[ Outsiders > Fiends > Orphans ]
Shadow Fiend
Shadow Demons (CR 7)
Home Plane: Unknown
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Themes: Tenebrous traders in stolen minds
Philosophy: In the darkest corners of the Lower Planes dwell the elusive shadow fiend dwells—creature as mysterious as the inky blackness that shrouds them. With bodies seemingly woven from liquid shade, only their sharp, gleaming teeth, dimly glowing eyes and slashing claws betray their presence as they stalk silently through the gloom. They thrive on stealth, striking unseen with feral claws and bite attacks rather than wielding weapons. More dangerous still is their control over the emotion of fear, and their wicked magic to possess victims and steal their minds.
Nobody seems to know the name that shadow fiends call their own people, or even where these creatures originally come from—although you can bet that it’s somewhere where there’s precious little light to cast shadows. The few settlements of shadows fiends known to planewalkers are dimly lit villages build from darkness, often near planar gates, but well-hidden from casual observers. Here, black stone sculptures carved from blocks of solid blackness decorate the twisted settlements, symbols of an eerie kind of craftsmanship. Sunshine and bright light are deadly enemies to shadow fiends of course, although as they say, without light there can be no shadows in the first place.
Now don’t go thinking that shadow fiends are merely predators. They are also cunning merchants of evil, wielding darkness as a weapon, as art, but also as a commercial concern. They control a sinister economy centred around the capture and trade of minds, which they imprison in jet-black gems to fuel their dark magics and apparently spawn more of their kind. Their favoured customers are necromancers, night hags, and yugoloths.
Travellers through the Lower Planes would do well to steer clear of their eerie villages and keep a bright light close at hand, lest they become another lost intellect in a shadow fiends’ ever-growing library of trapped minds.
Canonical Sources: Planescape Monstrous Compendium [2e] p86; Book of Vile Darkness [3e] p173; Monster Manual [5e]; Bestiary [PF1e] p67
Source: Jon Winter-Holt
