The Wild Beyond the Witchlight First Impressions

 I picked up my copy of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, D&D's latest published adventure, which takes players into the realm of the Feywild.

I'm about 40 pages in, and already I'm pretty excited about what is on offer here. I'm still in the first chapter, which describes the eponymous Witchlight carnival, which ties into things we found out about in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and also gives us a better sense of who this Zibylna mentioned in that book actually is.

I don't want to get into serious spoilers. At this point in the book, we're really in the first stages of the adventure. The party goes to the carnival following one of two story hooks (one is more personal in nature, the other is a classic call to adventure - personally I'm more interested in the former, but we'll see how those hooks progress, as it's suggested that the party might have different objectives based on them.)

Anyway, the thing that stands out to me here is that there's more explicit advice for DMs. The carnival uses a tracking system to show what time it is in the 8-hour-long festivities, as well as the general mood of what's going on there (basically, the party has an influence on how everyone's feeling, which has story implications.

The immediate set-up means you're probably going to have a lot of stuff to do in a first session. If your players are the sort to really push for getting into danger and combat, I'll have to see what the rest of the book offers, but if you have players who are really into RP and shenanigans, this is a fantastic way to open the adventure.

There's a lot of cool lore right off the bat, and the tone of this adventure is already whimsical and intriguing before we've even gotten to the Feywild proper. The DM of my regular Sunday games more or less is an archfey already, so I think this would be a really fun game to run for that entire group (which I might do!)