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Recently I posted about my goblins – a player race that was shaped by the first two players picking it. In the same campaign, my wife has picked *shadow elves*. I had come across the term in the *Wilderlands of High Fantasy Player’s Guide* but didn’t like the idea very much: albino elves that look black from all the soot? No way. I also didn’t want to use Drow as-is because that would confront Claudia with a whole lot of expectations from the other players.
Since the race was to be “new” to everybody we agreed that they belonged to a small group of shadow elves (from which she would would draft more shadow elves for her entourage) searching for their ancestral home. Through play (and playing in the updated *Caverns of Thracia*) we discovered that Huvat Vex was in fact the long lost city of the shadow elves which was called *Ankharat Pratnam* in the ancient tongue. The shadow elves had in fact taught magic to the ancient lizard men…
Through play we also discovered that the shadow elves have red glowing eyes, are feared as forest demons by ordinary humans, love to drink a terrible green thing called *Curse of the Viper* – and they love to force it upon their friends and will be cross if they don’t like it! – and most of all, they hate insults and disrespectful behavior and will react with violence.
I don’t know where my wife hid away this vindictive and choleric part of her personality… 🙂
Recently this culminated in two of the shadow elves discovering that their cache in the goblin city of Grezneck had been plundered by the locals, and in an act of rage they killed a handful of innocents with a lightning bolt and went on a terror rampage to find the thieves until finally a goblin priest of Orcus arrived and settled the matter with 1000 gp. Apparently the goblin and shadow elf play characters will not be enjoying name levels in the same city…
This provided the kick the shadow elves required to finally take care of Huvat Vex – the reconquest of their ancient home. At the same time, the goblins killed the big ranger in town that had been agitating against them and learnt of a human layer of Orcus priests above Tribitz, high priest of Orcus and leader apparent of Grezneck. Interesting times await them!
Claudia was also confused at first because she felt that the goblins could murder at will without repercussions where as the elves were being spat upon and it took some explaining until she realized that this was actually just an in-game development. The goblins of Grezneck were treacherous thieves and ruthless racists. And the goblin player characters were obviously not concerned about their elvish friends’ loss of face…
As a DM I now get to figure out how to run adventures for goblin and shadow elf characters at the same time.
For the moment, luckily enough, they’ll be dealing with some corruption in the neighboring forest (Dungeon Crawl Classics #17: Legacy of the Savage Kings).
Dungeon Crawl Classics #17: Legacy of the Savage Kings
The picture above shows the shadow elf rogue Kishan wearing magic goggles made of Umber Hulk eyes and Displacer Beast tentacles that the shadow elf wizard Lordak is planning to create any time soon, now.
#RPG #Old School
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Haha, I was wondering about the tentacles – I thought maybe some crazy Cthulhu stuff was going on. Now I am imagining the shadow elf wearing a sweet displacer beast tentacle headband 😄
– Adrian 2011-03-21 16:07 UTC
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To be fair, the Goblins also didnt care about the loss of the group cache and it wasnt the best time to be associated with rampaging elves... :p
– Florian 2011-03-22 12:56 UTC
