Shambly was first discovered within the ancient and decaying sewer system that sprawls beneath the Europan capital of Dresden. He was found deep inside a lightless labyrinth that served as a clandestine laboratory for a malevolent necromancer. This practitioner of the dark arts had been utilizing the isolation of the city's underbelly to conduct horrific experiments on the resident goblin population, transforming them into various forms of undead thralls. While the party was forced to eliminate the necromancer and his more aggressive guardians, Shambly was identified as a peculiar and non-threatening anomaly of reanimation.

The physical state of Shambly is characterized by extreme degradation and advanced age. He is described as ancient and withered, with a mechanical or magical failure in his reanimation that resulted in an agonizingly slow pace of movement. Because of this physical infirmity, he was deemed effectively harmless by the traveling party during their initial trek to forge an alliance with Field General Philander Bramwell Neckett. In a moment of macabre levity amidst the chaos of the revolution, the group chose to spare the creature rather than destroy him, allowing him to persist within the tunnels.

Following the party's decision to grant him mercy, Shambly became a recurring fixture of the campaign’s narrative. As the vanguards of the revolution utilized the sewer network multiple times to navigate between the Tristessa Wood and the military compound, they frequently encountered the undead goblin. Shambly’s role became one of unintentional comedy, as he was perpetually found lingering far behind the group, still attempting to catch up to them hours or even days after their initial passage. Despite the fires consuming the city above, Shambly remained a constant, slow-moving reminder of the strange arcane secrets hidden within the foundations of Dresden.

Following the violent conclusion of the revolution and the final defeat of the Nightingales, the long process of rebuilding the shattered capital began. In the aftermath of the conflict, Shambly eventually accomplished his perpetual goal of navigating the city’s lightless labyrinth and emerged from the sewer system into the surface world. Despite his undead nature and extreme physical degradation, the unusual creature was not destroyed or discarded by the newly established government. Instead, due to his centuries of observation within the city's foundations and his methodical, if agonizingly slow, pace of operation, he was hired as a formal archivist at the Europan Parliamentary Archives in Dresden. There, the former laboratory experiment found a new purpose among the soot-stained records of Europa’s history, serving as a living—if withered—bridge between the city’s dark past and its uncertain future.