Why You May Never Leave the Feywild | Wild Beyond the Witchlight with Chris Perkins. why do you like the feywild like what is it about because i uh because i love gothic horror i love like werewolves and vampires and everything else but the feywild there’s something bigger and scarier and i feel like the threat in some ways is bigger in my mind when it comes to the feywild that your soul is and your mind are very much at stake in the feywild in a very different way i i’m drawn to the feywild because i can get whimsy and i can get horror in equal measure right quite simply um you there’s a lot of room to play with from sort of disney-esque quality you know fairy godmothers you know and singing birds and a lot of it and then there’s the grimm’s fairy tales which is dark and ominous and threatening and both of those things just create a beautiful beautiful lemon meringue pie um in my mind but what’s what scares you what scares chris perkins in the feywild other than clowns uh um is there something that drew you in yeah like when you look at mr dark from uh from something wicked this way comes that blows my mind every time because he is charming and well spoken and has a point to some horrible degree and it’s that charm that’s scary yeah it’s i think what i like about it is the sense that if you go here you just might not come back yeah and what like you’re just gone or you might come back and uh time has sort of left you behind yeah um the the rules of time can work a little differently in the feywild you know little johnny can go in there when he’s nine and return 19 years later and he’s still nine what happened see i feel like i feel like i know where everyone’s coming from in avernus but then you’re in the fame things get a little bit more complicated yeah and then you’re dealing with you know creatures of unfettered emotion who can actually sort of shape the landscape and do things because of it and how do you how do you deal with those people those creatures um the the fact that you could offend somebody by doing nothing part of it too is we just haven’t seen the fail wild much we haven’t done much with it and so it is a it is a more of a blank canvas creatively it’s it’s it’s an exciting place as a dm to go because there hasn’t been tons of feywild adventures written there isn’t you know a second edition feywild line that you can look back on like you can with ravenloft right uh there’s none of that yeah there’s nothing that immediately jumps to my mind so this feels like the first definitive yeah uh how many are how many archvay have we met in d i would like more yes so would i maybe maybe this is the start of something grand uh that’s fantastic is there one core element that is absolutely your favorite or do you think that’s going to be the most enticing to players um like i’ve never quite seen a carnival like this carnival before and i love the fact that there’s little games and everything it’s funny um you should mention come back to the carnival because when we sent the adventure out for playtesting one of the comments that was most frequent was we didn’t want to leave the carnival we didn’t want to go on the rest of the adventure because we were just having fun you know mucking around in the carnival and i think uh i think that’s one of my favorite things is you can just take the carnival and make that part of your campaign and leave the rest behind it’s just a fun place to explore on its own there is something that kind of intimidates me and i found this true to be very recently i actually had to run uh strawed and role play astrad and i feel like that that character is so loaded at this point of expectations that i tended just to go for combat and just smack everyone down when it when in regards to you know the while beyond the witch light and any nemesis or creature like do you have a go-to place when you run them for people in your like personal d games or um you know in the live games that you’ve done like how do you how do you keep fresh as a role player and an actor for like these bigger bigger than life characters that is a very good question i don’t really know the answer to that um because when i’m role playing i’m kind of in a zone right like you’re improvising so and i’m improvising so i don’t know that ahead of time necessarily but i find that the less i say the better because every time i open my mouth there’s a chance that you know i could say something that doesn’t quite doesn’t quite mesh with expectation or or uh could be unintentionally funny or you can sort of sabotage the character unintentionally by saying too much and so i tend to when i’m bringing a character to life be as minimalistic as possible in terms of what they say and their screen time strat is i don’t want to get into long-winded dialogue with straw yeah because the longer that conversation goes on the more off the rails it’s going to get right so at some point he does have to either turn into a bat and fly away turn into a cloud of mist and you know slip under the door or just you know rip your jugular out true for the players as well right like you don’t want necessarily keep the conversation going no no and that’s why you know a couple good zingers and then he’s out of there uh is there any environmental stuff is there any magical items that really stand out to you in this adventure that are particularly fun i have seen some of the uh there is a you know once talked about cute ugly there’s nothing but mostly cute in this and it like melts my soul when you see some of the names this is the cutest dandy adventure ever that is also extremely deadly uh you have weaponized cuteness yeah we have we have gone way overboard i think with with cute characters in this one partly because the story lends itself well to them um from baby displacer beasts to uh you know child-sized scarecrows to um oh gosh candy apple headed goblins uh all kinds of crazy crap but uh one of my favorite items in the book is a cauldron it sits at the center of the story um in fact the story really revolves around it it is a very very powerful magical cauldron potentially the most powerful cauldron in the multiverse and uh it is the source of great turmoil uh in the heart of the story and when the characters find it i think they’ll be they’ll be of two minds uh one mind they’ll want to keep it run away with it even though it’s not easily transportable and the other is they’ll want to destroy it and destroy it quickly if they’re capable and i love that i love when they finally encounter it what might happen to it and what they might do with it of course it’s uh it’s got a fierce protector and they’ll have to deal with that first yeah i’m always of a mind to just steal the thing if i can so yeah yeah yeah and you know bragging rights if you can get war duke’s flaming sword yeah well that’s the helmet and the helmet yeah yeah yeah yeah all that is the art is absolutely there’s a ton of amazing art in this book too oh yeah yeah the art the art and the just the layout of the book and all the flourishes that that were sort of added at the end um kate erwin is the art director and she arrayed a stunning cast of artists to bring all these cute characters and um magical moments of the story to life uh including anillo with a giant owl which i really like and then um trish yokum did the graphic design the final sort of layout of the book and the back from the background texture to the just the little bits of bits of lights and things that she added to the corners of some of the illustrations in the corners some of the pages it’s a very magical book https://t.co/53QuOpZbmN pic.twitter.com/UB7HDDRZbU
— Todd Kenreck (@ToddKenreck) September 14, 2021