Shadow Marches

I sometimes wonder if there was a typo in the title that the developers got stuck with; the Shadow Marches are consistently described in the short section of the setting book as if they were the Shadow Marshes. While I'm not interesting in removing the swamps entirely from the Shadow Marches, I don't want to imply that the entire region is one gigantic swamp either.

Obviously, where Eberron in Print has orcs, I will have Atlanteans. These savages, as I've explained earlier, are leftovers from Atlantis; not on the doomed island subcontinent when it sank beneath the waves and therefore spared. However, the curse of Atlantis followed all from that benighted land whether they drowned in the cataclysm that sank it or not, and the current Atlanteans are savage and hostile and are either completely unable and perhaps a little unwilling to advance beyond a stone-age savagery in small tribes and clans, holding tightly to their backwater lands and resisting the influx of foreigners with extreme prejudice. The Lovecraftian curse also still follows them; it makes sense to me that the Shadow Marches of Eberron in print were the beachhead of the invasion of Xoriat; basically the Far Realm of sorts of the Eberron cosmology, whereas for me it is the last redoubt of the Atlanteans, who's own hubristic delving into what men were not meant to know brought about their downfall and followed their refugee offspring. Many of the people of the Shadow Marches should be seen as very much like the strange swampy cultists mentioned in the middle section of Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu"—(The Tale of Inspector Lagrasse)—cultists of strange Lovecraftian monsters living their debauched lives away from the eyes of more civilized people who would in turn root them out if they knew what they were up to in the swamps as an abomination and affront to all that is good and holy. The Gatekeepers in this setting now become less heroic and friendly; rather, they are merely the ones who see a nihilistic Cthulhoid invasion into the world as a bad thing, especially since the Shadow Marches would be ground zero for such an incursion. They also tend to be more human and less Atlantean in their makeup, although of course there isn't a 100% correlation between being Atlantean and worshipping dark Lovecraftian cults.

In Eberron in print, there are of course half-orcs; the mixed progeny of the humans who arrived later and the orcs who were already there. The mixed race children of humans and Atlanteans, on the other hand, are just humans, albeit humans with an unusual physical appearance that hints at their foreign ancestry too. I don't believe it likely that many goblins live here, as the book notes; rather, I'll point out that for much of the long border between the Shadow Marches and Droaam there is no natural barrier of any kind, and that border is more academic and fungible rather than real. The same is true to a lesser extent over the smaller border between the Shadow Marches and the Daemon Wastes, so rather than being discrete entities, they are more like spectrums; Droaam gradually becomes the Shadow Marches as you go westward rather than you in a moment cross from one to the other. The monstrous inhabitants of Droaam therefore have more of a place in the Shadow Marches than goblins would; ratmen and thurses will largely replace the goblin population.

House Tharashk is more or less as indicated here; a mix of Atlantean and human peoples who are more outward looking than the norm for the region, and therefore perhaps more welcoming. Many of them do business outside of the Shadow Marches, of course, as well, and they provide a means and opportunity for adventure to happen in the region without it being cripplingly difficult due to the xenophobic and hostile reaction of almost everyone else to anyone who isn't from their tribe or group or at least native to the region and part of their culture.

The Shadow Marches population remixed

Atlantean: 55%

Humans: 20%

Ratmen: 12%

Thurses: 7%

Other: 6%