Fey Carnival (TTRPG Location Design)
For: Lion Forge Comics; Rolled & Told #8 - Sites & Settings Feature
Type: Location | Worldbuilding
Genre: Fantasy
Roles: Writer | Designer
I was hired by Lion Forge Comics to create an original location suitable for games of Dungeons & Dragons, and present it in an article as the Sites and Settings feature of the April 2019 issue of their RPG/comics magazine Rolled & Told.
I wrote a piece called “The Adventure Comes to You” for which I created a traveling Fey-themed traveling carnival titled Tuatha’s Traveling Feyre and created a location, interesting characters, and unique items for Dungeon Masters to flexibly drop in to any of their adventures.
My goal with this design was to create a location that was:
Flexible enough to work in a large variety of locations
Able to be succinctly presented within the page count
Fun & interesting enough to justify its actual use in games
Flexibility — Most locations are inherently static, but a traveling carnival had all the flexibility I was looking for, while still keeping a unique identity.
Limited Scope — With only so much space to describe the carnival, anything I spent time on had to be worth the space. To that end, I dedicated a significant amount of space to the characters you might encounter at the faire as characters tend to be one of the best ways to reflect the nature of a location back to the players.
Fun & Interesting — Prep time is a challenging issue for most game masters. If the carnival was going to find its way into people’s weekly escapes it really had to pop. I felt that the fey carnival concept was already strong enough to appeal to players interested in roleplay and the sort of hijinks common to D&D. So, with my remaining space, I wanted to supplement that appeal with actual gameplay functionality.
Magic Items — It’s no secret many players are motivated by loot. I developed original magic items that were appropriate to a carnival and inspired by fey-like magic. These items were made available to players through both vendors and as prizes for carnival games.
Fey Realm — In D&D, players can travel across planes of reality. But finding ways to these other planes can be tricky. I decided that this Fey carnival would make for an interesting threshold between the realms, operating on each sides of the portal. This opened up many opportunities for game masters to use the “feyre” in connection to other adventures that required players to traverse into the fey realm.
