Where did we leave off? I talk to @ChrisPerkinsDnD about the rules of the Feywild, adorable creatures, Archfey and… clowns… all right so we have wild beyond the witch light what inspired you to do this why i can tell that you’ve had a lot of fun making this book it was a fun book uh and the reason i wanted to do it because i’ve been in love with the feywild for a long time and we haven’t really gone to the feywild yet in fifth edition and it was always my hope that we could and i’ve sort of had a story in mind for a number of years but the feywild story just kept getting kicked down the curb by other things that were more timely so at last here we are see i saw a post about uh you know curse of straw and this used to be your favorite adventure used to be or maybe it still is yeah but you are very excited about which light yes what what what about this has like drawn your eye um in some ways curse of strawd and the wild beyond the witch light are kind of like two sides of a coin they’re they’re similar in a lot of respects one being that they sort of go to kind of a parallel plane um in the case of curse of straw of course you’re going to the shadowfell and now in the wild beyond the witch light you’re going to the feywild they’re both mirrors of the material plane of of the normal world and structurally they’re similar as well in cursive stride you sort of get pulled into this domain and then there’s the scary castle on the promontory that you know inevitably you’re going to end up in and there’s a scary creature that lives up there um the wild beyond the witch light you’re kind of drawn into this fey realm it has its own rules um that you kind of have to follow to survive there but in the middle of the domain there is a castle on a promontory glaring down at you and there’s a mystery up there that beckons you and what you find up there is hopefully not what you were expecting and so you can either go there directly or as directly as you’re able to or you can kind of meander around the domain a little bit get to meet some of the locals learn about what’s going on and then go up to the castle on the hill so beyond those similarities of course they’re very different adventures in terms of how they feel about the emotions and mood that they’re trying to evoke and of course the creatures that you’re meeting are all together different um not the shadowy undead denizens and werewolves of the of the shadowed realm but the fairies and goblins and hags and miscreants of the uh shall we say uh fairy realm the glittering realm of wonder and whimsy you know i’ve always think that shadowfell and ravenloft is kind about repetition yeah i expect that the feywild is perhaps not so much no it’s a bit more unpredictable instead of dealing with a dark lord you’re dealing with an archway and archfey are by their nature mercurial and so this is a more chaotic place than you’re probably accustomed to in the shadowfell i don’t want to give too much away but there are some mechanisms in the wild by beyond the witch light that help you as a dm paint the feywild in a certain dazzling rainbow color uh and uh invest in the characters of that realm certain qualities for instance what i mean by that is uh there are some rules that are sort of stipulated up front like for instance the rule of hospitality and how you as a dm can use that and in some cases weaponize it against your players okay how do you weaponize hospital hospitality um well you know if if the characters really want to carry on in the feywild and and get to where they need to go um it can be a lot easier if they follow the quote-unquote rules of the feywild be it the rule of ownership or the rule of hospitality or any of the other rules if they don’t um they could find themselves confounded or slowed down and the rule of hospitality basically states that a host has to be good to you while you’re in their house but they want something in return a cert level of civility if nothing else and if the characters aren’t prepared to be civil bad things can happen to them if they break the rule um uh if they take something that does not belong to them even if they don’t know that it doesn’t like who it belongs to that can that can come back at them uh through the rule of ownership and the proper owner can demand something from you or you could find yourself in a bit of a pickle um and fairies are generally tricky right there are some there are some tricksy characters that you will run into but then there are some that aren’t who are generally just kind-hearted souls who want to help you and um they sort of recognize you’re an outsider and may not understand the rules fully and so they may not hold you to them quite so stringently as they might others who should know better do you have any favorite characters that are in this because there are so many quirky characters in this particular adventure so many um the ones that you encounter in the carnival of course which we haven’t talked about yet but um but then the ones in the feywild themselves there are there are probably more individual sort of concepted characters in this story than we’ve ever done before in a published fifth edition adventure but my one of my favorites is sir talavar he is a fairy dragon knight um yes who’s very much on the up and up a he’s a noble soul and has trained many other fey wild knights in his illustrious career and he has found himself in a bit of a predicament and if the characters help him out of it he’s sort of like their stall he can be a stalwart uh and he actually when they need it most actually drops off a little gift for them uh that that can help them on their way but i think what what sold me on sir talavar wasn’t simply the concept of a of a valiant um chivalrous fairy dragon but also the art that sean wood did which um uh gave him like a little sword and accoutrement and just the way he sort of carries himself he sort of one won my heart another figure in the feywild who i love is jingle jangle who is a she’s a female goblin who collects keys and keys are near and dear to her heart and part of her soul and at one point she actually gives you one that can be helpful sort of parting with it and she’s one of the ones i mentioned earlier who recognizes the characters or outsiders and may not want to give her something in return even though that’s sort of the law of the land um i just love i just love some of the helpful characters that you can run into it’s also hard not to love all the npcs that i’ve seen in the book and they’re all very very charming even when they’re terrible which is i guess kind of the appeal right when you look at david bowie and labyrinth and any kind of fae story uh there is there is a charm there is a charm and um it’s funny you should mention david bowie because um i’ve always loved his character in in the labyrinth and i love how it shows that the the side of the fae well there are two sides of the fae there’s um and one of them is this sort of darker side and i think that’s one of the other things that appealed to me about the story was that i’m a big fan of ravenloft and i love the dark edgy stuff i could bring a little bit of that into the wild beyond the witch light and have this sort of undercurrent of dread um that characters may be oblivious to most of the time but it’s there yeah like i don’t feel safe with david boy’s character in the labyrinth until maybe the very end where you’re like maybe he was helping all along right right but you don’t know but there’s a lot of other stories where they no they were not helping at all they were coming for your soul yeah the the archfey of prizmir who i i’m not i haven’t talked much about is very much that kind of complicated character whose motives are ambiguous could be helpful could be hugely detrimental right [Laughter] we’ll see how it plays out in groups and there’s also domains essentially in the feywild as well so there’s uh within the feywild we have created what are called domains of delight as a concept and they are the mere opposite of domains of dread whereas a domain of dread is a prison containing its dark lord a domain of delight is created by the archfey who rules it and the archway has complete control over the domain in terms of its structure malleability or whatever and the more powerful the archway the bigger the domain can be uh this is sort of um kind of based on the notion that every creature in the feywild has some control over that environment if you cry by a rock because you’re sad a little you know blue flower might spring up out of the ground and just sort of um you know weep tears of dew um like it’s like the land itself is feeling your sorrow if you’re an archfay in the feywild your emotions are so powerful that you can shape mountains and forests and rivers and the whole lot of it and basically sculpt a domain out of nothing and so there are these domains of delights scattered all throughout the feywild each with an archfay ruler um all as individual as any dark lord or any other entity they’re all unique creatures and so and sometimes these domains can overlap and sometimes they don’t and you know it’s it gives you as a creative the opportunity to create archfey domains archfay and their domains of delight uh of your own modeled after the one that we present in the wild beyond the witch light which is the domain of prismier can you give me a little bit more insight into prismier yeah so because we knew we were creating this new concept of the domains of delight prizmir sort of stands as an archetypal arch phased domain but in this story when the characters first come across it it’s in a bit of a state things have gone a little bit awry and so uh it has kind of split into three realms so one domain three realms each realm has its own sort of texture and complexion to it and so what that means is in the course of the adventure you really get to explore three very different environments within the feywild and that’s that was the major appeal of doing that was giving us a chance to show you that the feywild isn’t just for instance one big happy primeval forest right you know there are different kinds of environments that you can have within this setting and prismier sort of embodies that yeah like again like i know i’m referencing a lot of 80s films but like legend for instance scale’s pretty uh super evil to yeah unicorns right so yes where does the carnival come into this and why did you include a clown on the cover [Laughter] uh well clowns freaked me out like they freaked many people out and one of the direction one of the directions for the cover was we want to balance the charm and the the dread ah so clown yeah an easy easy way to do it yeah yeah happy happy little carnival tents lots of sort of bright orange colors but then dark and stormy sky and a big clown sort of hanging above the scene with a maniacal grin on his face what’s going on here yeah yeah yeah that tends to ruin my day yes exactly and and so trying to strike that balance now the carnival the witch-like carnival came about because one of my favorite novels is something wicked this way comes by ray bradbury which of course has a carnival and it is also impossible to make into a film that they tried h they gave it a good old-fashioned try the best disney tradition um it is a hard film it is a hard book to adapt and so i wanted from the very start to try to um create a carnival that was a bit of an homage and it occurred to me fairly early on that a carnival is a great place to have a fey crossing because it means that you can have the carnival show up on any world yeah you know your home game world greyhawk forgotten realms the witch-like carnival can land anywhere and the fey crossing goes with it so it makes for an easy point of entry into the realm into the domain of prismir the carnival itself i also wanted to do because i thought it would be fun to have a carnival that was faith themed and what would that mean and how could the characters learn a little bit about the feywild by experiencing the carnival before they actually go to the feywild right so they kind of have a few of the rules or concepts down before they get there i thought that was a really neat opportunity https://t.co/RDeEQOy9Aw pic.twitter.com/TMITzbnQmx

— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) August 31, 2021