2021's big fall adventure book is going to be The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: A Feywild Adventure. We've now gotten some new details on the adventure and the stuff we'll be getting in the book beyond that.
Before we get into the adventure itself, we should talk playable races. This is the first adventure book since Princes of the Apocalypse to bring with it a playable race, and in this case, it'll be two! As hinted at with "Folk of the Feywild," Witchlight is bringing the Fairy race and the Harengon, which is a race of rabbit people ("Hare," get it? Also "here and gone.") The Owlfolk previewed in the same UA article will be showing up in the Strixhaven book instead, while the Fey Hobgoblin seems to have been cut.
There are also two backgrounds - the Feylost is for a person who grew up in the Feywild, and a Witchlight Hand (if I'm remembering the name correctly) lets you play as a worker at the carnival.
The adventure is divided into two different primary settings. The first is the Witchlight carnival. If you read Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, you'll know that there's a weird, traveling Domain of Dread simply called the Carnival. The eladrin leader of that carnival, Isolde, traded her old one to a pair of Shadar-Kai, and she journeyed into the Shadowfell while they journeyed into the Feywild.
Thus, the Witchlight Carnival was Isolde's original Fey carnival.
The tone of the adventure is going to be very light in comparison to many recent ones. Perhaps reinforcing that fact is that characters from the 1980s animated Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show are going to make appearances as NPCs. Now, I think I'm too young to have ever seen the show (the final air date was precisely 6 months and a day before I was born,) but I've absorbed a tiny bit of its references through pop cultural osmosis, and it does appear that the roller coaster that takes the kids in that show into the world of D&D is, in fact, at the Witchlight Carnival.
The Carnival serves as its own mobile portal into the Feywild, and it appears that there will be a mechanic to help the DM track the passage of time within the carnival to make sure that things go according to their schedule - with different events happening at different times.
From there, however, the adventure goes into the Feywild proper, and enters Prismeer - a "Domain of Delight."
This last bit is fascinating for anyone familiar with Ravneloft. If you're not, Ravenloft as a setting is a series of isolated demiplanes known as the Domains of Dread that exist within the Shadowfell. Otherworldly beings known as the Dark Powers take figures who are both evil and can be tormented because of their unchanging character flaws and build domains around them, with the individuals as the "Darklords," who, consciously or no, have control over the domain.
The Domains of Dread exist within the Shadowfell - a dark reflection of the material world that is drained of vibrancy and hope. The Feywild in general exists as a sort of counterbalance to the Shadowfell. While the Feywild isn't strictly good (and the Shadowfell isn't strictly evil,) it is filled with the energy and vivacity that the Shadowfell lacks, to the point where it can be overwhelming to someone from the Material plane. Generally, the way I phrase it is that the Shadowfell is depressive while the Feywild is manic.
But even if the Shadowfell and Feywild serve as opposite numbers of one another, until now there hasn't been any indication that the Domains of Dread have a feywild equivalent. How similar and how different are these?
We've gotten a look at the map of Prismeer. Apparently, the central conflict is based on how the archfey of Prismeer has gone missing. The land has divided into three regions, Hither, Thither, and Yon (which is just *chef's kiss*). Hither is a fetid swamp, while Thither is a vast forest, and Yon is a land of towering mountains (that also appears to always be in nighttime).
As mentioned earlier, the campaign is designed to allow you to handle every encounter nonviolently, which is something I'll be very curious to read about.
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