Forest filled with fey creatures, need encounters and events

[DualShadow]

I find myself with a problem. I want to have my PCs make their way through an untamed forest and have them feel the danger and hardship without actually throwing ten random encounters with various monsters for each day of travel.

The basics of things is that the forest is filled with feys and other monsters and there is no path through it. For all intent and purposes that forest is untouched by civilization. I want to put together a list of encounters and various non-combat events that could happen in their travel through the forest. And some tips and tricks to make it look and feel deadly without being a hassle for the players.

-Various monsters
-A spring with a fey that try to tempt players
-Some event with feys laughing at the PCs while being hidden

[Ninja_Prawn]

This is relevant to my interests! Here are some non-combat encounter ideas...

The players stumble into a ball or party of some sort, and have to dance their way out.
A fairy that speaks in rhyme offers to grant a wish if they can solve three riddles.
Wild magic zone!
Two factions of fey creatures are fighting each other. It turns out that the origin of the conflict is something ludicrously petty that the party can resolve.
A human child who had been kidnapped by fairies stumbles into the party. They are sick and need humanoid medicine, but are distrustful of the party.
The party stumbles on a rare, valuable and/or dangerous herb/spice/flower.
If the party lights a torch or starts a fire for any reason, they are immediately swarmed by invisible fey that put it out (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1LI81cWh3Fs/maxresdefault.jpg).
The party all fall suddenly asleep and wake up 8 hours later. Nothing obviously bad happens, but they have all acquired strange tattoos...
One of the PCs develops an allergy.
A druidic hermit tries to scare the party away from a sacred glade.

[GungHo]

Missing items
Talking animals
Psychedelic emanations from rings of mushrooms/stones
Strange areas of silence or noise (whispers, giggling)
Clearings that literally appear, travelling in a straight line actually sends you in circles, or other obvious spatial anomalies

[illyahr]

Not just spatial anomalies, but visual anomalies as well. Colors bleed out so that everything looks bland, or colors intensify to painful levels, or even colors reverse in things so that trees have brown leaves and green bark. Throw down masses of low- to mid-level Illusion effects. The party sees and hears things on a near-constant basis. Nothing ever actually happens directly, but make the party feel like something is stalking them.

Fey feel things with an intensity that is beyond the comprehension of most people. They shift emotionally at the drop of a hat, so the party could do something that they perceive as nothing that the fey view as extremely insulting or something they did the fey find extremely amusing and decide to play with the party a bit. Fey are playful and passionate, even the Evil ones, so they will try to screw with the party at nearly every opportunity.

[Segev]

Pickpocketing pixies. Possibly "trading" worthless pebbles and leaves and flowers for the stuff they steal. So when the party opens their packs, instead of rations they find a bundle of brightly-colored (still living) insects. Instead of gold they have smoothly polished river-stones.

Maybe have one or two of the things be genuinely valuable, rare forest items.

Don't overdo it. Individual things. One or two replacements per day, I'd say.

[Joe the Rat]

Menhirs and Circles.

Weird writing in a forgotten tongue telling a long tale of hapless adventurer's who got lost in the fae woods and fell asleep wherever it was they camped the night before.
At night, pixies, sprites, and dancing lights come here for the nightly grand ball. It's pixies, every ball is grand.
Alternatively, it is very quiet, with no signs of animals passing through. Maybe it's a safe place to camp?

A tall stump, stripped of bark and covered in Sylvan an/or Druidic writing. It contains a long and exhaustive list of alterations to the layout of the forest and surrounding terrain, including a lengthy back-and-forth (with dialog suggesting issues with one another's parentage) about which side of the dolmen a particular Sacred Grove should be positioned. Yes, it's the forest's Changelog.

A beautiful, if surprisingly tall maiden out walking with her pet boar, who is both huge and green. This can turn combat (Hag and Gorgon) if the players are particularly rude or tasty looking.

[BarbieTheRPG]

More setting/climate info would be good, but;

1. Players like magical mounts so have them encounter a herd of pegasi or unicorns trying to free one of their members from a trap set by ....

2. ... a hunting band of Striders, who are being stalked by ...

3. .... a troupe of Satyrs looking to rescue one of their own that was captured by ...

4. .... a group of beautiful, lonely Nymphs who despise ...

5. ... a pair of Centaurs willing to trade jems for information regarding ...

6. .... a Green Dragon looking for its next meal

Within cities, humans tend to have interlocking relationships to one degree or another. Why wouldn't forest-dwelling creatures? "Society" can exist anywhere the GM likes.

[CovertCobalt]

A magical scarecrow-construct with a Bag of Holding filled with various strange enchanted items with unusual effects. In exchange for a good story, he gives each of the characters one random item. Immediately after, he disappears, leaving nothing but a sinister laugh.

Later on, the party hears a tale from a local about a Fey trickster, exiled from his homeland and forcibly transformed into a monster, who wanders the forest giving out cursed items to hapless travelers...

[Joe the Rat]

More setting/climate info would be good, but;

1. Players like magical mounts so have them encounter a herd of pegasi or unicorns trying to free one of their members from a trap set by ....

2. ... a hunting band of Striders, who are being stalked by ...

3. .... a troupe of Satyrs looking to rescue one of their own that was captured by ...

4. .... a group of beautiful, lonely Nymphs who despise ...

5. ... a pair of Centaurs willing to trade jems for information regarding ...

6. .... a Green Dragon looking for its next meal

Within cities, humans tend to have interlocking relationships to one degree or another. Why wouldn't forest-dwelling creatures? "Society" can exist anywhere the GM likes.
This is fun, but chain of deals can get really annoying. Which is probably perfect for this situation.

[Vegan Squirrel]

I built up a faery adventure for my players in my last campaign right before it died out due to busy schedules. People here have already hit on most of the ideas I had, but I'll add a few more.

You can have imperceptible minglings of different planes, where you can end up on a different plane without realizing it. I put most of the fey stuff in its own Feywild plane, with a few strange things on the other side as well. For instance, a lost dryad had ended up in the material plane while her tree was in the Feywild, so both dryad and tree were slowly dying.


A stream flowing uphill.
A group of satyrs (or other fey) invite the PCs to join their feast. The PCs are expected to provide music, regardless of their abilities. Refusing is taken as an insult.
Animals acting strangely.
You can steal a page out of The Wizard of Oz, with a field of sleep-inducing poppies, or other plants with some magical effects.
Dreams. Literally playing with the PCs' heads. You can give them any kind of encounter you want, and then they awake to realize it was a dream. Or was it?
You can play with the passage of time, totally up to your whim. The entire adventure can turn out to have been mere minutes, or a week of travel could result in years having passed, or anything in between.


For deadly, there can be pits to fall into, camouflaged by nature or malicious fey, or things that aren't as they should be, like the old tree in Lord of the Rings that tries to eat the hobbits. They can witness an encounter from afar. Maybe a challenging encounter with some oversized vultures that they then occasionally notice circling in the skies, but they can usually hide from. Or dragons. Remember that any tree can turn out to be an angry treant.

[falcon1]

This should be useful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/5d9rvh/you_liked_my_mountain_encounters_so_here_are_my/?

[Pugwampy]

I love fairies

Personally I would suggest go home brew for funny fey encounters .

Classic old fairy circle that traps them for a while or a trapped NPC encounter .

Sparkle Water that tastes likes strawberries that has random annoying buy non lethal temporary effects . eg. Body Swop , Gender bend , animal polymorph , funny antenna or wings growing out.

A slightly dangerous encounter , that shrinks the PC,s to half a millimeter or something . You give em giant bugs to fight , telling them its only new born baby bugs about a millimeter in size .

Pugwampy <bad luck fairy> hides in one of their backpacks . Every time a player wants to roll for something , you ask them to roll twice and choose the lowest score .It will annoy them bad . When they finally find pugwampy it screeches and runs away .

A job from another girl wanting her horsie rescued from goblins . The horse turns out to be a unicorn .

..................................

How about a job from a fey queen maybe disguised as a pretty girl . Get rid of a dangerous beast . PC,s agree , something happens and enviroment changes and they ride butterfies to someplace yellow . you place with golden yellow trees combat area and a giant tick .
QUEENIE HAD A TICK IN HER HAIR !!!

< i wanted to do this and bought a yellow T shirt for enviroment . Every time I wear that shirt I think i am wearing the hair of the fey queen >

[Ninja_Prawn]

Personally I would suggest go home brew for funny fey encounters .

If you're playing 5e d&d, you could use my stuff (https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3crmpfdbc5u5x5/Fey%20Creatures%20Complete.pdf?dl=0)!

[Vegan Squirrel]

If you're playing 5e d&d, you could use my stuff (https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3crmpfdbc5u5x5/Fey%20Creatures%20Complete.pdf?dl=0)!

Wow, that's an amazing fey sourcebook! Thank you for putting together such an excellent and thorough resource!

EDIT: Do you have monster versions of any of these creatures hiding around the forums somewhere?

[Ninja_Prawn]

EDIT: Do you have monster versions of any of these creatures hiding around the forums somewhere?

I made a start on compiling one, but I find writing monster stat blocks is a bit... well I occasionally have bursts of inspiration and write ten in a day, and other times I can't stand to look at them.

I have a very early, very rough draft in my homebrew sig ('Fey Folio' under 'Monsters'), but it's so far from complete that I don't even want to copy the link into here. I have vague intentions of completing it for release on Middle Finger of Vecna next year, if we get enough people saying they want to see it.