent yet will be perplexing and unsettling. Also maybe a neat way to combine the “no one knows their name” with “you can’t just fight a fey in their realm” would be to say that knowing a fey’s name doesn’t itself kill them but they’re invulnerable if you don’t know their name. I’d even apply that with fey v fey interactions so violence doesn’t normally have consequences in the feywild
The Changeling games in World of Darkness are an excellent setting for a horror type concept of the Fey and their realms.
I have played with direction for the feywild:
West: Deeper into the Feywild, East, closer to the "border marches."
North is towards the Unseelie, and South is towards Seelie.
You can't *merely* head East to escape the Feywild, but if you don't you will surely remain.
You can't avoid all Unseelie fae and the darker aspects of fae by going South, but it matters.
So excited about this! For me as a fan of D&D, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and Narnia I have been struggling with deciding on a setting for our games. I don't have the time to homebrew and have found many of the published worlds to be too familiar, lacking mystery. What better place to find adventure than in the perilous realm! Looking forward to reading your recommendations and creating a campaign where the characters will find themselves drawn into a land of mystery and peril, adventure and amazement. Into the Feywild we go! Thoroughly enjoyed your video - thank you Dael.
Thanks for some profound thoughts! I feel like Forgotten Realms kinda lost this pervasiveness and freshness of Faerie world. Glad to find it again in your approach!
When I DMed a campaign that had a section on the fey I took a lot of inspiration from Algernon Blackwoods 'The Willows' and a number of modern forest centered creepypastas. Like, the the creepypastas about forest rangers and finding pristine staircases in the middle of the forest. Stuff like Slenderman and the Rake, all which are basically modern fairy tales. Those were some of my best moments as a DM where logic and mechanics no longer held meaning to the player and watching them figure out that you need to THINK differently, and that you actually need to FAIL a survival check from getting lost to succeed. If done right Fey scenarios can be the most memorable in my opinion.
I got that Illustrated fairy book years ago. I loved it and thought it was creepy all at the same time. I got one that was similar about gnomes. These were so much fun to read!
This video inspired me to make a faewild faun melee class, this video and fearne calloway of course. Here is a bit about her.
Shes been back and forth between the fae wild and the mortal plane quite a few times, dozens even, but because of the oddity of time, what was for her days between visits, could be anywhere from weeks to years to a lifetime, and, she doesnt quite get that the villagers were for the most part afraid of her, and she became a cryptid like figure for the small village, the sort of scary stories they'd tell their children to keep them out of the woods.
"Hello, My name is Floralynn... Floralynn De LaFontaine. But when I visit my mortal friends, they call me Pale Oak Wendy, or Hanged Wendy when they are rushing... I'm not sure why, but they did always sound so excited when they said it, so I didn't want to ruin their fun... They hadn't ever asked me my name though... maybe someday they will?.... What is your name, and what do your mortal friends call you?"
I want otherness to exude from every fiber of her being. The focused point between peace and chaos. A clash of a terrifying presence,
tall, armoured, strong, with her mannerisms all slightly off,
And,
beautiful, calming, carefree, slightly whimsical
Thank you for providing a good summary with examples and suggestions for how to make the Feywild line up with the Faerie of lore and the mysterious and symbolic nature of magic in those stories over the more well-defined and "scientific" nature of magic in more modern fantasy, especially fantasy games (whether video or tabletop). So I think I've decided for sure then (or for now at least) on what would make the Feywild different from the Prime Material of what is already a fantasy world, and that is going to have to be the way magic works... Which I had an inkling of before since I've read lots of Faerie stories before, but hasn't yet articulated it for DnD.
Pretty much by definition, normal magic in DnD is pretty orderly and structured... It's a hard magic system. You have a whole rulebook dictating precisely how magic works each and every time and who can have it with spell slots and preparation and memorization and component costs that all strictly define magic. Sorcerers, especially wild magic sorcerers, play with this a little bit to make it more innate and mysterious and random, but I think my idea now for both the Feywild and Shadowfell is a place where magic is innate to everything based on the mysterious power of the sentient mind and soul... The Feywild is a natural place where imagination and intent become reality, while the Shadowfell is where fear and anxiety are manifest.
In this way both are more chaotic and mysterious "fantasy worlds" within an already magical fantasy world that happens to already contain some degree of order imposed on magic (usually by the gods in canon DnD lore), wherever your world falls in terms of baseline magic...
I live only a few mile away from Pity-Me in Durham.
We also have a place called NoPlace quite close by too.
Dael, I could listen to you talk about myths and mythology for hours, you have such a distinct style of story telling. :-)
You live at very great risk of falling into Faerie by accident. Tread carefully and always carry an iron nail in your pocket.
(Also thank you)
Everything you said about C.S.Lewis on faerie reminded me of the Horse and his Boy. One theme of the book is “Northernness”. Shasta lives in the mundane desert land and wants to live in the faerie North where exist the talking animals, fauns, and dwarves. He longs to escape his dull life of abuse in the desert and live free in the cool northern vistas.
I adore that book
Tolkein and Lewis are the Kings of Elves and Fey. I would also posit this quote from Terry Pratchett. Always makes me think of the Feywild.
"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
I'm preparing to make a feywild arc with my players and wow, this videos is beyond incredible, thank you
Superb video!
I LOVE U I JUST HAD A SPLENDID IDEA FOR PACT OF THE ARCHFEY WARLOCKS. Thought that it would be interesting to have Titania's outsider name to be Fairy God Mother (instead of godmother since she is a godlike fey and mother because the fairy mother or because of stealing children) and take Once Uppon A Time's approach that fairy godmothers take children to raise heroes and with the pass of the years people misunderstood it for godmother. The roleplay potential.
This is incredible.Your ideas are so well researched and articulated in a way that could be practically implemented. I'm going to have to check out more of your stuff. Also, I get the sense that any players in your games get to enjoy an extremely vivid setting.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one of the few books I've read that really nails Fairies as "not good or evil just really alien". Its one of my favourite books.
Edward Gurney: Have you seen the mini series based on these books?
@@alanschaub147 I have not, actually, despite reading the book after seeing the publicity for the tv series.
So the Faewild appears to be a realm of fluidity that is based on whimsy and mischief with just a hint of wonder, the phrase "expect the unexpected" is heavily implied there, and it appears that laws and rules are bound by deals between two parties
"use the language of ideas to put non-pictures in people's heads" - This is a hot bowl of genius soup.
Best description of Fairie ever!
This video makes me think you'd really enjoy parts of The Kingkiller Chronicles and how Rothfuss implies way more often than he explicitly tells in his storytelling.
Iv'e never heard of your channel before this, but I did want to run a quest in the feywild, where a tribe of pixies send the players to rescue a flumph that had been kidnapped by goblins.
That is what I love about how Tolkins describes magic. he really makes it feel like something mystical and out of this world
A Wise Man's Fear is a book that describes the Fae very well. I would definitely recommend it, though it is book two in the King Killer Chronicles so read The Name of the Wind first.
This is fantastic. The only games I've played where the feywild comes up, have been run really well. I think the love of what Fairie is, only appeals to people who already get it, even if they can't understand why they like it. Their fascination with the feywild is as abstract and emotional as the feywild itself.
Thank you for bringing up Jonathan Strange. It's my second favorite modern Fairie story after King of Elfland's Daughter.
Also, Ian McDonald's "King of Morning, Queen of Day" always sticks in my head as a way to discuss how the fey can passingly interact with multiple generations, with a history of Irish struggles.
I would also add some poetry, like Dylan Thomas' "In the white giant's thigh".
No one gets it like Dael does. I'm currently writing a play about two people who get lost in Faerie, and I honestly learned so much from this video. It felt like a lot of things that lots of us might on some level inherently know and use in our stories or campaigns without understanding the factors influencing it - but this video puts them into words so well.
Also, "Use the language of ideas to put non-pictures in people's heads." is possibly some of the best writing advice I've ever heard. It's that idea of the non-picture. Prompting someone's imagination to conjure something up that they can't possibly conjure up, and so they conjure up the absence of it, the shape of it, the outline; or in place of it, they imagine something completely different, completely unexpected even by the author. It's like directly triggering the part of the brain that contains and responds to the Uncanny.
I just played pathfinder: kingmaker, and it's version of the feywild: the old world, is like the god's first draft of the universe, where the laws of nature weren't physics, but everything was defined by emotions. ( they obvoiusly scrapped that idea and made the laws of physics in the second draft due to most of them preferring order to total chaos)
This naturally affects the fey's behavior, for instance they might be very jolly and confident, because expressing doubt and fear might literally take them to a bad place.
In that settings the creatures native to the feywild doesn't have the soul/body distinction where the soul goes to some afterlife, but they are instead reincarnated in the feywild in a new, weaker form, but with their memories and personalities intact.
This would of course make killing someone more like a prank, than condemning them to hell, and explains some of the skewed logic the fey often express.
Also, perspective and size can be played with if you throw physics out the window. Imagine being invited to a eladrin's castle, which he points out on a hill in the distance, but when you walk there, it comes closer, but never increases in size, so you end up at a castle the size of a sand castle. You still have to enter some way as not to be impolite....
SO HAPPY TO SEE YOU AGAIN DAEL WOOOOT
Spot on, in your conceptual personal interpretation of faywild. Your were articulate and clearly welspoken too. You eloquently, hit the nail on it's head, you have amazing understanding of the material and I wish I had, had a DM with your perfect sense of meaning of the land of the fay and faeries.
I agree with the notion that defining the fae (or even game mechanics regarding magic and monsters - anything that is fueled on mystery and the unknown) is a slippery slope. Even referring to goblins as 'goblins' instead of describing features and mannerisms half seen in the gloom, each an individual rather than a species with set characteristics, in my opinion, is better to avoid. Vids like this one are really great for GM/DMs behind the curtain, tinkering backstage. Thanks for uploading. Dael, great stuff.
My plan for the Feywild is a "World that once was. Still full of beauty but the original residents are either gone or have become something frightening."
This is exactly the type of video I was looking for to help me plan a one shot soon. Thank youuu
Faerie feels like a perfect premise for a Call of Cthulhu game to be honest
Love this video precisely because it's about the desired affect, not the steps to take. The Feywild isn't just another place. It's a whole different way of thinking.
I could have used this earlier. My players are on the way out of the Feywild in a few sessions. Nice to see you again 😁
Just UA-cam-stumbled into this channel. She is brilliant! What a mind!
This is such a good video to re-watch for ideas for my archfey warlock I'm planning. I love the idea of a human who somehow gets wrapped up in all of the high magic, low logic strangeness of a fae.
One thing that's helped a ton with establishing the vibe of the Feywild is to Never Refer To It As The Feywild. Maybe a dusty tome so analytic it borders on useless found in an old wizard's library uses the term, but anyone who's actually gonna be able to help a party without plane shift find their way into it (such as an ancient powerful druid) is going refer to it in a much more magical way. "Feywild" has always just seemed such a DND game-y kind of term and using it carelessly will ruin the atmosphere.