In Dungeons and Dragons, a nightwalker is one of three forms of nightshade, evil extraplanar creatures inimical to all life. These monsters first appeared in Frank Mentzer’s Master Rules set (1985) for the Basic D&D system. As the Master set focused on characters from level 26 to 36, nightshades were intended to be suitably epic-level threats—and they mostly deliver on that premise.
The nightwalker was a 20-foot tall, pitch-black humanoid with 21–26 HD and lots of special abilities, including its signature move: destroying a character’s magic items. I’ve known players who would rather have a character killed than lose their magical goodies. I think the nightshades were probably the most, and possibly only, memorable new monster to come out of the Master set.
The nightshades were converted to 2e AD&D in the Mystara Monster Compendium Appendix (1994) with their abilities mostly intact. From there these monsters were brought into 3e with the Monster Manual (2000) and placed into the System Reference Document. Paizo also included these monsters in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 2 (2010).
Nightshades were not included in the 5e core books, but the nightwalker did make Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (2018) as a Challenge 20 undead. The 5e nightwalker lacks the signature ability to destroy magic items (boo) but does have several suitably nasty abilities, including the dread Aura of Annihilation: “Any creature that starts its turn within 30 feet of the nightwalker must succeed on a DC 21 Constitution saving throw or take 14 (4d6) necrotic damage and grant the nightwalker advantage on attack rolls against it until the start of the creature’s next turn. Undead are immune to this aura.”
One of the best things about the 5e nightwalker is the new visual look for an old monster. The 5e artwork clearly taps into the Pale Man from Guillermo del Toro’s haunting Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) but also recalls the xenomorph from the Alien movies. It’s really a perfect fit for a silent, extraplanar horror.
WizKids has a great miniature of this monster, part of their licensed Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures line. I snatched this up thinking it would be an easy paint that I could bang out in between other projects.
I was wrong. First, the miniature is partly translucent to capture the smoky wisps of negative energy floating off the monster—so with my skill level I really couldn’t use my airbrush on this model. Second, the Nolzur miniatures all come primed with a white primer. This is normally a feature, but it turns out painting a base coat of black on top of white primer is a nightmare—every time I thought I was done I would find another tiny speck of white peaking through. Eventually, though, I was able to start adding highlights of dark blue and gray to bring out the features on this great sculpt.
A Michael Mordor video was very helpful for approaching this model, and he had a particularly helpful technique for painting the translucent parts. Although this mini turned out to be much more work than I had anticipated, I was happy with the final results and hope to throw this beast at some unsuspecting players in the not-too-distant future.
One quibble I have always had about the nightshade: how are they undead? Undead are normally creatures that were once living but died and were subsequently transformed into some foul mockery of life. So what was the living antecedent for a nightwalker? The Mystera Compendium has maybe the best idea I’ve yet read: “Some sages suggest that when numerous undead beings are destroyed, the energies released on the Negative Energy Plane coalesce to form a nightshade.” In a sense, this makes nightshades “undead undead,” which is a good enough explanation for me.
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