Dealing with the conceptual overlap of Arborea and the Feywild/Faerie
Hi everyone!
I'm gearing up to start running a level 11+ campaign, and it's going to be involving the planes. I've been reading old 2E Planescape stuff, as well as all the planar 3E, 4E, and 5E books I have. One of the players is a fey pact warlock, and Titania specifically is her patron, so I'm definitely going to be involving the seelie courts. I am using Forgotten Realms as my base setting, with 2E planescape approach to the outer planes, but with 5E Dawn War and First World history.
I've long struggled with differentiating the Feywild and Arborea. It seems D&D struggles with it too, since they've been moving the Eladrin around a ton. I want to stick with a more 2E approach, with Eladrin being the exemplar celestials of Arborea, but I keep running into issues. Arborea has its own fey, and the Seelie Court spends time there. By using the Feywild, the Seelie Court will be on the Feywild, but they're said to be allies of the Seldarine.
If elves descended from fey, then why are the elven gods Gods and not Archfey? Why is Arborea described so similarly to the Feywild? Would it be simpler to remove the Feywild and just have it be Arvandor/Olympus? (Similarly, the Shadowfell could just be part of Hades).
The solution I'm entertaining is that the Archfey are the remnants of the Primordials (I do like the notion of Primordials and the Dawn War from 4E and 5E). The way I see it, when the gods waged war against the primordials, they did so to protect mortals from the primordials destroying their material worlds. The Archfey were Primordials that sided with the gods, wanting the preservation of the world. They could even be the neutral party that pushed the celestials and fiends out of the material world when the divine started warring against itself.
But, part of me keeps thinking that fey as chaotic outsiders would be interesting, and that it would help set Eladrin apart from their celestial cohorts. The seelie Court being in the CG planes and the unseelie court being in Pandemonium fits.
How do you, or would you, reconcile the Feywild with Planescape?