I Would Love To Have A Window Like This In My House.

“I confess I do not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream.”

— Vincent van Gogh

Wow, that's a lot of information, but amazing and exactly how I have been imagining archfey in my head.

Villains - Archfey - Worldbuilding Wednesday

The villain is my favorite part of ANY campaign. So here I am gonna talk about how you can make different kinds of villains, honing down on a specific type and offering various ways to make them interesting. As always, we will be looking at real world history, culture, and mythology to make your villains seem realistic and specifically dastardly. For our first entry let’s discuss…

~~~~~~~~~~~~Archfey Villains~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why archfey? Two reasons: 1) I like archfey, they’re fuckin’ dicks. 2) Someone who’s name I can’t find asked me to make this and I am more than happy to make things for my followers.

NOW, let’s understand what an archfey really is.

An archfey is a creature of fey ancestry that is excessively powerful, nearing the power of a deity. Usually, such creatures are native to the Feywild. Within this realm, they command great power and can even shape the realm itself to their whim and whimsy. 

Common Misconception

Archfey doesn’t mean “superelf.” An archfey can be a pixie, a dryad, a ghost, a beast of some kind, anything that is classified as “fae” or “fae-like” can be turned into an archfey. Elf-like archfey are the most COMMON, but absolutely not the ONLY form of an archfey.

The other misconception is that the archfey are good. This is because the Feywild is mistaken as a plain of good, while Shadowfell is a plain of evil. This is wrong. Feywild and Shadowfell aren’t images of good and evil. Their are images of abundance vs lack of emotion. Shadowfell is a plain of the depressed, the emotionless, the broken. Feywild is a plain of the bipolar, the expressive, the artists and the madmen.

(I’m getting tired of saying “archfey”)

Characteristics of the Archfey

So to understand how we get an Archfey villain, lets discuss some general characteristics of the archfey.

Background.

The archfey come from the Feywild. This is a place governed by emotion. When its denizens feel something strongly, they can physically change their environment. A cruel witch will transform the forest around her to grow trees that bleed and produce fruits shaped like heads. While a kind princess will transform the fields around her into a gorgeous plain of crystalline flowers.

Now, the archfey can transform the Feywild at a moment’s notice. Which means they can do one or both of these things:

They can control their emotions very well.

They only ever have emotional extremes powerful enough to instantly alter the Feywild.

Lifestyle

The archfey live careless lives. They are too powerful to have any natural predators, as such live carefree and happy. Due to their extended life (they live like thousands of years), they are NEVER in rush. Why should they be? They’ve got time, ALL the time.

Environment

Based on HOW the Feywild is, how it is ever-shifting and changing, its denizens must learn to control this change to be able to thrive. Since we are working with an archfey, we can assume they’ve already thrived to the top of their food chain. As such, they must have learned to command the Feywild OR adapted to this changing world, having very drastic changes in personality, behavior, or even looks.

With all this information, let’s share some ideas for archfey villains.

Examples of Archfey Villains

Example #1: The Many Faced Man. Simply put, a doppelganger. The archfey are ever-changing. For this example, our villain always changes their looks. So your Party pisses off this archfey or in some way becomes enemies with him. So when your spends the night camping outside, whoever is keeping watch suddenly poof, is teleported away (because this is an Archfey, it can do this kind of shiz) and in steps a the Many Faced Man who takes this lost PCs form.

I urge you, IRL, pull the Player of this character aside and tell them your plan. Tell them that you want to replace them with a Doppelganger, but not to worry, because their PC will eventually be rescued. THEN, offer them to role play as a doppelganger pretending to be their character. Most players will have TONS of fun with this idea. If you player doesn’t want to RP a doppelganger offer them to role a new temporary PC or just dump the idea.

Example #2: Prince of Liars. A very powerful archfey this one is. He has immense power in the Feywild, and has managed to TRAP the Party in his domain. I’m stealing from Curse of Strahd here, but essentially rework that campaign with more fey-like themes. Instead of vampires, we got fey, instead of Strahd we got a spoiled brat of a prince who is all-powerful but only wants to mess with the Party before killing them in a cruel manner for his or her amusement.

For additional complexity, you can make the Prince of Liars have very drastic shifts of emotion. Think, the bad guy from Split (the movie). One moment he is nice to the Party and leads them to a place filled with treasure, the next he snaps into sheer brutal cruelty and slaughters the ranger’s companion. This will put the Party on edge when dealing with the guy. Furthermore, knowing that the archfey is powerful enough to destroy them with ease puts the Party on the edge, at least until they find something that can kill or neutralize this big bad.

Example #3: The Undying Court. This is for LARGE scale campaigns. Let’s say you have a game that is heavy on politics, but spans different dimensions. So the PCs are working with the politics between Mount Celestia and the 9 Hells and the Abyss, etc. That’s when you throw in the Undying Court. A hive-mind of several Archfey that operate as a singular entity and wish to expand their chaotic influence across the many plains. They may ally with Demon Lords and expedite chaotic situations to gain more power, so your PCs would have to negotiate a turbulent field of politics.

And that’s that folks. I hope this provides SOME use to y’all and helps you out with future ideas. Of course you don’t HAVE to follow my guideline 100%. You don’t need to follow it at all, in fact. Just take it as it is, my ideas for a good fey villain. What about you folks? Would you like to see breakdowns of other kinds of villains? I’d love to do more. Send your recommendations my way or share your ideas for villains. I’d love to hear it. Good luck everyone.

The Unfair DM

I love this new revelation.

You know how everyone’s perception of dinosaurs shifted when the public was introduced to the fact that they probably had feathers? I’m feeling that way again except this time about lips.

T-Rex without lips:

(the much more likely) T-Rex WITH lips:

I love these characters. New D&D PCs anyone?

Bird Warrior - Character Design Challenge by selected artists: Đặng Trường, Bruno Jacob, Isaac Jadraque, Thomas Dumey - Locki, Liam Rogge

These are beautiful, I recognized the first from Exandria Reborn but I'm trying to place where the 3rd (with the oxycotl) is from.

Art by Zuzanna Wuzyk

Would love to see these in person.

Kelly Campbell Berry

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll This is 1 of 15 vintage paperback books that comprise our current giveaway.

The water doesn't even look real, amazing!

Moss waterfall

Love this!

Bookwyrm

There is a bookwyrm in the library.

Note the spelling. Not a bookworm. A bookwyrm.

No one is entirely sure when it snuck into the Elsewhere University Library, but one thing has become entirely certain: it is never, ever leaving.

And why should it leave, with a veritable unlimited floor plan filled to the bell tower with delicious, fragrant tomes to claim and hoard and sample.

An ink-black serpentine wyrm that originally was not much bigger than a rabbit, it used to scamper here and there in the library looking for open tomes to slurp the words out of (it is a terribly messy eater, much to the librarians’ chagrin). The words it eats etch themselves somewhere onto its dark hide, though it has consumed so many letters in so many languages that it is difficult now to see where new bits of prose are added.

Students have been warned repeatedly over the years not to feed the bookwyrm. But there are always those who do not heed the warnings of the librarians. It used to be a funny pastime for students that had become stuck in one section or another of the library’s labyrinthine stacks to feed scraps of paper with vulgar words to the then tiny bookwyrm and then try to find where the offending epithets manifested. The bookwyrm was not terribly picky about the words it ate back then, because it was always hungry. Whether they were in good taste or bad, it didn’t matter; its appetite was insatiable.

And this kind of recklessness is why it grew so large in such a, relatively, short amount of time. It sprang up to the size of a cat one semester, then a large dog a year later, and then eventually… well, to the point where it’s a very good thing that the library has a mostly Other architecture, because it surely would have burst the building by now. And the bigger it grew, the more territorial it became. The more it hoarded tomes in certain sections (it really seemed to savor Anne McCaffrey’s works, but would never be found anywhere near Hemingway, for example). The more aggressive it became to students and librarians alike who needed the books also.

Hoping to avoid another calamity like the last wyrm that took up residence on the campus, the librarians decided to make good use of their new pet. With a copious amount of parchment and ink, they lured the bookwyrm down down down deep into the seldom used catacombs of The Library and set it to work. They knew that once it was presented with its new collection that it would never stray far from it again. And there it stays.

It was a constant conundrum that the librarians faced in the early days, when the Fair Folk and students were beginning to… mingle. A place filled with a vast amount of knowledge like The Library is always bound to have certain… archives that are better perused by no one. Ancient texts. Tomes of ages, dated further back than it is currently recorded that written word existed. The language of the birds, poetry of the stars, and truths that would shatter the mind. Words that needed to be preserved but not necessarily studied. Not by the Good Neighbors, and certainly not by incoming freshmen. Absolutely not by school administrators.

A tiny bit of such knowledge is dangerous. A little more is a disaster. Lots of that knowledge, though, would present a crisis of cataclysmic proportions. These are the books, bound in iron and chains, locked with enchantment and dusted with bottled oblivion, that the wyrm keeps. Guards. Claims. Hoards.

Not all words fade with time. Some grow sharp teeth and attack from the dark instead.

So if you are lost in the library and find yourself in a place that is blacker than spilled ink, smells of iron and sulfur, and sounds like an ancient bellows, turn around and leave out the way you came.

Yesterday, if possible (which, in The Library, of course, it always, always is).

This is on my wish list of places I hope to visit one day but probably won't get to. Dreams are just Dreams though, until we are able to make them come true.

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