Wizards of the Coast has expanded the Dungeons & Dragons game with two great new sourcebooks: Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium and Player’s Option: Heroes of the Faewild. While both books are for the game’s current edition, each harkens back to the earliest days of this perennially popular roleplaying game.
Players of a certain vintage will no doubt recognize the name of Mordenkainen. This powerful wizard of dubious repute lent his name to a great many magical spells and codices, some of which have been a part of Dungeons & Dragons since its inception. Mordenkainen’s Magnficient Emporium is worthy of his name.
This tome catalogues numerous magical items and wondrous artifacts to award brave characters, yet this is no mere book of lists and stats. The Emporium presents all of these items with bits of story and legendry, making the discovery of even the paltriest of magical gear an event worthy of an epic. Would Tolkien’s Ring saga have been nearly as enthralling had Bilbo found a simple “Ring of Invisibility”? Unlikely. Who would have thrilled to the Lady of the Lake presenting Arthur with a “longsword +1” Few, if any.
Those examples are perhaps a bit extreme, but I resort to such hyperbole to make a point: Magic items should be magical. A wild array of treasure is buried between the pages of this book: Doppelganger plate mail, the Jacinth of Inestimable beauty and more. No treasure here is commonplace.
In the Dungeons & Dragons cosmology, the Feywild is analogous to the faerie realm of mythic Europe. Contemporary stories depict faeries and faeriedom as being harmless and quite delightful, but those who have taken time to peruse the annals of folklore will know that this is far from the truth. Faeries are amoral, cruel and capricious. Visitors to faerie land find it a disorienting and perilous experience; a place where nothing is as it seems. The Feywild is somewhere between these two extremes: A realm both dangerous and beautiful, where cruelty and conviviality are found in equal measure.
Player’s Option: Heroes of the Feywild explores this realm in depth, offering new character creation opportunities for players and a wild new setting for adventure. New races for play include hamadryads, pixies and satyrs, and they’re accompanied by new character build choices like skalds, berserkers, witches and more. While many players will encounter the Feywild as travelers, Heroes of the Feywild is full of options for players preferring to play a native of the realm.
The realm itself is fully detailed geographically and socially. Significant landmarks and places are detailed thoroughly, among them the Isle of Dread. Much like Mordenkainen, the mere name of this island should be enough to stir a little excitement among players old enough to remember the hobby’s early days. The Isle of Dread was a legendary adventure setting, part King Kong’s island and part Lovecraftian horror, that came packaged with every new copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set. It is nice to see it resurface so many years later.
The Feywild is a dangerous realm that will undoubtedly draw in many brave adventurers. Whether bravery will be enough to survive its challenges will have to be determined.
