How to Play Fey Creatures in D&D | Wild Beyond The Witchlight | D&D the wild beyond the witch light we have archfey coming up you are a fantastic uh hag player fake creature player all of that and and you love the feywild do you have advice for people that need to play an arch fae whether you’re a dungeon master or you know maybe maybe a player wants to be a a formerly removed arch faye and that was like a lowly level one warlock or something like that like what what kind of tips and tricks do you have one of the things that i love about the feywild and the thing i love about it is also true of its most powerful beings the arch fae and that is that it is a realm of extreme emotion and so that’s something to channel whenever a person is dming or playing a character or creature that is suffused with the magic of the feywild and that is if you feel something you feel it powerfully it’s it’s sort of like if you imagine the ways the way a human might feel something and might go the dial might go up to 10 well for in the feywild it goes at least up to 11 if not higher and the other thing is is that in the feywild because of these extremes this means not only do you have extreme beauty and glory but it also means when things get wicked they get very very wicked or and i often do this when i’m role-playing hags if things get mischievous they get very very mischievous so really role playing someone from the feywild is an opportunity to pick a particular sort of personality mode and really lean into it a bit further than you would for a mortal because and that’s another key thing to remember especially if you’re playing a person or some other kind of creature that has the fey creature type you’re not a mortal being at that point and so your perspective is very different and i often as a dm love having that in mind not only when i role play hags for example which you know hags are some of my favorite creatures in the whole game to roleplay but this is also true when i role play dragons liches angels anything that has lived for centuries that fact alone means their perspective on reality is different from ours and that means they will often be far more patient about the unfolding of plans than humans will be but it can also mean they can be more impatient because imagine all of the petty things in life that wear on us yeah now imagine having to be exposed to those things for hundreds and hundreds of years which is also why i often have hags like they just cannot even you know because because they have been around the block so many times right right and and so again i think those are all things to think about extreme emotion longevity also consider whimsy because whether someone from the feywild is wicked or benevolent wherever they are in sort of a moral spectrum there should always be a little bit of whimsy because the feywild is inspired by fairy tales from the real world and so even when you’re in a terrifying place in the feywild there might still be something that will make people smile and this is especially something to think about as a dm when you’re describing a terrifying location or a terrifying creature in the feywild what is that little bit of whimsy you can sprinkle in the tea cup on the shelf might be commenting on what’s going on it might otherwise be a typical dungeon environment for dnd but there’s the talking teacup uh or as you near the haunted castle on some more within the feywild the stream that you walk by might literally be singing and now if you were in some other part of the fey wild the song might be cheery uh but perhaps as you approach that haunted castle the song you hear coming from the stream is about your in your upcoming doom uh there’s so much room for play whether it’s describing the environment or playing an arch fae or some other feywild influenced creature not only in the wild beyond the witch light but in any d game that’s connected to the feywild in some way the weird thing about the feywild in the shadowfells they feel like uh the the both furthest ends of halloween yeah they’re both creepy in very different ways i talked to chris about this like shadow fellas about repetition it feels like and the feywild is like no you you have no you have no solid ground to stand on here uh what what do you like about that kind of like give and take between those two i like to think of the feywild and the shadowfell almost as characters uh you you could imagine that the feywild to use a winnie the pooh reference you could almost think of the feywild as tigger and the shadowfell as eeyore where in in in one case in the shadowfell they’re in contrast to the feywild where where emotion is at its most intense whether positive or negative in the shadow fell there was a flatness to the gloom and that’s a really important thing to tease out as a dm because both realms have scary locations but in the feywild the emotion is heightened whereas in the shadow fell it is dampened which can be terrifying it’s a it’s a quiet deadliness and you can also imagine that in the shadowfell often beings will be very dignified talk very calmly as horrible things and so you could you can imagine that uh in the shadowfell even when you encounter kind creatures who mean you well there would still be this stillness to them a sense of calm and of no rush to get anywhere because also the shadowfell is is connected in many ways to the power of the negative energy plane in which is to say on the the spectrum of life and death shadow the shadowfell is toward death whereas uh the feywild is much more toward life at its most intense right they’re both filled with living creatures although the the shadowfell is also a realm uh jam-packed with undead right but it is important to point out that just as the riotously colorful realm of the feywild can have scary gloomy things similarly the quiet gray realm of the shadowfell can have kindness but rather than it being accompanied by parties and merriment like you might find in the feywild it might be accompanied by you know a quiet dirge that you know where where you hear songs about beautiful things that have been lost but you know looking toward their return perhaps after after things have faded away that they will be reborn so both realms speak to each other in many ways they they are siblings which is why there is not only connections between them but also travel between them in the wild beyond the witch light there is this carnival that we associate with the feywild yet the owners of that carnival are from the shadowfell yeah and again they are sibling realms a fake creature might be uh in wonderment about the quiet dignity of some place in the shadowfell right uh because remember the shadowfell is also the realm of ravenloft and in the different domains of dread there are places of intense beauty and dignity but again always it’s the side of beauty that is touched by melancholy and death it is beautiful nonetheless you’ve got two new races that are in and while beyond the witch light you’ve got the heron gone and then you’ve got fairies i i really appreciate that you can kind of like build your own ferry because there’s like a pretty big spectrum and i am rather taken like i’ve always liked the very typical fairy with the kind of dragonfly wings but i i will confess the pan’s labyrinth kind of aesthetic has appealed to me much more in the last 20 years i felt a kind of creepy fae what was important to kind of uh show off with the hair and gone and also the fairy as as races so the i’ll start with the harengan the harengan began as an npc folk in the adventure and we actually didn’t have any plans initially to make them playable it was largely the art that we got for them that we found so enchanting that we just as a team thought you know what people are going to want to play them we want to play them and so this is a great example of the game design being inspired by the art for the project and that’s how we ended up with playable rabbit folk it was not a part of the original brief for this book and it was just crucial for us as we do anytime we make a a playable race option that’s inspired by an animal we wanted to make sure that you really got a sense of being a rabbit person uh hence you know hopping and whatnot and the energetic quality of of the race with the ferry uh it evolved as we worked we pondered early on about bringing back the pixie as a playable race the pixie was playable in fourth edition and we thought initially that would be the natural choice we ended up steering away from that because we already in the monster manual make it clear that the realm of the fae is filled with a variety of different fairy-like folk because even in the monster manual we have pixies and sprites folk tales in the real world are also filled with other fairy folk who are of different sizes uh have different types of wings you know they’re not all as you mentioned they’re not all dragonfly wings or butterfly wings sometimes it might be little bat wings you know etc and and so what we decided is rather than somewhat arbitrarily picking just one of the fairy types from the monster manual the pixie how about we instead create an option that is more fluid that allows you to model different types of fave folk you can easily make a person who feels like they’re a cousin to pixies or sprites but you can also use the fairy to make you know as you want to you know your favorite little halloween right inspired person and and that really was our goal that the fairy is just sort of the all-purpose fae person and we we in many ways tried to have our cake and eat it too where you’re small rather than tiny like pixies and sprites yet we give you the ability to cast enlarge and reduce so if you really really want to get to get to be smaller you can but we also made it so you can get bigger if you want to because uh size-changing shenanigans are a big part of fairy tales and so we decided to build that in flight of course was also important here we went through in the unearthed arcana process different versions of the flight we experimented with a much more powerful version of flight than then that ends up in the book where you could hover playtesters rightly pointed out that that was way too powerful we knew it when we sent it out in another turkana we often send things out that we know are overpowered but we’re curious to see what does the community think the flight that the fairies ended up with is akin to the flight that era cochrans have right uh where we we make it so that you don’t essentially get to be a mobile defense platform at first level of flying in heavy armor and are forever unhittable so we’ve corrected for that in in the final version and i think people are going to be delighted i’m looking forward to making fairies of different sorts using what in a way is sort of a fae template that’s really how i think of this race https://t.co/IWEAFDveeR 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— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) September 15, 2021
