My Warduke painting from The Wild Beyond the Witchlight was previewed by WotC. Trying to find the balance between staying true to the original design and updating it was challenging. #dnd pic.twitter.com/25GSMdPJzI

— Mike "Daarken" Lim (@DaarkenArt) August 14, 2021

Why You May Never Leave the Feywild | Wild Beyond the Witchlight with Chris Perkins. why do you like the feywild like what is it about because i uh because i love gothic horror i love like werewolves and vampires and everything else but the feywild there’s something bigger and scarier and i feel like the threat in some ways is bigger in my mind when it comes to the feywild that your soul is and your mind are very much at stake in the feywild in a very different way i i’m drawn to the feywild because i can get whimsy and i can get horror in equal measure right quite simply um you there’s a lot of room to play with from sort of disney-esque quality you know fairy godmothers you know and singing birds and a lot of it and then there’s the grimm’s fairy tales which is dark and ominous and threatening and both of those things just create a beautiful beautiful lemon meringue pie um in my mind but what’s what scares you what scares chris perkins in the feywild other than clowns uh um is there something that drew you in yeah like when you look at mr dark from uh from something wicked this way comes that blows my mind every time because he is charming and well spoken and has a point to some horrible degree and it’s that charm that’s scary yeah it’s i think what i like about it is the sense that if you go here you just might not come back yeah and what like you’re just gone or you might come back and uh time has sort of left you behind yeah um the the rules of time can work a little differently in the feywild you know little johnny can go in there when he’s nine and return 19 years later and he’s still nine what happened see i feel like i feel like i know where everyone’s coming from in avernus but then you’re in the fame things get a little bit more complicated yeah and then you’re dealing with you know creatures of unfettered emotion who can actually sort of shape the landscape and do things because of it and how do you how do you deal with those people those creatures um the the fact that you could offend somebody by doing nothing part of it too is we just haven’t seen the fail wild much we haven’t done much with it and so it is a it is a more of a blank canvas creatively it’s it’s it’s an exciting place as a dm to go because there hasn’t been tons of feywild adventures written there isn’t you know a second edition feywild line that you can look back on like you can with ravenloft right uh there’s none of that yeah there’s nothing that immediately jumps to my mind so this feels like the first definitive yeah uh how many are how many archvay have we met in d i would like more yes so would i maybe maybe this is the start of something grand uh that’s fantastic is there one core element that is absolutely your favorite or do you think that’s going to be the most enticing to players um like i’ve never quite seen a carnival like this carnival before and i love the fact that there’s little games and everything it’s funny um you should mention come back to the carnival because when we sent the adventure out for playtesting one of the comments that was most frequent was we didn’t want to leave the carnival we didn’t want to go on the rest of the adventure because we were just having fun you know mucking around in the carnival and i think uh i think that’s one of my favorite things is you can just take the carnival and make that part of your campaign and leave the rest behind it’s just a fun place to explore on its own there is something that kind of intimidates me and i found this true to be very recently i actually had to run uh strawed and role play astrad and i feel like that that character is so loaded at this point of expectations that i tended just to go for combat and just smack everyone down when it when in regards to you know the while beyond the witch light and any nemesis or creature like do you have a go-to place when you run them for people in your like personal d games or um you know in the live games that you’ve done like how do you how do you keep fresh as a role player and an actor for like these bigger bigger than life characters that is a very good question i don’t really know the answer to that um because when i’m role playing i’m kind of in a zone right like you’re improvising so and i’m improvising so i don’t know that ahead of time necessarily but i find that the less i say the better because every time i open my mouth there’s a chance that you know i could say something that doesn’t quite doesn’t quite mesh with expectation or or uh could be unintentionally funny or you can sort of sabotage the character unintentionally by saying too much and so i tend to when i’m bringing a character to life be as minimalistic as possible in terms of what they say and their screen time strat is i don’t want to get into long-winded dialogue with straw yeah because the longer that conversation goes on the more off the rails it’s going to get right so at some point he does have to either turn into a bat and fly away turn into a cloud of mist and you know slip under the door or just you know rip your jugular out true for the players as well right like you don’t want necessarily keep the conversation going no no and that’s why you know a couple good zingers and then he’s out of there uh is there any environmental stuff is there any magical items that really stand out to you in this adventure that are particularly fun i have seen some of the uh there is a you know once talked about cute ugly there’s nothing but mostly cute in this and it like melts my soul when you see some of the names this is the cutest dandy adventure ever that is also extremely deadly uh you have weaponized cuteness yeah we have we have gone way overboard i think with with cute characters in this one partly because the story lends itself well to them um from baby displacer beasts to uh you know child-sized scarecrows to um oh gosh candy apple headed goblins uh all kinds of crazy crap but uh one of my favorite items in the book is a cauldron it sits at the center of the story um in fact the story really revolves around it it is a very very powerful magical cauldron potentially the most powerful cauldron in the multiverse and uh it is the source of great turmoil uh in the heart of the story and when the characters find it i think they’ll be they’ll be of two minds uh one mind they’ll want to keep it run away with it even though it’s not easily transportable and the other is they’ll want to destroy it and destroy it quickly if they’re capable and i love that i love when they finally encounter it what might happen to it and what they might do with it of course it’s uh it’s got a fierce protector and they’ll have to deal with that first yeah i’m always of a mind to just steal the thing if i can so yeah yeah yeah and you know bragging rights if you can get war duke’s flaming sword yeah well that’s the helmet and the helmet yeah yeah yeah yeah all that is the art is absolutely there’s a ton of amazing art in this book too oh yeah yeah the art the art and the just the layout of the book and all the flourishes that that were sort of added at the end um kate erwin is the art director and she arrayed a stunning cast of artists to bring all these cute characters and um magical moments of the story to life uh including anillo with a giant owl which i really like and then um trish yokum did the graphic design the final sort of layout of the book and the back from the background texture to the just the little bits of bits of lights and things that she added to the corners of some of the illustrations in the corners some of the pages it’s a very magical book https://t.co/53QuOpZbmN pic.twitter.com/UB7HDDRZbU

— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) September 14, 2021

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 pic.twitter.com/IIK4qAvibk

— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) September 15, 2021

Let's talks about 80s villains, half plate and custard damage and you’ve talked about damage to a degree there’s custard damage there are some interesting games yeah i did i did not plan for custard damage um well one never can stacy allen who did the initial design on the which light carnival introduced a pie eating contest and you take custard damage in the course of eating pies and if you accumulate so much custard damage things can go wrong but you never die from custard damage oh see now are we going to get a subclass eventually that does custard damage like you can turn like 1d8 extra custard damage like the custard ranger that would be delightful and i look forward to seeing it on dm’s guild yeah or rogue it poisons you with custard right yes yeah yes your friendly sneak attack so yeah when i saw the custard damage in the first draft is like you know this is such a wacky concept i think i’ll just keep it we’ll make it work that’s fantastic uh did it was was it natural progression with the fact that you did this carnival and again with the 80s we had some reference of a carnival uh when it comes to dnd there’s some notable familiar things in that map mainly the roller coaster is directly from the animated there are a lot of 80s stuff nestled in the wild beyond the witch light from the characters who were once action figures to the little little visual drops like for instance the 1980s cartoon roller coaster appearing in the witchlight carnival those are just little you know tip of the hats all done deliberately because at its heart the wild beyond the witch light is a story about time yeah uh the conspiracy theorist to me is thinking that you have gone back in time and now many times retroactively yes well yeah clearly uh and now that carnival was always that carnival so the they were responsible for sending all these kids to the d d universe true enough that’s how i see it now that’s that’s how you should see it you’ve altered the canon of my brain but there are some 1980s cartoon characters who are showing up uh my favorite is kellik because i am a sucker for a petty wizard so tell me about kellik kellik appeared in an episode of the original cartoon and he was also a 1980s action figure along with several others his first appearance in a role-playing game product was in a module called quest for the heart stone which was a first edition expert relax not first edition was an expert level adventure for those who are familiar with the expert box set congratulations you’re as old as i am kellik and a whole cadre of other characters including strongheart warduke skilla and numerous others were actually in that adventure as pre-generated characters you were supposed to play them there were evil ones and good ones and the whole structure of the adventure was take a bunch of good characters take a bunch of evil characters throw them together send them on a mission together and see what wackiness ensues well um i wanted to bring kellock back mainly because uh the wild beyond the witch light is a tale about time and i thought it would be good to go back in time pull some characters forward and figure out what have they been doing or what have they been up to or how has being pulled into the feywild just sort of pulled them out of time and sort of set them on a path but i also wanted nods to the the cartoon series so in the in the cartoon series calyx got a thing for unicorn horns yes well he still does yes he does in the wild beyond the witch like he’s still got a thing for unicorn horns he’s very focused indeed indeed and uh he’s also got his eye on ringlerun’s staff and so those two things combined uh sets him on a course and he brings a lot of his evil friends along and so you find him kind of in the thick of things in the wild beyond the witch light what i love about the kellik and the other characters in general is that um they may not mean anything to some people coming to this adventure right but they will add sort of a deeper resonance to those who are familiar and and have been waiting decades now for these characters to resurface in a meaningful way calc just has the best cloak he does have a pretty badass cloak with us the sort of cut at the bottom and the the big cowl yeah uh or the uh sort of like the yeah it’s kind of like the the the most uber color of all time yeah yeah it is definitely he went to the evil collar shop together and um he’s rocking the long white beard and so he’s he’s somebody that i could probably pull off a cosplay yeah yeah oh i’ve thought about it [Laughter] war duke is an interesting character i’ve always been fascinated by the fact that he just never got to the rest of his armor on one side of him yeah he does he he does take half plate to its extreme yeah that’s what he said yes and the the the short shorts are also yeah were something to behold back in the day liberating yes yes uh so we along with kellik and the other characters we gave war duke um to um sean wood who was our concept art director and then sean gave it to darken one of our artists and so darkin did a refresh on all the characters and made war duke a total badass um he’s got a little bit more armor now a little less leg showing um that’s okay it works and now he’s got his full flaming sword and display too so very good um yeah i war duke is one of those characters i had been looking for a home for for many years um and obviously one this is this is the now now is the time he’s back he’s he’s bad he’s still wearing his spooky ass helmet and um carrying a spooky ass shield yeah you were very uh you were very cheeky about the whole thing because the dread helm showed up under the uh very common magical we do that all the time yeah we seed i i knew we were doing the feywild story while we were working on xanathar’s guide to everything so putting war dukes helm in xanathar’s guide was a tip-off of something coming you https://t.co/fw1q4OSbxr pic.twitter.com/nJ2v7k7rg9

— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) September 7, 2021