Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild

The Journey Beyond: The Shadowfell

This is the beginning of my new venture! I had an absolutely amazing time writing The Journey Between, but the Material Plane—with its forests, oceans, hills, and deserts—wasn’t enough. I wanted to stretch into the other planes of existence that this wonderful lore gifts us! And, with it being spooky season, I figured the Shadowfell was the perfect place to begin.

And so, the first entry in The Journey Beyond has been born: The Shadowfell—a region of sorrow and shade, forgetfulness and withering—is seething with opportunities for adventure. This book is written for Dungeon Masters who want to craft sessions steeped in tension and decay, whether as part of a long-running campaign or a single, haunting one-shot that their players will never forget. It isn’t a lore guide or campaign setting, nor is it a plot outline or monster compendium. Instead, it’s a modular toolkit—a collection of interlocking ideas, encounters, and thematic frameworks meant to amplify your imagination, not replace it.

Every page is built to help you layer dread into your story: to make a forest whisper secrets in the dark, a ruined shrine ache with memory, or a weary traveler reveal something that should have stayed buried. The goal is to give you options—to help you turn the Shadowfell into whatever form of nightmare suits your table best. Inside are rules to shape the plane’s tone, encounters that test the boundaries of sanity and willpower, and narrative tools to make despair itself a character in your game.

What you can expect inside:

• Modular rules that fit each plane of existence’s lore and tone. These are mini rule sets that help a DM craft atmosphere, culture, and divine influence suited to each realm. This section helps DMs make roleplaying choices matter, economies feel distinct, and the will of the gods felt. The Shadowfell offers countless ways to make travel and interaction feel unique, and this section makes planning such variety easy and memorable.

• Hundreds of travel encounters specific to this plane of existence. Included are scores of encounters that deepen worldbuilding while providing opportunities for roleplay, tension, and reflection.

  • Terrain encounters that turn the shadows, crags, canyons, wastelands, weather, and ruins of this realm into evocative, easy-to-run challenges that make the world writhe with danger and mystery.
  • Social encounters that fill this world with strange meetings and unforgettable confrontations. If you want to explore the factions of the realm or confront your players with grim moral choices, this section is for you.
  • Curiosities and places of wonder. Within these pages lie monuments that baffle the mind, oddities that must be seen to be believed, and wonders that beg exploration. If you’re searching for a strange relic to mark on a withered map, look no further.
  • Strangers, citizens, and wanderers. A realm like the Shadowfell teems with eerie characters to populate its taverns, roads, and strongholds. Here you’ll find pages of unsettling travelers, mysterious vagrants, and doomed wayfarers.

• Combat lairs that offer unique options for plane-themed battles. Combat in the Shadowfell should feel different than in the hills of Mount Celestia, and these lairs ensure it does. Each comes with a vivid description and a suite of thematic traps, terrain hazards, and initiative-based effects that make the realm’s nature matter.

• Magical items! Each plane of existence will feature new and unique magic items and trinkets tailored to its nature. The Shadowfell brims with objects steeped in fear, darkness, madness, and loss. Perfect for dimly lit shops or cursed hoards—and yes, there’s an entire section devoted to cursed items, ideal for Shadowfell adventures.

• Logical, terrifying, and unique ways to travel to and from this place. The threshold of such a dark adventure deserves weight. Entering the Shadowfell should feel momentous, and leaving it—if your players survive—should feel equally profound.

• 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.

And this isn’t just a one-off experiment—it’s the start of something far larger. My goal is to build The Journey Beyond as a full companion series, a continuation of the same spirit that made The Journey Between so rewarding to write and run. Each entry will serve as a deep dive into one of D&D’s major planes of existence, offering travel encounters, modular rules, roleplaying tools, and plane-specific hazards that make each realm feel alive in its own strange way.

From the endless battles and heroic ascents of Ysgard, to the wild trickery and living beauty of the Feywild; from the cold precision and clockwork logic of Mechanus, to the infinite silence and dreamlike expanse of the Astral Realm—each plane will receive its own treatment. The intention is to give Dungeon Masters the same pick-and-choose flexibility that The Journey Between offered, but with every layer steeped in the flavor, cosmology, and moral texture of its world.  Having run a multi-year campaign with "planes-hopping astral travelers," I found planning sessions for new realms outside of Faerun proper to be immensely rewarding.  Now I can keep using all of those notes I made when I was session planning for the multiverse! 

In short, this is a long road across the planes of existence, and The Shadowfell is just the first step into that greater journey.  Now if I only could pass the grading of my students' essays off to someone else!  Ahhh!  Be patient with me!  I have a job as an AP teacher, a family, and other nerdy hobbies to attend to!  

P.S.  If you have a plane of existence you want me to do next, seriously let me know!  I have so many darn notes for them all!  I'm waffling as to which one to do next.  Help me decide!

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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 SECOND product of mine: The Journey Beyond.  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!

: $7.99