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wearykatie · 5 months

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The Journey Into the Wild Beyond - Introduction

In 2023, I ran my first full D&D campaign. K, a forever DM and the DM of three campaigns I play in, asked if I would be willing to run The Wild Beyond the Witchlight in place of one of those campaigns for a little while. The normal campaign is one we call Royal Flush, a 5th Edition D&D campaign set in a homebrew world where I play a Gunslinger Fighter who is an assassin for a holy order in the Erathis faith.

She’s actually really well-adjusted.

K needed a break from Royal Flush, and the current storyline allowed for that because we were visiting a town called Magewood that was hosting a coronation at the same time the Witchlight Carnival was in town. My character, Ana’leth Firebrook was following up on a lead and was conflicted because her younger sister was going to the Magewood Academy. She tries to keep her work life and home life separate, you see.

The pitch was simple: I would run Witchlight from the book, but tie it into the Royal Flush setting and K would be playing Elora Firebrook, aforementioned younger sister to my character. I would be running the game for five players: K and the Royal Flush players who would be playing new characters created specifically for this campaign. Our sixth player is on a hiatus for the game and wouldn’t be able to make this one either, but provided me with an NPC I could use.

I’d run games before. Typically one-shots or two-shots. A few months later in June, I would go on vacation with another of my D&D groups to play in person for the first time and run a one-shot there too. This would be my first long form campaign. Now, I figured K would want a few months break from Royal Flush but they and the rest of the group wouldn’t want to spend too much time away from our main game, so I’d run an abbreviated version of Witchlight.

I mean, it’s one campaign, Michael. What could it take? Ten sessions?

What Do You Mean Five Chapters?

So right away, I knew I was going to be making some changes to the campaign to get it to fit neatly into the setting and continuity of Royal Flush. I also like to make personal stories. I want to give player characters a reason for being there. Luckily, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight has a plot hook perfect for that: Lost Things

The basic premise is that the player characters all visited the Witchlight Carnival at some point in their past and snuck in without buying a ticket. Unbeknownst to them, doing so leaves you open to being stolen from by agents of the Hourglass Coven, three hags who pull the strings of the carnival. Now because these are hags and this is fey magic, it’s not as simple as getting your coin purse stolen. The things stolen could be nebulous concepts like a sense of direction, a sense of time, or even a name. The players are drawn back to the carnival some years later to find what they’ve lost and that’s where the game picks up.

I had my players, now I had to get them to create their characters. Since we already had one in the form of 15 year old academy student Elora, I decided to give them the prompt that all of their characters were students at the academy, and they could be of various ages, but teens to young adults were preferred, though given that some races age differently, the equivalent of teens would also work. Now let’s meet our player characters.

Elora Firebrook - 15 year old female half-elf Alchemist Artificer who lost a cherished stuffed animal.

Rhin - 8 year old female goblin Death Cleric who lost her artistic creativity.

Bjartur “Artie” Folur-Alfur - 75 year old male pallid elf Circle of Spores Druid who lost his sense of direction.

Hakewood - 18 year old male human Divination Wizard with a cool hat who lost his name.

Irlyhime “Early” Mystan - 17 year old female silver dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter who lost her sense of time.

When it came to the missing things, I wanted them to have a larger impact than what was described in the book. I think it gives an excellent start with a table you can roll on for your missing thing or pick your own, but I wanted to go deeper than the surface description. What does losing these things do to a person? How does it impact their life?

Strangely, the easiest to start with was Hakewood. He only had his last name, he didn’t know his first. It wasn’t a simple matter of forgetting the name and replacing it with another, the entire concept of the young man having a first name was lost to him. I described his entry papers for the academy either having ink spilled over the first name or no first name field existing on the paper at all. Early on, the rest of the party would try to recall his name and couldn’t, so they tried giving him one but nothing came to mind. Hakewood was just Hakewood, even to his family.

Rhin lived in a world of muted colors and rote tasks. She liked the newest season of the Simpsons, water without any ice, and dirt. Her only passion was for dead things, and Death Cleric kind of lent itself to ‘goth’ anyway. She was a loner, people thought she was weird, and she had long bangs that covered her eyes.

Artie couldn’t tell North from South. He got lost often, he’d forget where he came from and where he was going, and he required a sort of service animal to get to his classes. This service animal took the form of a white furred fox named Little Friend. Artie wasn’t just physically directionless, he’d also have trouble finding a path in life.

Early was another that sounded simple at first. She’d lose track of time often, never knew what time of day it was, and couldn’t tell you how old she was if she didn’t have it written down. Seconds could seem like hours, days like minutes, weeks like years. She also didn’t know how long she had been at the academy, nor did anyone else. Some thought she’d always been there. She worried that if she got her sense of time back, she’d find out she was much older than she appeared and possibly become old age, or even die.

So with all of those lost things being so existential, why did K pick a stuffed animal for Elora? Well, they didn’t. I picked it for them.

Picking on the DM

Maybe it’s just me, but when my forever DM friend asks me to run a campaign they can play in, I feel an obligation to make the experience as memorable for them as possible. And since they were playing the little sister of my character from their game, I felt an intense obligation to pick on them.

I was already taking creative liberties with the Witchlight story, so I asked for permission to take some liberties with Royal Flush canon. I wanted to be vague, but because of a certain thing, I had to show my hand on one thing. K basically gave me free reign to do whatever, knowing that I wouldn’t do anything too drastic.

So I killed Ana’leth.

This made no sense because we would be continuing Royal Flush after Witchlight, and where we left off, there was no way Ana’leth could be dead. However, the morning of the Witchlight Carnival, Elora got a letter from her sister’s temple. She knew what this letter was. She was warned this letter might come someday. This was likely a letter informing her that her sister fell in battle. So Elora had a lot on her mind, but she was afraid to open the letter, so she went to the carnival with the letter in her pocket.

She didn’t remember the stuffed animal. She knew she’d lost something, but she didn’t know what it was. But she would learn the importance of it soon enough, because that stuffed animal was the last gift her older sister gave her before she left home for training when Elora was only five years old.

This would be an ongoing thread through the game that would take a few twists and turns and not really have a payoff until Chapter 4. We’ll get there.

We’ve got the setting, we’ve got the players, now we need a story. Not just a story, an epic story. What’s the difference?

Presentation!

Luckily for me, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight has a good story already, and because most of it takes place in a little pocket of the Feywild, I didn’t have to make too many changes to get it to fit into the Royal Flush canon.

The Witchlight Carnival travels around the multiverse, offering fun, games, and prizes. It’s also closely linked to a Domain of Delight in the Feywild called Prismeer. I love fey myths and depictions in fiction. All of it from the cute and whimsical to the horror-themed stuff, and Witchlight offers a little bit of everything. The main villains are the Hourglass Coven who have taken over Prismeer by overthrowing its ruler, the archfey Zybilna.

The Hourglass Coven would be easy. Not many changes there. I divided the Lost Things up between the hags, then read up on their personal domains, personalities, and abilities. They consist of toad-like swamp hag Bavlorna Blightstraw, the doll-like Skabatha Nightshade, and the skeletal four-armed theater hag Endelyn Moongrave.

The first major change I made was actually regarding Zybilna. This is where the major spoilers come in, so this is your final warning for that. Zybilna has a long and storied past full of different identities. This plays heavily into who she is, her motives, and will influence how the party feels about her.

Much of this doesn’t really come out until Chapter 5 where the party is supposed to go through Zybilna’s palace learning about her past to eventually free her. We’ll get to Chapter 5 and my thoughts on how the book presents Zybilna, but I wanted to weave more hints about Zybilna’s true nature earlier in the story to make the party question whether she was good for Prismeer or not. I also wanted them to put together the mystery of her identity on their own rather than just being told near the end of the game.

The other major component of my campaign was giving the players a choice about how they dealt with the world. Witchlight is absolutely a campaign you can murder your way through or go for a full pacifist route. I wanted my players to have that option clearly presented from the start, especially because they were playing young students and not adventurers.

The campaign that followed surprised me. Not just in how much it challenged me creatively, but in how my players interacted with the world. We had many laughs and shed many tears along the way, and it’s an experience I’ll be thinking about for years to come.

#The Wild Beyond the Witchlight #D&D #d&d 5e #Journey Into the Wild Beyond #DM #GM

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