Thought this column had been written into the dead book? Well you aren’t so lucky as all that—we’re back, and though A Walk Through the Planes won’t ever be quite as regular as it once was, I do plan on getting us all the way through to current day D&D. That’s right, eventually I’ll just be writing about new releases as they appear, which I’ve been looking forward to for ages now—though that’s still quite a ways off. We’re not quite finished with Fourth Edition, plus there’s all of Fifth Edition to trudge through before we arrive at the now-current 5.5. On the plus side, there’s a lot less officially published material once Dragon and Dungeon die off (Dragon+ is a pretty sorry replacement), but many of these works are full books that need reading through. I’m a weirdo in my desire to finish projects regardless of mitigating circumstances (yes, I do have plans for returning to Codec Logs…), which means that so long as I and this site are still kicking around these will keep going, but there may be future lengthy pauses as well; I do need to spend some time and energy on writing that actually pays, much to my eternal chagrin.We only have two final columns for this edition, though, so let’s get back to the material at hand so that we can once and for all leave my least favorite version of D&D to the dusties and say goodbye to it forever.
I’d rather been dreading the content for this penultimate bit of coverage because it centers around the Feywild and its Court of Stars. The Feywild has always felt half-baked to me, but the Court of Stars at its center wasn’t even seared on the grill. Despite reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of Fourth Edition material, with a focus on its other planes of existence, I still fail to grasp how this dumb governmental system is supposed to function or even what its purpose is. Its structure is ineffable, possibly so as not to limit DMs, though really it always felt like it was just never fully conceptualized. That was always a major issue with the edition’s non-campaign setting Nentir Vale, in that its openness led to a lack of details and wishy-washy approach to most everything. The Court of Stars could be used for almost anything, which is another way of saying that I’m not sure why anyone would want to feature it because it seemed to have no real purpose.
However, the actual “Court of Stars” articles took a right turn from what that name implies. Yes, they are about powerful faeries and Feywild denizens, the notable ones roughly on par with demon lords and the like in terms of power, but almost all of the individuals covered aren’t in the actual court, or if they are their role in it is extremely peripheral. Instead, it’s a series about powerful outsiders who often happen to be archfey, but on the whole the emphasis isn’t in making sense of this kinda awful plane and its messy hierarchy. For the most part it was a lot of fun to read, and many of these entities would be easily transplanted into a Great Wheel cosmology or really any other one (hell, some already exist there). That’s always the thing about the Feywild—because it’s essentially the same as the Prime anyhow, it’s never difficult to do with it whatever you’d like, including my usual choice of ignoring it entirely.
The series began with Keith Baker’s profile of the Prince of Frost in Dragon #374 (April 2009), which surprised me not just because it was so good, but also because it had nothing to do with Eberron, Baker’s own setting and a far more interesting and worthwhile one than the default blandness of Fourth Edition. The Prince of Frost, and that’s his whole name so far as anyone can remember, is the ultimate incel. Years ago, he was betrothed to a woman. She dumped him for a human adventurer, and ever since then he has spent his eternal life as a weird jerk, abducting and abusing all sorts of other women in his search for the resurrected soul of the woman he “loves.” He has little to do with the typical eladrin machinations and court intrigue, instead he’s just a villain who hates adventurers out of jealousy and women because one time he was rejected. He is a loathsome, repulsive jerk, generally as hated by the eladrin as by mortals, and with all of this seems like a fantastic campaign adversary.
The Prince has two primary minions, the sisters of the woman who dumped him, which is maybe not a great development, but for the most part he broods over the winter and causes problems for everyone else because that’s what incels do. Baker supplements this profile with many plot hooks and ways to pull the Prince of Frost into a campaign, and it’s all well rounded and thought out. There’s even several pages of character options in case the party contains an incel who wants to follow the Prince’s lead, and it all feels modular and eminently usable. There’s some small attempt towards making the Prince into a more complex character, but really he’s just a villain with a reasonably compelling motivation and backstory, making for a different type of adversary than your typical archdevil or demon lord. One indelible part of Fourth Edition was its focus on making everything into a conflict so as to allow for maximum fisticuffs, and while that led to some piss poor lore and worldbuilding, when it comes to an individual like the Prince of Frost you’ve got no complaints from me.
The next Court of Stars article wouldn’t arrive until more than a year later, when the column jumped to Dungeon magazine (#185, December 2010 for this particular piece) for the next couple years because that was the style at the time with Wizards’ absolutely moronic periodical management. “Selephra, The Bramble Queen” by Ari Marnell isn’t poorly written, but the central idea behind her is misogynist and, frankly, bad. Essentially, she rescued a beloved man after a long period of capture from a mortal sorceress, and when he spurned her, she went all evil. Her backstory isn’t all that different to that of the Prince of Winter but the tropes it plays with have a lot of ugly, sexist connotations. She is essentially a harpy in all but name, and that she is the patron of all shape-shifting fey (who are with this also connoted with evil) should tell you everything you need to know.
As if that wasn’t enough, Selephra’s evilness has a certain cartoonish, over-the-top quality so as to really hammer it home that women become evil when dumped. “Many mortals who were charmed by her servants or captured by her hags or even by Selephra herself are kept in slave pens hidden in the deepest recesses of her Feywild forest demesne. These slaves are forced to serve as porters, physical laborers, and as convenient victims when the mood strikes Selephra to torment or slaughter a mortal.” She is the archetypal bitch-queen in a way that’s rather uncomfortable to me and is not something I would want to see used at a gaming table. There’s a lot of old school sexism involved with the hags from D&D, and really doubling down on that part of their identity is a poor choice indeed. I generally like Marnell’s writing, but recommend skipping this entry entirely nonetheless.
Alanna Abbott helped with Wizards’ retcon of Baba Yaga, turning her into an archfey (the November 2011, issue #196 of Dungeon also includes Craig Campbell’s new version of “Baba Yaga’s Dancing Hut,” which we covered earlier), though as with the adventure itself it’s hard to take issue with this change. Baba Yaga should be fey, and I love that she really has nothing to do with the actual Court of Stars and its inconsequential politics. Every article in this series has also been shorter than the last, but the characterization here doesn’t really require much more. Baba Yaga simply isn’t given enough of a relationship to the rest of this world to merit one, and this write-up serves to offer an introduction to a character who could use more fleshing out from the rest of D&D considering her importance in mythology. Abbott’s write-up is strong, but Baba Yaga is a character who feels weird to have stated out, and ultimately isn’t a great fit for this cosmology, as much as I do like the role she now plays.
“The Trinket Lord,” by Karl Resch in the August 2012 issue of Dungeon (#205), feels like a fan creation in the best possible sense. It profiles Tuxil, a weird gnome who found treasure and then went a little bit nuts as a result. Also: he’s a fox sometimes, or at least plays one at parties for reasons never quite made clear. In any case, he’s barely an archfey at all, and more a strange, unaligned being who exists outside of the Court of Stars entirely. One of the issues with the fey in D&D is how whimsy-less they often feel, but that’s not the case with Tuxil. He’s strange and ineffable and has his own desires that exist outside of world domination or some such nonsense. He wants treasure and will trade with anyone, and seems very fun to use in a campaign—so often these archfey dominate a storyline, but Tuxil is an individual to slip in for a few sessions and maybe a sidequest or two, adding some texture to the world that’s so often lacking. A wonderful read, I can’t help but wish that we’d hear about this individual again, as gnomes with distinct personalities are too rare in the best of times; he may be neutral, but adding him to Bytopia seems like a no-brainer.
At this point, the series moved back to Dragon magazine, where Wizards of the Coast was tossing in some last remnants of old Fourth Edition material while previewing what was then being called D&D Next (i.e. Fifth Edition). It was a strange period, and the entire second half of this series was printed in less than a year while Wizards of the Coast was burning off its old commissions. Dragon #420 actually featured two of archfey from the series in a fey-themed issue, neither of whom are bad, though one is far, far more interesting than the other. That one is Jeff LaSala’s “The Carrion King,” who despite that title is in fact a myconid lord. Now, there already was a myconid deity in D&D, the oft-forgotten Psilofyr, but LaSala smartly came up with a way to reconcile this issue, even if it’s a little bit of a stretch. Essentially, the Carrion King is just a current name for this weirdo creature, despite his new features hardly matching up with what we knew of him from the past.
The Carrion King has been around, in one form or another, for nearly as long as the Feywild. He has largely forgotten his own origins—a fractured personality isn’t conducive to a long memory—but he knows he has had many names. The “Carrion King” is only the latest epithet.
Psilofyr the Spore Lord, the entity mentioned on page 109 of Underdark, was probably one name given to him by the myconids in ages past, but the Carrion King cannot recall it.
I always kinda liked Psilofyr, but they were never much developed. LaSala’s version is slightly incompatible with what came before, but that seems largely like a result of the awful overall cosmology, and what I would do with my own version is to take this new concept of an alien and fractured deific consciousness and simply make them hail from Mechanus. Psilofyr is more interesting than ever now and is characterized in a way that seems wonderful to roleplay. I’d love to see more of this version of Psilofyr in the future, and LaSala’s profile might be the best in this entire line, even if he isn’t a shape-changing gnome-fox.
“Thrumbolg, First Lord of Mag Tureah” by Jeff Dugan and Tim Eagon is far less interesting and unique—unlike Psilofyr, this isn’t someone who I’d bother with moving to Planescape—but does feel like a necessary addition to the game. For all its talk of fomorians in the Feydark, Fourth Edition never did a great job with characterizing them. Thrumbolg is the king of the fomorians, for the most part stereotypically evil but still worth having in the game if you’re going to include the Feydark at all. The most interesting thing about this profile is an unexplained portal network in Mag Tureah, which he’s using for inscrutable reasons.
Millennia after Thrumbolg claimed the citadel, the questions of who built Mag Tureah’s portals, how they function, the reason for their instability, and the purpose they originally served remain unanswered. Some scholars have noted disquieting similarities between the functioning of the portals and the way in which aberrations traverse the planes. The only consistent fact is that each portal connects to an abandoned ruin in the mortal realm.
This concept turns Mag Tureah from a dull fortress of mediocre evil into somewhere worth visiting, and though I generally dislike the fomorians, this is a fantastic planar concept that could easily be transplanted elsewhere. So it ends up worth reading this article despite being mostly skimmable—Thrumbolg may be as basic a tyrant as they come, but he happens to have landed in a cool enough location to make it worth including some version of all this in a campaign.
I’m including Mark Monack’s short write-up of “Hyrsam, Prince of Satyrs” (Dragon #422, April 2013) in this series on the assumption that it should’ve been a part of it, it’s simply that Wizards’ lax editorial oversight forgot to add the header and branding. Anyhow, Hyrsam is, uhh, the prince of satyrs like the title says, and he… likes to satyr it up. There’s some adventure hooks for how to use him, and a small mention that “As the fey spirit of revelry, he is effectively immortal. If killed, he reappears elsewhere in the Feywild at the next dawn or dusk.” But really, he’s just a bigger, fancier satyr, and a couple pages of new magic items and abilities for his revelers do little to cover for this fact. Moving on.
Unfortunately, Court of Stars ends with another down note, as “The Wild Hunt” by Aaron Infante-Levy (Dragon #428, October 2013) is essentially as boring as I thought this entire series was going to be before I started reading through them. His backstory includes all manner of tired fantasy cliches, from lame prophecies to meaningless proper nouns to forgettable purple prose. Cerunnos, the Horned Lord, hangs out with the Gloaming Court and kills people because… he likes murder? I think? “His bloodlust is as legendary as his skill.” So yeah, he likes killing people, I was right. He has a tragic backstory that is painful to read through with all of its terrible writing, and leads the titular wild hunt, in which fey go on murderous rampages because lazy DMs need to let PCs stab them. I had to reread much of this profile again because it was all so immediately forgettable, but even so I struggled to fill this paragraph as there’s just so little of substance.
So there’s the series, which had some impressive highs before crashing to its end with a forgettable sigh. Does it add much as a whole to the Feywild? Despite the number of articles and their accompanying pagecount… not really, and I can’t help but hope that Fifth Edition’s version of this plane throws a lot of the previous edition’s lore out completely. Even after all of this, the actual Court of Stars is as opaque as ever and the Feywild as a whole still feels messy and half-developed.
And with that, there’s just one more Fourth Edition article left in this series—let’s all hope it takes me far shorter to write about it than the Court of Stars did, despite covering another eight articles along the way. I’m sure some of them are even good! Probably….
