Tag: Feywild

Other Worlds

Jake: Go then, there are other worlds than these.


Stephen King, The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1)

Recently, my family and I attended a wedding in my hometown for a relative of mine, who is marrying for the third time. The wedding took place at a famous golf course, which is situated on the top of a hill with a commanding view of the area.

It was a surreal experience for me. My sisters and I grew up with our single mom in slummy apartments just ten minutes away, and we never went to that golf course in our youth. Now, we were there many years later, surrounded by wealthy men in tailored jackets, holding brandy glasses, bragging loudly about business, surrounded by women with fake boobs, and cocktail dresses. As a Marxist-Buddhist with an Asian wife, we felt out of place.

But it was fascinating too. Here’s a group of people who live a completely different lifestyle than me. It wasn’t a question of class differences either. It was just a choice of lifestyles and values. When my relative comes to our house in a couple weeks for my daughter’s graduation party, they will no doubt find my lifestyle strange too.

I keep thinking about this quote from Stephen King’s book The Gunslinger, which I posted above. People might physically exist in the same proximity, but they might as well be living in different worlds.

If you have ever played the game Dungeons and Dragons, you are probably familiar with planes of existence called the Feywild and the Shadowfell. The setting of Dungeons and Dragons usually takes place on a plane called the Prime Material Plane: the normal world of stuff, people, etc. But in the D&D setting there are other worlds that closely mirror it, yet are subtly different.

The Feywild (which I wrote about ages ago) represents a version of the Prime Material Plane that is overflowing with life, change, chaos, hence it has many “fey” creatures (fairies, goblins, elves, etc). By contrast, the Shadowfell (another old post) is a colder, more static and gloomy version of the Prime Material Plane. In Dungeons and Dragons, objects and places in one of these planes will appear in some form in the other: a small castle on the Prime Material Plane might be a grand fairy palace in the Feywild, or an abandoned, gloomy fortress in the Shadowfell, and so on. If you’ve watched the Netflix series Stranger Things, it’s the same concept.

So, as I stood there watching the golf course employees serving drinks to wealthy men, it was like they were in different worlds. Some people there are unhappy and stuck in a rut, and might see things through the lens of the Shadowfell, while others are flitting from one party to another, like the fey of the Feywild. And then everyone in between, too.

This isn’t limited to Dungeons and Dragons either: if you look at Buddhism, and its many realms of rebirth (heaven, humans, warrior titans, animals, hell, hungry ghosts, etc), you can think of it the same way: we might occupy the same space, but we might as well be living in different worlds.

Perhaps this is why chapter sixteen of the Lotus Sutra strongly implies that the Pure Land of the Buddha is here, not elsewhere.

Regardless of what world one dwells in though, it’s important to remind myself that all beings deserve happiness and wellbeing.

Captain Pike has an illusion, and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant. 

Star Trek, “The Menagerie, part II” (s1ep12), Stardate 3013.1

Long days and pleasant nights to you all.

Namu Shakamuni Butsu

Exploring the Feywild

photo of a pathway in a forest
Photo by Artem Saranin on Pexels.com

Dungeons and Dragons has many different planes and places to explore, but one of my personal favorite is the Feywild. D&D Beyond has a terrific article on the Feywild and this is a good starting point, I think.

If the Shadowfell is bleak and dreary and full of inertia, the Feywild is basically the opposite. It is teeming with life, passion and change. So much so, that it can be genuinely dangerous or downright maddening to players not native to that plane. Even time behaves inconsistently in the Feywild.

Further, fey creatures tend to divide along either “Seelie” or “Unseelie”. Seelie Fey tend to be loyal to some degree or another with Queen Titania of the Summer Court, while the Unseelie tend to be loyal to the Queen of Air. The Seelie Fey typically are “good” while the Unseelie are seen as “evil”, but from what I can tell, these lines can be somewhat blurred. Because fey such as the Eladrin, can be so passionate, this might lead them to do some terrible deed even if they are otherwise good-aligned. Similarly, a dark Fey power may be swayed into helping a party for some reason.

Anyhow, a while back, my daughter’s campaign took an unexpected detour into the Feywild. What started as a minor side-quest turned into a major adventure in its own right after her party stumbled into a portal into the Feywild, and after exploring a bit came to the court of a powerful Unseelie Fey who put them through a lengthy trial. Eventually, they made their way to a large town mostly populated by satyrs who loved to revel so much that their town frequently burned down. They also came across a haunted cornfield and an old murder that was loosely based on this excellent adventure from D&D Beyond.

With the constant upheaval, exotic places, unexpected attacks from various Fey creatures in the forest and dealing with the time-displacement, the party was all too happy to finally get back into the Prime Material Plane several episodes later.

Looking back, the biggest challenge I found was coming up with enough Fey creatures. Luckily I had old copies of Dragon Magazine and old Monster Manuals to help fill in gaps for creatures that are fey and should be in there (but for which have not been ported into 5th edition D&D). Of course, as with any D&D adventure, you can also just make your own based on existing stats.

But if I had to do it all over, I would definitely make an adventure in the Feywild again. While there isn’t a lot of material on the Feywild (the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes seem to be the best resources), the general principles of the Feywild were enough to make a solid adventure and really spark the imagination in the players.

Good luck and happy adventuring! 🙂