The Shadowfell

A dimension of black, gray, and white where most other color has been leached from everything. It is a place of darkness that hates the light, where the sky is a black vault with neither sun nor stars. The Shadowfell overlaps the Material Plane in much the same way as the Feywild. Aside from the colorless landscape, it appears similar to the Material Plane. Landmarks from the Material Plane are recognizable on the Shadowfell, but they are twisted and warped — distorted reflections of what exists on the Material Plane. Where a mountain stands on the Material Plane, the corresponding feature on the Shadowfell is a jagged rock outcropping with a resemblance to a skull, a heap of rubble, or perhaps the crumbling ruin of a once-great castle. A forest on the Shadowfell is dark and twisted, its branches reaching out to snare travelers’ cloaks, and its roots coiling and buckling to trip those who pass by. Shadow dragons and undead creatures haunt this bleak plane, as do other creatures that thrive in the gloom, including cloakers and darkmantles.

Geography

The landscape is a dark, twisted echo of what exists on the Prime Material Plane. Upon entering the Plane of Shadow, the local features were usually quite similar: casting shadow walk in a forest put you in a shadow forest; casting it under water dropped you in a similar body of water, etc. But from that starting point, the landscape diverged rapidly away from the familiar, and on subsequent visits from the same starting point it diverged in different ways, making mapping the Shadowfell a useless endeavor. Landmarks were usually recognizable but altered in some bizarre way: buildings might be constructed in a different style, built with different materials, at a different location, and/or in any condition from dilapidated ruins to its normal appearance, for example, or otherwise strange and distorted. Similar sites were sometimes called "shadow-analogues".

Included Locations