Sinister Shadowman - Catacombs and Catgirls Teaser

Shadowmen have been among the most 'popular' subjects of rumour and folklore among mortals over the past two centuries, partly because of how little is known about them, but no less because of how they seem constantly to waver uncannily between benign and malicious in their interactions with mortals. A seasoned adventurer knows that a shadowman, no matter how peaceful it may seem, cannot be trusted, with very few exceptions to this rule. Like their undead counterparts, the spiters, shadowmen are feared, loathed, and slain more than they are observed. Thus, research on these creatures has thus remained sparse even as their numbers have steadily risen. 

Some radical scholars claim that there are ways of communicating with 'wild' shadowmen, as the incredibly rare few members of the species that have learned mortal languages seem to suggest, but even these shadowmen have not been able to offer much, if any, insight into how to keep an unfamiliar shadowman from acting violently toward mortals attempting to communicate with them. The only hints at how the shadowmen understand mortal communication are in how they mimic mortal behaviour with stilted, unnatural motions. They have historically expressed a fondness for dance, but this fondness does not seem to come with an understanding of mortal empathy, which has led to many tales of innocent-encounters-turned-bloody-murders. As vexing as it is to see such beings look and act so similarly to most mortals yet still present a constant threat of violence, for the time being it remains conventional wisdom not to join a shadowman's dance if invited. Hopefully, the coming years will help bridge this seemingly unbridgeable perceptual and communicative gap...