Did you hear the news? @ChrisPerkinsDnD, Game Design Architect for #dnd and Project Lead for Wild Beyond the Witchlight, is coming to talk to us about the upcoming release & will take some of YOUR questions! Tune in tomorrow over on Twitch at 12pm PT!
0:00 Introduction
2:30 What is ‘The Wild Beyond the Witchlight’?
6:55 What is the Feywild?
9:47 Rules of the Feywild
14:35 New Races: Fairies and Harengons
18:09 New Backgrounds: Feylost and Witchlight Hand
20:24 Classic D&D Characters & References in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
23:34 Designing Non-Combat Options in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
27:04 Campestris & the Jabberwock
29:52 DM Tools in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
34:09 Using elements in your own adventures
35:55 NPCs in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
39:41 Magic Items in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
42:20 The Hourglass Coven
43:50 On Monster Alignments
47:24 Special Guest Arrives
47:46 Audience Q & A
01:01:26 Final Thoughts
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architects for d d and the project lead for this adventure please welcome back chris perkins hi aloha hi everybody how are you doing not too bad overall not too bad uh as i was saying before we logged on i’m fighting a bit of an ear infection so i’m mostly hearing out of my left ear but this is fun i’m looking forward to talking about all things fae and and witchy and halloweeny i i love that it’s out just in time for us to be in the middle of our campaigns at the perfect seasonal moment very nice planning uh on your part and also thank you for being with us despite uh that situation and i give you permission to pretend any question you don’t like came in the wrong year sounds good speaking of which uh before we get started i am happy to say that we will have some time at the end of our stream to take a few of your questions you in the chat about the wild beyond the witch light so get those ready and share them in chat and our wonderful moderators are gonna pass them along to me for the end of this hour uh so you know please feel free to go wild with power uh and we’ll see what happens but let’s get into it chris what is the wild beyond the witch light it is our first uh full-blown feywild adventure um not just for fifth edition but really for any edition um it’s a it’s a wondrous realm uh that we’re exploring this time around it’s not only full of fake creatures but full of weird magic and uh and oddball settings and i think uh opportunities to role play unlike the kind of opportunities that you may have seen before in some of our other adventures i’ve noticed one thing that i find very striking about this and it’s been consistent the the last couple adventures for me have felt like they are moving in this direction strongly but in this one especially setting theme story and character are all very closely intermeshed uh was that an intention behind it something you arrived at or just derived from the nature of the feywell oh no it was certainly intentional um some of our some of our adventures sort of begin as kind of a theme we want to tackle and sometimes it’s actually a location that we want to go to um and explore and sometimes it’s uh like a character hook or it’s a sort of a villain who’s sort of at the center of it but in this case we kind of had all of that um brewing in my mind what 11 years ago was when this sort of adventure was first started to crystallize in my mind and i was thinking about all the things that i could throw into it because we don’t get to go to the feywild very often and when i do finally go i want to make sure i kind of throw everything i can into it just in case i can’t get back to it anytime soon so i remember i remember a long time ago i wanted to tell a story in the feywild and i had this sort of vision in my mind of a cauldron that had that was sort of sinister and um you know like a typical black witch’s cauldron but it had like eight cats sculpted into it and eight toads and eight snakes and you know uh and that image stuck with me almost a decade before i was finally able to sort of realize it and and make it a thing that’s incredible because it sounds very much like being visited by a vision from the feywild that was just sort of waiting for you it was it was like i got a it was like i got a fay visitation and it sort of incepted this this kernel of an idea in my head that’s stuck around for a long long time a lot of people don’t know this but we were actually slated to do the feywild story in 2019 but it got delayed when when larian said they were going to do baldur’s gate and we thought oh well we’ll do something boulder’s get related in 2019. that actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing because i think the the timing of this feywild story is is good it sort of lands at a time where i feel like i want a little optimism and lightheartedness um in my life there’s a lot going on in the world and dnd is great escapism and this story in particular is all about escapism the blessings and limitations thereof uh yeah it would have been a little bit heavy if like avernus was dropping on us right now yeah yeah gnarliness averna certainly felt like that belonged in 2019 now i feel like we’ve moved on although the great thing about adventures is that they will always be new to anybody running them for the first time yes yes absolutely so and every every group every group’s got its own preferences too right i mean for some people’s jam is going to hell and rocketing around on infernal war machines and that kind of thing and other people like to you know talk to birds and and and and make deals with little fake creatures and i will say yeah punching some infernals in the face uh is also a totally valid form of escapism so we’re not really pick your poison but uh so we talked a little about why the time might have been right now for this one um can you tell me a little bit about the feywild itself and which sort of of the there are many visions of the realm of ferry we were talking about potential inspirations on this stream a few weeks ago because there’s such a beautiful cornucopia of influences to draw on how did you decide which ones were right for this feywild and sort of gather them together that is a really good question so um once i decided that we were going to show off uh the first ever domain of delight uh sort of a specific domain within the feywild and that this domain hadn’t existed previously in any source book i wanted to make sure that there was enough going on there that it gave you sort of a real sense that the feywild isn’t just one kind of terrain or one kind of environment it has it has as many or as diverse environments as you can find anywhere so um in the construction of this domain i made sure okay yeah we’re going to have this sort of primeval forest corner of the domain and that’s a lot of people associate the feywild with forests but then we’re also going to do a face swamp and we’re also going to do this sort of really kind of treacherous stormy mountainous realm and all three of these things will be blended together to sort of give people a sense of just how varied a feywild environment can be um so that was that was sort of important i think the other thing that kind of defines the feywild is it it is a mirror of our world in a lot of ways so there are things about it that are familiar but at the same time it’s almost like a fun house mirror it’s a little bit distorted it’s not quite the same and so one of the challenges we had was how do we portray the feywild so that it’s relatable there are things that sort of you can relate to coming from you know the material plane or the natural world but then how do we make it feel wondrous how do we define things that are unique to the feywild so for instance we sort of really leaned into this idea of the the feywild is a place of unfettered emotion where any creature no matter how small can exert some amount of influence over its environment so if you’re sad and you’re sitting on a rock well maybe the rock itself sort of re-sculpts itself into a sad sad visage or if you’re happy and frolicking in a field maybe the the flowers all sort of turn their heads up at you um lovingly you know and and hearts start to form in the clouds above your head that that’s the kind of thing and if you’re an archday then your ability to harness that is actually much greater you can actually sculpt entire lands based on the emotions that you’re feeling and so that was sort of an idea we want to get across and that fay creatures have their own rules or their own sort of their behaviors or knacks like for instance the concept of the rule of reciprocity where if you give a gift to a fake creature they are obliged to give you a gift in return that they busy they believe is of equal or greater value well that’s a great thing to play with in the feyweld because once the characters know that that rule exists the role-playing opportunities that can emerge are you know limitless and i love the way that you you’ve you’ve taken a lot of ideas that sort of exist uh and and there there’s a term that i like picked up in a poetry class at some point uh it sounds bad but it’s not a bad thing the term pathetic fallacy um comes from poetry and refers to sort of like you know clouds can’t be angry you perceive them as angry because you’re angry but this is sort of this beautiful what if of like okay but what if they could though what if that actually happens and it has consequences in the world of the game and it gamifies that literary and thematic idea in the beautiful way which i think also applies to the rule of reciprocity we’re used to it in stories of like yes people make bargains and they go well or badly but what about when that power of choice is in your hands what can you do that will actually have real story consequences uh yes yes and the feywild to a certain extent can enforce that like there’s almost like a there’s a magical force behind these deals in these bargains that are sort of making you honor them and so um one of the things that we’re doing in tandem with the book is we’re releasing a a pdf on dm’s guild which is called domains of delight and it’s going to be a for charity thing um and what it does is it sort of digs down into what the feywild is and how it it can actually intervene like if you break up a deal with a fae the feywild can impose a penalty upon you for that infraction and those kinds of things are sort of covered there because it’s sort of beyond the scope of the adventure there we’re talking more about the feywild in general but in the adventure you do meet a number of specific creatures who whose behavior is shaped by their experiences of growing up in the feywild uh to hearken back to your earlier question though another thing that was important in so far as defining the feywild in this adventure was kind of striking a balance between the disney-esque quality you know the the tinker bells and the singing creatures and sort of the happy colorful light-hearted aspect with the more grimm’s fairy tales bleak uh sinister eerie aspect it’s like okay yeah you can sing with the birds but there’s also a cautionary tale here and you could find yourself in serious peril um there are creatures even fake creatures that are malign um whose whose intentions are not pure and you have to deal with that and so this adventure strives to create a melange of those two aspects so yes there is the fairy pale palace atop the mountain peak but there is a sinister side to it that you have to be careful of even while you’re listening to the singing badgers or the you know the musician badgers and things like that like it was fun to be able to take uh both the eerie and the cheery and kind of mix them all together uh that’s one of the things i think that’s most appealing about this is that as someone who’s a big fan of both of those sides of the influences uh having them both together and having it be unpredictable which piece this next one might be is just so much more fun than being straight one or the other i think yes one of my favorite places in the adventure you go to is a place called downfall which is this swamp village uh populated by bullywugs and the bullywugs are actually super charming they sort of gather in a society they call the soggy court and they dress in sort of royal finery and they’re very foppish and fun but then at the center of downfall is this old hags cottage on stilts and it’s this lumbering looming very ominous and dreary structure and i like the juxtaposition of the silliness of the soggy court and the fearsomeness of this hags abode sort of in the same place at the same time i just i have a soft spot for bullywugs so i find that part especially exciting and it’s such a great play on the fact that they always sort of have issues of status within them so of course the feywild ones would have their version of that uh and also the art is just glorious uh not to the hand on any there but uh uh so speaking of maybe growing up in the feywild can you talk to us a little bit about the new player options that we get in the wild beyond the witch length we have two new backgrounds and two new races coming into play um how did you hit on the races that you used uh that is a that’s an excellent question so we entertained very early on the possibility of you may be playing like a sprite or a pixie um but one of the issues we ran into is that tiny creatures as player characters are sort of problematic within the system because you know how do you buy armor for your pixie that kind of thing and just so so to sideline those questions we came up with a playable race called the fairy which is deliberately um we chose the fairy as the name of the race to create kind of an open-ended uh quality to it you can sort of define yourself however you wish within that space like what kind of fairy are you if you want to call yourself a brownie for instance um that’s fine uh you can be a brownie fairy uh if you want to sort of play more of a leprechaun like character then fine you can be a fairy as well and and sort of add some specificity as you will but uh so the fairy was kind of a no-brainer we thought yeah if we’re gonna introduce the fey wild fairies just seem like a fun option to play and we know they’ll be popular wait can you be a brownie fairy with an artisan background and your backstory is that you were one of the shoemakers brownies that like snuck in and did things and that was like what you were doing before you became an adventurer absolutely absolutely yes yes um if you want to play more like a sort of a ethereal wispy self-like fairy that’s also great too there’s so there’s so much range of possibilities um with now the other race the heron guns were not in we we did not actually set out to create them they sort of were created by force and what i mean by that is uh we had heron guns in the adventure as npcs and they were they were basically little bastards who were who act like brigands and and beat you up and punch you in the head and take your stuff but uh sean wood our concept artist did some concept art for them and as we were showing off the concept art people in wizards like on other teams and things got to see them and kept kept hounding me and saying this is what i want to play i want to play this guy can i play this guy i’m like well no they’re just monsters that you encounter and but i kept getting inundated with these uh with these asks to play the bunny folk that eventually we did include them in an earth arcana article um we had we had some of our internal folks uh do the mechanics and then uh sent it off and they were undeniably popular so uh and there’s nothing wrong with that uh people love playing animal-headed humanoids that’s just the way it is i mean look at this i i totally can’t and you’re and your hair and gun your hair and gun doesn’t have to be a bully like the ones you need in the although that would be an interesting start for this particular adventure just uh uh to play through this particular one as someone who begins as rude and uncooperative would be like a difficulty setting essentially um i don’t recommend being rude not cooperative unless your party’s in on it with you but uh fun possibilities there um what in this adventure sorry oh and you also asked about the backgrounds yes so very quickly um there are two backgrounds the fey lost which is the background you take if your character prior to being adventurer basically either got uh lured or lost in the feywild for much of their childhood or adolescence and that’s really just sort of filling in a trope of of sort of faith-themed fantasy of the young child who is who chases after the rabbit into the woods and then unknowingly passes through some sort of fake crossing and then disappears in the feywild or or the one who’s visited in the night by their bedside who wants to escape their home and so the fairy godmother says come with me little child and off they go but they eventually make their way back home after a fashion and so buffet lost to somebody who basically lives in two worlds has has lived in the both the material plane and in the feywild and uh that’s just fun to that’s just a fun concept to play with the other background the witch light hand is very specific to this to something in this adventure which is there is a carnival in this adventure that serves as the gateway to the feywild and uh another literary trope is you know the the child who joins the circus and we thought well why not why not open up the possibility of your character having basically spent much of their childhood in early adolescence or adolescence in in this fae themed carnival and so you became a witchlight hand hand is sort of a play on words because time is a big thing in this adventure and uh mr witch who runs the carnival uses a cl uses a pocket watch to basically do it and so we see clock imagery and all over this adventure i love that and i do also love that i feel like the adventure very much wears some of these influences on its sleeve in a really delightful way um where you all have put the title of the classic ray bradbury novel on the back of the book just to sort of lead people into it uh and you know references to some of those stories you were referring to earlier pop up in really fun rewarding places um but that’s not the only uh things that you’ve sprinkled into the book you’ve also got some wonderful surprises for experienced players for long time fans of d um i okay this just my question shackle the clown did you settle on a sad clown for thako because a sad clown is the only person who’s better when they’re low i’m gonna have to say yes because that is a brilliant way of looking at that character um it was uh i think it was actually jason rainville the artist who gave thako his final expression but it was based on a piece of concept art that sean wood had done of the character which actually had the character smiling so his expression actually changed from concept art to final and i love your explanation but uh you’re when you’re when you’re running second edition and using faco low is always best um it’s uh there’s no direct inspiration for thako uh all all fako was originally conceived to be was just a nod to the past and nods to the pastor like you say all over this adventure um i know today and we were looking for we knew we were going to have a we knew we had a clown and we knew we needed a name for it and uh thaco is just a perfect clown name it is which i would never occur to any of us but uh the uh you also as you’ve talked elsewhere folks should track down about uh some of the wonderful easter eggs that you’ll encounter from uh the history of d in the game um at what point in the process this 11-year gestation of this book did you put together that you wanted to pull in some of those references for it uh pretty much from the first time i started thinking about it to the to the couple days before it was about to go off to the printer so stuff just kept getting injected all at different points like i knew fairly early like a few years ago that i wanted war duke uh sort of a classic character from the cartoon series who you know we once rendered into an action figure back in the 80s i knew i wanted to figure out a home for him in the story but for instance um the the nod to the d d cartoon series uh the little the little easter egg on the poster map uh tied to that that was that was added late and not by me that was done by the cartographers during the rendering of the map and then i looked at it and said yes exactly um it was it was so perfect i don’t want to spoil it i want people to look for it themselves but it’s really cute and it’s it’s it’s another one of those things that sort of points you to some prior era of the game of the game’s history all right and this is probably a good point to say that if you are planning to play through the wild beyond the witch light uh we are about to get into some not spoilers necessarily but some of the other stuff that i love about it or that’s more dm oriented um so just uh that that’s where we’re crossing the the the fey crossing right now into that territory um one of the things that you designed for this adventure is that uh in i i think a first for a major adventure uh this you you made this one an adventure that can if you want to and if you’re interested in doing this and if you’re able to do this you can play through the wild beyond the witch light without combat was that always in the plan did it evolve as you go and why is it appealing as a designer to try to make something like that it wasn’t always in the plan but but you articulated it very well that it’s sort of an option um you can you can hack and slash your way through this adventure just like any dnd adventure if that’s if that’s how you roll um there’s lots of things to kill and there’s lots of evil things uh out there trying to do harm to to good folks um but uh at some point it was kind of in the middle of of the early sort of concepting for the project but before writing had begun it occurred to me looking at all the elements that i was hoping to include that this adventure given its setting and given the nature of the threats might actually lend itself well to um dms who want to run it for younger players uh i thought there’s there’s a lot here that could that could really appeal to younger players and as i was thinking about that i was also thinking well maybe this is maybe this is the right time to to really think about um creating an adventure where players are sort of tested or encouraged to creatively think their way through the adventure in non-violent ways uh you know if if you’re running for for your kids or whatever and you you just assume not have the murder of their way through it you can sort of prompt them to think about how they can solve their problems without having to resort to violence and and uh i also thought it would just be a fun design challenge to make sure that there’s always multiple ways to sort of get past each situation because i think that lends myself that that’s actually just a good practice as far as adventure design goes and even beyond this adventure i’d like to try to continue that trend whenever possible to make sure that we’re presenting scenarios where there isn’t just one way through because i think that’s one of the charms of dnd is the creative problem solving and rewarding characters for coming up with unorthodox or unusual ways of getting around things um i think that’s that’s something that we should be encouraging whenever possible i will also say that one of my favorite old adventures is a module that released back in the early 80s called beyond the crystal cave and just so you know uh wild beyond the witch light didn’t wasn’t the pioneer in these waters that adventure actually allowed you to basically talk your way through it um and so i i may have been channeling some of that i love that and and also a lot of the the we’ve been talking about monster the monsters that you find uh here on the channel and we were talking about two returning monsters that speak to the fact that a variety of tones work in d d but also that the seeds of all these variety of tones have been present throughout the history so we were talking about the jabberwock and about the campestries who are amazing uh who are a wonderful testament to d d containing multitudes yeah so the campestries for those who don’t know are tiny singing mushrooms and they’re ambulatory so they can sort of follow you around singing in their nasal falsetto and they’re they’re they they love to learn new songs so every time you sing to them they basically internalize it and then we’ll just keep singing that song over and over and over again until you teach them another song so they can they can be quite tedious as well but they originally appeared in an old dungeon magazine issue issue 41 in an adventure called old man katan the incredible edible dancing mushroom band and i’ve loved them since that first appearance and was just dying to bring them back and this this gave me an opportunity to do so but it was actually claudio pozas who’s one of our artists did the new art for the camp history and it’s my it could be my favorite piece of art in the entire book because it’s just so ridiculously happy [Music] [Laughter] it’s got a contagious smile i just absolutely love um and so uh they’re they’re fabulous now the jabberwock um traces its origin back to an old gary gygax adventure from from first slash second edition called dungeon land which was guy gax’s attempt to do a d and d alice in wonderland um actually i think it appeared in the sequel the line beyond the magic mirror but whatever i remember uh i reincarnated it back in second edition for an adventure called the manxum foe which appeared in an adventure anthology and um i didn’t have any i don’t i think it was actually decided quite late that we were going to put it in the adventure and it wasn’t me who wanted to do it i think it was will doyle my co-writer who proposed bringing it back and so we quickly hastily created some concept art for it and then he slid it into his part of the adventure and will doyle and stacey allen are the cartographers you referred to earlier right will doyle and stacey allen are not only the cartographers for this project but they are also both co-writers on the project which was hugely advantageous because it meant we could do the maps fairly early in the process or at least sketches of the maps and then work off of them um and their their their stuff in the adventure is their their text is utterly charming and the the maps are just brilliant in their in their uh vibrancy and um just adorableness there’s lots of little lots of little things you can look at on the maps there’s so much richness yeah there’s design in every element uh of this book from the story information to the npc personalities to the handouts um which brings me to something i’d love to talk about some of the dm tools that you all have put in wildly on the witch light are really really fascinating to me uh in something that i think this i think this adventure will be extremely satisfying for longtime dms but i think it also will be among the friendliest i’ve ever seen for new dm’s uh and i i love it includes things like uh role-playing cards as of references for the npcs um a story tracker that has been included to help sort of guide you in keeping track of information over time uh most of us with our like notebooks where we’re bookmarking random pages of what happened in week eight uh will probably for me maybe a little bit of a revelation there uh and it includes i i mentioned this to you off stream but i think maybe my new favorite piece of d d text is a little box called making mistakes that’s included with the dm instructions uh that essentially just says don’t panic uh this is part of the process but uh how did you hit on that like why was this the right adventure to put that stuff in uh and and what was the thinking behind that wow great question the sorry big this adventure is part of a continuum um you know it follows a series of adventures that we’ve released for this edition previously and every adventure i think should be a learning opportunity and we should be able to take lessons from our from our previous creative efforts and apply them um this was a case where due to the fact that we’re going to a new realm and we’re doing a lot of new things we’re already breaking a bunch of new ground it occurs to me that we can just do better to help new dms particularly with these big adventures because if you’re going to run a 200 and some number of pages adventure you’re kind of buying into something pretty big and significant and it makes sense that some portion of that adventure should be set aside to sort of help you manage it a little bit better and so this was just about just just our latest opportunity to explore some new things like the story tracker you mentioned i don’t know how many dms are actually going to use it or want to use it because different dms track information differently but at least we can show you what a story tracker might look like and how you might be able to utilize it um the information in the introduction that talks about hey dm here are some tips to know like when you show dice rolls to your players and stuff like that’s actually the kind of information i wish was in the dmg um and if i ever get another chance to to uh to tweak the dmg i’ll probably stick it in there but it’s it’s really sort of basic level stuff to to relax the dm um [Music] since this adventure is pretty approachable i think it’s it’s probably going to be played by a lot of new dms just because of the subject matter and so this seemed like a really good place to double down i love that and i do feel like i can see what you’re talking about in terms of the continuum that uh like in this last year both tasha’s and ben richton’s have included really helpful running the game advice that just sort of fit with uh the things that they were doing so it’s like you’re assembling a pretty amazing body of all of the all of the lore that has been passed dm to dm but not necessarily made it into the official instructions over time uh i love that and we’re always somewhat limited by space um but we try to we try to press we’re going to try in the future i think to press as much of that kind of useful information into adventures when appropriate and of course with all of you what’s right for you and your table in your style always the case yeah exactly it’s like you know several years ago we decided that sometimes it’s helpful for the flow chart of the adventure in the adventure so sometimes we do that we have different tools now and like the pronunciation guides is another one which i love thank you helpful so you know every every adventure is a new learning opportunity new opportunity to make the the task of dming easier on folks what pieces do you hope people might uh pull off of this and use in their own games oh gosh um so the while beyond the witch light is deceptively modular um most of its chapters can be peeled off to sort of create discrete smaller domains if you want to like we explore the domain of prismir extensively but your campaign in your campaign you might decide that i just want to use you know downfall in the soggy court and the bullywugs and the hag and the hag in the hut and that’s about it it’s very easy to do with this project to break off a piece and just use that piece in your adventure and have the characters spent make a small trip to the feywild um and then and then leave the the biggest piece i think that a lot of people are probably going to break off and just use on its own is the witch-like carnival itself because it’s tailor-made for it we wanted this adventure to start on any world and so the carnival can touch down on your campaign setting world at any time anywhere you want and it’s it’s sort of a self-contained experience you don’t even have to go to the feywild and frankly our playtesters when they were running the adventure a lot of them didn’t want to go to play wild they just wanted to hang out at the carnival and so it just makes if you want a sort of a fun evening of play in a sort of strange landscape the witch-like carnival by itself can be a lot of fun fantastic uh let’s see please do be sending those questions because we’re gonna get to those in just a couple of minutes but before we do uh let’s see can you tell me a little bit more about the uh the fabulous npcs of the wild beyond the witch light which have been fleshed out wonderfully i think a personal favorite is mud lump uh who i cannot wait for folks to encounter um but uh what was the thinking behind like they’re they’re particularly rich obviously you’ve included cards for role playing them the the style of play where all of these decisions and interactions have consequences comes into play with a lot of them uh but how did you approach that in a way that’s still game design that combines theatricality in game design so when we get down to the npcs it’s interesting because it was really a collaborative effort at that point um where all of the all of the writers were basically um coming up with characters and then trying to figure out a way to kind of weave them all together i think the instructions i gave at the outset were in your various pieces make sure that you have characters who are natives who can sort of tell you how the feywild is supposed to be who are intruders like the characters who have just sort of invaded this realm and are just as strangers and then um poor sods who have gotten tangled up with the hourglass coven uh and you’re either beholden to them or have suffered some consequences as a result of breaking a pact with them so that we get the so that we get that range um [Music] uh you mentioned mud lump specifically he’s a cyclops beekeeper um that that was stacy allen’s creation um and there’s a potential later in the story for you to hook mud lump up with another giant um and they can go off together and live a happy happily ever after scenario the other giant was will’s creation so will and stacy sort of conspired off to the side to make this potential love affair a reality in the adventure um from my point of view uh in this story in particular i think we have an overabundance if not an abundance of just colorful of a colorful cast of characters and that’s that’s really to sort of create this impression of the feywild being this kaleidoscope of of personalities and um just to kind of overwhelm you in a way with all of just the the whimsy and the the wildness of it all um not all the characters get the get a role-playing card treatment because they’re just too many but the major npcs do basically we try to figure out which npcs are you likely to interact with for a protracted period of time and those are the ones that we did sort of deep dives on where we gave them personality traits and flaws and that kind of thing and others that you meet you just kind of meet them once and then wave goodbye and they’re really there to sort of show you a shade of the feywild that’s sort of new and a slightly different color from what you’ve seen up to that point and that’s fine too and those were just these design choices pick random ones to adopt from that crew well yes yes they’ll they’ll be friend of the random snake that they met the talking snake that they met outside the tower and that snake somehow will become a full-fledged party member and possible cohort and you know um and live on an infamy in campaigns i can’t i can’t predict which characters a particular party will glom onto um i can just make my best guesses and go from there um all right let’s see do you have anything that you would want to tease about uh like there are some very cool magic items uh coming in this book yeah so um the the magic items section of this book is a combination of things that you’ve seen before and things that are new uh we picked up several of the common magic items from xanathar’s guide to everything and actually illustrated a few of them uh for the first time um mainly because common magic items are often just fun flavorful uh tchotchkes that are kind of power neutral and we could just you know spill them out and let characters accumulate them willy-nilly those are always great but we also introduced a number of new magic items um the aforementioned cauldron that haunted my early dreams plays a prominent role in the adventure it’s a very very very powerful magic item others were included because they tie into elements that we had already decided to include like if you’re going to have the jabber walk well then you need to have a vorpal sword in there right um and so we have snickersnack a particular vorpal weapon that you can use to to kill the jabberwock if if other efforts to deal with the jabberwock should fail and things like that and then just other sort of whimsical stuff born out of necessity um in one part of the venture you kind of go into a magical garden and uh will wanted a magic item called a chromatic rose you can basically find a garden of chromatic roses and they they have sort of magical properties uh things like that things like um we wanted some of the prizes that you get in the witchlight carnival to be magical so one of the things we have are packets of pixie dust and so we’ve defined the magical properties of pixie dust now stuff like that so the magic items really exist to serve the story yeah i uh i think oh i can i can actually sneak one of the audience questions in right now we will be getting to those in just a couple of minutes but this is a perfect moment uh laura rojo asks is there a fairy dragon somewhere in this adventure why yes yes there is [Laughter] his name is sir talavar and he is a he’s a he’s a charming knight and finally i there’s so much i want to get to the the in this but i don’t get all the time to myself i do have to share um but i would love to hear just a little bit about uh that hourglass coven you mentioned ah yes so um reinforcing the theme of time which is throughout this adventure it’s literally everywhere um is this idea of a coven of hags who call themselves the hourglass coven because they too are somewhat preoccupied with time um they are as you expect of hags uh not to be trusted but you can you can actually negotiate with them uh you can get stu you can get as much out of the hags as uh as you want you just have to be willing to wheel and deal with them and that’s always a double-edged sword and so uh i don’t want to give too much away but they are these hags are unique that is to say they’re not just green hags or anise hags or knight hags or sea hags uh each one is a unique creature and uh with specific characteristics and uh one of the most project was actually concepting these three these three delightful ladies um [Music] and making sure that they are unforgettable i am a big fan of them and considering just you know an alignment switch uh in in their service which is probably not a retractable choice but uh speaking of which uh we did notice that the monsters in this have for instance the jabberwock has a typically uh alignment on it um would you can you speak a little bit to the decision to to bring that into play yeah so um a project two or ago we actually tinkered with the idea of stripping alignments out entirely um but then uh because you know we try to keep our one finger on the pulse of the community we we we shifted away from that to uh go with the typically to reinforce the idea uh where appropriate that uh if you don’t know what the if you don’t know or you don’t care what the creature’s alignment is you can just assume that it’s it’s typical alignment um but by putting the typically there we basically make it we we we double down on what the monster manual already says which is in the monster manual introduction it says that a creature’s alignment doesn’t have to be what is stated in the stat block that it can be different but a lot of people miss that information or they they didn’t catch it during their read through that introductory material so all we’re doing in the stat block is reinforcing that idea that if you have a story in mind and that story includes taking this creature but giving it a different disposition um from what it what it typically has then you can change its alignment and freely do so and not feel bad about it in the least now certain creatures if you’re a humanoid creature if you’re a humanoid creature you don’t typically have a typical alignment you have uh instead we’re just saying you know any alignment because humanoids um or you know anything uh they have the full range if they have the full moral and ethical range of of we human beings then they should be able to have any alignment i i that makes total sense um i would like to ask on behalf of chat what is the name of our friend who has joined us on stream because i know they want to know we’re hearing some a special guest making an audio appearance in the stream i’m just asking your dog’s name i’m sorry oh i’m sorry i didn’t pick up on that uh yeah that’s my dog milo he is barking at presumably some other dog possibly the white and black one who is his arch nemesis they’ve never actually been within 30 feet of each other but for some reason they don’t like each other maybe they want i think it must be i think i think it’s pheromonal actually i think there’s something about the smell of the other dog that sets him off that’s all i can raising mm-hmm speaking speaking of dropping speaking of dropping milos there’s a there’s a milo easter egg in the wild beyond the witch light oh i don’t think i found that one yet oh that’s exciting okay um i will i will leave i will not say anymore uh that’s that’s coming up it’s all about the guest experience come on that’s good boy come on you need to lose weight or something man you know i’m jumping out there hang on and uh i think this is very good as our guest joins us oh oh yes milo hi this is my first chance to meet him so i’m excited he’s very camera shy so he probably won’t look directly into the camera but it’s a beautiful profile yes indeed so we have some wonderful questions coming in from chat thank you all so much i’m gonna see how many we can get through in our remaining time redbeard in 84 starts us off on a great note uh would mr perkins care to confirm or deny that he is in fact an arch faye uh i can neither confirm or deny are disputed reports about whether i’m an archway or a lich or a vampire or possibly a robot um but uh you know um i do live in my own fey domain so i guess archday is probably apt let’s go with that do i have any special particulate powers no not really are you the archway who doesn’t know that you’re bending the environment around you yes that could be it yellow does it uh has a question that i think i can go ahead and answer asking any new class or subclass options in the wild beyond the witch light um so that that’s a no from my knowledge um but we talked through some of the other stuff you get um uh although if you are if you are playing if you if you are playing a warlock with an archfey patron you can choose the archway of prismier as your patron and we haven’t talked about the arch fair prismier nor do i want to because the archway of prisoners something of a mystery and best discovered by yourself excellent yes there is some tasty stuff uh for warlock specifically that is an option uh in terms of approach to the game uh that i thought was very cool as well um antnugay asks uh what was the inspiration behind harangons and asks if there’s any red wall influence the brian jake’s books beloved by many of us that is a really good question and for that i’m going to have to punt uh because uh my co-writer ari levich who is one of our in-house designers was the one who decided to who wanted to create hair and guns and i know if i recall correctly he was actually inspired by some old uh black and white line art illustrations of mean rabbit people doing mean things um and i don’t know where he got the inspiration exactly but uh he was just enchanted by by the art and asked if we could have rabbit folk in the adventure and i said of course yes i do love that the rabbit folk putting themselves into the game uh feels very much like the feywild inception we were talking about where i’m just going to assume that this adventure helped create itself uh in addition to all the hard work you all did uh laura mayor who asked how important is it for players to create characters specifically crafted for this adventure not important at all um you you can go into this adventure with just a character of your own concept and the adventure hooks that get you in lend themselves well to that uh one of the adventure hooks is pretty is a tradition what we call a traditional hook which is some outside motivator basically sets you on a quest um and you don’t have to have any embedded uh information about the adventure in the construction of your character your character could be whatever you want it to be the other hook is actually a character driven hook where you sort of the players buy and one or more of the players buy into a basic assumption and that is they visited the carnival as children and it has since come back around but the last time that they were at the carnival they lost something that was important to them it was basically uh and they haven’t been able to get it back since and so the characters basically embark on a quest to get back that which they have lost and it’s actually causing some kind of um it’s it’s more than just a sentimental thing it’s actually um affecting you as a character and will affect your sort of ability to grow as an adventurer if you don’t get this sort of missing piece of yourself back and so if you use that hook then you kind of sit down with your dm or you roll on a table to decide what it was that you lost so that you now have something to to go after that’s very delicious uh since the last time the carnival was in town comes every eight years right yes it cycles it cycles around uh world to world every eight years and uh we chose the number eight for a few reasons that are articulated in the adventure debbie plain asks what race in class do you chris think would be a lot of fun to play in a feywild setting i gotta think uh a warlock of the archway pact would be super fun to play um i think uh gosh um i would love personally just to play a wizard in the archway as well uh in the in the in the land of the fae as well because i think that uh being able to trade magic or uh offer up magical goodies uh magical aid to fake creatures could actually um be quite a quite a gift that they would respond well to but i think the the best class to play in this adventure is the bard because you know a winning personality will get you farther in the feywild than a sword or spell will that’s so intriguing uh speaking as a highly partisan toward the bard class myself uh to chris from cameron darpal who he might also remember as proloque uh how many beloved characters in this adventure will you traumatize your players with through ceremorphysis uh i think you’re safe from ceremorphysis in this adventure i don’t think you you will not find a single mind flare poking its tentacle into the feywild in this adventure so no trauma will come in other ways though um rest assured dandelis asks a question that i think we may have the answer to can we hear about any of the archday featured in the new feywild release and i would say that is a wait and see although they might want to check out that supplement you were talking about that’s going to be going up yeah so yeah we’re we’re keeping the arch fae of prismier who’s central to the story of the wild be on the witch light under wraps so that dm’s can surprise and delight their players but the domains of delight product the the pdf that we’re going to be releasing on dm’s guild for extra life charity that has in addition to a chapter on uh the feywild the celia and the unseelie courts faye pacts fake curses and uh whatnot uh is a chapter on creating your own archway and creating a domain of delight around that arch fae and then it ends with a sample archway who is depicted in the wild beyond the witch light is a giant spider that reads storybooks to awakened animals um and that arch phase name is yarn spinner i am very excited because i that is one of my favorite pieces of art in the whole book uh and i’m definitely going to need this that is also one of my favorite pieces of art rasmus can you elaborate on how time works in the feywild versus the material plane yes it works however the dm wants it to ultimately and that sound that sounds like a cop-out but actually that’s kind of what the dmg recommends as well it’s like this is a tool that dms can play with um but we don’t enforce sort of time dilation and and weird things because we don’t know what effects that might have on your campaign so uh there are time effects in the adventure though for instance you can go to a place where time has stopped in the adventure and what does that mean and what does that do to what what sort of environment is that that’s kind of interesting how do the players interact with time-stopped creatures uh you know things like that um so we do we do mess with time quite a bit uh within within the structure of the adventure itself and uh there there are mechanisms in the adventure particularly toward the end where the dm can figure out okay when do when the characters go back to their world what how much time has passed and there is a section of the adventure that deals with that specifically and provides guidance to the dm uh so that they can decide what the what the time dilation is uh on a maybe slightly less serious note we have a question from aaron lore uh will you do your camp history voice for us oh my gosh uh yeah i guess it would probably sound like [Music] [Laughter] [Music] yes exactly amazing uh and we have sorry a standard dnd on question that we have to make sure that we get on the record do you have a favorite dinosaur a favorite dinosaur um yeah i would say my favorite dinosaur is either the oh i’ll just settle down one it’s got to be the t-rex t-rex ah is it the hand specifically yeah it’s just like a mechanical balance of it big jaws small hands yeah yeah pretty much pretty much uh let’s see rubik wants to know how you would work the carnival into one of the ten towns this seems a bit odd uh but like how would you approach something like that oh by 10 pounds you mean the 10 tons of ice when dale right yeah yeah i’m assuming i’ll assume that so i would say so so when the which light carnival lands it there is actually a mechanism by which it sort of can reshape the land in which it lands in so that like for instance if it wants to land but there are trees there’s like a tree ant that works on staff who can actually cause the trees to move out of the way and things like that so there’s already sort of built in some geographical manipulation effect that the the witch-like carnival is capable of doing when it when it settles in a place so that it can have the configuration that it wants to have so i would say in a place like cold winter north of iceland dale that when the witch-like carnival touches down the snow just sort of recedes and melts away and there’s this like bubble of autumnal air that just sort of surrounds it um and of course they don’t since the which carnival operates uh mainly at night certainly the darkened skies wouldn’t trouble them all if the place is well lit and and all that so really i think it just sort of brings its own bubble of autumn with it i love that very much uh thank you all for those very excellent questions this has been so much fun i i think the final one jared if we have just a second here asks darger i’m so sorry if i’m massacring your name darger uh can you mention uh some of the hints and easter eggs that hinted at this adventure in previous books um i will oh gosh can i say that do you want to just make people look for them yeah i think at this point in time let’s let dig around for them there are ties so this book was sort of um forecast in an earlier book um from not too long ago i will say that and there are elements in that book in this new adventure this new adventure while beyond the witch light also plants a couple seeds that we hope to pay off in the not too distant future but i don’t want to tell you what they are because i can’t do it without spoiling what the future products are and i can’t do it without spoiling um something big so but yeah we’re always doing that with our with our products we’re always creating little little links between them and uh i hope you find them all as a comic book fan i’m i’m a huge uh lover of the like little continuity plant that guides you between those worlds um this has been such a blast thank you so much for joining us to talk today all about the wild beyond the witch light i should note if you’re watching this you can pre-order it on dnd beyond.com and if you do pre-order it you’re gonna get some amazing perks which is eight frames eight themes eight gorgeous backdrops and one set of ring masters the digital dice which i really really love and i’m probably never going to turn off um because they’re so cool looking um chris congratulations to you and the whole team that brought this book to life with you it is beautiful i think people are going to love it if if someone busts this out in 25 years at a con because it’s their favorite classic adventure what do you think will be the thing they’re trying to uh bring back or hold on to or remember that makes this their fave um that is a fine question and i don’t think there’s one answer to rule them all uh i think it’s everybody there’s something there’s there’s a lot for there’s a lot in here and people will glom onto different things and be enchanted by parts of it uh more than others i’m sure um but i think it has a great replay value um and that might be one of the winning characteristics is they know when they run it for the third time that it’s not going to be the same uh as it was the last two times i can’t wait i can’t wait to jump into this game i hope if you’re watching this you’ll go ahead and work on grabbing some wild beyond the witch light for your table and for your friends and uh to chris and milo thank you both so much for joining us and let me let me know on twitter when you find the milo cameo i will oh i’m excited and i know you’re talking to the audience but i forget they’re here sometimes um thank you very much uh where can the people find you if they want to know more about what you’re doing i am on twitter occasionally at chris perkins dnd other than that i’m in my fey domain making magic we have our answer arch pay it is thank you so much we’re all looking forward to the release on tuesday and we will see you next time on dnd beyond [Music] it’s [Music] pic.twitter.com/h4znAcx0J0

— D&D Beyond (@DnDBeyond) September 15, 2021

Dungeons & Dragons: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight | Review – https://t.co/rUMxYSFh4J @Wizards_DnD #TTRPGs #DnD #WitchlightDND pic.twitter.com/OxU5n4DaXr

— Jeff McAleer 🎲 The Gaming Gang 🎲 🔜 Gen Con! (@TheGamingGang) September 15, 2021

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The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is D&D’s next big adventure storyline that brings the wicked whimsy of the Feywild to fifth edition for the first time. Tune into D&D Live 2021 presented by G4 on July 16 and 17 for details including new characters, monsters, mechanics, and story hooks suitable for players of all ages and experience levels.

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is D&D’s next big adventure storyline that brings the wicked whimsy of the Feywild to fifth edition for the first time. Tune into D&D Live 2021 presented by G4 on July 16 and 17 for details including new characters, monsters, mechanics, and story hooks suitable for players of all ages and experience levels.

• Publisher : Wizards of the Coast (September 21, 2021)
• Language : English
• Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
• Dimensions : 0.59 x 8.5 x 11.18 inches

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