oldkat
Level 6 Magician
Posts: 431
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Post by oldkat on Mar 7, 2012 20:16:20 GMT -6
The addition of these creatures to the monster library is an interesting one.
The question that comes to (my) mind is...what are they, exactly? Beings from another plane of existence? Why do they come here? Its not like they can loot the Prime plane and take stuff back with them.
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Post by grodog on Mar 8, 2012 11:47:57 GMT -6
Presumably they're from the plane of shadow (or perhaps RJK's Shadowlands?).
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Post by geoffrey on Mar 8, 2012 14:05:27 GMT -6
Read A. Merritt's Creep, Shadow, Creep! for the inspiration for D&D shadows. IMO, it is one of Merritt's more forgettable works, so I've forgotten much of what I read.
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Post by llenlleawg on Mar 8, 2012 16:32:20 GMT -6
It's not Gygax's inspiration by any stretch, by one version of an animated shadow I enjoyed was from the otherwise forgettable 1981 animated Faeries, based on the book of the same name by Brian Froud. Anyway, in the story, the King of Faerie conjures life into his shadow, which unhappily becomes malevolent and gains an independent existence of its own. Interestingly, in light of the D&D shadow's strength drain, the Shadow in Faeries grows stronger at the expense of the King, who, along with the Kingdom of Faerie, falls ever further into eternal night.
I also seem to recall, although my memory may be playing tricks, that in one of the modules for Ravenloft there was a village where all of the villagers souls had been stolen by the fey, and the remaining listless residents of the village had no shadows.
In any event, I think the idea of a dark fey, rather than either undead or extra-dimensional origin (granting the folkloric tie between the fey, the dead, and Hell), makes for a great angle on the D&D shadow.
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