4.1 KiB
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| Players Guide 2 |
While death comes for all, it arrives differently for different creatures. Most pass instantly and tender their souls to the afterlife. Others pass more slowly as they clutch onto their passions, purpose, and memories. A few are caught between the world of the living and the spirit realms though, and these are known as shades.
Shades come from the ranks of any living lineage. Scholars theorize that shades develop because they have nigh-unbreakable ties to friends and family while priests postulate that the gods blessed shades with an echo of life to serve a deeper purpose. When asked, shades themselves profess a multitude of reasons for their transformation, suggesting that there’s no true path.
At a glance, a shade’s body looks, acts, and feels much like it originally did in life. However, the shade is not a creature of flesh and blood. Its physical form is constructed of composite memories from their previous life.
As a shade suffers wounds or fails to engage in its routine, it becomes increasingly less corporeal. Bright colors grow dull, voices grow more distant, and memories bleed from their forms as the pain of wounds causes them to forget. If a shade is not provided with healing magic—anchoring them to their past lives—they pass, and their memories collapse like a dilapidated house.
Shade Lineage Traits
Your shade character has the following hereditary traits.
Age
Shades appear as the age they were at their time of death. They have potentially no limit to their lifespan, but realistically, ancient shades grow weary, and their faculties fade as centuries past. Even persistent shades rarely live beyond 750 years.
Size
Your size is Medium or Small. When you create your shade character, choose a different lineage option (such as human or kobold) to represent the lineage you were in life. This choice informs your overall appearance. Your size, weight, and height are determined by the lineage you pick as your living form. If you choose a lineage with multiple size options, you can choose between them. For example, if you choose kobold as your previous living form, you can choose whether your size is Small or Medium.
Speed
Your speed is determined by your living form.
Hybrid Humanoid
You are a Humanoid, but your partial transition into undeath gives you traits in common with Undead. You are resistant to poison damage. In addition, you have advantage on saves against being poisoned and advantage on checks made to resist suffering levels of exhaustion. Game effects that raise a creature from the dead work on you as normal, but they return you to life as a shade. A true resurrection or wish spell (see Player’s Guide) can restore you to life as a fully living member of your original lineage.
Phantasmal Form
As an action, you can temporarily dissolve your physical body and assume a ghostly form. This transformation lasts for 1 minute or until you choose to end it (no action required). While transformed, you become translucent and devoid of color, and the air around you grows cold. You also gain the following abilities:
- You are resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks.
- You can move through spaces occupied by creatures and solid objects as if they were difficult terrain. If you end your turn in an occupied space, you are pushed back to the nearest unoccupied space, take 1d10 force damage for every 5 feet you are pushed, and revert back to your physical form (ending the transformation).
- You gain a flying speed of 30 feet with the ability to hover.
- You have advantage on ability checks and saves made to escape a grapple or against being restrained. Once you use this feature, you can’t transform again until you finish a long rest.
Spectral Sight
You have darkvision to a range of 60 feet. In addition, as an action, you can open your awareness to see 30 feet into the Ethereal Plane while you are on the Material Plane (or vice versa), until the end of your next turn. You can activate this special sight a number of times equal to your PB, regaining all uses when you finish a long rest.