Encounters in the Plane of Shadows

[Greenfield]

I'm planning a group excursion across the Plane of Shadows as a way the group will access the Egyptian afterlife.

Setting: Party starting off in Heliopolis (Cairo) or perhaps Memphis (not the one in Tennessee), and traveling via a variation on Shadow Walk.

So they'll start in a Shadow version of a great Egyptian city, then "west" to a special place. Egyptian mythology says that Amon Ra, the sun god, is also their gatherer of souls. He sweeps up all who are ready to pass on, and at sunset he lands his chariot at a particular point on the Nile. (No corresponding point in the mortal realm.)

There he loads them aboard the great golden barge and escorts them down the Nile to the Palace of Two Truths, a place of judgment. Along the way he fights Apophis, the great serpent of destruction, protecting those souls from him as they pass.

So that's where the party has to go. And yes, I know, both Cairo/Heliopolis and Memphis are actually right on the Nile. The party still has to travel to the west from those cities, at least on the Shadow Plane, to reach the banks where Ra lands.

Jackals are the servants of Anubis, and their job is to guard the dead, not to prey upon them. They might object to living people approaching them, since Egyptians believed that they could take their wealth with them to the next life. Robbery is possible.

I plan for there to be a great battle going on as they approach, with Ra, Set and Anubis working together against a foreign deity.

What I'm looking for is ideas for encounters in the Plane of Shadows.

The party is around 10th level, with a few 11th levels in the group, and one 9th I think.

Currently on the list: Shadow Mastiff (including some advanced ones), at least one Black Dragon, and a night flier version of the Darkwalker undead.

The night flier is more background, he'll be engaged against some other opponent in the big battle scene.

Monsters are easy. Scenes and settings, twisted versions of reality where the monsters make sense, that's the hard part.

One note: We've often described the Plane of Shadows as the place where nightmares (bad dreams, not the monster) come from, so dreamscape type themes work.

Anyway, I'm fishing for ideas and/or inspiration.

 

[Celebrim]

The plane of shadows is the place where the nightmare's nightmares come from, so we would seem to be in accord as to what this place means.

Keep in mind that size doesn't have any real meaning on the plane of shadows. (Think about the relationship between an object and the size of its shadow.) Neither does direction much (think about how the direction of the thing a shadow falls on changes the orientation). Anything that you can do to play with space - houses bigger on the outside than the inside, giant-size version of ordinary objects, things looming over head or leaning off into the distance - is good.

1) A shadow wood of enormously tall thin trees with multiple trunks gently swaying past each other while dark shadows flit overhead. Underneath, a band of shadow template bugbears hunts eternally for and endless stream of victims. The victims are produced by perverse nightmare (treat as a Shadow Conjuration Living Spell) which favors creating bands of panicking shadow template commoner children (1d4+1 a round, endlessly), but which will produce worse and worse nightmare creatures if identified and threatened (typically 1 shadow template ape, boar, or bear a round). All the while the forest echoes with sounds heard from far away, "Don't go into the woods.", "Stay out of the woods.", "Watch out for the boogeymen.", and similar things (DC 20 listen to understand in phrase).

2) The PC's find they've walked into a shadow necropolis of 20' tall thin monoliths, gravestones, and distorted spindly mausoleums. The graveyard contains a number of well concealed pit traps (because everything is well concealed on the plane of shadow) which open up seemingly at random beneath a players feet. A greater shadow lurks in the bottom of one.

3) The PC's must cross an undulating sea of shadowy sand, which rolls them up and down as if they were walking on a storm tossed ocean but without a sense of motion. Their feet are brushed with tides of sand. There are occasional dangerous sand slides, and the PC's must deal with an avalanche of dark gray sand washing over the lighter gray sand of the dune. Among the dune hills are shadowy sandmen who use sleep inducing spray attacks and slams to try to incapacitate their victims, resulting in them being buried alive in a number of rounds if not wakened or dragged to the surface continually.

4) The PC's find that they've transitioned suddenly out of one environment into a shadowy city street, where the tall dark shadows of revelers spin and dance, imbibe, and riot against the lighter gray shadows of the walls, and the traces of now long dead bonfires and torches haunt the streets with flickering shadows. Amongst the revelers is a crypt chanter whose faint tune wafts through the silhouette of the town.

5) The PC's find themselves along the shore of a shadow sea, whose waves crash noiselessly and wash the shadow sand in darker shadows. The shades of bare chested women with skirts tied up at their waist wade in the lagoons, pulling up muscles and sea weed. Over a spit of land, the shades of a band of northern barbarians attack amidst distantly echoing cries of terror. Treat them as Evolved Murks casting confusion over their victims.

 

[Dandu]

Carnival of horrors. Creepy clowns, twisted beasts performing tricks, circus performers who perform sadistic acts, etc.

 

[Greenfield]

I'd like to stay with the Egyptian theme, since that's the part of the world they'll see shadows of.

I like the idea of size and distance distortion. The place where they land should appear towering, perhaps reverse perspective, as if the heights of the place somehow appeared larger as they rose, instead of smaller.

More of the same when they get outside. Avenues seem to get wider as they recede, rather than smaller, making it difficult or impossible to judge distances accurately. I wouldn't skew the proportions of potential targets, since that would be a mechanical change in ranged combat. So people would appear to be tiny compared to the out of proportion buildings.

Some people, important people, would tower and appear more grand than in reality. I'm seeing sweeping fleet of chariots racing through the streets at insane speed (50 mph, to be exact, as per Shadow Walk spell). Armies rallying to the trumpets of huge generals and several past Pharoes. (Egypt, in the game world, is in many ways a shadow of its former self, so they might see the glory that once was.)

The huge images of the dead leaders would be oddly consistent with egyptian statuary and architecture.

I like the "sea of sand" image as well. Chariots in the desert being drawn by sea-horses, leaving rippling wakes where they pass, and sand dunes as slowly rolling waves.

Classic images of Egypt, as drawn from any number of old movies and tales, never seem to include great forests, so I probably won't go in that direction. Dead cities that are revealed and then covered again by the "waves" of sand? Perfect.

 

[Celebrim]

Classic images of Egypt, as drawn from any number of old movies and tales, never seem to include great forests, so I probably won't go in that direction. Dead cities that are revealed and then covered again by the "waves" of sand? Perfect.

I think of the plane of Shadow as being a bit more jumbled up, both in time and place. If you want to stick to the Egyptian theme consistantly, make the shadow forest a forest of shadow ferns and have it filled with shadow Spinosaurus and shadow Sarcosuchus.

 

[Greenfield]

Well, this particular trip starts in an Egyptian temple in either Cairo, Memphis, or perhaps Heraopolis, and is heading across the planes to the entry point to the Egyptian land of the dead.

If they somehow manage to leave shadow Egypt, they're off course and the mission fails.

So yeah, we're kind of stuck with Egypt, like it or not.

Still, a shadow forest, a remanent of ages past when the whole land was green, could be worked in.

Good place for Shadow Mastiff, if nothing else.

 

[Celebrim]

Your plane of Shadow would appear to be coterminous with the prime material then, rather than being a demiplane of the Ethereal.

 

[Greenfield]

I thought Shadow *was* coterminus with Material.

 

[Ranes]

It is. It is both coterminous and co-existent, at least in the standard Great Wheel cosmology.

By the way, if you're thinking of using any shadowcaster stuff from ToM, you might be interested in this file. It's Mouseferatu's own unofficial errata for the class, which he wrote. He posted them to a thread here on EN World and I thought they were worth copying and keeping. I've used them in my games and think they work well.

 

[Celebrim]

It is. It is both coterminous and co-existent, at least in the standard Great Wheel cosmology.

I thought that it was promoted up to co-existent only when it was promoted up from being a demiplane, and that only sometime after that did it evolve the notion that the local geography of the plane resembled the local geography of the material.

In any event, surely it is only partially coterminous and co-existent, since it is only coterminous with any plane at a point where that plane lies in shadow and only co-existent where shadows have in the past existed.

In my own conception, the plane does not merely contain the shadows that exist on the material, but all the shadows that have ever existed on the material. Thus my comment about it being jumbled up in time and space. Particularly combined with the idea that length and direction don't have a clear relationship to the material, I wouldn't have a problem with asserting that the local geography of the shadow plane didn't resemble the local geography of the prime. For example, a flat salt pan on the shadow plane, would exist only as the shadows of the things that crossed over it, making it a small void of flitting flying things and not a large flat hard thing. Where as a jungle could conceivably be represented on the shadow as a solid object of shadows accreted together like some sort of sedimentary stone. Or the same thing could be attenuated out in time and space into a jungle shaped like vast pyramid far larger than the real jungle. And all of this could itself be distorted or repurposed by the shadows themselves to suit their own alien needs.