Pathfinder: Races of Shadowsfall

Last preview of Shadowsfall: Shadow Plane Player’s Guide I said I would post more about the other three strongholds. Since then I’ve been busy, busy with the races section so that is filling up my mind. So I’m going to tell you all about races instead today.

The write up of the core book races got thrown out earlier this week. I had an epiphany while on one of my daily walks about humans, halflings and all the rest of the regular races: they are not normal. I mean I don’t want my races to just be the regular standard races, I want them interesting. So I started thinking about this logically. They’re on the Plane of Shadows. The races are being changed into their dark equivalent. Its dark and the landscape changes. … And their mind doesn’t know how to adjust to the Plane of Shadows.

Take humans for example. The Plane of Shadows is adjusting their mind and body a little at a time until several generations from now they become fetchlings. Over time they go stark raving mad. So there are groups of humans just roaming the countryside that have lost all connection to their humanity. Kind of like those crazy people that will rape someone to death, eat the person’s flesh and so their skins into their clothing. Inhabitants of remote villages deep in the outlands speak of them in hushed voices while those in strongholds talk of them as the bogeyman. Some humans are immune to this maddening effect *cough* player characters *cough* and help keep the normal humans safe from these terrors of Shadowsfall.

Halflings are were probably the hardest to come up with a Shadowsfall option, and for a long while their write up consisted of little more than “halflings are not comfortable here and leave the plane as fast as possible,” or something to that effect. Last night my girlfriend gave me the brilliant idea of using Golem from the Lord of the Rings movies as the basic idea for a Shadowsfall halfling. Hairless, bulging eyes and not quite right but otherwise funcitonal. Oh and halflings have darkvision in place of halfling luck.

Elves and dwarves were fun. Basically they both live a long time, long enough to see 3-5 generations in their lifetimes. So they both get to watch before their eyes as each successive generation becomes closer to drow and duergar, respectively. How f-ed up is that!

I’m still trying to get a handle on what I’m going to do with gnomes. Its hard to make a race that is already crazy crazier. Maybe I’ll make them sane. I don’t know. Do you have any suggestions?

Shadowsfall: Player’s Guide to the Shadow Plane also describes other races as well. Chief among them: wayang. Paizo introduced this race with the Dragon Empire Gazetteer and Primer books and will be detailing them further in the Advanced Race Guide, saying they come from the Plane of Shadows. I hadn’t really planned on them but alright. Wayang live in the deathlands, areas where the Plane of Negative Energy and the Plane of Shadows intersect. No living creature can live there, unless they possess negative energy affinity or similar variations. Wayang possess an ability called Light and Dark which allows them to basically have negative energy affinity for 1 hour/day. Well, that’s not going to cut it, so I gave them an alternate racial trait of negative energy affinity in place of light and dark, saying that light and dark is the Material Plane variation.

A few other races described include orcs, hobgoblins, ratfolk, drow, duergar, fetchlings, half-elves/orcs, svirfneblin and of course umbral kobolds and wanderers. These last two races each have a full page detailing them for your game. I’ll be talking more about these these two on a later post. Until then, later.