You guys dropped this video the exact same day I launched the party I dm for goes to the FeyWild, the stars have aligned, the circles carved, time for FeyWild campaigns.
I like that quote, I think it sums up the feeling nicely. If I ever had to describe the two to my players I'd describe the Feywild as the world amplified, like film overexposed and with the colour saturation turned way up, where all the landscape features were exaggerated and things moved slightly too fast. Conversely, the Shadowfell as a world fallen to entropy, dull and greyed out, eroded down into crags and gravel and time stretched into monotony.
My favourite idea of the feywild (and the one I use in my campaigns) is from the movie Annihilation. The idea of this constantly growing world where nature and people blur into one, the magic in the air twists and mutates "refracts" everything. It's a fascinating take on the idea of fey and faerie and I love it.
My DM would put his version of the Feywild as dealing with perception. When you first enter The Feywild it seems magical and closer to the imagined view of it, slowly (or suddenly, time is iffy) the perception shifts and it turns into a normal looking forest. The Fey will pay closer attention to you if you're a first time traveler since you still have the 'wonder' they've lost over the course of eons.
In my Feywild (if my players ever go there), I am going to have the Twk men from Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Little tiny men who ride dragonflies and take messages from place to place in exchange for salt.
A lot of discussion in the video of the Feywild as a chaotic place, but in my homebrew I intend to actually make it a lawful plane. I plan to play up the parts about faeries never telling lies and how difficult (and dangerous) it is to break a deal with them. Faeries never tell lies because doing so in the Feywild causes actual mental pain, and giving a faerie your word is practically like submitting to a Geas spell. I am trying to decide, though, if I want to keep the Seelie and Unseelie courts or just have a single one. Having both would be nice, but I'm not sure if I have enough space for both, so to speak...
I've been playing a feylock changeling who didn't know they were a changeling until recently. They were placed as a replica for the real child that was kidnapped and now the changeling is trying to find the original
@@Curriay mines the exact opposite as Changeling aren't considered fey in D&D lore (WTF?) he was discovered to be a changeling as a child and kicked out of the town, he ended up lost in the forest and adopted by a fey He now adventures for a way to become an actual fey and serve his adoptive mother. He disguises himself as an eladrin and claims to be Fey to explain his shapeshifting Originally he was a monk with basically a warlock background but now hes an actual archfey warlock and echo knight fighter
@@ShurikenSean yeah but not everyones games take place in dnd lore. Changeling came from stories of faeries replacing children with their own. I just tied the two stories together and my dm okayed it.
One of my player’s is dying to go to the Fey Wild. This has been really helpful. Now I can make the Fey Wild beautiful before the Living Gate opens and starts spewing Lovecraftian cosmic horror all over the place.
THANK YOU!!! Fey and all of it's trappings has always been my favorite go to. I always try to make it seem sinister & alien, even the "good guys" seem unhinged. Thanks for the heads up on Discoverie of Witchcraft!
Exalted the Wyld and Changeling had some of the best details for the alien nature of a Feywild location. I like the idea of narrative structure defining their nature, they are living stories. So much of those and multiple other sources provide many things to add.
If you look at the 4e Dungeons and Dragons books like the Heroes of the Feywild, Monster Vault and I believe Monster Manual 2 they could give you great inspiration for the Fey wild. They describe some of the titles of fey courts with Eladrin, how the Feywild is the bright colorful yet still dangerous twin of the material world just like the Shadowfell is the dark twin.
+1 The Feywild was almost as well-represented as the Shadowfell in the various 4e publications, with at least a few entire articles in Dungeon & Dragon focused on Feywild-related themes, or exploring ways of incorporating either a little or a lot of its elements into your game. Dragon 405 and 420 were good, and Rodney Thompson did a lengthy write-up of the eladrin city of Mithrendain in Dragon 366 that is especially worth checking out if you're looking for someplace more "civilized".
Thank you for mentioning Dresden Files and his awesome use of fairy, excellent reference and I was thinking that the whole time I was watching until you mentioned it.
I really like the spirit world from ATLA and Korra as inspiration for the feywild. Ko the Facestealer as an evil faerie is just amazing, got to use something like it at some point. Dresden as well, and all of this I really love, but especially the avatar.
I have a campaign where half of the continent is covered in a dangerous forest called the Feywild. It is also known as the Forest of Change. The forest was made when an empire of elves took what is called an Elderan Seed from the Realm of Change (my version of the Feywild) and planted it in the ground. The seed then sprouted and created a massive tree that basically made a forest with the same properties as the realm 8t came from. (Fun fact: I named the forest the Feywild before I even knew that a place in DND already existed called Feywild.)
Dresden Files are always great inspiration! If you want to delve into something a bit stranger, A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffen really changes up perceptions of magic by modernizing it, changing what the fey could really be. British based urban magic, but, wow.
My main character, Qivyre, an eladrin creation bard is heavily inspired by Feywild mythology. Thank you so much for doing this deep dive on this wonderful plane I love so much.
working on a one shot right now inspired by a midsummer night's dream, where the pcs wander into the feywild when the barrier between planes is thin and end up in the middle of a fight between oberon and titania, very high hijinks, and honestly that's what I love about the feywild, just the chaos and wildness of it, where the players can have some wacky hijinks with later consequences
There's a mission in the Witcher 3 during Hearts of Stone where Geralt goes to this place where everything look like it was painted and i think that perfectly represents the FeyWild.
Dark Crystal and Labyrinth are linked by Brian Froud, who did creature design and concept art for both. With Alan Lee he also authored “Faerie”, which is a great compendium of faerie tales and types of faerie. It’s essentially a Feywild sourcebook without stat blocks
If you like Hayao Miyazaki’s films as inspiration then you should watch Ancient Magus Bride which is very reminiscent of British Fey and the show Mushishi which tells of spirits called Mushi that cause weird phenomena.
The Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance (yes that Jack Vance) is also great inspiration. It features changelings swapping with children, time distortion in the feywild (the child ages 9 years in the span of 1 on the mortal realm), trickster fey cursing with bad luck, archfey, water nymphs with nasty hexes, and dialogue as crazy as you would expect of inscrutable & selfish fairies. Also Poul Anderson has a couple good books with these elements; The Broken Sword and Three Hearts & Three Lions. They feature trolls, hags, troll hags, changelings, faerie knights, fey princes in magic castles, and myriad of other mythological creatures. Also a good poetic dance scene in TBS.
Pans labyrinth is my favorite movie, right next to the dark crystal and then labyrinth. I've always seen the feywild as of the quintessential fairytale world. I often imagine that old fairy tales may have been an authors near forgotten trip to the fairy land.
I like to think of the Feywild not only as an amplified or wilder reflection of the Material plane, but also as a place where fate, mysticism and binding oaths have extreme power. Basically mix traditional (not Disney) fairytale tropes and themes with the 5th edition focus on its exaggeration of emotion, magic, colors, chaos, everything. I think it's important to realize that the fey are NOT good-natured. Sure, most Eladrin tend to be chaotic good, but one should not think of the fey in mortal moral terms, or to expect their behavior to conform to mortal/material standards. The fey may aid or hinder adventurers, or just take the piss, and they may appear to be completely erratic, but they have an internal fairy-tale inspired inner logic. Great video tho! You guys gave a great list of resources to draw inspiration from!
Excellent - can't believe the amount of dictionary use this took from me! Chthonic and atavistic. Wow! But really, great topic and excellent treatment of it
My favorite thing about The Discoverie of VVitchcraft is that its both an excellent refutation of the witch-craze that was going on at the time (Scot spills an awful lot of ink to say "magic not real"), and is also a great catalogue of some pretty gnarly spells if you practice.
I really like to blend, or bleed, the Feywild with/into the Shadowfell, and vice versa. It helps to capture a lot of the nuisances with regards to fey and undead/spirits, that are found in the myths of the various cultures around the world. The feywild representing more life, growth, energy, etc. and the shadowfell being death and decay. Crossing from one to the another is as simple as going too far into the dark wood, or the shadow of the mountain, etc.
Don't forget in the feywild there are infinite things that would just stalk the party, like every 3 rounds of initiative you just force perception checks on everyone. just constantly.
Great video! By far the way fey magic is depicted in Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel is my favorite. It's excellently as dark and mischievous as I feel like it truly would be
i can see my own setting im working on right now literally take shape as you guys introduce these cool ideas to me. great and helpful content as always, thanks :)
Thanks guys for the ideas. I have been trying to find a bridge between worlds and I believe I have thanks to your video. Thanks again and keep up the good work.
Decided to watch this video for inspiration to flesh out some backstory for a monk I’m creating who’s “half-fey” (reflavoured Eladrin or Wood elf or tweaked variant half-elf with once-per-rest Misty Step). She already would have a connection to the Feywild by being half-fey, but I also wanted her monk training to have some connection to it too. A:TLA and Legend of Korra would probably be great sources for this particular build, but I have unfortunately watched only a little bit of the former and none of the latter :( . That said, the link you guys made between the Feywild and the Matrix hit me like a ton of bricks!! I’m now thinking that along with the monastery being located close to a druid grove and working with druids and rangers to help maintain the border between the Feywild and the Material Plane, the monks at this particular monastery perhaps go into the Feywild on occasion as unarmed operatives to locate other people lost in there and bring them back to the Material Plane! The idea still needs some tweaking, but it’s a great start ^_^ .
Playing a Mousefolk Oath of Ancients Paladin who comes from a long line of Fey Crossing-point Guardians. Ousted from her home by Formians (hideous Fey Giants), Deliah Moonthistle finds herself in Baulders Gate at the start of Decent Into Avernus...Been one of my favorite characters yet.
One of my personal favorite inspirations for how to blend the feyrealms with my play world would the the darkwalker trilogy in which there is plenty of crossover between creatures and lands of the fey and the druids of the Moonshae isles
Kelphi are my favorites because they’re such a good way to play on the trusting players who don’t fear the fey like they should. They’re pure terror with a gullible player. I’m not a sadist dm usually, but the feywild seems like it can be.
I've always seen the world of fae as a land of chaos, but also where a lot of children's tails come from. So you'd possibly run into random animals that walk upright and have full conversations with you like nothing is wrong at all. But at the same time there's an archfey that just wants to see what it's like to choke someone out that's not from this part of the woods.
I just started a campaign where the players wake up in a natural cathedral. They're told they are the gift of the "flower girl", a little fae girl named Jynx, for a great hunt honoring a marriage between a fae and...something darker. They are tattooed. Like in Berserk. They are all sacrifices. In order for the wedding to commence they all have to be sacrificed and hunted down. So it's very The Most Dangerous Game. The alliance of the fae and the darker force was born because one of the characters has one of the first guns. The parallel worlds of the shadowfell and fae are rebelling and allying because they feel like they need to ally against this nuclear power of gunpowder. The ultimate villain is an empress who believes by setting these factions against each other she can lead everyone to a more efficient universe. This video gave me so many ideas. Thank you.
my two cents would be to also take from japanese folklore. Gegege no kitaro shows the gegege forest and all the yokai that live there, although the "japanese feywild" looks more like a combination of sorts of the feywild and the shadowfell
World folklore is a great source, if you want to get away from the Celtic-Germanic stuff. The orisha of African lineage and the New World variants of them in African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin folklore are another field that is less-explored but rich with inspiration. The Native American traditions from throughout the Americas are also very interesting, but you'd have to do more digging into current, active anthropological research.
Our party went into the feywild for a few sessions at the behest of the bird queen. A few party members backstories were woven in here or there, like our newest rogue was tge product of a one night stand between the queen and our bard, but because of the time weirdness, his daughter is older than him. Its also where my wizard pissed off his ancestral goddess and in return, she ripped his magic from him, so now when anyone sees my wizard with detect magic up, he looks like an antimagic zone.
@Adam McLeod - Check out C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy. Humans colonized a planet where science doesn't work properly because reality is warped by will - consciously or not. One of their greatest "wizards" is actually a guy (Gerald Tarrant, great anti-villain) who essentially rediscovers quantum physics and uses that to shape his understanding (and control) of the world.
To have an episode about the feywild and not mention Gimbles Guide to the Feywild is a disservice to your fans and yourself if you haven't read that. Go check it out absolutely amazing.
started a faun druid recently in a game and it's great to hear about the place Bramble Hollywine got kicked out of and is trying to avoid at all costs :D
Gruumsh was the first man to enter the Fey realm. When he repeatedly burst into fits of rage during his tryst with Correllan, the elf cast him out, proclaiming him ,"the natural embodiment of rage" and was cursed to have the face of a boar. During his conflict with Corellan, the elf took his eye so he would not remember the beauty of the Feywild. Millenias has passed and now orcs have bred true. But their human lineage allows for their cross. And their history shows their propensity for rage and the reason for their conflict with elves.
Consider. A mini campaign where the summer court hosts a wild hunt. The party has a week to hunt down a monster for their patron, with teams fighting both the party, other inhabitants of the feywild itself, and the actual terrain in order to claim the kill on the monster thats been marked. Who does everything in its power to throw off/set the hunters against one another.
Basic, normal, Forgotten Realms and other such settings DnD probably. It contains all kinds of things based on so many myths and legends and folklore from so many cultures and eras, but the wonder has been largely erased, but that's kind of what happens when you try to give gameplay and stats to things.
For anyone curious to see the source material referenced in 25:36 search for the following FOLKLORE OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND in the reference material found here: www.forgottenbooks.com/en/readbook/TheDenhamTracts_10024245#3
The comment about faeries can't lie but can obfuscate made me think of pinocchio in Shrek. Great video guys. You give us consistent quality content. We aspire to do the same.
Good timing for this vid. I'm about to play a Hexblade-Warlock, who's patron is an ex-lover of Titania turned Bow and my DM is quite thrilled to get some pointers on the Feywilds. Also, you guys think, you'll maybe do a series on different cultures in the Forgotten Realms? I'd quite like a nice, chunky bit of inspiration and lore about Thay.
You took the video off and re-uploaded it, right? Yesterday I saw the cover of the video and thought: "I'll watch it later". Well, later I went looking for the video and I didn't find it! I searched UA-cam and nothing. I thought I was crazy. Now, look at it here! Already get "liked"
Just a random thought: In my campaign setting, there is an alternate planet where the standard races have evolved into chaos. The orcs have become abyssal, hungry giants who drove the elves to extinction. The dwarves and gnomes have evolved into burrowing mole people with little distinction between the two races, both of which serve a new pantheon of Abbathor and Urdlen. The halfling leaders broke a deal with Asmodeus, turning the whole race into the insane Spillifians that spit death and hurl missiles of fire. Yet, there is one good group of races: The goblinoids. In an interview with the creator of Eberron it was said that the races of that world are taken to their natural conclusion: stealthy illusionist gnomes become assassins, etc. Well, consider this: hobgoblins become noble samurai, cavaliers, and paladins. Goblins, touched by the feywild, become helpful and playful tricksters. Bugbears, being strong and dextrerous, have become monks of enlightenment, their rare families become secretive monasteries.
For my fey creatures I stole the idea of the Dr who episode "the Rings of akathen" where the inhabitants trade goods for memories and items of sentimental value only. Even the bad guy is of the episode is tied to this currency of memories, emotions and untold potential. Also love Holly Black's fey creatures from Spiderwick. Great material to use for one's own campaign!
Eladrin whose name was stolen by an ancient hag, and who spent three decades driving the Black Coach in the Dark Woods somewhere on the PMP which brought lost children who accepted their offer of help getting home to the hag's demense, there to be dealt with as the hag saw fit. The Eladrin didn't like what she was made to do, but what could she do--the hag had her name. She did eventually manage to escape, by trading for the name of a mother who had caught up with the Coach, but when she attempted to return home, she found that her kinsmen were aware of what she'd done. They banished her to the PMP, where she still remains to this day. As for the mother, well... The Black Coach needs a driver.
Imagine if Changelings were fey that could trade your appearance in exchange for something else, so if you received a gift from a changeling (unknowingly) but did not repay them they would have your appearance. It kind of fits the idea that you do not receive something for nothing with fey, and would perhaps encourage a sort of superstition about reciprocity
I admire your use of ACTUAL myths in your game. The reference to the book is wonderful. Is there a compendium of literature like that freely available online? I'm certainly working on a list, crudely sorted by subject.
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Thank you for the fixed reupload of this awesome episode 🙏🏻
You guys dropped this video the exact same day I launched the party I dm for goes to the FeyWild, the stars have aligned, the circles carved, time for FeyWild campaigns.
The fact that this feywild video vanished yesterday and showed up today without any warning is so meta
I shape my Feywild details around this quote I heard: The shadowfell is our plane depressed. The Feywild is our plane manic.
So like if Bob Ross dropped acid?
@@cameroncox2739 Versus Edgar Allen Poe on opiates haha
I like that quote, I think it sums up the feeling nicely.
If I ever had to describe the two to my players I'd describe the Feywild as the world amplified, like film overexposed and with the colour saturation turned way up, where all the landscape features were exaggerated and things moved slightly too fast. Conversely, the Shadowfell as a world fallen to entropy, dull and greyed out, eroded down into crags and gravel and time stretched into monotony.
The Shivering Isles
@@user-gj7lp5iz6k you read my mind
My favourite idea of the feywild (and the one I use in my campaigns) is from the movie Annihilation. The idea of this constantly growing world where nature and people blur into one, the magic in the air twists and mutates "refracts" everything. It's a fascinating take on the idea of fey and faerie and I love it.
How is this not a more popular channel? This is exactly the kind of content I want an infinite backlog of
Looks like leaving that bowl of milk on the porch paid off! Great video full of resources for inspiring faerie realm adventures and encounters :)
I will never get tired of you guys mentioning the Dresden Files.
Third...ed?
It’s the greatest secret epic fantasy series I’ve ever experienced.
My DM would put his version of the Feywild as dealing with perception. When you first enter The Feywild it seems magical and closer to the imagined view of it, slowly (or suddenly, time is iffy) the perception shifts and it turns into a normal looking forest. The Fey will pay closer attention to you if you're a first time traveler since you still have the 'wonder' they've lost over the course of eons.
Whew hoo! I get to like this episode TWICE! The Thumbnail is just too good.
Lauryn Hill...Laurel Hill...hmm. Ready or Not.
Now you can be Siskel & Ebert, give two thumbs up.
In my Feywild (if my players ever go there), I am going to have the Twk men from Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Little tiny men who ride dragonflies and take messages from place to place in exchange for salt.
26:41 basically just sounds like the index of a monster manual 😂
A lot of discussion in the video of the Feywild as a chaotic place, but in my homebrew I intend to actually make it a lawful plane. I plan to play up the parts about faeries never telling lies and how difficult (and dangerous) it is to break a deal with them. Faeries never tell lies because doing so in the Feywild causes actual mental pain, and giving a faerie your word is practically like submitting to a Geas spell.
I am trying to decide, though, if I want to keep the Seelie and Unseelie courts or just have a single one. Having both would be nice, but I'm not sure if I have enough space for both, so to speak...
Just finished reading the 1st Dresden Files book a few days back because of how often you mention the books
Someone once told me, when imagining the Feywild think of the Kokiri Forest, Lost Woods and Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time.
stepped into a fairy circle yesterday to arrive exactly at this moment
been hoping for a feywild video, planning for a changeling raised by a fey
I've been playing a feylock changeling who didn't know they were a changeling until recently. They were placed as a replica for the real child that was kidnapped and now the changeling is trying to find the original
@@Curriay mines the exact opposite
as Changeling aren't considered fey in D&D lore (WTF?)
he was discovered to be a changeling as a child and kicked out of the town, he ended up lost in the forest and adopted by a fey
He now adventures for a way to become an actual fey and serve his adoptive mother. He disguises himself as an eladrin and claims to be Fey to explain his shapeshifting
Originally he was a monk with basically a warlock background but now hes an actual archfey warlock and echo knight fighter
@@ShurikenSean yeah but not everyones games take place in dnd lore.
Changeling came from stories of faeries replacing children with their own.
I just tied the two stories together and my dm okayed it.
im doing a half-human half-fey for my first campaign
One of my player’s is dying to go to the Fey Wild. This has been really helpful. Now I can make the Fey Wild beautiful before the Living Gate opens and starts spewing Lovecraftian cosmic horror all over the place.
THANK YOU!!! Fey and all of it's trappings has always been my favorite go to. I always try to make it seem sinister & alien, even the "good guys" seem unhinged. Thanks for the heads up on Discoverie of Witchcraft!
Exalted the Wyld and Changeling had some of the best details for the alien nature of a Feywild location. I like the idea of narrative structure defining their nature, they are living stories. So much of those and multiple other sources provide many things to add.
If you look at the 4e Dungeons and Dragons books like the Heroes of the Feywild, Monster Vault and I believe Monster Manual 2 they could give you great inspiration for the Fey wild. They describe some of the titles of fey courts with Eladrin, how the Feywild is the bright colorful yet still dangerous twin of the material world just like the Shadowfell is the dark twin.
+1 The Feywild was almost as well-represented as the Shadowfell in the various 4e publications, with at least a few entire articles in Dungeon & Dragon focused on Feywild-related themes, or exploring ways of incorporating either a little or a lot of its elements into your game. Dragon 405 and 420 were good, and Rodney Thompson did a lengthy write-up of the eladrin city of Mithrendain in Dragon 366 that is especially worth checking out if you're looking for someplace more "civilized".
So grateful for this. The Feywild has been so underrepresented.
Thank you for mentioning Dresden Files and his awesome use of fairy, excellent reference and I was thinking that the whole time I was watching until you mentioned it.
This was a *excellent* coverage of alternative sources for inspiration for the feywild.
Wednesday 2 - Electric Boogaloo
I enjoyed the clips of shows/movies throughout.
People saying they’re early... I saw the video when it was released early by mistake yesterday ;)
I really like the spirit world from ATLA and Korra as inspiration for the feywild. Ko the Facestealer as an evil faerie is just amazing, got to use something like it at some point. Dresden as well, and all of this I really love, but especially the avatar.
I have a campaign where half of the continent is covered in a dangerous forest called the Feywild. It is also known as the Forest of Change. The forest was made when an empire of elves took what is called an Elderan Seed from the Realm of Change (my version of the Feywild) and planted it in the ground. The seed then sprouted and created a massive tree that basically made a forest with the same properties as the realm 8t came from.
(Fun fact: I named the forest the Feywild before I even knew that a place in DND already existed called Feywild.)
Did you grab some senzu beans, mega seeds and a weatherseed, along with your Magnigoth seed?
@@draxthemsklonst what?
Dresden Files are always great inspiration! If you want to delve into something a bit stranger, A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffen really changes up perceptions of magic by modernizing it, changing what the fey could really be. British based urban magic, but, wow.
Please check out the novel, " NeverWhere." it is also a BBC mini series.
My main character, Qivyre, an eladrin creation bard is heavily inspired by Feywild mythology. Thank you so much for doing this deep dive on this wonderful plane I love so much.
Great video! you're in my wheelhouse now, faires where my History MA subject!
working on a one shot right now inspired by a midsummer night's dream, where the pcs wander into the feywild when the barrier between planes is thin and end up in the middle of a fight between oberon and titania, very high hijinks, and honestly that's what I love about the feywild, just the chaos and wildness of it, where the players can have some wacky hijinks with later consequences
Seems like the video travelled through the feywild itself
For real this time, yup, there it goes.
Edit: for House spirit, I always liked the Grugach, or Brownie.
There's a mission in the Witcher 3 during Hearts of Stone where Geralt goes to this place where everything look like it was painted and i think that perfectly represents the FeyWild.
Dark Crystal and Labyrinth are linked by Brian Froud, who did creature design and concept art for both. With Alan Lee he also authored “Faerie”, which is a great compendium of faerie tales and types of faerie. It’s essentially a Feywild sourcebook without stat blocks
My two favorite sources of inspriation for the fey are the show Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and the game Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning
Yes! The doppelganger coming from dead tree from a finger?! That kinda wild magic was awesome and totally unexpected, I loved it
If you like Hayao Miyazaki’s films as inspiration then you should watch Ancient Magus Bride which is very reminiscent of British Fey and the show Mushishi which tells of spirits called Mushi that cause weird phenomena.
The Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance (yes that Jack Vance) is also great inspiration. It features changelings swapping with children, time distortion in the feywild (the child ages 9 years in the span of 1 on the mortal realm), trickster fey cursing with bad luck, archfey, water nymphs with nasty hexes, and dialogue as crazy as you would expect of inscrutable & selfish fairies.
Also Poul Anderson has a couple good books with these elements; The Broken Sword and Three Hearts & Three Lions. They feature trolls, hags, troll hags, changelings, faerie knights, fey princes in magic castles, and myriad of other mythological creatures. Also a good poetic dance scene in TBS.
Pans labyrinth is my favorite movie, right next to the dark crystal and then labyrinth. I've always seen the feywild as of the quintessential fairytale world. I often imagine that old fairy tales may have been an authors near forgotten trip to the fairy land.
I like to think of the Feywild not only as an amplified or wilder reflection of the Material plane, but also as a place where fate, mysticism and binding oaths have extreme power. Basically mix traditional (not Disney) fairytale tropes and themes with the 5th edition focus on its exaggeration of emotion, magic, colors, chaos, everything. I think it's important to realize that the fey are NOT good-natured. Sure, most Eladrin tend to be chaotic good, but one should not think of the fey in mortal moral terms, or to expect their behavior to conform to mortal/material standards. The fey may aid or hinder adventurers, or just take the piss, and they may appear to be completely erratic, but they have an internal fairy-tale inspired inner logic.
Great video tho! You guys gave a great list of resources to draw inspiration from!
Excellent - can't believe the amount of dictionary use this took from me! Chthonic and atavistic. Wow! But really, great topic and excellent treatment of it
Some great inspiration is Neil Gaiman book 3 of the "book's of magic" mini- series. Where the land of fairy is shown.
Terry Pratchett's books covering Tiffany Aching are good as well
THANK YOU! My players just fell into the Fae and this helps my prep so much!
This was a good one. I have been really interested in the Feywild and fey creatures lately. Thx for the inspiration & discussion guys!
Thanks for the Video! there needs to be a published book for the Feywild realm.
My favorite thing about The Discoverie of VVitchcraft is that its both an excellent refutation of the witch-craze that was going on at the time (Scot spills an awful lot of ink to say "magic not real"), and is also a great catalogue of some pretty gnarly spells if you practice.
Brilliant! I recently rewatched Brothers Grimm and thought it was rife with inspiration, much like your content. Keep it up guys 🖖
I really like to blend, or bleed, the Feywild with/into the Shadowfell, and vice versa. It helps to capture a lot of the nuisances with regards to fey and undead/spirits, that are found in the myths of the various cultures around the world. The feywild representing more life, growth, energy, etc. and the shadowfell being death and decay. Crossing from one to the another is as simple as going too far into the dark wood, or the shadow of the mountain, etc.
I love the Crown Royal purple bag!!! I have one for my dice.
Don't forget in the feywild there are infinite things that would just stalk the party, like every 3 rounds of initiative you just force perception checks on everyone. just constantly.
Listless in the sea of reality was a great line.
Can we please get more planescape type episodes? They're really informative and I love seeing what yalls brains come up with.
I love this stuff. I personally enjoy digging deeper so i can work on my fey corrupted halfling circle of the dream druid.
Great video! By far the way fey magic is depicted in Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel is my favorite. It's excellently as dark and mischievous as I feel like it truly would be
i can see my own setting im working on right now literally take shape as you guys introduce these cool ideas to me. great and helpful content as always, thanks :)
Thanks guys for the ideas. I have been trying to find a bridge between worlds and I believe I have thanks to your video. Thanks again and keep up the good work.
Awesome
The cover art you put your faces on for each video is hilarious lol 😆
Decided to watch this video for inspiration to flesh out some backstory for a monk I’m creating who’s “half-fey” (reflavoured Eladrin or Wood elf or tweaked variant half-elf with once-per-rest Misty Step). She already would have a connection to the Feywild by being half-fey, but I also wanted her monk training to have some connection to it too. A:TLA and Legend of Korra would probably be great sources for this particular build, but I have unfortunately watched only a little bit of the former and none of the latter :( .
That said, the link you guys made between the Feywild and the Matrix hit me like a ton of bricks!! I’m now thinking that along with the monastery being located close to a druid grove and working with druids and rangers to help maintain the border between the Feywild and the Material Plane, the monks at this particular monastery perhaps go into the Feywild on occasion as unarmed operatives to locate other people lost in there and bring them back to the Material Plane! The idea still needs some tweaking, but it’s a great start ^_^ .
Playing a Mousefolk Oath of Ancients Paladin who comes from a long line of Fey Crossing-point Guardians. Ousted from her home by Formians (hideous Fey Giants), Deliah Moonthistle finds herself in Baulders Gate at the start of Decent Into Avernus...Been one of my favorite characters yet.
One of my personal favorite inspirations for how to blend the feyrealms with my play world would the the darkwalker trilogy in which there is plenty of crossover between creatures and lands of the fey and the druids of the Moonshae isles
Kelphi are my favorites because they’re such a good way to play on the trusting players who don’t fear the fey like they should. They’re pure terror with a gullible player. I’m not a sadist dm usually, but the feywild seems like it can be.
I've always seen the world of fae as a land of chaos, but also where a lot of children's tails come from. So you'd possibly run into random animals that walk upright and have full conversations with you like nothing is wrong at all. But at the same time there's an archfey that just wants to see what it's like to choke someone out that's not from this part of the woods.
Helpful, inspiring ending. Thank you webdm!
oh.. a porcelain pig behind Jim! upper left corner! I wonder which adventure that was included in...
I just started a campaign where the players wake up in a natural cathedral. They're told they are the gift of the "flower girl", a little fae girl named Jynx, for a great hunt honoring a marriage between a fae and...something darker. They are tattooed. Like in Berserk. They are all sacrifices. In order for the wedding to commence they all have to be sacrificed and hunted down. So it's very The Most Dangerous Game. The alliance of the fae and the darker force was born because one of the characters has one of the first guns. The parallel worlds of the shadowfell and fae are rebelling and allying because they feel like they need to ally against this nuclear power of gunpowder. The ultimate villain is an empress who believes by setting these factions against each other she can lead everyone to a more efficient universe.
This video gave me so many ideas. Thank you.
my two cents would be to also take from japanese folklore. Gegege no kitaro shows the gegege forest and all the yokai that live there, although the "japanese feywild" looks more like a combination of sorts of the feywild and the shadowfell
World folklore is a great source, if you want to get away from the Celtic-Germanic stuff. The orisha of African lineage and the New World variants of them in African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin folklore are another field that is less-explored but rich with inspiration. The Native American traditions from throughout the Americas are also very interesting, but you'd have to do more digging into current, active anthropological research.
One of your all time best episodes!
Thank you!
In our current campaign the unseilie court (however you spell it) is like 1920s New York.
Our party went into the feywild for a few sessions at the behest of the bird queen. A few party members backstories were woven in here or there, like our newest rogue was tge product of a one night stand between the queen and our bard, but because of the time weirdness, his daughter is older than him. Its also where my wizard pissed off his ancestral goddess and in return, she ripped his magic from him, so now when anyone sees my wizard with detect magic up, he looks like an antimagic zone.
I had an idea I'd love to refine one day of treating the feywild like the realm of quantum mechanics.
@Adam McLeod - Check out C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy. Humans colonized a planet where science doesn't work properly because reality is warped by will - consciously or not. One of their greatest "wizards" is actually a guy (Gerald Tarrant, great anti-villain) who essentially rediscovers quantum physics and uses that to shape his understanding (and control) of the world.
IT'S WEDNESDAY AGAIN!
Whoo!
To have an episode about the feywild and not mention Gimbles Guide to the Feywild is a disservice to your fans and yourself if you haven't read that. Go check it out absolutely amazing.
Susana Clarke is always gonna be my flavour of Faerie.
twisted, and mad, and medieval, and capricious,
started a faun druid recently in a game and it's great to hear about the place Bramble Hollywine got kicked out of and is trying to avoid at all costs :D
Gruumsh was the first man to enter the Fey realm. When he repeatedly burst into fits of rage during his tryst with Correllan, the elf cast him out, proclaiming him ,"the natural embodiment of rage" and was cursed to have the face of a boar. During his conflict with Corellan, the elf took his eye so he would not remember the beauty of the Feywild.
Millenias has passed and now orcs have bred true. But their human lineage allows for their cross. And their history shows their propensity for rage and the reason for their conflict with elves.
I really hope y’all do a review of the Dolmenwood setting when the full book comes out.
Consider. A mini campaign where the summer court hosts a wild hunt. The party has a week to hunt down a monster for their patron, with teams fighting both the party, other inhabitants of the feywild itself, and the actual terrain in order to claim the kill on the monster thats been marked. Who does everything in its power to throw off/set the hunters against one another.
12:17 I think Jim just doesn’t like D&D. More and more I am convinced of this.
Basic, normal, Forgotten Realms and other such settings DnD probably. It contains all kinds of things based on so many myths and legends and folklore from so many cultures and eras, but the wonder has been largely erased, but that's kind of what happens when you try to give gameplay and stats to things.
Lords and Ladies is a great inspiration for handling Fey courts
This is timely, my players are about to travel to the major elvish kingdom in my campaign so these ideas will give me food for thought.
For anyone curious to see the source material referenced in 25:36 search for the following FOLKLORE OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND in the reference material found here: www.forgottenbooks.com/en/readbook/TheDenhamTracts_10024245#3
The comment about faeries can't lie but can obfuscate made me think of pinocchio in Shrek. Great video guys. You give us consistent quality content. We aspire to do the same.
While not a D&D game, I always thought "Kingdoms of Amalur" was a fairly decent Fey Wild type universe.
Such faerie courts 🧚♂️
You get the thumbs up for mentioning Dresden
I've always liked fey, thanks for another awesome video.
You mentioned Legends of Core Season 2 at the 13 minute mark, I can't find it. I would love to watch it for inspiration.
Good timing for this vid. I'm about to play a Hexblade-Warlock, who's patron is an ex-lover of Titania turned Bow and my DM is quite thrilled to get some pointers on the Feywilds. Also, you guys think, you'll maybe do a series on different cultures in the Forgotten Realms? I'd quite like a nice, chunky bit of inspiration and lore about Thay.
You took the video off and re-uploaded it, right?
Yesterday I saw the cover of the video and thought: "I'll watch it later".
Well, later I went looking for the video and I didn't find it! I searched UA-cam and nothing. I thought I was crazy.
Now, look at it here!
Already get "liked"
The fairies were displeased with our offerings yesterday and they gummed up the works
The Cheese and the Worms! My Master had me read that book when I was her Padawan.
I hope they do an episode on ritual contests like types of trial by combat. All the other ways of combat like jousting.
Just a random thought: In my campaign setting, there is an alternate planet where the standard races have evolved into chaos. The orcs have become abyssal, hungry giants who drove the elves to extinction. The dwarves and gnomes have evolved into burrowing mole people with little distinction between the two races, both of which serve a new pantheon of Abbathor and Urdlen. The halfling leaders broke a deal with Asmodeus, turning the whole race into the insane Spillifians that spit death and hurl missiles of fire. Yet, there is one good group of races: The goblinoids. In an interview with the creator of Eberron it was said that the races of that world are taken to their natural conclusion: stealthy illusionist gnomes become assassins, etc. Well, consider this: hobgoblins become noble samurai, cavaliers, and paladins. Goblins, touched by the feywild, become helpful and playful tricksters. Bugbears, being strong and dextrerous, have become monks of enlightenment, their rare families become secretive monasteries.
All these mumpoking snakes on this mumpoking plane!
For my fey creatures I stole the idea of the Dr who episode "the Rings of akathen" where the inhabitants trade goods for memories and items of sentimental value only. Even the bad guy is of the episode is tied to this currency of memories, emotions and untold potential.
Also love Holly Black's fey creatures from Spiderwick.
Great material to use for one's own campaign!
Because I know it's going to get asked: Denham Tracts.
loved this one to bits
Eladrin whose name was stolen by an ancient hag, and who spent three decades driving the Black Coach in the Dark Woods somewhere on the PMP which brought lost children who accepted their offer of help getting home to the hag's demense, there to be dealt with as the hag saw fit. The Eladrin didn't like what she was made to do, but what could she do--the hag had her name.
She did eventually manage to escape, by trading for the name of a mother who had caught up with the Coach, but when she attempted to return home, she found that her kinsmen were aware of what she'd done. They banished her to the PMP, where she still remains to this day. As for the mother, well... The Black Coach needs a driver.
I see my initiative is still high.
Imagine if Changelings were fey that could trade your appearance in exchange for something else, so if you received a gift from a changeling (unknowingly) but did not repay them they would have your appearance. It kind of fits the idea that you do not receive something for nothing with fey, and would perhaps encourage a sort of superstition about reciprocity
I admire your use of ACTUAL myths in your game. The reference to the book is wonderful. Is there a compendium of literature like that freely available online?
I'm certainly working on a list, crudely sorted by subject.
Y’all NEED to make a Midgard video!!!