D&D: Fairies And Rabbitfolk Preview – New Races In Beyond The Witchlight
Come and take a look at two of the new D&D races coming in The Wild Beyond The Witchlight: A Feywild Adventure – Fairies and Harengons, aka rabbitfolk.
That’s right folks, fairies and rabbitfolk coming to your D&D game in the very next book. And not as monsters or cute NPCs you can interact with but never actually get to play unless your DM lets you adopt them, but just as playable options for your character. It’s all thanks to The Wild Beyond The Witchlight: An UwU Adventure, the upcoming fae-cottage core adventure from WotC. You’ll come for the magic carnival, but stay for the fey sprites and new player options.
Today we’re taking a look at previews of the upcoming races in the new book, thanks to Polygon, who revealed some of the details you’ll see below.
via Polygon
There are two brand-new races in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: A Feywild Adventure, the spritely Fairies and the sprightly rabbitfolk known as the Harengon. Both of these are brand-new to 5th Edition, but feel like they’ve been a long time coming. You can check out a brief preview of the two races below, starting with the Fairies, who bring a touch of multicolored magic to the Feywild. But as Chris Perkins, principal story designer for D&D at WotC, puts it, the plane is as much whimsy as it is dark and twisted–it’s very (brothers) Grimm. But still full of practical considerations, like the rules for playing as a Fairy which have you actually a bit larger than you’d think:
“We wanted to give you a fairy option, but we wanted to get it closer in size to our gnomes and our halflings for practical game considerations. They’re size small, but no smaller than say a gnome who’s about two-and-a-half, three-feet tall. And beyond that, and the fact that you can fly, what kind of fairy you are is customizable. If you want to call yourself a brownie, go right ahead. If you just want to call yourself a generic fairy, go right ahead.”
Not only are they small but they carry forth the new tradition for all PC race option–you increase one score by 2 and a different score by 1 when creating your character. You’ll also be a flier, if the Unearthed Arcana is anything to go by. It was originally released back in March, so there are bound to be changes, but at the time the two biggest traits for Fairies were that they had a fly speed of 30 feet and the ability to hover, which are both powerful options for a PC, especially at low levels.
And on top of that they get Fairy Magic which lets them cast druidcraft and faerie fire for free–it makes you wonder why fairies cast faerie fire, and if faeries cast fairy fire, but either way it’s pretty simple and straightforward. We’ll have to see what changes they retain.
Far more unexpected, though, are the rabbitfolk known as Harengons.
These rabbitfolk are something of a happy accident, as Perkins puts it. The team was looking through inspirational material talking about fey creatures from other fictional worlds when one of the writers came across an illustration of rabbit bandits. The rest goes exactly as you might expect:
“He liked that imagery so much, because the sort of aggressive bully and the gentle rabbit just do not go [together]. He was sharing some of these images and talked about what if he could put a group of brigands in the adventure who were kind of like these little rabbit dickheads. And I thought, OK, yeah, they’ll be fun monsters.
It turns out, actually, that any creature with an animal head is a pretty easy sell to our fans. But there’s something about rabbits that I guess is just too much to pass up. And so that’s how the harengons came to be.”
And according to WotC’s polling, the rabbitfolk Unearthed Arcana was a smash hit and soon you’ll get to hop into adventure.
Above: the Rabbitfolk Unearthed Arcana, an early version of what would become the Harengon. Note the similarities.
The earlier draft has them proficient with initiative rolls, perception, and a version of luck that lets them add a d4 to a failed Dexterity save. Which sounds a lot like the entry. You’ll be able to see the final version for yourself in two short weeks.
Happy Adventuring!
