dailybestiary:

I’m back!  Major pitch
submitted, 19-day workweek survived, and a Labor Day weekend with board-gamer
friends miraculously achieved.  Let’s
monster it up, shall we?

The mythical svartálfar have been just waiting
to be worked into your game.  Given that
their name means “black elves,” they were probably Garry Gygax’s inspiration
for the drow, but in and of themselves they’ve never played a big role in
D&D or Pathfinder that I can remember.
(I think GAZ7 The Northern Reaches
might have name-dropped them, and dock-alfar/dockalfen got a mention in the 2e Vikings Campaign Sourcebook and Ian
Malcolmson’s excellent “Dark Ages” article in Dragon #257, but that’s about it that I can recall.)

Pathfinder’s svartalfars take what little source material
there is and riff on it nicely.  Bestiary 4’s svartalfars are
ebon-skinned fey exiled from the fey realms to live on the Plane of
Shadow.  Their main trade is
assassination, for which they demand payment in secrets (and if that sentence
doesn’t scream adventure potential, I don’t know what does).  Since they are superbly talented swordsmen
who can imbue their weapons with bane
and other abilities, they’re clearly good at their jobs.  And if one cabal member can’t pull it off,
the rest will jump in to finish the kill and preserve the group’s honor.  In fact, it’s this loyalty and efficiency
that makes them kind of the anti-fey—they are lawful evil, emotionless, and
always keep to their contracts.  But in
the end, what they know is still far more deadly in the long run than how well
they kill.

Svartalfars collect
secrets…and since the Plane of Shadow’s kytons are some of the best
torturers in the multiverse, svartalfars take pains to collect the screams that
fall from their victims’ lips (sometimes openly, sometimes clandestinely).  When adventures rescue their friend from a
kyton’s operating theater, their mad escape attempt takes them down below the
complex…and smack into a svartalfar listening post.  Only a very good secret will keep the fey
from butchering them on the spot for putting their position at risk.

A svartalfar accepted
an assassination target beyond the reach of his abilities, and now half his
cabal has been left dead or maimed trying to preserve his honor.  If it spills beyond the cabal, the entire
clan could suffer, and that the clan chief cannot allow.  The calculating fey hires adventurers to find
a loophole that will nullify the original contract.  Their research will likely put them in the
path of the remaining cabal members still on the hunt, and since the clan chief
cannot reveal his involvement, the adventurers are on their own when it comes
to defending themselves.

No one wants to be in
debt to a servant of Death, so when a viduus calls in the favor some
adventurers owe him, they leap at the chance.
Besides, the viduus said the mission was something called “interlibrary
loan”—how hard could returning a simple book be?  Of course, only after the party agrees does
the pychopomp mention that the book belongs in one of the deepest svartalfar
libraries on the Plane of Shadow…and that the book wasn’t ever properly borrowed;
it was stolen.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
256

Hi, guys!  Miss me?

In case you’re wondering, this weekend I played Kingdom
Builder (my feelings for which fall about halfway between Quinns and Paul’s
thoughts on the subject), Dixit (great art) and some Star Trek co-op that used
dice pools to resolve mechanics.  I don’t
remember what it was called, but since I was utterly useless for the entire
game and then saved everyone with a last-minute deus (or rather dice) ex
machina, it definitely felt just like an episode of ST:TNG to me.  So that’s…good?

A clan of svartalfars was contracted by the green dragons that signed the Five-Scale Alliance, and they proved quite useful against the Western Queen’s forces. The dragons retained their services in the centuries since, using them as secret police to keep a watch over the fields they rule. They also maintain a watch on at least one of the Western Queen’s Redoubts, which the more academic of their clan still pore over to this day.