BEHIND FALSE FACES: DOPPELGANGERS EVERYWHERE (Patreon)

BEHIND FALSE FACES
Doppelgangers Everywhere

In Waterdeep and its environs, “everyone” has heard of the Unseen, the mysterious, hidden—and in reputation, decidedly sinister—organization that supposedly lurks in the shadows, its members hidden in forms not their own (having killed, eaten, and impersonated so many fine upstanding citizens, that when you deal with anyone in the Deep, “you just never know”).

The Truth?

However, as many merchants will mutter to you if they’re convinced you are not yourself a “sidler” (the most popular current slang term for doppelgangers; older words include “falsemasks” and “deadlies,” and the race calls themselves Shallar), doppelgangers live undetected in many cities of Faerûn, wearing the shapes of others. The individuals they’re impersonating are often high-ranking courtiers and civic officials, or innkeepers or tavernmasters who reign over large staffs to do the “bustling work.”

Most such conspiracy and “dark lurker” beliefs are fanciful embellishments of some sort of grain of underlying truth, but in this case, the muttering merchants are right: there are indeed doppelgangers dwelling in many large cities, living as “easy lives” as they can attain without being important enough to command high public profiles and therefore rivals and enemies.

Long ago, doppelgangers (like gnomes, and halflings) decided that the ambitions, energy, and relentless drive for betterment of the human race made humans ideal folk to live among, and human cities were well suited to them.

The Doppelganger Way

Unlike gnomes and halflings, who thrive in human cities by being tireless workers, both skilled crafters and menders and swift drudge-workers (the maids, launderers, scullery-maids and “chopknives” of kitchen and pantry fame, as well as the sorters and packers in many warehouses), Shallar decided to impersonate (and so, replace) humans living the lives they craved for themselves. Talk of doppelgangers eating their human victims is usually just that—empty talk—but doppelgangers who don’t have ready access to slavers, to remove the humans they replace, usually do slay their targets, and then face the perennial problem of murderers everywhere: body disposal, in a manner that won’t link them to the death, or ideally lead to the body being found at all.

For this reason, there has long been...

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