Some rules issues for my campaign

[ZamielVanWeber]

I am running a game where have come into a pile of questions:

1) Does the total concealment granted by the shadow template prevent the players from knowing where the creature is, or only give the 50% miss chance?

2) How would low intelligence enemies react to the construct created by Astral Construct? I mean in terms of prioritizing it in battle.

And I cannot remember the rest of the questions right now... I will totally update this when I remember them.

[Flickerdart]

1) The players could not use visual means of locating the creature, but any others would still work.
2) Depends on the creature and its motivations (so exactly like a high-Int creature, but with simpler goals). Vermin and animals would probably shun it and try to get around it, because it doesn't smell like food, but they wouldn't be above attacking it if that was the only option presented to them. Golems explicitly don't do anything without being attacked or ordered, so they would ignore the Astral Construct until it attacked them (and then probably prioritize by what dealt them the most damage). Things like oozes would do the same thing they do to everything.

[ksbsnowowl]

I am running a game where have come into a pile of questions:

1) Does the total concealment granted by the shadow template prevent the players from knowing where the creature is, or only give the 50% miss chance?

A strict reading does not allow normal visual means of seeing the shadow creature. There are things that would at the very least show what square the shadow creature is in (Arcane Sight would show which square it is in, because Supernatural effects are detected by detect magic, but it would still have a 50% miss chance; blindsense would show the square; tremorsense would too). Blindsight and a Daylight spell (and actual day light) are pretty much the only ways to completely "defeat" a shadow creature's shadow blend ability, and most other things only show the square it is in.

That said, it wouldn't be a bad idea as a DM to rule that the Shadow Creatures are completely unseen (effectively auto-succeeding on Hide) until they enter combat (so they pretty much always get surprise), and at that point just treat it as a 50% miss chance.

Note that in 3.0 such creatures only had a 40% miss chance and were fully targetable, they just had a miss chance. The attempt in 3.5 to "simplify" the concealment rules produced a rules abomination by giving them total concealment, which is effectively auto-hiding all the time.

[Than]

Mindsight (Lords of Madness) would detect the creature's square unless this shadow creature had 0 INT. Scent would note the direction until you were adjacent to it, then you'd have the square pinpointed. Scent won't remove the other benefits of total concealment though.