DM: What do you want to roll to triangulate this angle of attack?
Twilight Sparkle: It sounds like I get hurt from a cave-in if I get it wrong, and I've probably got some time left before the wedding... Can I just take my time to get it right? Take 10 or 20?
DM: Sure, that's reasonable. It takes a while with only your wits and the light of your horn to go by, but you figure out what you need. You fire another Magic Missile. It bounces around the room growing larger in size, then hits the wall at the precise point you calculated and...
SFX: (BOOM!)
Rainbow Dash: Dang. We need to get you to explode things more often.
DM: The section of wall is shattered into pieces, and thankfully the rest of the cave remains still. Behind it you see another large chamber full of pale crystals, and inside is... Princess Cadance?
Twilight Sparkle: How does she look?
DM: Disheveled, like she's been down here for days.
Twilight Sparkle: So it's the real one?!
DM: Unless it's a clever fake-out.
Twilight Sparkle: ...Why would you suggest something so cruel?
Shapeshifting is a neat power on the players' side, but the paranoia of dealing with shapeshifters is terrifying and demoralizing. Something about the horror of being unable to trust your own eyes and assumptions about who is who...
Notice: Guest comic submissions are open! Guidelines here. Deadline: February 20th.
I don't think the comic is going to go this route, but I do think there might be an interesting story in "The character that everyone knew and loved this whole time was the imposter living out the life of someone they thought had died, but now the other person is back and wants revenge on their imposter"
(I mean, it's kind of the plot of a recent movie, and I've seen something like it in a video game, but I haven't seen it in a D&D context and that might be neat.)
It's a film that released on March 22nd, 2019, from a horror director who surprised everyone when they stepped into the scene in 2017.
The whole thing I mentioned is kind of a massive spoiler for the plot of the film, so I'm trying to keep it vague for the sake of not messing with other people's experience.
I'm sure there are other examples too, the "kill and replace" trope is common enough. But that was the example that occurred to me.
Elvis. He's the Schrodinger's Cat of potentially dead celebrities.
Let's be fair, by now he's almost certainly succumbed to age, but for 50 years he was the one
Reminds me of a really, really weird Wh40k Black Crusade campaign I ran, with players wholey unable to play scumbags.... Instead of becoming Daemon Princes they ended up becoming imperial saints instead...
As for WHY it reminds me... There was a Arc where a Inquisiter they inexplicably sided with sent them to infiltrate a Tau city on some planet, and foun a EPIDEMIC of bootleg Polymorphine created from some byproduct of a local sea creature that was totally not space Ilithids.
Who was really who and doing what was intentionally impossible to track, but seemed like it COULD be figured out, but I designed it so that whatever they ultimately decided to do was right...
One of the PCs barely managed to make a compound that causes Polymorphine is o Explode on contact... And we're so annoyed by the shape shifting that the fact it was a horridly painful, scarring acid on anyone NOT using Polymorphine was an acceptable side effect, and the players and the NPC sidekicks were all required to carry some at all times...
THE FACT IT WAS EXTREMELY PAINFUL ORGANIC ACID actually came in handy fa, far more then once... So many ruined eyeballs...
I've never had a shapeshifter in my game, but I HAVE thrown Mimics at the party! Would that count as thematically relevant?
Honestly, mimics are a lot of fun all 'round, I highly recommend them! They're not grievously difficult, but they throw a wrench into combat that forces them to think and improvise, at least a little. And there's so many options! Give a mimic the Giant or Young template so that the PCs can't even judge by size whether it's a mimic or not! (I had a Giant Mimic that was disguised as a four-post canopy bed. Lots of fun!)
Alternatively, throw a mimic WITH a mimic. My party was kind of expecting the suspicious chest to be a mimic, and was prepared to grab a big keg of ale to destroy its sticky ichor... but of the two available, they picked the wrong one... it was ALSO a mimic. TWICE as much fun!
Other mimic ideas: test the party's memory, have a "door" slam in what used to be an empty narrow archway! How many chairs were around the dining table? For bonus confusion, mimics are smart enough to move other objects to throw you off the scent!