By the release of “Shades of Darkness” by Robert J. Schwalb in May 2010 (Dragon #387), it was already clear that D&D‘s magazines were following suit with the rest of the brand in their downturn. Editor-in-chief Chris Youngs was still in charge and doing his best, but he was on his way out shortly afterward and it was clear that the edition and its support were chugging along on fumes. Nearly every article used a prescribed template and with this seemed bereft of the wild creativity that had been Dragon‘s identity for most of its run. On the plus side, it was immediately clear what every article would be from just its branding, but this also made it so that very few individuals would find more than a single article of interest, or at most two. It was a magazine no longer really focused on fantastical roleplaying, instead it primarily focused on the mechanics of playing Fourth Edition D&D. 

“Shades of Darkness” is a “Guilds & Groups” article, yet another of the many recurring series that filled up the entirety of Dragon’s pages and that features information about exactly what you’d expect. Very few of these series were ever planar in anything but a sentence or two of tacked on flavor, and given how integrated they were with Fourth Edition’s pseudo-campaign setting most have largely been forgotten. That’s true of so much of the final years of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, and while I wish I could say that people were missing out on a lot of great material, for the most part it’s a lot of rote pieces reliant upon interest in this particular edition of the game. Case in point, I don’t hate “Shades,” but at the same time it’s hard to imagine anyone caring enough about it to go back and read the article today, let alone adapt and use it in a campaign. 

The Shades of Darkness organization at its center is a group of nativist fascists within the Shadowfell. Their goal is to preserve this plane as it is, devoting themselves “to shielding the Shadowfell from the forces capable of altering the plane for good or ill.” As with any group aware of its dislike for good, it’s hard to imagine anyone with this actual mindset who isn’t, well, as I said earlier, fascistic. And for that matter, even the article is more than a bit confused about the morality of the Shadowfell as a whole, stating, “The Shadowfell, however, is indifferent to morality. It might be gloomy, and it might foment grief, but it is no more and no less evil than the Feywild. However, something about this plane draws some of the worst people into its chilling embrace.” When reading that passage I had to go back and do an immediate reread because of the intense contradiction between those two sentences, but no, that’s really what it says. The Shadowfell isn’t evil, but it makes people evil. Which is the same thing written in an insignificantly different fashion. How can anyone read that and not be annoyed at the illogic being applied?

Anyhow, the Shades are nativists and so not something you’d really want to see within a PC—there’s enough of that intolerance in the real world that I’d be annoyed to have a friend roleplaying a fake version within fantasy. That means that they’re mostly just there as villains, but as villains they’re pretty damn bland and middling as well. There are a few details about them with strong hooks, primarily in their founding and their opera house base within Gloomwrought, but overall it’s a strange article in that it continually insists on how this group is amoral when their actions are anything but. Killing people for being outsiders is evil, as is squashing other cultures for simply existing, how is this supposed to be complicated? This article’s feigned confusion about this aspect of the group annoyed me throughout the article, and I suppose maybe the author just failed to understand that nativism is one of the most horrible and destructive evils that exists… but how?

I suppose that if you’re looking for another group of villains within the Shadowfell, ones with an obviously shitty philosophy, you could do worse than bringing in the Shades of Darkness. But that’s really it. They’re fine, the article—aside from its own moral failings—is fine, but there’s nothing really special here, nothing that makes you want to grab onto the group and base a story around their dismantling. I’d guess that even the author has forgotten it by now, and can’t help but hope we never hear from the Shades of Darkness again, in favor of making the Shadowfell more wild wonderful in the future rather than just adding another brand of pathetic fascism to the game.