Following the success (maybe? Who the hell has any idea?) of Player’s Option: Heroes of Shadow, Wizards of the Coast soon released a follow-up counterpart with the oh-so-clever title Player’s Option: Heroes of the Feywild. As with a lot of the company’s paired works, though, these books are far from symmetrical in nature, and while Shadow had very little new lore for players to peruse, Feywild contains a fair amount. It’s hard to say whether this is because the plane had so little exploration otherwise, but the book spends a lot of time delving into the intricacies of the Feywild itself in ways it hadn’t before.
Much of this probably derives from the plane’s greatest exploration until now being the 15 pages devoted to it in the Fourth Edition Manual of the Planes. While that’s far from a tiny amount of space, for exploring what is essentially a fifth of the entirety of multiverse it’s actually pretty paltry. Feywild is the only book ever fully devoted to this plane, even now (sorry Wild Beyond the Witchlight, you didn’t quite pull it off), and so its version ends up being the most expansive yet written, even if a majority of the book is still devoted to PC-based mechanics.
At the same time, very little is actually added here, almost as if the authors were afraid of covering new ground. In the Fourth Edition Manual of the Planes, the city Astrazalian was given only five paragraphs of explanation, meaning that there’s plenty of space to turn it into something more interesting. As such, Heroes of Feywild gives it a grand total of… five paragraphs. Hmm. Some locations do receive legitimate expansion, with Shanaelestra feeling at least slightly less half-assed now, but for the most part it’s just a repackaging of the old information… though I suppose there’s now a map, an addition that does make me legitimately happy.
What is in fact helpful and new, on the other hand, are the book’s many explanatory sidebars, such as one saying that there is essentially one Feywild connected to all Prime worlds. “You can view this consistency as a mysterious property of the Feywild—its features mirror every world at once—or as a convenience to make this material as useful as possible to the game.” This seems both official and unofficial, but is at least an interesting slant to take on the shape of the multiverse. Likewise, a sidebar explaining the more than half-dozen fey factions really helped me make more sense of this world’s oblique and almost intentionally vague political system.
Player’s Option: Heroes of Shadow didn’t even contain this much information, regardless of how much of it is simply recycled from before, thus why I didn’t cover it in this series, but this seems a bit short for one of these blogs so let’s take a quick look at a pair of Feywild tie-ins published for organized play. The first of these is the Encounter series module Beyond the Crystal Cave, released from November 2011-February 2012. If that title came as a pleasant surprise, since it’s also the name of a classic first edition AD&D module that’s actually pretty damn innovative and holds up well enough to get a recent Fifth Edition remake, then I’m sorry to let you down and say that while this module is based upon the original, it’s not nearly as good.
What made the original Beyond the Crystal Cave so special wasn’t that it was the first official module designed in the UK, or that even in its original inception it took place in a pseudo-Feywild (Chris Perkins commented in Dragon #305 that “You could say that [the original] Beyond the Crystal Cave was the first official D&D adventure set in the Feywild. Granted, in 1983 no one knew the Feywild existed!”), it’s that the module was possible to complete without combat. Hell, that was definitely the implied solution to most of its scenarios—while many situations could lead to battle if the PCs were particularly bloodthirsty, it was one of the earliest D&D adventures that put story and characters first rather than murdering a plethora of random monsters.
But Fourth Edition D&D is all about the fights, and the Encounters series has never been shy about this. The big innovation of this module was that every session didn’t end with a fight, instead they were often sandwiched in the middle of a session, and in many cases it was better if your adversary was left alive… but every session still has a fight. Often, a really tough one, too. A review of it on Dungeon’s Master wrote:
Most weeks the monsters had sufficient output to kill the entire party. Any week where the DMs dice were hot the party could expect to lose one or more PCs. Regardless of tactics or party composition, the monsters just pummeled the PCs week after week. Fortunately in many cases the PCs didn’t have to kill the monster, they could get it to surrender once it was bloodied. The problem was that by the time it was bloodied it was already too late.
I suspect that this particular decision was an overcorrection to longtime players complaining that earlier modules in the Encounter series were too easy. Keeping every session (except for zero, which was added to this module) chock full fights, on the other hand, was just par for the course.
The actual storyline seems initially similar to the original Beyond the Crystal Cave, but the addition of a villain both simplifies the story’s morality and overcomplicates the storyline. There are an awful lot of proper nouns here, and PCs are going to have a ton of conversations about characters they barely remember from a single appearance half a dozen sessions earlier. All of the original module’s elegance is removed, and while I appreciate Shakespeare references as much as any other former English professor, here they’re both hamfisted and thematically incoherent, existing for the sake of reference rather than to enhance the story.
What of the actual planar material? Well, it fares slightly better than I expected, and certainly seems more exciting than the Shadowfell from Dark Legacy of Evard. A time dilation waterfall leading to the Feywild is a nice touch, and the general nonsensical nature of the Feywild’s inhabitants is genuinely enchanting. It still largely feels like an alternate Prime Material plane rather than its own separate type of universe, but it also doesn’t feel cordoned off and small. The political chicanery feels like Shakespearean-style faeries in action, and the setting fits well with the confusing nature of the situation.
Ultimately, it’s hard to finish covering this version of Beyond without wanting to recommend either using the original or the remake from Quests from the Infinite Staircase, a book we will be covering in what no longer seems like the incredibly distant future given that Fifth Edition is peeking right around the corner. If you like the original module and want to move it to the Feywild, well then simply do that and ignore the evil hag nonsense that turns this situation into such a confusing, battle-ridden mess.
And since we’re covering organized play in the Feywild, I figured I’d throw in one more scenario for good measure. If you thought the Encounter series was overly focused on combat, then you’re not going to like the somehow even more combat-centric Lair Assault series. Published between 2011 and 2012, this was a set of seven one-shot “mega-encounter” adventures featuring minimal plot and maximal beatdowns. The third of these, Attack of the Tyrantclaw, was published in March 2012 and is set on the Isle of Dread, i.e. for some reason the Feywild. Designed for five 6th-level characters, it consists of… a fight against Tyrantclaw, which is to say a group of local orcs. It’s not even as fun as that sounds, though, as the actual objective is to keep a druid with 75 hit points alive until the fifth round while wave after wave of monsters and dinosaurs come in for the kill, at which point the druid turns into a tyrannosaurus rex and murders everyone around.
I find interest in the Encounter series largely baffling for how much it downplays the roleplaying part of this supposed roleplaying game, but conversely I do completely get the draw of the Lair series. What Fourth Edition is best at is combat, and every one of these modules sets up a really interesting single scenario for all players, including the DM, to really dive deep into that system. In this particular instance, players can purchase siege weapons and prepare for the oncoming assault, making for even more customization than usual. I have no interest in playing a game of Fourth Edition D&D ever again as a roleplaying game, but you know what, if someone was ready to run this scenario then I’d happily take part because it seems like simply an excellent war game.
As far as lore goes here, it’s simply a reminder of just how dumb it is to move the Isle of Dread to the Feywild. I sure hope that doesn’t carry over into Fifth Edition—this remains a bafflingly stupid decision that makes me roll my eyes every time it pops up.
