Located not far outside of Goldvale, the “Shelves Plateau” is named after the “people” living on top of it for an unspecified but long amount of time. It towers 1000 feet into the sky with no obvious way up, solid rock faces all around, and about 2 square miles in land at the top. The Goldvale Shelter is embedded into the base of it far below.
As the story goes, a wizard long ago1) abducted an elf named Harthi2), took him to the top of the plateau where the wizard's lair was3) to run experiments. Harthi was cloned, but imprisoned in a suspended state so unaware of the scope of what was going on. The wizard made many clones, and for some reason unknown turned them all into sheep. Sheep with humanoid intelligence, who were all once Harthi. Think of them as “splinterlings”, all having splintered from the original Harthi.
The splinterlings, each originally being a clone of Harthi, with some magical tinkering to make both males and female, sharing his memories and all, because a people of cloned elves turned into sheep. The Wizard made an exit at some point in time, perhaps because an experiment was finished or of other causes. Yet the clones remained, and even in sheep bodies, with no opposable fingers and meager resources on the plateau, mostly sticks, small grasses, and obviously a lot of wool, they flourished. First they learned how to trap water in dew pits. Then they learned to work together in sheep form using rams horns to push rock around. After more than 1000 years they'd built up a low tech society full of ritual, now believing in a sheep deity4), created terraced spaces and rotated crops amongst them for survival, long but low houses out of boulders, small branches from shrubs since trees were scare, grasses, muds and of course wool. Limited resources kept them at this level, as well as writing since the best they could do was scratch a broken version of elvish into surfaces with horns and hooves. They adopted the name “SHELVES”, a combination of the term “SH”eep & “ELVES”. Further that with them being on a plateau, which is itself a kind of “shelf.” As generations passed, each newborn took on the name Harthi with a # after it to represent themselves. e.g. “Harthi #5003”. The original elf they were all cloned from, Wizard, and links to the past faded. They had their own leaders, customs and existed as an isolated culture.
Eventually praying to their deity5) for salvation, better known as the herd wanting to finally escape the plateau, their deity abducted a pair of adventurers6): Eyrun & Urist. In the blink of an eye they:
This for now is where the tale of the SHELVES stands, with the sheep forms stuck high on the plateau and the original Harthi remaining with them, for now. But the PCs walked away with the ring, and with the knowledge of the inhabitants up there. Ethically torn (or NOT?) to return and get everyone down.