"It is rare for your kind to seek an audience at the Court of Graves. A bit of advice: turn back. Go back to Adra, explore the great river, or visit the Shadarlands, but you are best not walking through these gates. Few mortals have any profit come to them from traversing beyond this point."

-The Gatewarden of the Court of Graves, Ohskar Nightblood

Shadar-kai Culture

Servants of the Dark Queen

The first Fey which emigrated to Adra became the Elves. These Elves spread across the continent, and as they did, they had a stark realization about the nature of the world they then inhabited; Adra Prime, as some modern scholars refer to the material plane, was a sort of strange mirror of the Feywild. There was still nature and beauty, but all to a lesser extent. Indeed, they also found deserts, and volcanoes, and frozen wastelands, each of which could not be found as such in the Feywild. And still, every mountain seemed to have a kind of reflection in the Feywild, as did every river, as did every stream. The elves most interested in this began to create a map of all the gateways which they could find from Adra Prime to the Feywild. In their journey to do such, they developed techniques to magically detect such spectral gateways. Using this technique, they found not just gateways back to the Feywild, but also gateways to a strange other domain. Consulting with their kin, and with those who still had connections back to their old home, these scholars discovered these gateways to lead to the Shadowfell, a strange dark world, and also a reflection of Adra Prime, only where there was greenery and life in Adra, there was death and emptiness in the Shadowfell, and all features were twisted hollow echoes of their themselves in the Shadowfell. Much later on, during the great schism which would divide almost all the elves in Adra into two camps, there were those in the Hawk camp, those that would go on to be the Valenteran elves, who did not see the point in simply leaving the Blackwood: their goal was to escape the impure and lesser species of Adra, and where better to do that but a place with no life at all. Of course, Shadowfell had things in it, creatures you might call them, and souls, the souls of the unclaimed dead, but no life to compete with elven hegemony. So, a small minority of these elves travelled to the nearest gate into the Shadowfell to make their home there. They quickly discovered they had made a terrible mistake. The Shadowfell was not just devoid of life because nobody had tried to migrate there before - it was devoid of life because it could not contain life. It was a completely barren land, devoid of anything but the most tenacious and gnarled weeds and briars. The water there was a brackish and foul corruption, and no living animals existed to hunt. These foolhardy elves, who thought they could tame and bring crops to the land found they had no hope of doing so, and each day in the Shadowfell drained more of their vital energy. It is said that the Dark Queen, Lady of Bones, Reaper of Death, Lothal, took some kind of amusement with the plight of the elves (though not any kind of amusement a Kith could understand). Deciding to make their suffering into an opportunity, she made them an offer - either return to Adra Prime in shame, shunned from both the schisms of the elven race, or remain in the Shadowfell, and serve Lothal as her living servants. They accepted the offer, seeing nothing but ridicule and ignominity in returning to Adra. Lothal gave them a gift which she gave to no other living being, before or since: she gave them and all their descendants the ability to survive, even thrive, in the Shadowfell. They could consume the strange mutant fungi and some of the undead creatures in her domain, and could drink the normally poisonous water. She built for them settlements to live in, and taught them the secrets of her domain. In return for all of this, the Shadar-kai, as this new race of elves became known as, became the servants of Lothal, both in the Shadowfell, and in the rest of the planes. The Shadar-kai could more easily travel to the material world than her ferrymen or other unliving servants, and once there, they were tasked with rooting out those who opposed her - those who attempted to live forever were slain, those that tried to create undead armies outside of her domain were destroyed. In the Shadar-kai, Lothal had agents the likes of which few other gods possessed. With them, she extended her reach far across Adra. The Shadar-kai themselves flourished in the Shadowfell, building a unique culture and civilization which existed semi-independently of the Court of Graves. Indeed, Lothal kept her deal with the Shadar-kai, and so long as the majority of them remained to serve her will, many developed their own tastes, and left the Shadowfell to travel freely. The Shadar-kai were not slaves, despite what many think of them - they were as the Eladrin were - culturally bound to a Goddess, but a genuine people in their own right.

          The Shadar-kai have shifted and changed over time, evolved both by the environment they lived in, and the slow march of time. As such, the Shadar-kai have tended to drift into three broad camps, and each camp has different outlooks and goals. The first is the majority of Shadar-kai, those shadow elves who live in one of the many Shadar-kai settlements throughout the Shadowfell. These folk are reverent towards Lothal and the Court of Graves, but pursue their own form of nation building in the realm of the dead. Their settlements represent beacons of civilization in an otherwise bleak and lifeless land; beyond the borders of their realm, endless droves of spirits wander in a grey purgatory, moving through the mirror-like reflections of their past homeland. Within the Shadarland, undead disappear, and spirits are outnumbered by the living. Whatever the pact their ancestors made, these Shadar-kai remain in the Shadowfell for a simple reason: they are most suited to life there. The gifts they received from Lothal mean that the food, water, and general conditions of life outside the Shadowfell is actually harder on the Shadar-kai. The sun is harsh and exhausting. Bread and most meats are overwhelmingly salty and dense to eat. Even the water tastes strange. Most Shadar-kai remain where they are evolved to live - some staying in the same communities they have lived their whole lives, others travelling to far off wastes to establish settlements or outposts. Then, there are the Shadar-kai who do not merely remain in the Shadowfell, but stay near or within the Court of Graves itself. These are the true servants of Lothal, those counted upon day after day to travel both the Shadowfell and Adra in search of Lothal's enemies, or remain at the Court to deal with visitors; in times of conflict with the other planes, these Shadar-kai can even be counted upon to fight in planar wars. They are dedicated to their goddess and often feared outside of the Shadowfell for this reason. Finally, there are those Shadar-kai who have left the Shadowfell for good, or at least for a long period. These shadow elves, despite their inborne attraction to the Shadowfell, reject the plane of the dead, and reject Lothal - they find the realm to be devoid of kindness and filled with quiet dread, and seek a life of their own free of the shadowlands. They are a rare breed indeed, as are Drow who leave the Underdark, or Eladrin who leave the Feywild. They tend to be tourists and travellers, and often can be found adventuring across Adra with other groups of misfits. Most importantly, they are shunned by most other Shadar-kai, and many Shadar-kai who leave to live outside of the Shadowfell are not welcomed if they ever return home. These wanderlustful Shadar-kai are also forced to adjust to a world which their ancestors rejected, and must slowly build a tolerance up to the colorful visuals, heavy foods, and vibrant life of Adra, at least vibrant in comparison to the Shadowfell. However, those Shadar-kai that succeed in this often are some of the most content and flourishing people in Adra - they have a deep appreciation for the beauty present in the world, since their upbringing was spent in a mostly colorless and emotionless void. In general, despite the differences between the various groups of Shadar-kai, all Shadar-kai share some things in common. The Shadar-kai generally do not react overtly to bad or good news, instead having a much more compressed spectrum of emotion. Shadar-kai, since they spend most of their time and upbringings so closely intertwined with the plane of death, often use death as a way of interpreting the world - Shadar-kai might get to know you by asking you whether your parents are still alive, or how old you are and when you may die in the future, questions seriously at odd with pleasant conversation in most parts of the world, but very mundane inquiries to most Shadar-kai. Shadar-kai also rarely fear death, since to most of them, death is merely a transference of form, and rarely a change in scenery. Indeed, some of the most sane and approachable spirits in the Shadowfell are dead Shadar-kai, who sometimes linger near their old cities, speaking to their loved ones, and other times wander across the Shadowfell on grand quests of exploration. Shadar-kai are often viewed by many to be as cruel and as treacherous as the Drow, but this is rarely so. It is certainly true that the Shadar-kai however have a different perspective on morality than most, often seeing wars, plagues, and natural disasters as mundane and inevitable movements in the cycle of of the world. As such, while not going out of their way to do evil, they often through inaction, allow it to spread and fester.

          The Shadar-kai people exist almost entirely within the Shadowfell, and even then, usually concentrated in their own lands, called the Shadarlands. Outside of the Shadowfell, there are many Shadar-kai travelling Adra or even traversing across the outer planes, either looking for adventure, or serving Lothal's will. The only race typically found among them are unsurprisingly Shadar-kai elves; it is almost impossible for a non-Shadar-kai to become adjusted to life in the Shadowfell, and Shadar-kai living outside of the Shadowfell rarely have children, and rarely raise their children in their native culture when they do. Also unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of Shadar-kai are either adherents of or at least reverent towards Lothal and the Court of Graves. The exception are the rare members of the culture who choose to leave the Shadowfell permanently, and worship of pantheons other than the Court of Graves is extremely taboo within the Shadarlands. In general, the Shadar-kai tend to be calm, prodigious, and reflective. They also tend to be apathetic, dull, and uncaring. The Shadar-kai communicate almost entirely in their dialect of High Elvish, Shadowspeech, and it as become the language of the Shadowfell and the Court of Graves since the elves' arrival.

If you choose Shadar-kai Culture, you gain the following:

~Either a +1 to your Constitution score or a +1 to your Wisdom score~

~A -1 to your Charisma score~

~As a known language, Shadowspeech~

~A Sub-Discipline in every knowledge skill on checks relating to Shadar-kai Culture~

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