Hello everyone!
After I published the unboxing post of Shiver, I needed to take a little time for figuring out about my other cargo. And the time has passed faster than I wanted. And here we are; another Monday, another Monster!
Since I mostly run D&D games (because its players are more consistent), I'll probably go for D&D monsters for a while, but I'll keep my eyes on any other alternatives as well. This week's monster is, Shadow.
Shadow is a "chef's kiss" evil undead creature which you could use wherever you see fit. It's basically... a shadow, mostly in a humanoid shape. They can hunt any living being, but, because of their evil "unnature", they mostly hunt non-evil creatures.
This is the most beautiful part of shadows. Shadows are hard to detect, but easy to hit and kill. But if they attack you, their damage is necrotic (2d6+2), and also it drains your Strength (amount of 1d4). You know, strength is your muscle power, and when a shadow is able to hit you successfully, it weakens you physically. You die if your Strength score is 0, and if you die because of that, your shadow leaves your body after 1d4 hours.
Shadows are beautiful, because there could be no limit for them to use. There could be 10 shadows at a place, or hundreds of them, depending of your liking. I like to use them as a punishment for low-level characters, when they draw an arrogant path in their party. Like, when people want to stay close to the camp, but one of them wants to explore the area even others insist no to, that one wandering person may be ambushed by some shadows. Depending on characters' level, I put two or three of them and foreshadow their fate before entering the combat (yeah I did a word-play). They feel like someone is watching them, maybe some Perception checks to catch a glimpse of a weird movement of a shadow, maybe an unnatural darkness. When they insist to go deeper, it's mostly an ambush. I use shadows mainly for ability drain, not for their necrotic damage. So, characters always have a chance to leave the combat area in early turns. If they insist on fight against these creatures, I close the ways and go a little bit harder.
The advantage of being a shadow is, if there's no light around, they can't be harmed. I'm not sure if it's RAW (rules as written), but I never cared about it. If there's no light source, technically everywhere is shadow, and you can't detect the creature. Even with darkvision. Darkvision works when there's no light source, and it works depending on the range of solid surfaces. That means, there is a possibility of your character could die without knowing why. Isn't it just beautiful? :) By the way, shadows have resistance to non-magical damages, which makes them harder to kill.
The biggest disadvantage of a shadow is, obviously, a light source. But it only makes them targetable. If you are able to provide (or maybe reflect) direct sunlight, shadows gain disadvantage on all of their d20s. That's why I used them in undiscovered caverns, long forgotten ruins and places like that. They're also a nice thrill material.
You could use shadows as a tool for a cult, or a matter of curse. Maybe there could be a shadow society in Shadowfell, or maybe a shadow-cult. These are nice ideas I guess. I'll start to run Kobold Press's The Court of Shadow Fey scenario. I'll probably use a mix of fey creatures and shadow realm creatures, and I'll definitely use some shadows to increase the tense.
What do you think about shadows? Have you use them, or anything similar? What do you think about ability drain? I remember that I was using ability drains and level drains in older versions of D&D, and it was changing the game mode to survival horror. It was quite fun.
Probably I'll talk about my latest package in my next post. See you soon!
