Fairy Tales End Here: Fey Hunters & Horrors for D&D 5e/5.5e

TALES END 

A Bestiary & Hunter's Guide to the Fey for D&D 5E/5.5E

Hunt the Fae. Fear What Hunts Them!
The old stories were warnings. We made them instructions.

For centuries, mortals have been warned about the Fey.
Don't follow the lights.
Don't eat their food.
Don't give them your name.
Don't step inside the fairy ring.
And always carry iron.

Those warnings exist because someone survived.

Tales End asks what happened when mortals stopped treating those warnings as superstition...and started treating them as instructions.

This is a dark fantasy sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons 5E/5.5E, designed for both the 2014 and 2024 rules, about hunting the Fey, surviving the Fey, breaking their bargains, cleansing what they leave behind, and exploiting the weaknesses hidden within centuries of folklore.

But this isn't simply a book about killing fairies.

Because mortals aren't the only creatures with reasons to be afraid.

The Fey have things they fear, too.

What Is Tales End?

Tales End: A Bestiary & Hunter's Guide to the Fey is a player and Game Master supplement exploring the darker side of Fey encounters, fairy folklore, supernatural hunting, and the creatures that prey upon the Fair Folk themselves.

Inside you'll find new D&D 5E subclasses, backgrounds, feats, equipment, magical items, hunter traditions, Fey-hunting techniques, and monsters, along with tools for bringing the danger and strange rules of traditional fairy stories into your campaign.

The book is divided into three broad sections: The Hunters, Things They Fear, and The Price.

Content Advisory

Tales End contains dark fantasy and horror themes intended for mature audiences, including body horror and corruption, death and violence, disturbing methods of hunting and killing Fey, psychological horror, fear, madness, obsession, loss of self, cruelty, depravity, and morally ambiguous characters whose methods may become as disturbing as the creatures they hunt. Some material draws upon the darker traditions of folklore and intentionally explores what frightened, angry, desperate, or vengeful mortals may become when they finally decide to fight back.

While the book does not focus on explicit sexual content, some themes, situations, and imagery may involve mature or disturbing subject matter. GMs are encouraged to review the material before introducing it to younger or sensitive players.

Section I: The Hunters (PC's)

Mortals have dealt with the Fey for a very long time.
Some learned to negotiate.
Some learned to protect themselves.
Some learned to hunt.
And some learned considerably worse things.

The player-facing section of Tales End explores the people who have made dealing with the Fey their calling.

Current development includes:

• 13 Hunter Philosophies, representing different approaches to dealing with the Fey.
• 7 New Subclasses built around hunting, resisting, containing, bargaining with, cleansing, consuming, or stealing power from supernatural creatures.
• New Backgrounds for characters whose lives have already been touched by the Fey.
• New Feats based upon hunter training, folkloric protections, supernatural knowledge, and darker practices.
• Tools of the Trade, including cold iron weapons, specialized ammunition, charms, traps, restraints, wards, and other equipment developed by people who expect the old stories to come knocking.
• New rules and guidance for Fey bargains, glamours, cold iron, wards, supernatural weaknesses, and the strange rules governing encounters with the Fair Folk.

These options are being designed to remain useful throughout a campaign.

A Feyslayer should still be dangerous when fighting a vampire.
A Purifier should still have work to do when confronting a demonic possession.
A Cold Iron Hunter should still know how to prepare for a monstrosity.
The Fey may have inspired these traditions.
They are not the only creatures hunters have learned to use them against.

The Thirteen Philosophies

Those who regularly deal with the Fey generally recognize approximately thirteen philosophies for doing so.
Different cultures call them different things. Some combine several traditions. Others refuse to acknowledge certain philosophies at all.
That doesn't mean those philosophies don't exist.
They are not organizations or character classes. They are different answers to a very simple question:

What do you do once you know the Fey are real?

1. The Slayer studies them.
2. The Warden stops their incursions.
3. The Folklorist remembers the old ways.
4. The Bargain-Breaker learns their rules.
5. The Iron Hunter turns knowledge into technique.
6. The Thief takes their power.
7. The Survivor makes certain someone comes home.
8. The Purifier cleans up what they leave behind.
9. The Inquisitor finds what is hiding among us.
10. The Shepherd knows when not to kill.
11. The Avenger remembers what they took.
12. The Binder takes them alive.
13. And the Devourer makes certain the strength of worthy prey is never wasted.

These philosophies form the foundation for many of the player options, organizations, equipment, techniques, and darker practices found throughout the book.

Seven New Subclasses

Our initial book is planned to include seven new subclasses for D&D 5E, each representing a very different response to the Fey.

Barbarian: Path of the Maw

Some Fey hunters believe that leaving a powerful creature to rot after defeating it is an insult.
The Path of the Maw believes strength should survive its bearer.
These Barbarians ritually consume the heart, blood, marrow, eyes, or other significant portions of worthy supernatural prey, taking fragments of that creature's essence into themselves.

For some, this is an act of profound respect.
For others...
They just want what's inside.

Bard: College of the Last Word

The Fey love rules.
Promises. Gifts. Hospitality. Names. Invitations. Debts. Exact wording.
The College of the Last Word learns those rules well enough to use them against the creatures that created them.

These Bards specialize in supernatural bargains, verbal traps, loopholes, names, obligations, and the dangerous realization that sometimes the easiest way to defeat a Fey is simply to let it keep talking.

Cleric: Purification Domain

The Fey do not need to kill someone to ruin them.

Curses, possession, transformation, stolen memories, supernatural corruption, emotional manipulation, and things left growing where they shouldn't be are all problems someone eventually has to clean up.

The Purification Domain specializes in undoing supernatural damage and removing the things that refuse to leave quietly.

Druid: Circle of the Hedge

Sometimes the forest moves.
Sometimes winter arrives in June.
Sometimes a road leads somewhere it didn't yesterday.

The Circle of the Hedge follows signs that the boundaries between the mortal world and the realms of the Fey are failing.

These Druids investigate supernatural incursions, contain what has crossed over, close breaches, and restore the natural boundary between worlds before a handful of strange occurrences becomes something far worse.

Fighter: Cold Iron Hunter

Eventually someone looked at centuries of warnings about the Fey and asked:
What if we did all of this deliberately?

Cold iron. Rowan. Bells. Mirrors. Specialized ammunition. Restraints. Traps. Wards.

The Cold Iron Hunter turns generations of frightened superstition into professional technique.

Give them enough information about what they're hunting and enough time to prepare, and they'll bring the appropriate tools.

Ranger: Feyslayer Conclave

Everything leaves tracks.
Everything has habits.
Everything has weaknesses.

And everything dies.

The Feyslayer studies supernatural quarry, learns its behavior, tracks it through places where ordinary hunters cannot follow, discovers what makes it vulnerable, and prevents it from escaping once the hunt begins.

There is nothing mystical about their philosophy.
Learn what kills it...then kill it.

Warlock: The Stolen Patron

Most Warlocks receive their power through some form of agreement.

This one presents a different question.
Who said the Patron has to agree?

The Stolen Patron has somehow trapped, wounded, deceived, bound, or otherwise gained leverage over a powerful supernatural entity and is siphoning power from it.

The relationship between Warlock and Patron remains deeply important.
It is simply considerably less consensual than usual.

And somewhere, something very powerful would desperately like its magic back.

Cold iron is only the beginning.

Tales End will explore the weapons, equipment, charms, wards, traps, and peculiar little objects carried by people who have survived long enough to become professionals.

• Cold-iron nails.
• Bell charms.
• Rowan stakes.
• Iron-thread nets.
• Saltshot.
• Witch bottles.
• Ritually prepared bread.
• Glamour-breaking mirrors.
• Specialized ammunition.
• Name cages.
• Contract knives.

And other tools based upon folklore, superstition, supernatural research, and the accumulated experience of generations of people who discovered what worked.

The old stories weren't equipment lists.
We fixed that.

Section II: Things They Fear

Fey are dangerous.

Ancient creatures capable of twisting memory, stealing names, changing shape, manipulating emotions, transforming mortals, and turning an innocent promise into a generational curse deserve their reputation.

But the Fey are not always the apex predator.

Tales End includes a bestiary devoted to the creatures that plague, corrupt, prey upon, and sometimes deliberately hunt the Fey themselves.

Some evolved alongside them.
Some were created by mortals.
Some are Fey that became something terrible.
Some are mistakes the great Courts would rather everyone forget.
Some were deliberately built to kill them.

And a few appear to come from somewhere even the Fey do not particularly like discussing.

The Iron Devil

One of the creatures currently in development for Tales End is the Iron Devil.

No one seems entirely certain who created the first one.

The most persistent stories claim they originate within the enormous war foundries of Dis, the infernal city where cold iron, hatred, and industry were supposedly combined to create a weapon capable of hunting creatures that had long considered themselves nearly untouchable.

No reliable source has ever confirmed the story.

Someone started calling them Iron Devils.

The name stuck.

An Iron Devil is a construct fashioned primarily from cold iron and created for one purpose:
Find the assigned target. Kill the assigned target.

Once given its quarry, an Iron Devil does not bargain, tire, become distracted, accept surrender, or abandon the hunt.
It succeeds.
Or it is destroyed.

In that respect, some planar scholars have compared the Iron Devil to a blasphemous infernal answer to the legendary Retriever, the relentless extraplanar hunter traditionally associated with the Abyss.

Iron Devils, however, appear to have been designed specifically with supernatural prey in mind...and the Fey in particular.

Even more disturbing is that there is no single Iron Devil.

Reports describe multiple configurations ranging from Tiny hunter-killers to Gargantuan engines of pursuit, each apparently intended for a different class of quarry.

Our current working designations range from the Tiny Piranha-class to the Gargantuan Pit Fiend-class, although those names, the creature's lore, and its final mechanics remain works in progress and may change before publication.

What will not change is the central idea:
Somewhere, someone figured out how to manufacture a predator whose prey includes the Fey.
And they appear to have made more than one.
Not Every Monster Is Fey.
This distinction is important.

Tales End is not simply another Fey bestiary.

Our creatures will include several broad families of horrors.

1. Fae Predators naturally hunt creatures of fairy and supernatural origin.
2. Ironborn Horrors were deliberately created to suppress, capture, or destroy them.
3. The Ruined were once Fey themselves before curses, corruption, experimentation, or something worse changed them.
4. Court Mistakes are things powerful Fey created, discarded, imprisoned, buried, or tried very hard to forget.
5. Mortal Creations exist because humanity eventually became surprisingly good at killing the things in the woods.
6. And then there are the things associated with what some hunters have begun calling the Fae Dark.

We aren't going to explain that last one yet.

The Fey don't seem particularly interested in explaining it either.

Section III: The Price

Eventually every hunter discovers the same problem.
The Fey possess extraordinarily useful things.
1. Their blood.
2. Their names.
3. Their glamour.
4. Their memories.
5. Their voices.
6. Their years.
7. Their magic.
8. Their immortality.

Some hunters learn when to stop.
This section is about the others.

The Price explores the darker side of Fey hunting: twisted boons, broken bargains, Fey scars, stolen gifts, forbidden practices, supernatural harvesting, and the consequences of deciding that merely defeating the monster isn't enough.

This is where the question changes.

It is no longer:
How do you kill the monster?

It becomes:
What are you willing to become in order to win?

Tales End is intentionally darker than many traditional fantasy supplements.

This book deals with predation, corruption, body horror, supernatural coercion, stolen identity, transformation, cruelty, ritual consumption, psychological horror, and player options that can become morally reprehensible in the wrong hands.

Some of that material will not be appropriate for every gaming group.

That's intentional.

We recommend discussing boundaries at your table and using only the material appropriate for your campaign.

Fairy stories have always had teeth.
We're simply putting them back.

Why This Book?

There are a lot of books about the Fey.

• Beautiful Courts.
• Enchanted forests.
• Mischievous spirits.
• Moonlit dances.
• Glittering wings.
• Ancient bargains.

We wanted to know what happens when someone brings an iron hammer to the dance.

The older stories about fairies were often beautiful, but beauty did not mean safety.

• Children disappeared.
• Travelers returned decades later.
• Names were stolen.
• Promises became prisons.
• Food became obligation.

Something beautiful could smile at you while explaining precisely why you should never have accepted its gift.

More importantly, those stories were filled with instructions.

• Carry iron.
• Use salt.
• Hang bells.
• Know which trees protect you.
• Watch the threshold.
• Never give away your name.
• Remember what your grandmother told you.

So we started taking those instructions seriously.

Then we asked the question that really created this book:

If mortals are afraid of the Fey...what are the Fey afraid of?

That question led somewhere considerably darker than we expected.

We decided to follow it.

Stretch Goals

The core book begins with seven new subclasses, but we already have more Hunter Philosophies than we have subclasses.
That's deliberate.
If the campaign grows, so does the hunt.

Potential stretch goals include additional subclasses drawn from the remaining Hunter Philosophies, additional monsters, expanded Tools of the Trade, new supernatural practices, templates, and other material developed during the campaign.

Some stretch goals may even be placed before the community for a vote.
You may get to decide which philosophy receives its subclass next.
More details and funding levels will be revealed as development continues.

About Poveglia Games

Poveglia Games was founded to create the kinds of tabletop RPG material that makes players sweat, scream, cheer, and remember why surviving the session is its own reward.

We like consequences.
We like monsters that are actually frightening.
And we like ideas that make someone at the table look at the GM and ask:
“You made WHAT?”

This particular book started with a conversation.

DM Dan has spent years developing the Fae Realms and the creatures, cultures, Courts, and magic within them.
Eventually he asked a dangerous question:
“How would you counter my Fae?”
We probably should have left that question alone.
Instead, we started thinking about cold iron.
Then traps.
Then hunters.
Then things that eat Fey.
Then things that Fey are afraid of.

And somewhere along the way, this stopped being an answer to a question and became a book.

Tales End is a Poveglia Games title developed with permission to draw upon and interact with material from Making Crit Up's Fae Realms, including the realm of Annwyn.

It is not another Fae Realms sourcebook.
We are visiting their sandbox.
Apparently we're bringing cold iron.

Designed for D&D 5E/5.5E

Tales End is being designed for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, with support for characters and campaigns using both the 2014 5E rules and the revised 2024 5E rules.

The book will contain game-ready:

• Subclasses
• Backgrounds
• Feats
• Monsters and stat blocks
• Magic items
• Weapons and hunter equipment
• Supernatural rules and GM tools

Our goal is simple:
You should be able to open the book, find something terrible, and put it in your campaign.
Preferably without warning your players first.

What Backers Receive

All qualifying backers will receive:

• The complete Tales End: A Bestiary & Hunter's Guide to the Fey digital sourcebook.
• All applicable unlocked stretch-goal content.
• Lifetime PDF updates through our digital fulfillment platform.
• Access to campaign updates, development previews, and community polls throughout production.

Additional reward options and unlocked content will be detailed as the campaign develops.

How It Works

Backing our Kickstarter is as simple as stepping into a faerie ring.

Unlike stepping into a faerie ring, we will clearly explain the terms first.

1. Pledge Your Support
Choose the reward level that fits your table.

2. Join the Hunt
Follow the campaign, participate in polls, help choose future content, and watch the book develop.

3. Unlock More
As the campaign grows, stretch goals will add new monsters, subclasses, hunter tools, and other material to the project.

4. Receive Your Rewards
Once production is complete, digital rewards will be distributed through DriveThruRPG and made available to qualifying backers.

5. Ignore Everything Your Grandmother Told You
Go into the woods.
Follow the lights.
Step inside the ring.
Just remember to bring iron.

Thank You!

Poveglia Games exists because people continue supporting the weird projects, the dark projects, the risky projects, and the ideas that probably wouldn't survive very long in a corporate meeting.

Your support gives us the freedom to make them.

So from all of us at Poveglia Games, thank you for helping us make another one.

We hope Tales End gives your players new ways to confront the Fey, gives your Game Masters new things to hide in the forest...
...and occasionally makes everyone at the table wonder why the Fey just started running.

The old stories were warnings.
Now you know why.