The Shadowfell makes sense to me. It's the realm of decay and entropy. The Feywild doesn't. And it shouldn't. I like to think that the Feywild is actually one of the Far Realms that wondered too close and collided with the Prime Material. It stuck and molded itself after the Prime Material, but ultimately it still works by its own rules, not ours. The creatures of the Feywild may *look* like things from the Prime, but they're ultimately strange and alien and incomprehensible to us.
That last part is largely because the feywild amplifies a lot of what goes on in the material plane. Taking singular concepts and dialing them up to eleven. To the point where their singular nature is no longer recognizable from a perspective where all those singular aspects used to be part of a greater whole. Though at this point they're just connecting the dots and filling in the blanks. Making the "lore" fit what is already established. Looking at a bunch of datapoints and going "How can we make this make sense."
In my campaign world, I had it where the Fey *fought* the Far Realm in a prehistoric war (agents of the natural world vs the unnatural, sort of like 4e lore about the Living Gate), and the Fey's madness actually comes from the repercussions of that war. They're mad because the taint of the Far Realm corrupted the wildest natural reflection of the world (the Feywild) into chaos and uncontrolled passions. They were never "like us" and still pretty alien on their own, but the balance of nature they practiced was enflamed and twisted by the influence of outer chaos.
For me i'd like to think that if the material plane is a 'body' then shadowfell depicts the hard reality of it while faewild is the delusion it do like to see of itself through the mirror.
I enjoy this little bits of lore and world description. Keep uploading more of this. Maybe going into one faction at a time, dig into VIPs in the world. important cities, world changing events. All of that. Keep it up!
Okay, I normally give Mearls a lot of crap, but THIS was brilliant. Thank you. The difference between the Feywild and the Shadowfell remind me of the World of Darkness and it's overarching concepts of the Wilde, the Wyrm, and the Weaver. Growth/Death/Stasis. Examining the Feywild and the Shadowfell in an emotional context brings a new understanding. Thank you for that.
The way I've implemented these two planes into our setting is mostly the same, but adds an additional dimension to them; the Feywild, the Prime, and the Shadowfell are all material planes, arranged in a stack. Souls that perish or fade in the outer planes appear in the Feywild. They carry a lot of magic and power with them, which is why the Feywild is so permeated with magic. When souls die in the Feywild, they are born in the Prime Material plane. Some magic might be carried over, begetting wizards and sorcerers and bards, etc. but the Prime Material is far less magical. However, some memory of former power remains, and the denizens of the outer planes use this to influence and attempt to lay claim to the soul whilst it is alive in the Prime Material plane. Good-aligned entities as well as evil all engage in this bidding war for souls, creating religions and cults, offering bargains and pacts for power. When souls die in the Prime Material, they sink to the Shadowfell. If undisturbed, the soul is safely transported down the river Styx to True Death. After passing into True Death, the soul is claimed by whichever outer plane entity, be it god or celestial or fiend, that held the most influence over it in the Prime Material. How far down the river the soul has travelled (and whether they have been disturbed) affects how easily a person can be resurrected. These additions help fit the inner planes into the cosmology of the outer planes, provides solid reasoning for outer plane entities to have any interest in humans (gotta keep your plane's population up, or the Abyss might invade!), and can set up extra-planar adventures that have real impact to the Prime Material plane (something's grabbing souls as soon as they pass into Shadowfell? Now no-one can be resurrected! Hades is claiming too many souls? Now Elysium is shrinking, and clerics of Pelor are losing their powers!). And yes, I base my Shadowfell a lot on the Abhorsen series.
I'm really enjoying this take on the feywild. Plots I've threaded in various campaigns all link to the idea that they feywild is the place where things just "are". Anger, it has a form. Love, it has a form. That one specific idea of darkness over your shoulder on a cold misty night when you have a slight fever, there's an archfey for that. It's the realm where concepts become reality at a whim.
I absolutely love these videos! they are so full of new ideas and concepts, and they are extremely useful for a DM- I had absolutely no idea on how the feywild or shadowfell would influence the PCs, but now I do and I can work it in the game. keep it up!
Oh you know what! It's probably going to be Beyond the Crystal Cave. They've been doing all of their products based on classic modules of the past, and that's the iconic fey adventure.
I always wanted a book that went into more detail on all the 4e Feywild locations that got mentioned in sources like the Manual of the Planes and Player's Option: Heroes of the Feywild. Basically the Feywild as a campaign setting.
This is fascinating stuff! I grew up mainly interested in Warcraft lore, which is very good vs. evil and nothing else, but I'm really getting interested in D&D's views on also the forces of order vs. chaos, mania vs. depression, and so forth.
It's funny we're playing curse of Stradh and my barbarian commented after meeting Stradh that despite Stradh's professions of Godhood and immortality he was essentially just a corpse that walked and talked having lost the drive that make mortal creatures such dynamic agents of change. Seems like I was thinking along the same lines as you.
I think one of the most useful things for imagining the Fey Wild is Faerie in the Dresden Files. We see trees and plants and wildlife in way too much of the art for the Fey. Where are the glaciers and the mountain peaks? I would imagine anything in Peer Gynt should be able to fit in the Fey Wild, and that would include 'In the Hall of the Mountain King'.
Feywild is the plane of life while the Shadowfell is the Plane of Death. Both are overflowing and brimming in their realms with life and death respectively! Both are horrifically dangerous when left unchecked!
I describe the Feywilde and Shadowfell as "positive material" and "negative material" respectively - that is, similar to how older editions had planes of positive and negative energy, the Shadowfell is a fusion of the material plane and the negative energy plane, which is where it gets its core features such as emotional fugue and landscape.
I never realized that the setting of curse of strahd was in part of the shadowfell. I had assumed They were just in another part of the material world.
Ravenloft was originally one of the "Demiplanes of Dread" in 2e. Basically, private little lands, disconnected from any of the actual campaign settings (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Greyhawk etc.). Each was ruled over by a "Darklord" who had incredible power over his or her land, but was essentially a prisoner of it. There was a "Frankenstein" analogue, an "Island of Doctor Moreau" analogue and so on. PCs could be drawn into one of these demiplanes through "the mists" (ie. "because the DM said so") and face the challenge of how to get back home before the place corrupted them. So far, the only "demiplane of Dread" to be carried over to 4e is Ravenloft and it's kind of a sub-realm within the Shadowfell. It's not inconceivable however, that the other demiplanes could be found tucked away here and there where their lords/prisoners continually retrace the central tragedy of their existences.
Oh, that makes sense for the Demiplanes of Dread. I'm taking my high level campaign interplaner, because they need to stop or assist an emerging god, but the plane stuff in the DMG is sparse compared to previous editions. It'd have to be, to avoid adding another 300 pages. I hope more either comes out soon or gets released to the DM's Guild.
... and now we destroy the Shadowfell. Hey, what happened to the Shadowfell leading to the other realms? Where the Eldritch horrors are? The dream realms? I mean, love the reinterpretation of the Feywild. Just, the Shadowfell was just fine before now.
I imagine the shadowfell as a place where NPC’s are exactly like written RPGs... they repeat the same sentence in the same way over and over again. Going about their daily routine never breaking from their script.
Oh, this is the exact issue me and my friend have been discussing recently! A really pleasant coincidence, if you'd ask me. I've always also wondered, what's the relation between Feywild/Shadowfell and positive/negative planes?
So back in the day there were was a Positive (Life) and Negative (Death) Energy Plane. The Positive was where life came from and the Negative was where undeath came from. It was created back during Planescape as an explanation for undeath. Both were bad. The Negative would eat your soul and the Positive would heal you until you exploded in a burst of new life and sparkles of radiance. Around 4e, folks wanted to simplify the cosmology and get rid of the planes that were just basically misty places or the ones that would kill you as soon as you arrived. So they boiled all the planes down to four: The Elemental Chaos: all the Elemental and Paraelemental Planes fused into one big angry plane of chunks of element warring with each other The Astral Sea: a literal sea of silver...stuff with stars floating down in it and also stars above--granted the actual stars were Cthulhu monsters in 4e so don't ask me what the Astral Sea's stars were supposed to be--but if you sailed far enough you'd run into islands wreathed in mist which were the divine domains of the gods. The Shadowfell: a hybrid of the Plane of Shadow, Ethereal Plane and Negative Energy Plane. It drained you, but not enough to destroy you. It was hungry and full of ghosts and undead, but not actually evil. It had ragged bleached copies of things that existed on the other side in the real world (a mountain might be shaped like a giant skull or be made out of tombstones, a castle might appear as a tumbled ruin, a lake might be a pit of tar filled with skeletal fish monsters) The Feywild: a hybrid of the Faerie plane, a bunch of the unused Great Wheel planes like Arcadia, and some of the stuff from the Astral Plane and other planes that didn't get folded in elsewhere. It was a rough draft version of the world in the early 4e lore, where everything looked geographically the same but without the things of man, brighter and wilder and more beautiful. When it finally got its own book, that got amended a bit and it became a land of enchantment and physical laws based more on the mythical rules of a story with grand archtypes being more powerful than weapons. It got really great. TLDR; The Shadowfell and Feywild are evolutions of the idea of Positive and Negative Energy Planes. Now that they all exist together in the same edition--it's kind of up to you to sort it out.
The material plane is the plane of positive energy, counter to the shadowfell (which used to be the plane of negative energy). As for it being a pleasant coincidence? Not really. They're filling in the blanks making the new lore fit the established datapoints. It becomes selffulfilling.
www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Positive_Energy_Plane Here's the SRD writeup on the Positive Energy Plane. It's totally a thing of its own, not just the material world.
Hey guys, Im a fairly new DM and I love these little videos and was wandering how you could possibly push these aspects of different realms into the game like how you could play it out for example the shadowfell where you find yourself repeating and the characters “forgetting their quest” like how do you tell that or give that feeling to your players? Please help! Thanks!
You should be able to do 10th, 11th, and12th level spells in the Shadowfell right... Since any spells you do there do not use the weave to materialize them.
So, in terms that Elric would understand, the Feywild is the realm of Chaos, ruled by Arioch, where the only constant is change; and the Shadowfell is the realm of Law, ruled by Donblas, where the never ending constant eliminates and change or growth.
Except that the shadowfell represents entropy, not law or order. And the only reason you'd call the Feywild chaotic is because it is so inherently different.
This interpretation of the Feywild really contradicts the Archfey. I hated his line about "There are no simmering resentments". That is literally the point of Fey politics. They're shadowy backstabbers who slowly plot against each other over eons while having great big parties with their arch nemesis.
I Have been thinking about the 5e Feywild a lot lately and been Re-watching this video for insperation, as am currently DMing for both a Warlock Player with a Seelie Archfey as patron and one player that are a Circle of Dreams druid That was raised by dryads. I feel That Fey=Extrem emotions are a cool Idea That work with a good number of Fey creatures, But i can't really see how the Archfey would follow in to this concept in a good way, most of the cannon ones i found seem to complex to be connected to certain emotion in their Loré with one or two exception, i really don’t dout you could make it work as i My self has been writing nearly 150 full pages of homebrew Loré around this Emotion concept for fey, But it do feel really weird That there is No proper explanation and deeper written Loré about this in 5e? Especially as there are a good number of Sub classes in 5e That are connected to the Feywild.
Bit of self-fulfilling prophecy there. Making the lore fit the creatures and then say "see, it all fits!" Also, I was under the impression that rather than being "opposites" of eachother, they are both reflections of the material plane. With the shadowfell (formerly plane of negative energy) being the polar opposite of the material plane (A.K.A. plane of positive energy).
In my cosmology, the Positive and Negative are still there, but at the furthest reaches of the Planes. Feywild and Shadowfell are right next door to Prime Material, they have gravity and oxygen and we can live there. Think of Positive Energy Plane as the Big Bang, all light and heat and energy, and Negative Energy Plane as so far into the future we can't conceive of it, the last of time, heatdeath of the universe, the final entropy. But each one exists continually as a plane, unchanging, as a fixed point in time. I need to make a big map on a giant sheet of paper to be able to see with my eyes what my brain is telling me in thoughts.
Man...I'm not sure how I feel about this. The Feywild and Shadowfell were such key parts of the 4e cosmology--and really started to come into their own with the Heroes of the Feywild book and Shadowfell box set. I'm not sure they ever really worked with the Forgotten Realms (except as maybe alternative names for the Fugue Plane and Faerie). This new lore seems to wreck all of that--which wasn't that the POINT of 5e? NOT doing that anymore. I really enjoyed the take on the Feywild that it's ruled by storybook logic and a place of enchantment. Now it feels like the land of random bipolar disorder.
I agree, I prefer the kind of more classical Land of Faerie version of the Feywild. I'm currently running a homebrew campaign for my players that's based in the Feywild and its more Celtic mythology and Brothers Grimm than the ideas Mike Mearls was talking about. That's what I love most about tabletop RPGs; he gives a great idea, but you can entirely ignore it if you so choose. I prefer the way my players and I have created the Feywild so that's the version I use.
And while I know that's true (and I totally will)--it's never not been true. About anything. Ignoring things has gotten me through a lot of stuff (*cough* 4e). But one of the things I love about 5e has been the effort taken to listen to the fans, and among fans to bond into a community. That's been really awesome. In that spirit, yeah I'm not crazy about this new interpretation.
so... is shadowfell literally just the dark souls world? "death of emotion, gloomy, existing in cycles". dark souls is gloomy, oppressive, hopeless, and everything is tied to cycles. you cant ever truly die because of the undead curse. the curse that exists because Gwyn linked humanity to the flame and began the age of fire. the age which repeats over and over because a new successor, the chosen undead, will always arise to rekindle the flame.
ShivaX51 I still don't get the Feywild, the Shadowfell is just an expansion on the concept of the Plane of Shadow, but I'm not sure if the Plane of Shadow existed outside the Forgotten Realms...
In the Forgotten Realms the Shadowfell always got tied to the Plane of Shadow, but was really much more closely related to the Fugue Plane--the dreary land of judgement where the dead went to hopefully be carried off by representatives of their gods or else get grabbed by demons or dragged before Kelemvor, god of the dead to pay the price of their sins in his city of the damned or else, if they believed in no god, to be spackled alive-ish into the walls of the city. The Plane of Shadow was more just a weirder version of the Etherial Plane. Weird monsters like Malaugrims lived there. The Shades escaped there back when their kingdom fell apart (back when they were humans) and it warped them. You could also pull magic out of it that could mimic any other kind of magic you wanted--it was only an illusion, but if the target believed it was real, it could affect them. But it didn't have anything to do with death. It just had Shadow in the name.
I don't really agree with that view. This is a terrible simplification and a loss of huge potential. The world of fairies is, as for me, a World of Hopes and Dreams, and the World of Shadows is a World of Fears and Nightmares. These are the worlds of stories and fairy tales, archetypes and their specific incarnations. After all, we already know stories about scientists who fancied themselves gods, about vampire lords terrorizing their possessions, about unhappy people who sold their souls to Other Gods or demonic creatures. But Shadowfell has its own fairies, there is a collector of stories - the Queen of Ravens, and there are many references to fairy tales and classic horror films precisely as archetypal stories. I will not talk about such examples in the fairy world, because in fact ALL fairies are these archetypes, they literally came out of fairy tales. I would advise here to think less about official manuals and turn more to Keith Baker, the creator of Eberron, and his Telanis, the Court of Fairies. Telanis just includes both Faewyld and Shadowfell, in fact, and is the world of stories, which, under the influence of his magic, are often performed and repeated in the real world, and again influence Telanis, and so on in a circle (this is like in the question of chicken and egg). In general, I think that the authors are not working on the ideas they should have worked on. over the idea of a multiverse (exactly in the style of the old editions, everything was fine with it there), over the ideas of the World of Fairies and the World of Shadows (as in the fourth edition, because that's where they were finally made adequate), over questions about the gods and how and where they came from (because they didn't all of them were born out of faith, but at the same time, most of them have nothing to do with the creation of worlds). No, we're too lazy, let the players do everything.
Doesn't anyone else find names like "Feywild" and "Shadowfell" just *way* too cutesy and twee? I can't stand them. I'll stick with Faerie and the Demiplane of Shadow... and by the way, the plane of greyness, depression, and drained emotions has been Hades (The Three Glooms) since 1st Edition. And I'll keep Strahd and company in the Demiplane of Dread floating out in the Deep Ethereal. It sounds like he's shoehorning the "Feywild" and "Shadowfell" into the slots of the Positive Material Plane and Negative Material Plane.
