A Midsummer Night's Teddy Bear Picnic Where the Wild Things Are

For your consideration...

The Teddy Bear Picnic is the "domesticated" version of the Wild Rumpus. Once a year, on Midsummer's night, teddy bears and other stuffed toys come to life. Fur and claws, stitched smiles and button eyes, all come together in a fireside dance beneath the trees.

An enormous moon shines down from above, bathing the world in silvery light. Drums and horns echo through the night - the rhythm becoming more frenzied, more feral with each passing hour. The Teddy Bears become larger and wilder, growing until they tower over their young wards, having become the Wild Things.

Children who stumble upon the celebration are rarely harmed but are never the same afterward. They return to their homes, older, wiser, perhaps a bit more wild. They share stories that nobody believes. Those stories have some of the more fantastical elements edited out and are set to music, a nursery rhyme that becomes a song.

The child, or children, are drawn into the Feywild. They become the center of a Seelie Court Dream. Titania dotes on her changeling prince, Oberon becomes jealous of the attention the child receives. The Wild Things acknowledge their sovereignty because he commits fully to the bit, fulfilling Puck's desire to sow chaos.

This is how Max is able to sail through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year and still make it back to the safety of his room to find his dinner waiting for him.

And for it to still be hot.

In Your Campaign: The party is recruited to rescue a missing child; the Party is made up of children, the party stumbles across the celebration and walks away changed by their experience.