Fey Contracts – How To Beat the Fairies

Thanks to Domains of Delight, we have rules for contracts with the Fey too. This means we can dig for even more tech! The rules here are not as comprehensive as the ones for devils, but there’s enough wording to analyze.

How do we enter a contract?

Several ways exist to accidentally enter a contract with a fey. We don’t want this – we should only enter contracts on our own terms. When dealing with a fey, keep one hand ready to switch to aggressive negotiations. Tie up any loose ends with an antimatter rifle afterwards.

• Accepting a gift. Don’t accept – shoot the damn thing and take the item off its corpse.
• Thanking it for a gift. Again, just shoot it with your crossbow.
• Stealing something from it. Easy – it won’t bind you to a contract if it’s dead.
• Killing someone who owes them. This can’t be helped – if you kill someone, you have to kill someone else until you get to the top of the food chain.

Alternatively, we could just enter a normal contract the way we do with devils.

Greater and Lesser Contracts

Greater Contracts can be signed with archfey, ancient hags and “other powerful fey spellcasters”. This is a rather poorly defined term – what constitutes power? As an optimizer, I would say “the spells it has prepared”, but it could also mean CR or any other metric.

Note that it is possible for a player to play a fey spellcaster, as that creature type is obtainable as a racial trait. Are we considered powerful?

The 5^th Edition Player’s Handbook contains sixteen mentions of the word powerful, the following of which are of relevance to us:

• Even so, the other adventurers can search for powerful magic to revive their fallen comrade, or the player might choose to create a new character to carry on. – implying resurrection is “powerful magic”. Is a PC capable of casting revivify powerful?
• A spell’s level is a general indicator of how powerful it is, with the lowly (but still impressive) magic missile at 1st level and the incredible time stop at 9^th.
• Cantrips—simple but powerful spells that characters can cast almost by rote—are level 0.

If we go by a definition of “powerful” that makes sense in the context of optimization, one could argue a Satyr Conjuration Wizard can sign contracts with mortals right from level 2. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no clue what the word “powerful” means.

All other fey, like your Sprite familiar, the 8 pixies you conjured, or a martial Satyr(eww) can sign Lesser Contracts.

Let’s now go over the boons offered by fey.

Lesser Contracts

• You gain one charm of your choice, like with a chwinga except you choose. The DM has to approve the charm.
• You gain the Fey Ancestry or Speak with Small Beasts trait.
• You gain a guide who can lead you through a specific part of the Feywild.
• You gain inspiration every day for 2d4 days.
• You are invited to the Summer Court or Gloaming Court.
• You gain a common magic item, or the fey loans you an uncommon item for 5d6 days.
• You gain proficiency in a skill of your choice for 2d4 days.
• You can cast a spell of your choice of 4th-level or lower once without material components, using Charisma as the spellcasting ability.

The last one is by far the most interesting. Personally, I’d use it on a Warlock with the Undying Servitude invocation to get more skeletons via animate dead. Other uses that number among my favorites include Mordenkainen’s faithful hound and various summons.

Greater Contracts

• You and your companions get an audience with the Summer Queen and/or Queen of Air and Darkness. I’m not sure why anyone would want to talk to fey of their own free will, but okay.
• You get a free very rare magic item, or the fey lends you a legendary item for 5d6 days. I suggest a Ring of Three Wishes, because who cares if it’s not yours forever if it’s a consumable?
• One creature that regarded you as an enemy no longer remembers you exist. Useful if you’re being hunted by the BBEG.
• You get to travel to the Material Plane up to fifty years later.
• You get a title and all associated benefits. I imagine that if you were to, say, get the title of captain of a certain sunken ship, that ship would rise from the depths or something? I might be wrong here, but it sounds cool.
• Up to 50,000 gp of valuables/property.

It’s Strahdin’ Time

The land of Barovia resides in its own demiplane, isolated from all other planes, including the Material Plane. No spell—not even wish—allows one to escape from Strahd’s domain. Astral projection, teleport, plane shift, and similar spells cast for the purpose of leaving Barovia simply fail, as do effects that banish a creature to another plane of existence. These restrictions apply to magic items and artifacts that have properties that transport or banish creatures to other planes. Magic that allows transit to the Border Ethereal, such as the etherealness spell and the Etherealness feature of incorporeal undead, is the exception to this rule. A creature that enters the Border Ethereal from Strahd’s domain is pulled back into Barovia upon leaving that plane.

– Curse of Strahd, page 24

Let us observe what this means. No spell can let you exit Barovia. No magic items and artifacts(reduntant, as the latter belong to the former category) can do so either.

A contract with an archfey does not belong to either category. This means that you can – via a contract – exit Barovia at the cost of a 50-year timeskip.

But it gets even better! Being the Ireena simp that I am, I decided to try to find a way to put her beyond Strahd’s reach forever. Behold, the plan to end all plans!

• Enter Barovia as a powerful fey spellcaster or in the company of one.
• Get an audience with Strahd – this should not be particularly difficult, as he’s rather interested in new people arriving in his domain. Destroying large swathes of the Svalich Woods with catapult munitions to spell out I WANT TO SPEAK WITH STRAHD should do the trick. Treat the local wolf population as target practice and free XP.
• Meet Ireena, give her a spellwrought tattoo of the friends cantrip – common magic items can be made by an Artificer friend using infusions.
• Now Strahd is damn interested – you’re friends with Ireena and you literally blew up the forest demanding an invitation.
• Have Ireena “speak” to Strahd first – by this I mean “have her cast the cantrip on him right away”. Strahd is now about to become hostile towards her.
• The fey signs a contract with Ireena to make Strahd forget she exists.
• Now comes the hard part – convince Strahd the fey is legit and trustworthy.
• Have Strahd sign a deal with the fey to send him to the Material Plane 50 years into the future.

We have now successfully booted Strahd out of Barovia and can return home, bringing any of our favorite Curse of Strahd NPCs with us.

Much better than the utterly atrocious pool ending.

Contract Prices

Fey can and will demand something in return for the thing they give you. Fortunately, these prices aren’t terrible. What do they ask for?

Lesser Contract Prices

• Your singing voice. Just cast thaumaturgy to sing, I guess. Alternatively sign while magic jarred, who knows what it steals then.
• A trinket that carries great sentimental value. Prestidigitate your favorite childhood toy and hand it over, although fey with nuclear explosives are scary so beware.
• You stay “in the fey’s company” for a defined period of time. In other words, you kidnap the fey and make it an NPC sidekick.
• The color in your eyes – cast thaumaturgy so it steals the changed color, I guess?
• The memory of your first kiss – encode thoughts is an interesting cantrip to restore the memory, and never having been kissed just to crash the fey’s brain is an amusing concept.
• The spring in your step or the sparkle in your eyes – whatever.
• A lock of your hair – cheap.
• Your name – this means you need to pick a new name for yourself. This is why you should always have a few dozen ugly middle names to spare.

Greater Contract Prices

• One of your fingers. Sure, I have seventy-six in my freezer, what’s one less?
• To take the next child born in your family and raise it in the Feywild. Quite frankly, the best option I see here is to just annex the entire Feywild in the name of your house, which is a perfectly normal Tuesday activity for a Tier 4 PC.
• The completion of three quests – what’s there to say? You can assess the cost and determine if it’s worth it.
• Your everlasting fealty. It’s only everlasting until the fey gets microwaved. Commanding a few hundred skeletons to fire as soon as the deal is signed is another option. Can’t be loyal to something that no longer exists.
• Kill or ruin the fey’s enemy. Like with the quests, determine if it’s worth it.
• A precious object in the possession of the fey’s enemy. Again, determine if it’s worth it.
• An art object that is deemed priceless. If it accepts fabricated replicas, great. If not, true polymorph the original out of a rat. Alternatively, actually go steal it.
• Your youth. There’s a devil contract that gives you eternal youth.

Breaking the Contract

There are, of course, consequences for breaking the contract. These consequences only apply if you are in the Feywild. Most are rather mild. A remove curse spell can remove the lesser variant, the greater one “requires a wish spell” – as we will see, that’s sometimes an overstatement.

Lesser Contract Punishments

• Toad-like appearance.
• You stink.
• Your shadow doesn’t match your movements.
• Rat-like appearance.
• You cast no reflection, making people think you’re a vampire. Prove them wrong by morbing all over them.
• You’re surrounded by annoying flies.

Considering a 3rd-level spell deletes these problems, you’re fine.

Greater Contract Punishments

• You can’t speak or cast spells with verbal components. This is immensely crippling. The only solution I can think of is magic jar and pondering what “you” means.
• You turn into an owl. Simply be true polymorphed into something with Immutable Form when the curse hits(i.e. when you return to the Feywild).
• You can’t attune to magic items. Hand the stuff you have to your simulacrum while you go to beat up the fey with sheer force of magic.
• You are petrified. The least punishing option, as a nonmagical consumable that cures the condition exists.
• You die in 3 days and can’t be revived for 5d12 days. Death ward goes brr.

These things actually hurt, to the point where you should not break your contracts with the fey. However, there are still workarounds here so it’s not the end of the world if you do. Never cast wish yourself – use magic items or have a simulacrum or similar cast the spell. If the fey that caused your plight can cast wish, there’s something satisfying about breaking its will with the right spell and forcing it to cast wish just for the sake of trying to proc the 33% chance.

Making It Less Broken

If you haven’t read my article on devils, I suggest you do so. In it, I presented proposed homebrew fixes to the highly unbalanced devil deal system, and the same principles can be effective here. I would also suggest limiting familiars to one deal of either kind so that a single caster’s familiar cannot take the form of an imp, sign a contract, then turn into a fey and sign another. The other noteworthy thing is that “powerful” needs to be defined somehow, and PCs probably should not have this power as a racial trait.

Concluding thoughts

Fey deals are less exciting than deals with devils(and as you can probably guess, I rather strongly dislike the fey and am willing to nuke their entire plane), but there’s some amusing stuff to be found in these rules. I hope you discovered something that will be of use to you. Thanks for reading, and until next time!