Feywild/Fey Lands

I'll be posting some pics for inspiration now.

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Fun fact: there are parts of a corgi's anatomy called "fairy saddles"

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I think this is a 2hu, but I'm not sure.

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Some place names from a text file I found on my computer:

The Towers of Sleep
The Tree with the Great Painted Face
The Moon Garden

There are not only forests in fairy tales. Take the Snow Queen by H.C. Andersen, for instance. Lots of tundra. Don't forget the mermaid seas, the centaur plains and the Feydark, where everything is much muchier than in the Underdark. Every scent is stronger, every color is clearer, every feeling is intensified a hundredfold. The fair folk are quick to anger and quick to laugh.

Every fairy tale from every culture in the world might have been inspired by the lands of Faerie. Tir na nÓg, the Kakuriyo, Ljosalfheim, Wonderland, you name it - you could bring stuff in from everything.

In my campaign's Feywild, where the party is going at some point, they're going to meet a bunch of weird creatures, including:
- The Rabbit Prince, also known as El-Ahrairah or Inlérah, depending on his mood. Lord of all rabbits and hares, the Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and the Black Rabbit of Death. Stories of the puca are inspired by him - depending on his color, he brings either fortune or grief.
- Parsifal Nivens McTwisp, the Bane of Caerbannog, loyal knight of the Rabbit Prince, and worries too much about time.
- The Monkey King, Sun Wukong. Prophesied to go on a grand adventure in order to bring order to the world. Doesn't like order that much, so tries to avoid those mentioned in the prophecy.
- Sotlan of Summer, a cyclops pirate wearing an eyepatch because he was cursed by demonic fomorian magic to kill all that he lays his eyes upon.
- Chester, a fey feline of displacer beast heritage who turns invisible.
- The Erl-king, Wodan Winterbeard, former leader of the Wild Hunt. Stories of Odin, Santa and Harlequin are all inspired by him.
- The Green Knight, Nuadar Shavian, who once wielded the blade Claoimh Solais.

Good movies are Underground (Bowie), Legend (1985) and Strange Magic (2015).

Good reads are Dresden Files (every book has some amount of faerie as far as I recall, but it intensifies as the books progress) and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

When I first found out about this a couple of days ago, my first thought was "Wild Hunt riders on corgis, chasing down the party after they've had to drink shrinking potion to escape from evil giants."

mccartyscorgis.com/corgi-legends.html

Other sources for inspiration could be Changeling: the Dreaming/Lost.

Also music by Nightwish.

By "Underground" I of course mean "Labyrinth".

>A bunch of the mushroom people
>Many of which are edible.
>Immediately wonder how they taste

Poor little guys, I want to cook then up and eat then.

Laius, stop.
Not everything should be eaten.

NEXT CHAPTER WHEN?

I don't want to ask /a/

Soon I hope.

wait, what chapter is that from?
There has hardly been a single slip of fan service in there, I have eagearly been awaiting the exploration of the dwarf cook's repressed sexuality.

I'm actually running 3.5.e. IIRC, the whole thing was that elves are a bit bigger than normal, like a few inches to a foot, the trees and plants are huge in some places and normal in others, and the same for animals.

Good to know. Thanks.

I really like that mental image. Gonna use that.

I should throw in an talking animal or two, maybe more. It would probably catch the players off guard. As for Alice in Wonderland, I still remember watching it and being confused half the time.

I'm liking these. They're going into the pot.

Awesome! Thanks for the info! I can use some of those characters for inspiration.

>I'm actually running 3.5.e

But there IS no Feywild in 3.5e.

>As for Alice in Wonderland, I still remember watching it and being confused half the time.
That's how your players should feel. Faerie isn't for mortals - heck, most elves are weirded out by it. The Tim Burton movie has several elements that are perfect for the Feywild: A mad queen who sees deformity as beauty, the personification of abstract concepts (Time is an actual person, and killing him is bad manners), and talking animals each of which has its own sense of what is sane and proper.

The Feywild is a part of the setting, not a part of the rules.

>most elves are weirded out by it
Clarification: I meant wood elves, as in the elves who abandoned the Feywild for the mortal world ages ago, as opposed to the high elves who still live there. Still, when nature itself is part of politics as an actor instead of a subject, even high elves might be confused sometimes.

>3.5
>actual setting

That's from 4e, not 3.5.

3.5e Forgotten Realms HAS a Feywild, it's just called Faerie.

See This is part of the reason I wanted some help from the Hive mind for this. The whole world that my players are in is a homebrew one that my friend built for our very first campaign, and now I built another continent on it for our second campaign. Feywilds were never touched on, so I asked for help.

g.e-hentai.org/g/880758/c5df01e67b/

This chapter.

Well, one thing you might want to do is make sure the players understand that the Feywild is a land of fairy tales. The word "faerie" has roots in "fatum", Latin for "fate", and fairy tales are mostly about how the mortal world is thrown into chaos by some supernatural event that seems like fate itself has intervened for some strange purpose. In the Dresden Files universe, fairies are notable because they are unable to lie outright, and a contract has supernatural power over the ones making the agreement - the explanation given is that the way you speak is part of who you are, so when you break an oath, you break a part of yourself. Like that, stories themselves might have supernatural powers in the Feywild: Genre savvy people like bards are at an advantage because they know the structures of stories, such how to ask for help, how to avoid danger, and when to expect a deus ex machina. The rules of existence itself just aren't the same as in the mortal world, but you ultimately decide which ones are true and which ones are just myths.

I honestly like that idea, that Fey cannot lie outright and that contracts in the Feywild are magically binding. I'll have to download the Dresden Files on my Kindle this afternoon.

I can recommend the audio book versions read by James Marsters. The Dresden Files RPG also has some books you might find interesting. The setting generally has great world building going for it.

Well as long as you're homebrewing, you can hop by the Exalted General thread's mediafire archives and get any books pertaining to the Wyld. The have a bunch of freaky locations that can be used.

for example off the top of my head
>gem lava springs
>deep in the southern desert there is a geyser that sprouts multicoloured lava
>anything it touches gets turned into gemstone, lava encroaching on and covering any solid object introduced to it
>it is a very high risk - high reward business for some adventurers that know of it location

>cat forest
>instead of plant fiber, the trees are composed out cats endlessly climbing onto each other
>those who win favour of the goddess of the forest may be gifted with an artefact sword. Made of cats.

>synesthesia areas
>some perception sense gradually grows weaker, while others grow stronger to compensate
>daredevil ain't got shit on you after a while, you can hear what colour things are

I definitely want to use that last one. The gem lava seems interesting too. The cat forest seems like something fun to throw at the party if they explore a bit.

>Autumn Fairies: they are (re)born as a leaf detaches from a tree, and die when they touch the ground. The thicker the magic of an area, the more Autumn Fairies.
>Mycoblins: Goblins made of fungus. They tend to the forests, dragging deadfall into mounds that serve as their great halls and birth more mycoblins.
>Stoneminders: Tiny stone golems that totter around tapping large stones with sticks, herding them along in their lazy route over the fact of the earth through geologic time. Stoneminders trade large, unmolested stones for stories whispered among their flock.
>Forest Crowns: Whisps which settle on the brows of forest creatures, giving them a faint halo of light and command over lesser creatures. It is unknown if a Forest Crown imbues a creature with sentience or if they themselves are controlling those they settle on.
>The Unseen: A multitude of creatures with strange names and stranger forms, only spoken of by the fey that allow themselves to be Seen. Interactions with the Unseen are through feybands; lanyards of grass and leaves which can be wrapped around an object of any kind. An object marked with a feyband may be borrowed by the Unseen for any length of time, but upon its return it is always paid for in kind. Axes return sharpened. Shoes return with fresh laces. There is even a story of a woodsman who feybanded his cart and had it returned, loaded down with silver.
>Demigryphs: "gryphons" which are a mashup of mice and sparrows, rather than lions and eagles. They are created as messengers by great and powerful fey, and after their task is fulfilled they are allowed to live out their lives as they please. Since many travel quite far to deliver their message, they often make excellent guides.
>Guardians: Small, gnomish creatures who collect things which do not belong to the forest, and guide the lost to the edges of the feywild. They delight in bartering over the value of man-made goods, as they find the concept of material value amusing.

Ignore sensible terrain guidelines. Everything is impressive.

Forests are either comfy cosy bright groves, or thick dark ancestral woods. No middle ground.

Mountains touch the sky, always, and some are even higher than that.

Rivers don't start in the mountains, or end at the sea. They can do that, but just as often they can go the other way, or from mountain to mountain, or lake to lake.

It's perfectly possible to go into a small hollow under a tree, and find a tunnel that leads to a mountain cave seven miles away.

I'm liking these creatures and I want to include some of them. My op pic could be the stoneminders. I imagine the Guardians as a wood and stone version of Shield Golems. As for the mycoblins, I imagine them looking a bit like .

Also after some pondering you can actually read the mechanics bits for plothooks. Or at least making a really /weird shit/ encounter with a fae lord.

Lemme go on a little rant.
Now, Exalted uses a different system rather than initiative/turn/round of D&D, but lets for a moment pretend that it does.

But the Fae, while capable of interacting with the world normally, prefer to engage each other in their own weird style of /metanarrative combat/ of Shaping the fey realm and use their own timing and their own stats too so you can just give your players some fey boons that grant them those powers temporarily if you want to bolt it on.

Normally turns & rounds chain into an encounter, encounters chain into plot art and plot arc chains into campaign, see?
The fae then take it and move the chain one step to the left.
One Shaping action is equivalent to a whole encounter.

For example: a Black Knight bars your way.
Normal way: many turns of combat against him. Or a sidequest to get him something he wants so he can let you pass.
Shaping: one action of Sword Grace and if you win you defeat him and get his sword, which you can use later in the adventure. Or perhaps you use the Cup Grace to emphatise with his cause and convince him to follow you.
If you fail the action, you lose something or you are swayed to his cause instead of him to yours.

Also the Black Knight himself may be just conjured by the opposing Lord on the spot, /or/ he may be an actual subservient character, who is in Shaping framework is equivalent to a +2 Sword.

So yeah. Loads of fodder for weird.

Not that unusual for long-drawn out conflict resolution mechanics in RPGs (4e's skill challenge, Fate's conflicts and contests, etc.)

Yes, the weird is that they force this via in-universe fey majikz bullshit.

mid may apparently

That's pretty interesting. I don't know if I will use it, but having things like some Knights be the equivilent of magical constructs or weapons would certainly be something I will consider.

Now, a quick question, should Druids know some things about the fey and the elves in the Feywild?

I'm stealing this for my campaign.

Don't. The vast majority of players will whine at you for "fast forwarding through too much."

The players are at epic tier, and I might as well use this as a guideline for how quickly they manage to resolve combats that aren't at their level. Nobody wants to spend half an hour killing level 5 monsters with a level 22 party.

At that level you can just go with reversing Call of Cthulhu rules.
"You kill 1dX monsters per round"

>running epic-tier 3.5

You're already dangerously close to freeforming, you know that?

Shit, epic-level characters are forces of nature regardless of plane.

Some kami seem like they'd fit the feywild to me.

I'm not OP. I'm running 4e.

I'm thinking about having my players go to Kamigawa through the Feywild, with all kami being either Fey, Immortals or Devils.

I think that the Shugenja (the Oriental Adventures class with spirit binding) considered all fey to be spirits, like how Oni and Rakshasa are already spirits. If you go by that, the fey are already kami - and that kind of makes sense, considering how most fey embody some sort of concept or object, like talking animals and the seasonal courts.

Seasonal courts have no mythological basis.

If you're running 4e, why not use skill challenges?

I would use the fey of my country, but they are a bunch of lewd cunts.
The goblins of the countries we invaded tend to be rapists so it's even worse.

They're still used in both the D&D Feywild, Dresden Files verse and Changeling verse. If nothing else, that makes them a contemporary myth.

They'll end up being pretty much the same thing as I understand it, but I meant how the player characters would also feel more like what was happening would be part of some narrative, because of the laws of Faerie.

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Plus this bit cut off at the end

heaped on platters for them. Here can be obtained scrolls
depicting First Age devices, gryphon feathers, cakes of
diamond-dust and mechanical toys of inhumanly cunning manufacture.
Of course, other domains and freeholds buy slaves,
too, or trade away their dream-eaten husks to the Guild
or any other merchants. However, any deals the humans
broker outside the Goblin Bazaars are individual ones,
and subject to raksha interpretation and raksha humor.
Let the vendor beware.

THE JET COURT
Toward the Deep North lies the Jet Court, one of
the five great centers of raksha power. The raksha of this
court consider Temperance the greatest virtue, and go to
great lengths to show how temperate they are by spying
on each other, betraying each other and brutally killing
each other over who is most moderate. The court lies in
a set of ice caverns connected by twisting corridors, set
with arrases and convenient bedrooms and courtrooms,
perfectly arranged for plotting, rendezvous and affairs. No
other group of raksha nearby is foolish enough to defy the
court and give them cause for dramatic feuds and open
warfare; the Winter People journey from Creation and
the Bordermarches to exchange regular gifts and visits.
The court’s ruler Princess Kyema is as artistically
perfect in her beauty as she is perfectly cutting in her wit.
Her constant, mild smile soon seems more threatening
than any scowl. She has ruled the Jet Court for centuries.
Kyema enjoys leaving glamour-created copies of herself
around the court while she spies on her nobles. She
blackmails her agents into desperation.
Three special minions assist Kyema’s schemes. The
Lady Ennaya, a maker of poisons and aphrodisiacs, leads
the Amethyst Household. The fearsome warrior Count
Okudo decides his actions purely at the fall of dice. Lord
Kazour, a diplomat and courtier, conceals his hopeless
love for the Princess. He walks amid the falling snow in
thin silks and bare feet.

The major entertainments of the court are spying,
betraying, blackmailing, indulging or torturing pet mortals and disturbing other Fair Folk. The court is a very
random faction, since they can justify almost any course
in the name of “temperance”—and delight in doing so.
Indeed, to plan anything would show a disturbing lack
of indifference. The court has no set hours for rising or
sleeping, and courtiers and sycophants constantly wander
the long, icy hallways. The hobgoblins who serve the Jet
Court are usually beautiful metal statues or dreamlike,
mist-shrouded ice sculptures swathed in scarves of jet
that has been woven like silk.
The Jet Court does good business with the Guild,
directly and through the Mouth of White Sleep, throwing gold and gems at the merchants’ feet before luring
the unchained slaves that they have purchased out into
the snow. The court is also prompt in returning mindbroken slaves, and while these slaves often have artistic
mutilations that render them less than ornamental, they
are nevertheless adequate for hard labor. The Jet Court
doesn’t usually try to lure the Guildsmen into the snow.
In fact, a recent apparent kidnapping turned out to be a
murder attempt by a rival merchant group, who hoped
to anger both sides and usurp the Guild’s slave trade in
the region. The rival group in question now enjoys the
Jet Court’s hospitality.