This week’s Legend & Lore Show will be about the Fey, so I looked at my notes and created this short primer on how the Fey came to be, their home, its history and its place in MeyerHawk.
This post is deep, I need to have my games reach into the philosophical, existential, poetic, beyond our real world. I have an urge for my games to be both fantastic but feel “real” at the same time to suspend my disbelief and let me immerse myself in it. As I’ve gotten older my need for this has increased more and more. Please bear with me as I write this look at the Feywild.
The Fey has been a footnote at best in the lore of Greyhawk, a noteworthy exception is LG Geoff that made the Fey a central theme in their campaign. D&D 4E included the Feywild in its cosmology and had it run by two courts, the Seelie and the Unseelie. My Feywild is a huge place that can house much, much more.
My history if the Multiverse is divided into seven Epochs: Opposites, Shadow, Matter, Prime Urges, Though and Power. The Feywild joins the story just after half time, in the Epoch of Urges.
Each Epoch from Shadow and onwards gave rise to a new form of Essence of Life. The Feywild reflects this and evolves along with the rest of the multiverse.
A Transitive Plane that has existed since the Epoch of Urges when the fears and passion of creature’s imagination created a new realm, the Feywild, the first metaphysical plane.
Other aspects of the multiverse have always been reflected in the Feywild, and as the multiverse evolved so did the Feywild. At first the Feywild was a truly wild place, where the fears, love and imagination of primitive creatures like fish, reptiles, mammals and even others before them. It was a bizarre realm where even time flew faster in places as a reflection of the pace creatures that only live for very short spans understands the world.
As life advanced so did their understanding of it, and the Feywild evolved along with it. The never life forms took over more and more of how the Feywild evolved. It is often best described as a giant slab of land sloping in both "north - south" and "east - west", one of these directions leads from the bright of the "Light Fey" through the Shadowfell to the utter "Dark Fey". The other axis goes from highlands of unimaginable proportions to a coastline and then out to an ocean again. This makes some scholars refer to this as three distinct planes, opinions differ, both on how to look at it, and whether it matters at all.
Since its creation the Fey has been a place that has been an accelerator of change in existing life and an incubator of new life, and often a combination of the two. Early on fish and other marine life populated the Fey and here they manage to evolve into all sorts of wonderous, large bizarre and overly powerful beings. The metaphysical nature of the Fey means that things are only partially real, which means that creatures are only partially constrained by things like physics, metabolism and even time.
Most creatures that evolve in the Feywild are too far off to be able to exist for any length of time in the Prime, and even rarer for it to be able to breed successfully. This is a great thing that keeps the normal life on the Prime safer from incursions of various forms of "monsters" from the Feywild. This isn't always true though, sometimes creatures from the Fey managed to escape to the Prime and successfully established themselves there. Sine all Fey life, and even the Feywild itself, is a product of the life on the Prime, this just life proving its resilience, ability to evolve and to conquer every niche possible.
A couple of examples of this are the Aboleths that early on developed in the waters of the Fey and then to come back over to waters on the Prime again. The next example is from the reptiles when lizards gained both size, strength and other abilities in the Fey to then come back in the form of dragons. Much later when early hominids had evolved on the prime, they too migrated over to the Feywild, over time they came back as Elves, Goblinoids and others causing everything from joy to mayhem on the Prime.
Connections between the prime and the Feywild have always been present, it is how the Feywild was created in the first place. In areas where you have the highest concentrations of life the chances are the highest to have an overlap between our world and the Fey. Life includes things like plants and other primitive forms of life, even Unlife, so forests are a common place to find this overlap. It is in most cases just small areas existing on both realms simultaneously, but be very wary when entering these places. Walking too far might get you stranded in the Feywild unable to return without special means to do so.
The Shadowfell is in effect just a part of the Feywild, which means shadows are another way to enter the Fey, and these two forces work in conjunction. A forest might be a perfectly normal place during daytime but become a gate to the Fey at dawn or dusk.
As life advanced and other realms where created, like the Astral and then the outer planes, the Feywild changed to accommodate them. So now the Light Fey areas are a transitory place to the higher planes and the Dark Fey has similar affinity with the lower planes. This has turned the Feywild/Shadowfell into a way to travel the multiverse, albeit a very dangerous one. There are few (if any) places fuller of life of all sorts, which poses lots of problems, but also opportunities.
