Post-campaign semi-review of 'The Wild Beyond the Witchlight'
This week, we finished our year-long adventure through the Feywild. I had a lot of fun because of the group, but I can't really recommend the campaign itself.
One of my D&D groups has been playing a weekly game of D&D over Discord—and occasionally Roll20—since November 2020. Since none of us live near each other anymore, so this is our chance to still get to hang out.
I love this group, and I love playing with them. It’s really a highlight of my week to settle in on Monday nights and click-clack our math rocks.
We started out with Rime of the Frostmaiden, then did a jaunt into Descent into Avernus, and this week, we finished up The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. Next up, I’ll be DMing Spelljammer: Light of Xaryxis.
And I have some thoughts on that one, too, but this is about Witchlight, so let me stay on track here:
The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is not very good.
I say that with as much love to my group and DM as possible. I had a friggin’ blast playing through it with some of my favorite people, but the campaign itself left a lot to be desired.
It’s just not…good.
1. It’s got more rail than the Transcontinental Railroad
Witchlight is unbelievably railroady, more so than any other adventure I’ve ever played. And that’s not on the DM—he told us later about things he had to alter to keep things moving based on our decisions.
Like, if you miss a single aspect of a puzzle, make a wrong turn or decision, or don’t do the right thing at the right time, the entire narrative falls apart.
That’s just bad design. And no, you can’t plan for every decision a DM or player will make, but you can sure make it so that things don’t stall out and hit a wall if, for example, you put a crown on the wrong statue and it plane-shifts away with the item you need to progress.
When you take this in with the option for pacifistic playthroughs (I talk about that next, don’t worry), it feels like there are no real stakes for the heroes. If you don’t fight in combat, there is almost certainly no death, and if you miss some of the beats that tie the story together, it means playing connect-the-plot-points, or play-by-number almost.
2. You can play through with zero combat, technically
This isn’t a bad thing in theory, but it kind of falls into the same boat as the linearity and narrative breakdown I mentioned above.
Yes, you can technically handle every single scenario in the book with pacifism. You never have to draw a weapon or cast a boom-boom spell.
But that doesn’t mean everything can be politicked or Charisma checked away. Sometimes, it means you have no choice but to run away from an army of goblins (or whatever) if you want to maintain a pacifist playthrough.
Being able to avoid all combat also means that there are clues stuck in every nook and cranny for you to get past any roadblock you may come across.
But Paladine help you if you don’t search every nook and cranny because some of the clues and roadsigns are hidden (out of context) in a single place in a single area that’s easily missed if you are focused on anything else.
And if you don’t take notes from the beginning? Fugeddaboutit.
And if you do take notes from the beginning? Good luck tying them all together.
3. The Witchlight Carnival is wasted
You start out the campaign by heading to the Witchlight Carnival with an invitation to help recover something you lost in your childhood.
You can play carnival games, go on rides, and hang out with weird D&D carnies.
Then you get your mission and are sent to the Feywild. And neither the carnival nor the NPCs that hook you into the adventure ever show up again.
So I hope you have all the fun you want at the fair before you go to the Feywild for the adventure, because you ain’t coming back.
And again, Bahamut help you if you don’t speak to everyone, ask the right questions, or visit every single square-foot of the place. Because at worst you will miss a reference to something else, and at best, you’ll be locked out of a puzzle’s ending or area.
This is silly for a number of reasons, but the main ones are that there are player options like Witchlight Hand that involve you being a part of the carnival itself. Secondly, the entire buy-in for the adventure comes from the carnival, getting your lost thing returned to you, everything centers on being connected to the Witchlight Carnival and maybe being manipulated by Mr. Witch and Mr. Light.
Then it’s all done, never seen again. And that’s silly.
Side Note: WotC does this quite a bit in their books, if you notice. Baldur’s Gate in Avernus is like this, so is the Radiant Citadel in its namesake book, and even in Light of Xaryxis, you’re on the Rock of Bral for, like…15 minutes. It’s a thing.
4. The Final Dungeon Sucks
I’m not even going to try to explain why or how much this place sucks. There’s just too much to go into.
But it all boils down to having almost no player agency, your actions having little effect on the outcome of the plot, and the puzzles being so obscure and tedious that our DM just bypassed them because exploring 50+ rooms of a dungeon and having to backtrack in and out of the castle arbitrarily isn’t fun.
That’s what it boils down to: Witchlight just isn’t fun.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I had fun playing Witchlight. I had fun playing with my friends, and I had fun having my tiny Kobold Monk, Monky Brewster, get eaten and digested by a gelatinous cube.
I had fun interacting with the League of Malevolence from the ‘80s cartoon, and I had fun roleplaying that my character couldn’t read (his lost Thing was the ability to read).
But just because I had fun playing Witchlight doesn’t mean that Witchlight is fun.
D&D is fun, and my friends are fun.
But if we had the last year of sessions to do over, knowing what we know now, I am 95% certain that we would choose basically anything other than The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.
The book introduced Harengon and Faeries as player races, and they’re cool af, so it’s not a complete bust. That basically makes it wort 2-stars out of 5 instead of 1-star.
It certainly wasn’t ours, and it’s definitely the most flawed of anything put out by WotC that I have either played or read.
TL;DR: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight seems really awesome at first glance, but it’s poorly designed and narratively clunky. Choose literally any other WotC hardcover adventure, and you’ll have a better game.