Shadowslip Carapace

Aura Moderate conjuration and necromancy; CL 11th
Slot armor; Price 38,600 gp; Weight 15 lbs.

This immaculate suit of black leather armor appears almost liquid when viewed from the corner of one’s eye. Its surface bears no stitching despite clearly being crafted from many overlapping layers of impossibly supple hide. Faint silver tracery runs beneath the surface like veins beneath pale skin, occasionally pulsing with dim movement whenever the wearer stands near stone, brick, or worked timber. In darkness, the armor emits no reflection whatsoever, causing portions of the wearer’s body to appear strangely incomplete or half-erased from reality itself.

The Shadowslip Carapace functions as a suit of +2 shadow leather armor. Three times per day, the wearer may activate the armor as a swift action, granting the ability to pass through solid material as though using gaseous form combined with passwall. Unlike normal passwall, this effect allows the wearer themselves to physically move through solid surfaces at a speed of up to 10 feet per round for a duration of 1 round per caster level. The wearer may move through wood, plaster, brick, packed earth, or stone, though magical barriers and force effects remain impassable.

While using this ability, the wearer’s body partially dissolves into smoky shadow, becoming semi-transparent and unnaturally cold. Creatures adjacent to the wearer during this movement often report hearing muffled whispers emanating from inside the walls themselves.

Each use of the armor’s wallwalking ability accrues one “slip mark.” These marks cannot be detected through ordinary means and remain attached to the wearer permanently until removed through remove curse cast by a caster of at least 15th level followed immediately by break enchantment. Once the wearer accumulates thirteen slip marks, the armor’s hidden curse awakens fully.

Beginning with the fourteenth activation and every activation thereafter, the wearer must succeed on a DC 19 Will save after exiting a wall or become partially trapped within the material traversed. A trapped creature is considered helpless, unable to move, and begins suffocating normally. Removing the victim requires either destruction of the surrounding material, stone shape, passwall, etherealness, or similarly powerful magic. If the creature dies while trapped, the armor absorbs portions of the victim’s shadow, reducing the corpse to a flattened black stain within the wall itself.

If a trapped victim is successfully removed alive, the armor immediately attempts to bond more deeply with them. The wearer permanently loses 1 point of Constitution each time this occurs unless a remove curse spell is cast within 24 hours.

Should the wearer perish while fused inside solid material, the armor vanishes entirely after 1d4 hours. Within several weeks, rumors invariably emerge elsewhere concerning a silent thief who walks through locked vaults as though doors were merely suggestions.

LORE

Among the criminal underworlds of great cities, the Shadowslip Carapace is spoken of less as an object and more as a fate waiting patiently for ambitious men and women to discover it. Stories surrounding the armor rarely begin with its creation. Instead, they begin with impossible thefts - royal vaults emptied without broken locks, assassins appearing inside sealed chambers, prisoners vanishing from windowless cells only to leave bloody fingernail marks embedded deep within stone walls. The armor drifts through history attached not to dynasties or kingdoms, but to disappearances.

The oldest surviving references originate from subterranean burial records beneath a nameless river-city now long swallowed by marshland and ruin. Those records describe a guild of thieves who believed walls represented an insult - physical declarations that certain people were allowed safety while others were denied access. Their leader, remembered only as “The Gentleman Between Rooms,” supposedly sought magic capable of rendering ownership meaningless. The ritual used to create the first Shadowslip Carapace required the skin of executed burglars, mortar taken from prison walls, and dust gathered from tombs whose occupants had never been properly buried. Whether these accounts are true or merely embellishment remains uncertain. Unfortunately, the armor itself lends unsettling credibility to the tale.

What makes the Shadowslip Carapace especially feared among experienced thieves is not merely its curse, but the peculiar psychology surrounding it. Nearly every recorded wearer understood the danger eventually awaiting them. Nearly all continued using the armor regardless. There exists something profoundly intoxicating about stepping through barriers humanity collectively agrees should be absolute. Doors cease to matter. Locks become theater. Guards become irrelevant. The wearer slowly develops a sensation that the world itself has become thin and negotiable. Many users reportedly begin touching walls absentmindedly during conversation, as though reassuring themselves that solidity still exists for everyone else.

Recovered examples of the armor often carry strange secondary phenomena. Rooms containing the armor occasionally produce faint knocking sounds from inside the walls late at night. Candles nearby burn with elongated black flames. In several documented cases, individuals sleeping near the armor reported dreams of narrow suffocating spaces and the sensation of unseen fingers brushing against their own from inside solid stone. Priests specializing in funerary rites frequently insist the armor does not merely transport flesh through walls - it briefly places the wearer somewhere else entirely during transition, somewhere profoundly hostile to the living.

CONSTRUCTION

Requirements Craft Magic Arms and Armor, gaseous form, passwall, shadow conjuration, bestow curse, creator must have at least 10 ranks in Hide;
Cost 19,300 gp + 1,544 XP + powdered grave mortar worth 2,500 gp and a fragment of stone taken from a sealed tomb.

Kelwyn’s Notes

There exists a peculiar category of cursed object whose danger does not emerge from malice alone, but from cooperation with entirely reasonable desires. The Shadowslip Carapace does not tempt through bloodlust, madness, or cruelty. It tempts through convenience. Through the terrible seduction of bypassing effort itself. One need not smash the door if one may simply ignore the existence of doors altogether. Civilization, unfortunately, is constructed almost entirely from agreed-upon barriers. Walls, laws, customs, graves, promises, marriages, borders, coffins - humanity survives because we collectively pretend certain lines cannot be crossed lightly. The moment an individual acquires the ability to disregard those boundaries without consequence, something in the soul begins quietly loosening from its proper place.

I have observed that thieves who survive prolonged use of the armor begin speaking differently about space itself. Rooms cease being destinations and instead become volumes waiting to be invaded. Privacy becomes an amusing superstition. Locked vaults inspire irritation rather than caution. They develop the emotional habits of dampness - seeping rather than arriving. Even when standing perfectly still beside a companion, one receives the uncanny impression that they are already halfway elsewhere. Such people often become profoundly lonely without realizing why. Human beings are comforted by shared limitations. We trust one another partly because we all remain trapped by the same physical truths. A man who may step through walls ceases, in subtle ways, to fully belong among those who cannot.

The curse itself is almost philosophical in its cruelty. Eventually the armor forgets that the wearer is meant to emerge from the wall. That detail simply becomes inconsistent. One cannot repeatedly transform oneself into something liminal - neither fully material nor immaterial - without reality itself beginning to question which condition is correct. The final fate awaiting most users feels less like punishment and more like gradual administrative error within the machinery of existence. The universe ceases recognizing the wearer as a creature meant to occupy open space. Stone becomes uncertain whether to reject them. Flesh becomes uncertain whether it is still entirely flesh. The wall closes around them not with violence, but with terrible indifference.

There are laborers in Ville des Marais who repair flood barriers every season despite knowing the waters shall rise again regardless. There are lantern keepers who relight lamps consumed nightly by fog. There are mourners who continue singing funeral hymns despite fully understanding that death has never once been persuaded to reconsider its work. Such acts possess dignity precisely because they accept the existence of obstacles while choosing perseverance anyway. The Shadowslip Carapace offers the opposite philosophy. It whispers that barriers themselves are insults rather than realities to navigate with grace. Objects carrying such beliefs invariably consume their owners eventually, for the world has little patience for those who insist they alone deserve exemption from its rules.