The Feywild
The Faewild (or Feywild, or Faywild - the lack of a specific spelling is reflective of the nature of the plane) is as strange a place in the multiverse as any save the Far Realms - and technically they aren't in the multiverse at all, so it's fair to say that the Feywild is as weird as it gets. Weird can be good - strongly good, lawfully good, profoundly good, like the greatest of elven gods; or it can be evil, dark, and malicious, in the areas of the plane that rub up against the Shadowfell. Much of it, however, is strange and natural, utterly neutral though tending strongly towards chaos rather than law.
Where the Shadowfell has Domains of Dread - or so scholars label them - the Faewild has Domains of Delight - or Domains of Dementia, depending on which scholar's work you decide upon. Ultimately the Faewild is a microcosm of the difficulties with an orderly and organized concept of the progression of planes with clear borders in an arbitrary order in an infinitely vast wheel; yes, there is a spire, around which Sigil orbits, and there are the lands of the outlands, each with its gate town to a plane, but there's no evidence that the planes actually have any organization at all beyond these 18 conveniently arranged access points; where they lead may have no relationship to the gate town adjacent to it, and the existence of relatively mundane things like bags of holding and portable holes suggest that the actual structure and architecture of the planes is foamy at best and better yet, not pondered too deeply. In the same way, though the Faewild has a place in the wheel as a Parallel plane, one of those which touches the material world in the same way the shadowfell does; but it is not really a mirror opposite of the material, nor of the shadowfell. While parts of the shadowfell may rise to the level of being merely gloomy and miserable, none of it is bright and cheery; but parts of the Faewild are known to be darker than even the darkest regions of the Abyss and Nine Hells. This is due to a peculiar feature of the Feywild: It is powered, literally, by emotion.
Where the Abyss and Hells are dark places created by unknown forces in a mysterious past, and house all manner of evil today, the Faewild's darkest places, described as being 'off the edges', are areas where the overwhelming weight of dark sentient emotions - hypnotizing lust, murderous rage, insensate terror, paralyzing grief, and every other strong and dark thing far from joy - have dripped down and collected over the millennia. This is not about good and evil, nor about law and chaos; it is something else entirely. It is said that some portion of this, the surface oil, as it were, is what the shadowfell actually is, and falling off the edge of the Faewild takes you somewhere deeper and darker still, the most frightening place in all the multiverse because it transcends pretty human concepts like Evil and Law, stripping away everything but animal terror and existential dread. And sentient things do dwell in these spaces, floating like whales through seas of bitter regret and crushing humiliation.
And even the 'nice' parts of the Feywild, high above the darkness, are powered by emotions. Flowers bloom when lovers kiss, but shudder and wither when lovers quarrel. positive emotion powers positive outcomes, while negative emotions drain energy and the colors of the world. From this angle it seems clear that the Shadowfell itself may be entirely contained within the Feywild, a vast region utterly abandoned to darkness and sorrow where good emotions can't even be maintained; at least the Feywild doesn't actively drain good feelings like the Shadowfell does - its defining feature, in fact.
In broad strokes, Oberon the Faerie King and Titania the Faerie Queene are the rulers of the land, but their involvement in specific affairs is capricious at best. Generally thoe things which support them are called Seelie while those which oppose them are Unseelie.
Volumes could be, and have been, written about the Feywild, its denizens, rulers and domains of delight that are known, including Prismeer, which is further subdivided into Hither, Thither and Yon, each of which has its own regions; Thousandbreadth, a realm of elemental cities inside the shores of an impossible, circular river that flows forever from itself; Neverland, a place readily available to children of adventure and real danger; Skull Island, where tribes of humans fear and worship an enormous Gorilla god, sacrificing visitors to their animal King; And Wonderland, a region of hot springs and volcanic geology in which strange dreamlike adventures take shape without necessarily making any sense.
For further reading on the Feywild in general and Prismeer in particular, you can refer to:
- Prismeer: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/twbtw
- Domains of Delight: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dod/domains-of-delight-a-feywild-accessory
- Old School: The Seelie and Unseelie court https://web.archive.org/web/20161101074718/http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fey/20021213a
Related Reports (Primary)
Related Reports (Secondary)