Shade Lore
While some creatures pledge themselves to a patron who will accept their soul upon death, most creatures have no such protection from mortality. For those without a patron provided afterlife, the Bleak awaits.
The metaphysical bottom of the Dreamwilds, the Bleak borders the Beyond, being as close to not existing as anything that is can. In this desolate wasteland at the edge of existence, the mana of the Dreamwilds mixes with the influence of the Beyond to form something new.
This dark reflection of mana is antimus, a twisted form of mana never intended by the Gods. When a soul dissipates in the Mortal Realm, it’s consciousness takes form within the Bleak, shaping from the native antimus. Reborn as a formless undead, the creature becomes a Shade.
Society: In the Mortal Realm, Shades engender a level of fear that may even eclipse that Denizens feel towards essence creatures. In folklore, they are monstrous specters of damned souls who only wish to destroy and corrupt the good and living. They are the twisted evil souls of those who committed great sins in life, only summoned by the most depraved to ravage the living world in rotting and stolen flesh.
There is a grain if truth to such myths, if a small one. When a new Shade first forms in the Bleak, they will often have little understanding of, or control over, their new nature. They are not simply in a new form, but have ceased to exist before reforming from the ground up by their unconscious will alone.
Such a process leaves them unstable, their unconscious mind and base instincts easily able to overwhelm their identity and reasoning. These lesser Shades roam the undeveloped regions of the Bleak, kept at arm’s length by more stable Shades who know lesser Shades can cause significant damage in a town or city.
Most attempts to summon a recently slain creature as a Shape, one who the summoner new in life, will produce them as a lesser Shade. The summoner finds a version of the creature they new in life formed of indistinct frigid shadow and unable to function or control themselves.
Since most individuals summoned as an attempt to return them from death are still in such a state, there is reason to believe Shades are violent and unstable. In truth, this condition is temporary. A lesser Shade will, eventually, become familiar with their state of existence, adapting and losing the Lesser Shade Feature.
It is such mature Shades who make up the majority of the Bleak’s population, having either lost the Lesser Shade Feature over years, decades or centuries or possessed the adaptability to never gain it in the first place. Such Shades are behaviorally no different from their living selves, although life in the Bleak may shift their cultural behavior.
The Bleak is an endless desert, dunes of powdered bone below an eternally black and empty sky. Scattered across its expanse are osseous mountains, cliffs and mesa that Shades will often carve into to form towns and even cities. It shares its geographic fluidity with the Dreamwilds, maps being impossible to make.
When away from a landmark, the endless dunes spatially flow and alter to make the distances and relative positions of settlements different for every journey. The only reliable way to travel the Bleak is to use a teleportation beacon at your destination to teleport there, since spatial coordinates are no more stable than the space itself.
This necessity means that a settlement can be easily lost if it’s beacons are destroyed and no Shades remain in residence to repair them. Countless abandoned towns, fortress and even cities exist in the Bleak, the Shades who remember them having no way to find them. It is entirely possible for a wanderer to stumble across one, even if they cannot be located deliberately.
Shade civilizations vary across the potentially limitless number of settlements in the infinite expanse of the Bleak, but are unified by certain traits enforced by the nature of Shades and the conditions of the Bleak. The most apparent of these is the lack of physical resources.
Shades have no need for food, water, air or even physical form to survive. They can exist for eternity without resources, being incapable of death. However, few conscious creatures can indefinitely tolerate a state of existence without pleasure or entertainment. This makes the greatest resource in the Bleak entertainment.
A large part of this is social activities, many Shades grouping together for the positive effects of companionship. In addition, any form of art is highly valued, especially if it is novel. Since the only natural resource within the Bleak is the naturally occurring bone, much of the art created is media of one form or another. Plays, novels and fiction of all forms is highly respected, as are other forms of entertainment.
The limited variety of materials in the Bleak also makes Mages capable of conjuring other materials highly priced and extremely wealthy, with those able to create living bodies to host Shades some of the wealthiest crafters in the Bleak. Due to the rarity of such a skill and difficulty of performing it with only materials available in the Bleak, the possession of a living body is exorbitant and only powerful Shades possess them.
Having a living body is priced above all other signs of prestige, both do to the rarity and the excess to physical pleasures it provides. Although many stronger Shades become solid as their antimus develops, the sensations of a living body are coveted and usually reserved to Shade lords and those increasingly wealthy.
Likely the only resource more prized to Shade than living bodies, although strictly far easier to acquire, is access to the Mortal Realm. In truth, it is not that hard for a Shade within civilized society to purchase passage to the Mortal Realm. Penumbra Warlocks and Shades with the right skills already in the Mortal Realm can both summon Shades.
The only true limiting factor is the monopoly Shade lords go to great effort to maintain over reliable access to the Mortal Realm. Although any knowledgeable creature in the Mortal Realm can summon a Shade whose name they know into a corpse, it requires specific skills and resources to provide living bodies.
The ability of Shade lords to create Chosen Ones who can summon Shades into living bodies on demand gives them a massive advantage, and most will deliberately work to sabotage attempts by others to set up competing businesses. If an individual Shade is able to make mortal allies who will summon them, it is of little concern. However, if they start selling the service to others, a Shade lord will notice before long and take action.
It is thought that the Shade lords may deliberately contribute to the myth that Shades are always mindless monsters. This belief helps to hide Shades who use the Shade lords to gain access, since the use of living bodies makes them inconspicuous to mortals who think all Shades are rampaging corpses.
It also makes coming across into a dead body less appealing, since a Shade who does so will be treated as a monster. This incentivizes the use of their Chosen Ones.
Advocates of this conspiracy point out that the Shade lords enforce secrecy, hiding evidence of Shades’ true nature and punishing attempts to distribute such information. Officially, such policies are agreed upon to keep Penumbra Warlocks and Shades living in the Mortal Realm safe, but this explanation may only be partially true.
While it is possible for a Shade to develop the Shade Lord Feature at a low level, the skill to create Penumbra Warlocks rarely manifests until a Shade is approaching a god like level of power. It is unknown how many Shade lords exist, but there are a handful whose power and influence exceed all others. These are the greater Shade lords, and are what would usually be thought of as Shade lords.
The second strongest of the Shade lords, and by far most reclusive, is Cooper. Possibly the strongest Shade in existence, Cooper inhabits the physical form of the Realm Damn. Being a fragment of the Low King formed from the part of themselves they left in the Realm Damn upon its completion, Cooper is the guardian of the Realm Damn and the only creature capable of giving access through it.
The most powerful Shade lord, both in physical and economic might, is Maverick. Thought to be the oldest Shade lord, most Shade see Maverick as simply a component of the Bleak that has always been present. They control almost all industry and media, being the one who enforces a universal currency across the Bleak. They are often referred to as the God of Shades, despite not being a God… or even a Shade.
Ecology: When a mana or essence based soul becomes untethered within the Mortal Realm or Dreamwilds, it will float freely near its physical remains until claimed by one force or another. If the creature who the soul belongs to is a Chosen One, the soul will immediately be claimed by their patron, causing it to dissipate as its consciousness merges with its patron.
If not, it may be captured by a creature or item with the skills to trap or move souls. If trapped, the soul remains stable as if within a viable body, but will be in stasis if it lacks immunity to mental tampering. It may also be returned to life, placed within its repaired body or a new body.
However, a soul with no patron or meddling Mage will remain untethered. An untethered soul will slowly dissipate, its mana or essence unraveling as it remains disconnected from a viable body. Each month, it must make a Bad Ass Check (1d12 + Bad Ass) against the number of months it has remained untethered. If it fails, the soul dissipates completely, ceasing to exist within reality.
Cast into the Beyond, the creature becomes an entity of the Beyond far below the point needed to maintain influence over reality. The Beyonds equivalent of plankton, they are among infinite like them without the power or awareness to impose their own will. However, as dream mana reflects and forms the unconscious thoughts of those within reality, the antimus of the Bleak reflects those without and gives them form.
Unable to generate influence capable of altering normal reality, the feeble precursor of influence they can muster is more than enough to shape antimus. Having a conceptual connection to the reality they were once part of, the now soulless creatures feel the reflective antimus willing to hear their soundless calls.
They unconsciously shape the Bleak’s antimus into an imitation of their living selves, regaining consciousness as an imperfect replica of something half way between a body and a soul, but not truly either. Lacking the awareness within the Beyond to gain Beyond Creation’s Light or the ability to gain true influence needed to gain Unworldly Nature, Shades mostly function as creatures of reality. However, they are in truth the least of the entities of the Beyond, and cannot truly be a part of reality again.
Appearance: Without a body to contain them, Shades appear as something between vapor and shadow, a nebulous penumbral mass in the loose form they remember from their mortal life. This shape is too indistinct to identify specific individuals and parts like smoke when touched, a soul chilling cold felt by any living creature that makes contact.
While inhabiting a corpse, the antimus that forms them forces the corpse to behave as if living, but does not repair or otherwise alter it. They are left appearing as a walking cadaver, which continues to function as long as their antimus can hold it together.
If placed in a living body, they are impossible to identify as a Shade by all but the most powerful forces. This allows Shades with access to living bodies the ability to hide within living society.