Shen
Played by: Alex Morrison
First appeared in: 3.502: Monster Squad
Shen is an elf with carrot-orange hair who runs the Stoneway Inn in Evanstone, a tavern that is completely empty when the party arrives. In 3.502: Monster Squad he asks for a gold piece per room, but Major Baker's Cat haggles him down to a few silver with Persuasion and a failed dance routine, and he answers the cat in elvish when it turns out that the cat speaks it. He explains that people have been vanishing and dying and that the trouble began about when Mayor Warder Ebengard left town a week earlier, tells the party of rumors about a vault and rituals at the mayor's manor, and says that he has only lived in Evanstone a few years and was not always an innkeeper. When pressed on his angle, he says that he simply would like not to die in the night. He leads the party out through the back of the inn, promises not to lock the doors and asks them to knock thrice when they return.
In 3.505: Lighting the Way the party suspects him of being a "secret villain" and finds the inn empty and silent when it returns. The mayor's memories, which Glenn Ghoulia gets by eating the mayor's brain in the cellar, show Shen seated in a circle of symbols calling up silvery entities, which the party takes to be the dead lights, and later interrogating and beating the mayor in a basement. He serves one of the beings beyond the ways, wants them opened so that its servants, the "preparers," can be sent through, and wants the book that the party took from the vault. After the party sleeps, the book vanishes from its bag. At the obsidian pillar on the hill, Shen thanks the party for doing the "difficult labors" in the one place where he could not answer the questions himself, says that he has dozens or hundreds of preparers ready to wipe clean a world with a blue sky, and leaves the party to "play with my friends" as shrieks rise from the trees.