When we broke down Moonstone's troupes, the Shades got a short entry and a promise. Fair is fair: they are a full quarter of the game, they own some of the best sculpts Goblin King Games has ever put out, and they deserve more than a paragraph.
So. Welcome to the churchyard.
What the Shades Actually Are
Tauber's dead do not leave. They loiter. The Shades are what happens when a world full of petty, greedy, extremely funny people keeps its personality after death and then discovers there are still Moonstones lying around worth fighting over.
That is the joke underneath the whole faction, and it is why they do not read as generic undead. Nobody here is a mindless skeleton. They are the same grasping idiots as everyone else in Tauber, just with fewer functioning organs and considerably more time.
The Three Flavours of Dead
Once you start reading stat cards you notice the Shades split into three distinct keyword groups, and knowing which one you are drawn to tells you what your troupe will feel like.
The Risen are the ones who came back in their own bodies, and they are the closest thing the faction has to a conventional line. Negroli, Greymair, Serif, Nanny, and the frost giant Angerboda. These are soldiers, clerics and nobles who died with unfinished business and a full suit of armour. If you want a Shades troupe that can stand somewhere and stay there, you are building around Risen.
The Spirits never got a body back. Marley, Sen'Ara, Roary, Abra Cadaverous, Igor the Servant. Less substantial, considerably harder to pin down, and the half of the faction that plays with the board rather than on it.
The Psychopomps are the strangest and most Moonstone thing in the entire game: the escorts and ferrymen of the dead, rendered as a heraldic pigeon (Brave Sir Pidge), a lamp (Lampy Darkson), a fish lord (Jeremy, Lord of the Deep), several unsettling infants, and a sentient pastry called Teacake of Torment. Yes, really. If your reaction to that list was delight rather than confusion, congratulations, you are a Shades player.
The Ghost Pirates Situation
Here is a genuinely useful quirk, and it is the kind of thing that only turns up once you own a few boxes. A surprising number of Shades are also Dominion characters. Barnakelle, Commodore Delahaye, Chezapeaky, Brigid, Viktor Petty, the Viscount de Faulte.
There is a whole ghost-pirate wing of this faction with a foot in both camps. Souls of the Deep and Eternal Servitude sit in both collections for exactly this reason.
Practically, that means Shades models rarely become dead weight. Buy into the drowned-and-undead end of the range and you have quietly started a second troupe. That is unusually good value in a game where most people own more than one faction anyway.
How They Feel to Play
Dread and attrition. Where the Leshavult want to be somewhere else by the time your sword arrives, the Shades are perfectly content to stand there and be a problem you have to keep solving. They are patient in a game where most factions are in a hurry.
The bluffing layer plays differently for them too. Half the Shades roster looks unthreatening right up until it is not, and a faction full of small strange things is very good at making an opponent spend their good cards on the wrong target. Against the Shades you are never quite sure which model is the actual threat, and that uncertainty is worth more than any single stat line.
Choose them if: You want the spookiest, weirdest models on the shelf, you would rather grind an opponent down than outrun them, and you find a haunted pastry funnier than a lightning bolt.
Where to Start
The clean entry: the Shady Bunch troupe box. Three Spirit miniatures, Sen'Ara, Morag and Marley, and a tidy self-contained introduction to what the faction does.
The best value if you have a friend: the Life & Death Struggle Two Player Starter Set. Four Shades of Moonreach (Negroli, Greymair, Serif and Angerboda) against four Fauns, plus every card, token and widget two people need to play. Buying this and a rulebook is the cheapest way to have an actual opponent, which is the resource new players are always shortest on.
Once you are hooked: the Shades Campaign Expansion Pack if you want your troupe to persist between games, Nanny and Barnakelle for characters with real presence, and Echo of the Forgotten King or Never Ending Knights when you want the board to feel genuinely haunted.
You will also want the Core Rulebook and an Acrylic Measuring Widget if you do not already have them. The whole Shades range is here.
So: are you coming back as something with armour, something with no body at all, or a haunted cake? There is no wrong answer, and that is the best thing about this troupe.
