Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild

The Journey Beyond: The Feywild

You know you have wandered into a truly singular plane of existence when, upon waking from what seemed a perfectly ordinary night of rest, you find a veritable army of pixies mounted on foxes, toads, and butterflies encircling your campsite and demanding payment of their seasonal tax for use of their land. Or when accepting what appeared to be a simple token of appreciation draws you unwittingly into a formal negotiation between powerful court scribes from realms you have never heard of. Or when a passing tree, in a tone of mild boredom, informs you that the last week of travel has been entirely wasted, as the local Archfey has seen fit to fold your path quietly back upon itself. This is the Feywild, one of the most endearing, beloved, and quietly terrifying planes of existence in all of Dungeons and Dragons lore.

This book marks a turn toward one of the most beloved and bewildering settings in fantasy roleplaying. It lives in old stories of bargains poorly struck, of travelers who danced a single night beneath the stars and returned to find a month had passed. Deep familiarity with Titania or the Queen of Air and Darkness or the old division of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts is not required to find one's footing here, and there is no demand to root the story in Planescape or The Forgotten Realms or any particular canon. The Feywild is, in the oldest sense of the idea, a mirror of the Material Plane, a reflection of the familiar world cast back in stranger colors and deeper shadows, where every forest is more ancient, every river more alive, and every horizon more charged with possibility than its counterpart on the other side of the veil. It takes the already-strange world of the Material Realm and tranforms it into a more luminous, more jubilant, and more dangerous place for an adventure. Players drawn to trickery, transformation, and vibrant, dangerous landscapes will love this place. The Feywild has enchanted adventurers since the earliest tellings of Dungeons and Dragons, and there is no shortage of that enchantment here.

This module does not offer a campaign plot. It offers something humbler and perhaps more useful: travel encounters and worldbuilding options.  This provides hundreds of hazards that line the road, odd meetings at the crossroads, enigmatic attractions half-glimpsed through the trees, and whimsical encounters that fill every crack and hollow of this strange and sovereign land.

The plot remains yours. This book just helps fill the roads and taverns and forests and caves of your Feywild adventure.  

What you can expect inside:

• Modular rules that fit each plane of existence’s lore and tone. These focused rule sets help a Dungeon Master reinforce the plane’s particular cultural nuance.  The Feywild, a plane steeped in oddity, whimsy, and power is the perfect place to truly bend players' expectations.  You'll find easy-to-include overlays that will completely change the palette of your campaign, giving it an atmosphere and flavor that will make it feel truly fae-touched. 

• Hundreds of travel encounters. Hundreds of travel encounters fill the forests, villages, swamps, roads, and castles of the plane. Many are designed to deepen worldbuilding while creating opportunities for roleplay, tension, mischief, and terror.

  • Terrain encounters that turn shifting bogs, living forests, bridges woven from thorns, courts that rearrange themselves overnight, and meadows that remember every footstep into dynamic challenges and unforgettable tales. The land itself is a character here, and it is not always a friendly one.
  • Social encounters that make your trip to the Feywild feel far different from any other plane of existence. From the intrigues of elven courts to the pranks of the pixies, from the whispered lies of swamp covens to the bellowed orders of quirky Archfey, this realm has countless opportunities to engage with its strange and singular locals.
  • Curiosities and places of wonder are scattered throughout the plane. Monuments. Ruins. Businesses.  Natural wonders. This plane of unfettered growth and deep secrecy is ripe for exploration.  Let your party stumble across any one of these to deepen their curiosity and flesh out your world.
  • Strangers, citizens, and wanderers populate this eclectic realm of pranks and courtly law.  I won't lie: coming up with NPCs for this book was so, so fun.  The pile of notes I have for more characters is very, very long.  Just wait until your players travel alongside or make a deal with some of these quirky folk.

• Combat lairs and combat overlays help any DM make a battle in the Feywild feel as though it belongs there and nowhere else. Not only can the combat ideas be woven into any skirmish or boss fight, but the tone of your battles can feel truly different than, say, a battle in the Shadowfell or Ysgard.

• Pages and pages of magical items! These items reflect the Feywild's natural, raw vibrancy.  The items revolve around change and adaptability, versatility and charm.  They'll help with traveling in such a volatile landscape, and they'll help kill the dangers that lurk behind the ever-watching shadows.

• Helpful lore reminders. While not a pure lore compendium, this section includes brief explanations of the plane’s key figures and traits to help DMs theme their sessions, ground their reasoning, and deliver compelling “lore drop” moments.  It helps, too, as many of the key figures of this realm are woven into the various encounter types and adventure hooks.

This project grew directly out of The Journey Between (check it out! Please!), which was written to support travel through the Material Plane and the familiar terrains of most fantasy worlds. Forests, roads, mountains, coastlines, and the long miles between settlements formed the backbone of that book. It was meant to make ordinary travel feel meaningful, grounded, and alive at the table. 

The Journey Beyond builds off of that approach. Each book in this series focuses on a single plane of existence and presents travel encounters and adventures designed specifically for that realm's character, rules, and expectations.

The series began with the Shadowfell, a plane defined by loss, memory, and endurance. It then wandered into Ysgard, where conflict is constant and reputation is everything. And now any Feywild adventure can have hundreds of tools to help a DM worldbuild!

I am delighted to be writing about this particular corner of the beyond, and I hope it brings something genuinely magical to your table. Thank you for looking! May your bargains be clever, your glamours hold fast, and whatever you promised at the crossroads never quite come due.

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About the author.  As a full time English teacher of college level writing, literature, and mythology, writing has always been part of who I am.  From grammar to word choice, persuasion to imagery, it's been very fun to show my students that those who teach CAN actually do more than assign homework. As a dad of two amazing kids, it's been a joy to see my kids shocked that "dad made a book."  And as a husband, it's been such a blessing to have a wife show pride in her geeky husband's side project.  Finding a place to practice what I teach has been really, really important to me.

I wasn't allowed to play DND as a kid, but it never stopped me from browsing through the pages or listening in as my brothers played in the garage in the late 80s with their friends.  Boardgames and card games and video games filled the gap.  Even as a child, I made boardgames, coming up with rules systems and backstories, maps and encounter journals.  I loved my space legos, but the Medieval ones kept me more entertained.  I devoured books (they were loyal companions when moving over 22 times as a child).  I fell hard for Tolkien.  I couldn't get enough mythology.  I was the first in my family to go to college, and I ended up writing my Masters thesis about the modern need for the hero archetype.  As an adult, I'd make custom expansions for my favorite boardgames, many of which I still play with to this day. I need to create.  I need stories.  

This sort of thinking has always been a part of me.  And it wasn't until my 30s that I began watching streamed DND content like Critical Roll and Dimension 20 and Aquisitions Incorporated.  I was very, very interested in trying this out, as I love accents and improv and writing and story-telling.  I bought the core rules and monster manuals and decided to run a game.  Between my own campaign, which lasted 5 glorious years and ended with an epic final fight with Orcus, and my running campaigns for the game club I've run where I teach, I was neck deep in role-playing and creative world-building.  

And so my obssessive, creative brain needed an outlet to supplement my DM session planning.  I own hundreds of RPG books: all of the 5e products to date, a collection of the first edition/first printings of the original DND TSR texts, Kobold Press tomes, countless Kickstarters, and heaps of MCDM products.  I love this stuff.  And now you're looking at the FOURTH product of mine: The Journey Beyond: The Feywild.  I hope it brings life to your stories and to the game your players look forward to playing with you!  Thanks for even reading this far, and may the road to the end of your journey be as enjoyable as your mind can make it!

: $6.99