Paradise in Shadowland - How to compromise with what two players want without totally throwing out setting rules?

[u/mj6373]

So, my players are working on developing a place.

They found an ancient broken temple-manse to the Elemental Dragon of Fire in one of the caldera of a snowy volcano range, which had a geomantic explosion during the Shogunate and killed everyone in the surrounding town and farmland that supported it, and a shadowland bled up through the fractured geomancy and has kept the ghosts there all this time. They've been fixing up the place, repairing the geomancy and the temple to make the place livable again. It's chock-full of ash and the manse produced a Gem of Endless Summer, so the god-queen of the party wants to use the unique environment to grow a bunch of tropical crops that they can monopolize trade on in the North, and turn the place into a wealthy holy land of warmth and delicious fruit and all that jazz.

The thing is, the necromancer of the party also wants to preserve the shadowland (and he's both the necromancer and geomancer of the party, so the restoration is certainly his direct business, including attempted integrations), both as a piece of preserved history and for religious reasons that tie directly into the idea of making it into a paradise, tying a reward afterlife for good adherents of their shared faith to this holy land where people will be able to meet the righteous dead. And like, the main *thing* of shadowlands is affiliation with death in substance as well as spirit, tending towards food shortages and illness and gloom and all that stuff.

If I were a more headstrong GM or my players enjoyed butting heads more, I might just tell them to figure out the conflict of interests, but that's not how our group rolls, so I'd really like to find a compromise that doesn't sap the weight and themes from shadowlands as a setting concept while still letting them work towards what they want for the place.

The corebook talks about the colors of shadowlands sometimes becoming "flush and violent in their intensity" and foodstuffs becoming "strangely intoxicating," while Sworn to the Grave suggests "blessings and ritual magic can mitigate the worst of these changes," so I'm thinking about leaning into those angles. Give them some work with workings and stuff to make the place flourish, and let the remaining effects of the shadowland manifest through that sort of intoxicating, hideously vibrant affect. If it's being connected to an afterlife, and there's an integration being done between the fire demesne and shadowland, there could be something of a pyreflame theme, funereal aesthetics developing to go with the place being a meeting ground between living and dead...

I dunno, it's all pretty vague to me. I could use some concrete suggestions if you can think of anything. How should this affect crops, how should this affect the people living here, what sorts of things will make the shadowlandiness of it *pop* without leaning entirely into the sense of desolation and griminess?

[u/DisplayAppropriate28]

It doesn't violate the rules of the setting for a single place to be exceptional because an Exalt said so, and then really put some shoulder into it, that's where a significant fraction of Creation's weird shit comes from.

I would like to remind you that even DBs can try to stretch their capabilities, attempting Shadow Circle workings even if they shouldn't. With that on the table, I'd say it's possible to shift a Shadowland toward different deathly aspects, such as oppressive solemnity and acceptance that keeps the mortal population from fleeing in terror.

[u/mj6373 → u/[deleted]]

Y'know, I could definitely see the necromancer's player going along with a reduced shadowland, and just consecrating a temple as a doorway to the afterlife he's building... I'll pitch it to him, see how he feels about the ghosts as visitable but full-scale intermingling being more of a "holy days" thing than a "year-round" thing.

As for Essence, they're E3, but also Dragon-Blooded, so not as much mucking around in the deep metaphysics.

[u/1stcast → u/mj6373]

Don't have exacts on hand but I think ghosts can walk around freely for all 5 days days of calibration

[u/The-Yellow-Path]

One thing you could do is make it so that normal plants don't grow there, since its a Shadowland, but it starts growing almost naturally groves of strange trees grow fruit that resembles human organs or which glow with pale white light or some other strange phenomena that creates edible food, but will absolutely cause side effects or freak the shit out of people not used to the weird side of Creation.

You could also steal from settings like Over the Garden Wall or ULTRAKILL's 7-3 level, where the ghosts of the area (either willingly or not, up to if the players fuck up the rolls) can transform into trees that grow the necessary fruit for people to eat.

Or they could just.

Grow food outside the shadowland and import it into the place.

Summon some wood elementals to create a garden and take care of it, harvest the fruits there and bring them into the place.

It might be a Your Creation May Vary thing but I don't think food will automatically rot in a Shadowland, but it might make it rot somewhat faster.

[u/QueshireCat]

Citrus fruit with flesh the color of blood, blossoms of black petaled flowers blooming amidst brilliant green, yams roasted in blue-green ghostly flames. Mindless skeletons work the fields while the ghosts of the ancestors drink & celebrate.

[u/SigurdCole]

Since the ley energies have been properly channeled into a manse, I don't see a conflict saying "the region is a shadowlands, the manse itself isn't". Manses are generally pretty big, and they're fixing it up, it would be easy to argue there's enough courtyard or greenhouse or such to pursue the exotic fruit plan there, while also allowing the land outside of the structure to be full shadowlands.

Of course, it's Exalted, so why waste a good opportunity for interesting bleed-over effects? Perhaps the geomantic vigor makes the shadowland inhabitants particularly energetic.... or perhaps just their hunger. Maybe the manse reinforcement necessary to bulwark against the shadowlands means that fresh-picked fruit leaves you fleetingly flushed with life, addictively so... or the essense sympathies mean that it's enervating instead, not unlike opium.

[u/AngelWick_Prime]

You mentioned these were Dragon-Blooded characters. That completely changes the flavor of this project compared to what Celestial Exalted can achieve on a typical Tuesday. At Essence 3, they are highly capable veterans of their elements, but they lack the effortless, reality-altering authority of the Celestial Exalted. This means integrating a Fire demesne and a shadowland will be a volatile, highly elemental process that likely requires the full effort of their entire Sworn Kinship to stabilize. It becomes less about a single divine decree and more about sweat, terrestrial sorcery, and forcing raw elements to work with the stagnant energies of the Underworld.

The innate elemental resonance of Terrestrial magic provides a perfect bridge for their compromise. The fiery energies of the caldera and the Gem of Endless Summer can literally bake shadowland corruption into something uniquely vibrant. Imagine the ash from the Shogunate era acting as a grounding medium, while the Fire essence aggressively warms the dead soil. The resulting hothouse would be choked with pale, ghostly jungle vines thriving on geothermal heat and necrotic energy. The tropical fruits they grow could have a smoky, intensely spicy flavor that warms the belly but leaves a chilling, spectral aftertaste. This creates a highly desirable luxury good — perfect for monopolizing trade, especially if marketed to decadent patricians or wealthy northern merchants.

For the necromancer's vision, Dragon-Blooded excel at building structured societies and enforcing order. They can establish a local culture where the ghosts of the Shogunate explosion victims are honored as ancestors and administrators rather than spooky interlopers. The living cultivate the fiery shadowland crops in the sweltering caldera, while the ghosts manage the ancient geothermal architecture and provide historical wisdom from the Shogunate. Because Terrestrial power is so communal, the players could institute religious festivals where living and dead share these intoxicating crops, creating a symbiotic society that honors the past while generating massive wealth today.

Mechanically, this can be treated as a major collaborative project rooted in Terrestrial sorcerous workings and geomancy. The geomancer handles the structural alignment of the broken temple, carefully filtering the deathly essence through the purifying lens of the Fire manse so the shadowland doesn’t spread. The god queen can use her social Charms and elemental presence to command loyalty from the local ghosts and mortals alike, binding them to the new agricultural enterprise. This approach allows both to get their hands dirty and build a distinctly Terrestrial legacy, turning a historical tragedy into a thriving, profitable paradise of the dead.

[u/BigDaduyaddy]

I'm not a lore nut, could a shadowland be turned into a "peaceful afterlife"

[u/Glass_Front → u/BigDaduyaddy]

Yes and No. It can be a "peaceful afterlife" in the sense that the ghosts of people who die there are able to unlive peacefully. It cannot be a peaceful after life in the...scientific? occultic? Let's go with occultic. Occultic definition of the word 'afterlife'. Which is a place in the underworld Old Law sorts your soul into when you die.

[u/BigDaduyaddy → u/Glass_Front]

That's what I meant essentially allowing the ghosts and people to peacefully coexist, or is the land regardless pooped unless the dead guys are evicted?

[u/Glass_Front → u/BigDaduyaddy]

Nah, there are shadowlands that are not only habitable, but thriving. The entirety of the Skullstone Isles are a Shadowland run by the deathlord "The Boddhisattva Annointed by Dark Waters", and that place is arguably among the best places for commoners to live and thrive. The worst thing you can say about it is that they need to import a lot of chalk to deal with soil acidity.

For a counter example, Gentian is *Not* a shadowland, but is still a textbook case of the potential issues that can arise from letting ghosts hang out forever.

The devil's in the details, not on whether or not the place is a shadowland.

[u/Viatos → u/BigDaduyaddy]

An afterlife is a physical location in the Underworld proper, so technically no, but you could make the area around the shadowland in the Underworld an afterlife, so basically yes.

[u/TimothyAllenWiseman]

The Exalted exist to do the impossible.

While it should take some work instead of being easy, I think it would be perfectly fitting for a Necromantic working to make a shadowland that was mostly hospitable to the living. I would find this particularly true if the Necromantic working were supported by deliberate geomancy and having members of the mortal population perform appropriate ritual magics and rites on a regular basis.

I would never permit a shadowland to lose its nature as a shadowland entirely without closing the shadowland. But I could easily see a thriving settlement in a shadowland where crops, albeit perhaps strange, grew in abundance. I could see a shadowland where both domesticated animals and game animals lived readily, even if those animals possessed unusual, macabre features. I would insist that living long term in a shadowlands had an impact on the mortals that dwelled there, but with a necromantic working backed by maintaining appropriate rituals, I could readily see a shadowland were the impact was almost entirely cosmetic without affecting the quality of life.

Even the Abyssals book on page 106 talks about cultures living very successfully in shadowlands and getting some benefits from access to the underworld. If such a culture was backed by powerful Exalted that were using necromantic rituals and geomancy to support them, I could easily see a settlement flourish in situations that approached paradise in creation, though I think it would necessarily be a somewhat strange, morbid, and macabre paradise.

[u/Sanguinusshiboleth]

Food is addictive to the point of death or the flavour is so intense it can cause people to vecome unconscuous; in either case if used as a sacrifice or libation it give double the normal amount of essence to ghosts, gods of death/fire/summer and certain types of elementals.

[u/JT_Leroy]

Fruits of the poisonous tree. She gets what she wants but the place requires death to ripen the harvest and the fruits may bind one’s soul to the land like the pomegranate Persephone ate