Of all the planes, the feywild is the best at tricking you that it’s a material plane. All the normal features exist, from peasant villages to regal mountain ranges. If anything, it appears more real. Crisper edges. Brighter brights, deeper shadows. This facade makes the Feywild the most dangerous place in the multiverse.

Theologians and priests will warn of the corruption of demons, but at the base, humans understand demons. They desire power, and will chase it with cruel abandon. Humans understand being crushed beneath the wheels of the powerful. We know how to combat that. Pure hearts, unbreakable conviction, and strong community.

The outsiders, the aberrations, are too alien to know. But we recognize them as the Other, a great defilement of our world. Every blade of grass turns its hate against them. A devil and an angel would fight shoulder to shoulder against such alien things.

The fey are too familiar by far, and too alien by leagues, for either safeguard to apply. They are born where the great march of civilization meets the unknowable dark. They look like us, they break bread like us, and you will never see your downfall in those beautiful faces.

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The most important thing to know about the feywild is that all things are defined by association and inherent quality. The laws of space and time have no grasp here. A stone does not fall because of gravity, but because falling is a thing stones do.

Geography does not exist as we know it. The two cardinal axis in the feywild are more related to time than distance: day to night, and summer to winter. The “center” of the feywild is a permanent equinox twilight. At any given location, the sun will not move, and the seasons will not change.

Art by Cynthia Decker

Once this principle is grasped, some navigation is possible. If you fall asleep in a cabin in the night, and wake to daylight, you know you are actually in a very different place. Trying to follow the same stone path away from the daytime cabin will carry you to very different lands.

Other associations can make travel possible. All bodies of water in Faerie are linked, in one way or another. So are all caverns. Walking a hundred miles in an empty plain may only bring you to more empty plain, but even a broken archway will carry you forward. Threshholds hold great transportative power.

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Similarly, the behavior of the Fey doesn’t follow a human logic, but an extreme social contract instead. Words hang like iron chains. A promise is as real here as a yoke.

For example, a fey may say, “I am called Puck, may I have your name?”. If you respond, “Yes, my name is Vek”, you will have doomed yourself. You have unwittingly gifted your true name to that fey. At the most benign, it will now have two names, and you will no longer have a name. At worst, it will twist you into servitude.

The society is aranged into four courts. These are designed in the image of mortal royalty, so the rankings will be familiar to you. The queens, archfey of the highest order, are gods by another name. The whims of the higher eschelons cam shift the political landscape in moments, a duke can be a serving boy the next day. A fey sworn to a court may balk at this treatment, but obey, as a queens word is physical law.

This does not mean mutiny and rebellion are unheard of. It is exceptionally common. The queens have not, or perhaps cannot, forbid rebellion as long as it exists in humankind. But the rebellion never changes the structure, only who sits in what seat and who lies dead in the crypts below the great castles of the fey queens.

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Art by Anna Landin

The summer court is fair and kind. The fey here rarely do serious harm without reason. If they steal your name, they’ll likely rename you somethong embarrassing and be on their way. They love feasts, drink, sex, and friendly duels. This does not make it safe. The wild growth of summer can consume you, literally or metaphorically. A powerful fey may take a liking to you and try to keep you as a pet. You’ll be blissful, well fed, pampered, taken to dances atop crystal waterfalls watching an eternal sunset, and you’ll be a slave.

The winter court is harsh and pragmatic. The fey are callous. They do not care about the suffering of humankind, and will trample you underfoot. They love to hunt, or to huddle with drink inside. Despite all this, they are by far the most reliable of the fey. They twist words less, and entrails more. If they steal your name, they’ll likely decide they own your liver too.

The noon court is organized and militant. Bands of fey armies march here and there in strange patrols. Daytime fey are extreme in their attachment to a strange set of laws, which change from moment to moment. If they steal your name, expect to pressed into military service. The war is a kind of game to them, a mockery of a human tradition. The death however, is real.

The midnight court is shadowy and mysterious. The court is defended by lack of knowlege of it, rather than force of arms. They are even more ritualistic than the average fey, holding far more importance to the way things are done than what is being done. If they get your name, they will use it to take as many parts of you as they can, memories, talents, the way you brush your hair aside, all to incorporate into ritual magic.

There are other groups of interest as well. Most denizens of the feywild are not pledged to a court, at least not permanently. They live closer to the center, and only join the great wars as mercenaries, or looters. This group includes those weak enough to be below the notice of the courts, small groups with their own hierarchy, and those strong enough to escape the influence of the queens.

Art by Peter Nicolai Arbo

The Wild Hunt rides through the twilight forests. Riders wearing animalistic masks, hunting animals running with them (all of whom are transformed people). When the hunt catches you, you are either killed or transformed to join it. Sometimes you can even choose. The Hunt slips into the material plane more often than other fey, so many of their hounds are normal humans, whisked away from forests near their homes. They will hunt anything and anyone, the more dangerous the game the better. When the hunt is not in session, they feast on the meat of the kills in a great hunting hall.

The Crone is a force in and of herself. She is an ancient wise woman living in a simple cottage among a carefully tended garden of nightshades and other deady poison plants. It is one of the only locations that exists at all times of day and all seasons. This means that it can be adjacent to almost any part of Faerie that the Crone wishes. One may walk a short distance from the Winter Court into her hut in the dusk of winter, and walk out again onto a beautiful summer day, an ages journey away from where you were before.

Art by Greg Rutkowski

The Dragon in the Castle is the archetype of dragons. It is everything mankind fears the great reptiles to be. A tyrant, a pillager, a kidnapper of fair maidens. A genius, greedy beyond measure. Its solipsism and massive will have a strong effect on the dreamlike fabric of the feywild. Its castle leers impossibly tall, with a moat of liquid fire. People entering into the castle take on storybook roles without meaning to. Kidnapped people become princesses even if their fathers were beggars. It can only be killed by things it believes can kill it, and it will reform in time, reborn from the nightmares of men.

The Goblins are not an organization by any means, but the caves under the nightlands are full of them. They’re spawned in the Great Bloom, a mass of fungal growth who’s size is impossible to determine in the non euclidian spaces of the feywild. The psychic effects of a Goblin Bloom are extreme at the center, and no other bloom approaches this one’s size. The original few sentients infected here have had massive demiplane sized dreamscapes grow around them. A squadron of soldiers here are thought to be the origin of all hobgoblins.