A Broken World of Stagnant Fairytales

Welcome, wayfarer, to the Feengrenze — a world precariously balanced on the knife-edge between the realm of men and the dominion of the fey.
Here, every legend you’ve ever known is told again and again, trapped in a loop with hardly a happy ending in sight.

The lost cities of myth — Atlantis, Ker Ys, El Dorado, and a dozen others — still linger here, or rather, what’s left of them. Ragged, threadbare kingdoms ruled by exhausted dynasties, forever trying (and failing) to recapture their golden age. They never succeed. They never learn. Their rise and fall are so predictable, they may as well be printed on the calendar.

And yet their audience can’t look away.

Beyond the shrinking borders of mortal lands, in secret groves and not-so-secret courts, the fey peer out at mankind and giggle. They watch the kingdoms of men go ‘round the apocalyptic merry-go-round they’ve built for themselves — and laugh. But the Feengrenze is an equal-opportunity farce. The fey are no better off. They’re trapped in their own stories of unbreakable oaths, impossible quests, and the cruel, nonsensical laws of narrative convention — doomed to repeat their mistakes until the sun forgets how to rise.

Venture further still, and the world stops pretending it makes sense.
In the Wyrdlands, reality oozes like week-old soup, time loops in Gordian knots, and causality quit decades ago out of sheer exasperation. Something ancient (and frankly a little dramatic) might be watching from the margins — if it’s not too busy composing brain-melting poetry in seven dimensions. It waits for its moment, the one when it can turn the multiverse into its canvas — whether the multiverse agrees or not.

And yet…
In this world where reality leaks through your shoes, time doubles back for a second opinion, and the fate of nations might be decided by a croquet match — something is changing.
In a broad mountain valley so picturesque it must have been painted by a sentimental god, there lies a city — and a kingdom — where new stories are being written.

The city is called Sliberberg. The kingdom: New Mountainheart.
And for the first time in a very long while, the story isn’t going according to plan.

If you’re looking for happily ever afters, you’ve come to the wrong place.
But if you want to see what happens when the players stop playing their parts in the farce?
Then step carefully — and mind the reality puddles.

What is the Feengrenze

Poetic language aside, the Feengrenze is a surreal fairytale fantasy setting for Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games. It blends fey whimsy, past-their-prime empires, circuitous political intrigue, and metaphysical weirdness into a single sandbox.

It is a small world in a forgotten corner of the multiverse, stuck in a holding pattern between stagnation and capricious, unguided change.

In the Stablelands, everything and everyone is cursed to repeat the same tired patterns until the end of all things. The successor states, the tattered remnants of places like Atlantis, Lyonesse, and Vineta, relive their downfalls with only slight variations in the script. The enclaves that dot the wilderness are filled with small-minded peasants living the same lives their ancestors did, telling the same stories, and expecting different endings.

In the Wyrdlands, reality refuses to stand still. It has been run so thin that it squelches underfoot and runs through your fingers. The mountains drift on the current, and the trees chase after them. The land is charged with raw Wyrd magic — and when the pressure builds, something always gives. Everything changes, whether it wants to or not.

In the Feengrenze, almost nobody can change the story; the few who can are desperate and one who dreams of writing a new story for everybody, whether they agree with their new parts or not.

What’s this blog

This blog is my ongoing chronicle of exploring this world in my head. Here you will find adventures, bits and pieces of setting, short fiction set in the world, lore essays, and a lot of strangeness that can only come from somebody duct taping Pratchett and Grimm together with lots of tasteless humor and irony. Whether you’re looking for inspiration, planning your own game, or just like weird worlds with strong opinions, you’re in the right place.

My Journey and Inspiration

I am a long-time fantasy and sci-fi lover. Works like The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Bill Willingham’s Fables, the endlessly fascinating world of Discworld, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s mind-bending sci-fi have all inspired me deeply. I am also blessed with a mind that, due to my Aspergers Syndrome, constantly creates new odd ideas for stories. The ideas flow so abundantly that I need to write these ideas down, or else they tend to stick around and clog up my thoughts and rob me of my admittedly limited sleep.

Two years ago, I came across the idea of creating a setting where familiar fairytale tropes and plotlines were turned on their heads. I imagined a version of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, the perfect Prince Charming before his transformation, and still was afterward, even though he acted like the beast. What if there were a fairy godmother who looks like the classic archetype but who was, in reality, a wicked, tragic villain? 

I used to write in high school and my first few years of college, so I decided to give it another shot. With the help of chatgtp to serve as my ghostwriter( I have long since stopped relying on chatgtp as a writing crutch), I started to work on building what would eventually, after several iterations, become the Feengrenze, the fairy borderlands.