D&D's Shadowfell and Feywild Explained

The Shadowfell and the Feywild are in direct opposition to each other in the D&D multiverse, so I talked to Mike Mearls about what makes both of these planes of existence so different.

Mike Mearls: A lot of things that I really enjoyed working on and that ... how we built out the Fey in Volo's guide, when it came out last year, this idea that you take a Meenlock and then you take a Redcap and try to figure out how would these guys be linked in some way. And you know, you don't want the link to just be, like, they know the same guy. It's more like cosmically how are these things connected. What does it mean to be Fey? And we kind of have this idea come up that the Feywilds, the realm of extreme emotions, where emotions can become so strong that they become, they become essentially personified.

Mike Mearls: The Meenlock represents paranoia and fear. It is paranoia and fear. The Redcap is murderous rage, and that I loved. That was so much fun to work on, because then it just suddenly a lot of these creatures ... You not only ... it's not just they make sense in a way that you kinda pat yourself on the back and go, "Hey, these pieces fit together", but it also suggests what other things could exist, and as a dungeon master and as a writer it starts to inspire you and it tells you some really important fundamental truth about, in this case the Feywild, that could really inform all the rest of your writing and thoughts about it, in a way that I hope is, if we done our job right, inspiring.

Todd Kenreck: In Western mythology, the fairy realm is not a safe place.

Mike Mearls: No, exactly right. Yeah, and so for us what the Feywild represents is that idea wild is important. It's not just, it's the land of the Fey. It's a wilderness and it's a dangerous realm of the Fey. And the Feywild stands in opposition to the Shadowfell. So you have the material plane, where the worlds of D&D, like Forgotten realms, Greyhawk and so on. They're within a material plane.

Mike Mearls: And you can think of the Shadowfell and the Feywild as opposing poles. Where the Feywild is literally is the realm of emotion, it is a realm guided by extremes, it ... imagine, like, if you take any system and you just pump lots of energy into it, you just get lots of extreme outcomes, right. I mean, you just think of it. If you have two cars going, crashing together. The faster they go, the more dramatic the crash, right.

Mike Mearls: The Feywilds are where everything is going 100 miles an hour, and is constantly crashing into each other. There are no simmering resentments, there's just, you know, straight up blood feuds and then, you know, super deep, unbreakable ties that can give way to, you know, utter deep hatreds.

Mike Mearls: The Shadowfell, in opposition, is a realm of, not death in the sense of, like physical death, but more in the sense of the deadening of emotions and thought and feeling. It's a gloomy realm. Like, everything is just very muffled. There are ... like, you know, it's the opposite. It's where emotion is drained away. Everything is gray, everything is dull. Everything looks the same. Even events, things happen over and over again. You think of Strahd, he plays out the same story over and over again. It just becomes rout, you know.

Mike Mearls: Where in the Feywild, nothing is predictable, everything is constantly changing. In the Shadowfell, everything, essentially enters into a rhythm and remains stuck in it. So you imagine as adventurers, you go to the Feywild, you're dealing with a constantly shifting, dangerous situation. Whether it's someone that you're talking to, or monster you're fighting.

Mike Mearls: When you go to Shadowfell, where in the Feywild you're trying to keep everything steady, like, you want to keep everything on an even keel, so you can survive. In the Shadowfell, you're the change agent. You're the ones who break the cycle of Strahd. You're the ones who come in and you're trying to recover that artifact that might be lost there, right, but how do you find it? How do you, how do you take this realm of stasis and introduce change to it? You know, so it's a very different feel.

Mike Mearls: It's the opposite of the Feywild, where the Feywild is a realm of constant change, how do you introduce stasis? How do you hold on to your identity and remain who you are? And not, you know, the Fey Lord who welcomes you in. How do you very carefully stay on her good side, so she doesn't just suddenly order you executed? You know, for a slight, you know, an offense, you might not even think it's something offensive you just did, suddenly sets her off and then suddenly she's your best friend again. And then it's maddening, right, it's a realm of madness.

Mike Mearls: Where the Shadowfell is a realm of, essentially, depression. It's where everything just goes to just stop. You know, the challenge in the Shadowfell is how do you fight through that, it's dolorous nature, right. You might go to the Shadowfell, and then lose track of your quest. You might fall victim to it. You might start, yourself, just repeating the same thing. Like, let's say you're traveling across the Shadowfell, you might just start traveling in circles, endlessly, you lose all hope. You lose all emotion. What drove you here is probably something emotional, your goal. And instead you just accept stasis and just become part of the scenery, essentially. So that's how those two realms are positioned.

Todd Kenreck: Doesn't sound like it's pure chaos, it's just heightened.

Mike Mearls: No. It's heightened, everything is unpredictable. You might go in thinking, like, " We need to, like, this guy has this item we want, we need to deal with him." And you might have suddenly, have this overwhelming hatred of him. Like, you just want to kill him. That's the only thing you want to do. You lose sight of why are we talking to this person. I hate this guy, I hate him more than anything I've ever hated. I need to start strangling him right now, or I'm going to lose my mind, right. Things like that.

Mike Mearls: Both realms want you to lose yourself. One wants you to lose yourself by becoming an extreme version of yourself. The most hateful person, the hateful version of myself possible. Or the most drunkard, or the most whatever. The Shadowfell wants to become the least version of yourself, right. I am a great ranger and I got lost in the Shadowfell, so I just wander around aimlessly for no reason.

Todd Kenreck: So the Feywild does have a nefarious side to it?

Mike Mearls: Oh, 100%.

Todd Kenreck: It wants you to become an evil?

Mike Mearls: It's not that it's ... neither realm has a will. Neither one is, like, has a plan. It's just, like, high gravity versus low gravity. It's just the environment you're dealing with. Where the material plane is the middle, right, emotions as we understand them. We have our highs and lows, but there's a band. The Shadowfell says the band becomes this, the Feywild says the band becomes this and there's no middle. There's just one extreme and the other. And both are equally dangerous.