Paizo, $22.99, ISBN 978-1-64078-033-0
Fantasy, 2018

Ah, Nidal. A land shrouded in perpetual night and populated by folks that basically cosplay a cenobite all year long. Nidal, Land of Shadows promises to give me a closer look into that happy place, so how can I resist?

Well, as it turns out, that place isn’t as irresistible as I initially thought. By choosing to strip away the mystique of that place, Liane Merciel and her co-writers—yes, there are three more people involved in this one, even though Ms Merciel’s name is the only one on the front cover—end up revealing that there’s nothing really special about this place, unless one wants to go there and play count the people with darkvision or something.

Anyway, in this one, we learn that Nidal came to be when, desperate to avoid the apocalyptic meteor-is-coming-ooh event called Earthfall, the three leaders of the clans living in what will become Nidal accepted the Pinhead god Zon-Kuthon’s protection and Pin-Kuthon then twisted the people and the land to his liking.

In the millennia since, Nidal is forever encased in a dome of darkness, the perpetual night allowing the undead sensitive to daylight to openly walk among the living. This is how the evil lords of the land like it, of course, as many of the ruling caste called the Umbral Court are undead themselves.

Hilariously, this gives rise to a principal schism among the living and the undead in the Umbral Court. Devotion to Pin-Kuthon requires a large amount of self-inflicted pain and torture as part of prayer and religious service, so the Belevais Doctrine states that the undead are cheating because they can’t die or feel pain like the living, so their devotion is nowhere as sincere or worthy. The undead Umbral Court members naturally pooh-pooh this, but the doctrine becomes an expedient excuse for the living members to band together and murder their undead peers so that the living will never be outnumbered and hence lose political power in the government.

This gives to one of my main perplexities when it comes to this Nidal.

The original three that pledged their lives and people to Pin-Kuthon are still around as the Black Triune, but I guess they are busy playing backgammon or something, because they leave the boring ruling duties to a huge bureaucracy led by the ridiculously numerous Umbral Court members, who then task agents to do the actual dirty work of getting things done.

The Umbral Court members all hate and plot against one another, and they seem to have a lot of time on their hands to do this and yet somehow the nation never collapses into infighting.

One can argue that perhaps the Black Triune take action and murder a few dozens of these bickering twits to quell any serious feuds, but come on. The whole thing makes Nidal seem like a carbon copy of Geb, just add living people and an edgy perpetual night backdrop.

The land itself isn’t very memorable either, but things are made worse by how the gazetteer section lists all locations by alphabetical order instead of by the five principal regions, or so I gather based on the map: Uskwood, the Atteran Ranches, Nishroch Bay, North Plains, and the Umbral Basin. In fact, the region and the locations are all lumped together, making it hard for me to get the full view of the land unless I keep looking back to the map in the inside back cover.

This is why people prefer to use a wiki, I tell you, but it’s just too bad for people that want to know more about Golarian as the Pathfinder wiki is terrible—pretty much everything is a stub or deliberately made as detail-free as possible to get people to still buy the official products.

Anyway, aside from the headache of trying to figure out how all the locales fit together, the locations aren’t very interesting. It’s basically a cut and paste of every other country in Golarian. The main cities are naturally the capital, the military outpost, and the port—and they feel mostly like those other cities with wallpaper variations. Oh look, another castle with magical booby traps left by a loony mage! Another woods full of monsters! Two manors belonging to mean vampires! A cavern with another evil dragon! A magic school! Et cetera, et cetera—the whole thing feels by the numbers.

This is a huge missed opportunity, as a result, because Nidal is not just another place, it’s Pinhead’s playground after all.

The first sign that the folks at Paizo want to cut themselves at the knees is that they say kytons—the cenobites with another name—are rare, which is just a way for them to cut and paste their formulaic landmarks with cosmetic variations. Why would the kytons stay away from the one place on Golarian where they are treated as VIPs, and where they can find all the test subjects they want to play with to their wicked heart’s content? Imagine how much more atmospheric and terrifying Nidal would have been had it been a place with pain and pleasure indeed becomes hard to tell apart.

Also, some of the locations make little sense. Why would Ridwan be such a militant outpost when it is also stated that Nidal has no need for an army due to a lack of desire to expand its boundaries? Its nearest neighbor that could potentially be a threat is Molthune, but the folks are already busy enough trying to take down the rebels in Nirmathas and they have zero interest in Nidal. Okay, one may say that maybe they need troops to capture the hobbit underground movement that rescues the hobbit slaves in Nidal, but they don’t need a conventional army to do that.

So what’s the point of Ridwan again? It makes more sense for it to be inquisitor central, with a prison to torture and rehabilitate heretics, perhaps, considering that the Umbral Court is constantly trying to weed out non-believers and followers of other religions.

Even the lore is full of blank spaces, as the authors assume that I have either read or will read all other products that have Nidal even loosely associated to them. For example, who on earth is Mesandroth Fiendlorn? This fellow is mentioned in the Nidal timeline, and in the entry for Edammera’s Folly, it is said that he somehow betrayed his apprentices. This fellow seems like a big deal to be spotlighted like this… only there is no other detail forthcoming and I am left scratching my head. I look up the Pathfinder wiki, but yeah… the wiki is absolutely useless.

Then there are the inconsistencies that plague the lore. For example, the write-up on how to become a member of the Umbral Court states that success means you become lawful evil. It’s just how it is. However, in just the previous page, there are two neutral evil examples of Umbral Court members listed. So, which is which?

Then there is that part which states that Umbral Court members that don’t show up in the annual party with the Black Triune would be executed, no exceptions, and then later on there is the mention of an Umbral Court member that is also a cursed lord—in other words, Auriloch of the Winter Garden can never leave his home due to the laws of being a cursed lord in this setting, and yet he is still alive in spite of never being able to physically attend those parties. Again, which is which?

This inconsistency is par for the course, though, as Liane Merciel’s novels set in Nidal—Nightglass, Nightblade—won’t happen if the rules weren’t bent or even broken to allow the protagonist to remain alive. For example, in the former title, the protagonist is a goody-goody guy in an environment where minds are read and no thoughts are hidden, and yet somehow he manages to do just fine in such an environment despite standing out like a sore thumb that he’s not like the rest.

Here, there are other equally hair-scratching examples: a goody-goody knight still somehow kept alive in a vampire’s home as a plot for DMs to use, enemies of the Umbral Court that are allowed to live for flimsy reasons, a writer of treasonous tracts against the undead that is also allowed to live and keep doing what she does again just because. The excuses range from the Umbral Court wanting to appear united in front of the peasants or, my favorite, these Court members are too busy or just can’t be bothered. Did I mention that Nidal is supposed to be a lawful evil theocracy?

Then, there is the judgmental language used here, with this being called “wicked”, that being called “evil”, and so forth. This becomes an issue when things are not so cut and dry good or evil in the first place.

For example, the Black Triune is said to have made an evil, wicked pact with Pin-Kuthon… but they had to, to save their people, and heaven knows, no other gods offered to help them. Was it truly evil for them to do this to save their people?

Then, the baby trade in the Shadow Caverns, again described as evil, wicked, etc. The thing is, the folks called caligni are essentially a sterile species. They can’t have children at all. Caligni babies come to be apparently by chance among the dark folks, with dark folks sometime giving birth to a caligni baby perhaps due to genetic shenanigans or something. The dark folks view caligni babies in a “Yucks, take it away and get rid of it!” light. The caligni that want children buy these unwanted infants to care for and raise as their own, so what is so evil and wicked about this again? Do the authors believe it is more noble for the dark folks to drown those babies instead?

The use of judgmental language here, therefore, is just the authors injecting their opinions on the lore, and given how more morally complex situations are boiled down to “Bad, real bad!”, it makes the authors come off as a consortium of mass-produced Greta Thunberg clones.

Finally, of all the wondrous new strange creatures they could introduce here, the authors choose to present… shadow animals, shadow ferns, and some deadly shadow smoke animal.

In the end, I have to ask: what is this Nidal supposed to be, who is the audience for this splatbook? Is Nidal a land of high fantasy like any other—it sure seems like it—only with cenobites and darkvision and the occasional xenomorph bizarrely dropped into Uskwood? There’s nothing here that screams body horror or any kind of horror, just high fantasy with some goop of gore during the Festival of Night’s Return.

Nidal, Land of Shadows resembles the efforts of Paizo to half-ass backtrack on whatever they conjured for Nidal during their edgy phase in order to make it fit more to their current progressive pogrom of wanting every player to have participant trophies and to transform every tabletop gaming session into an adult daycare activity with the DM acting as the players’ life coach and punching bag.

Hence, this place being just like every other spot in Golarian with the occasional “Look, a scary kyton, ooh! Hey, that’s a vampire in BDSM gear, cute!” moment to remind people that this place is indeed Nidal. Only, this is the Disney World version of Nidal, with true terror going only as far as having Mickey Mouse wear plastic fangs and bondage gear.