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What is the best version of El? This poll is closed. |
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| Elminster |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Elmara |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Entwine |
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13 | 4.19% |
| GURPS |
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99 | 31.94% |
| El Kabong |
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153 | 49.35% |
| Elves |
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5 | 1.61% |
| Total: | 310 votes | ||
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In the last homebrew world I worked on with some friends, the Drow were a cultural offshoot with a legitimate grievance: Elven society prior to their creation was an aristocratic magocracy where the ruling class were sorcerers and wizardry (the practice of arcane magic through ritual and formal learning rather than natural power) was considered deviant and evil, binding magic unnaturally to the caster's will. The Drow began as a secret society of rebel wizards who wanted to change the existing social order, and when flushed out were driven underground to form their own societies. They aren't all onyx black or anything like that, and they aren't any more intrinsically evil, but they certainly do nurture an understandable grudge against their kin (who have since evolved a little either by retreating from the notion of government or becoming invested in more progressive human societies and realizing they were pretty lovely in the past). Our version of Corellon was a pretty ugly, two-faced god, who literally held a harp under one arm and a perpetually-bloodied sword in the other.
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Aug 17, 2014 16:46
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 17:45 |
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Drow in my campaign world are just Tolkien's Noldor, as are *tabs over to google doc* elves, eladrin, dragonborn, tieflings, halflings, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, sahuagin, aboleths, beholders, bullywugs, bugbears, ogres, giants...
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Aug 17, 2014 16:53
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Zombies' Downfall posted:I'm not sure there's anyway to explain why underground Drow have ebony skin and not paler skin than regular Elves without resorting to curses, divine marks, and poo poo like that and I'm pretty sure "having dark skin is a reflection of the evil in your heart" is p much the racistest. It's basically conceptually identical to the Bible reading white people used to justify slavery. The only explanation I've ever liked was "background magical radiation in the Underdark caused them to mutate" which makes about as much sense as anything else.
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Aug 17, 2014 16:56
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Effectronica posted:Drow in my campaign world are just Tolkien's Noldor, as are *tabs over to google doc* elves, eladrin, dragonborn, tieflings, halflings, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, sahuagin, aboleths, beholders, bullywugs, bugbears, ogres, giants... Impossible. I'd never kiss an aboleth.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:00
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I think I'm pretty much over a lot of fantasy roleplaying, and honestly fantasy in general. Thinking about most of my gaming purchases, they are seem to be clustered in Sci Fi and/or Horror genres. I still have a fondness for Tolkien though, mostly out of nostalgia. Which reminds me, is The One Ring RPG any good? I know nothing about it other than it occasionally pops up when I browse DTRPG.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:11
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Drow loving suck like every D&D 'bad race' because in the monster manual they literally have a chunk that says the entire race is some stripe of Evil (the big capital E evil that DEFINES YOUR VERY SOUL like capital G Good or capital N Neutral) and they're a bunch of demon worshiping slavers who eat babies and shake your hand after they sneeze and make uncomfortable eye contact with your girlfriend while you're trying to talk to them. Like, the only way to have any nuance in them without redoing the entire race is to make a group that bucks the mold to the extent that they're literal heretics that probably would be killed by the rest of Drow society, so it really hampers whatever 'well you have to understand even your enemies can have merits' thing you're doing with them. Also the hilarious nerdy weirdness about women. 'No see unlike others they're female dominated, which of COURSE means it's BDSM styles 24/7 and men are kept as nothing more than slaves and underclass!'
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Aug 17, 2014 17:16
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The best way to do an 'Always Evil' race is to treat that as an opinion written by their enemies. Think all the 'The Hun eat the flesh of children! Stop them ravaging poor Belgium!' stuff from WWI and all that. Treating the monster manual as propaganda written by warring people groups makes things way more fun.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:22
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Gravy Train Robber posted:I think I'm pretty much over a lot of fantasy roleplaying, and honestly fantasy in general. Thinking about most of my gaming purchases, they are seem to be clustered in Sci Fi and/or Horror genres. I still have a fondness for Tolkien though, mostly out of nostalgia. The One Ring is pretty good from a "reading without playing" standpoint, with some fairly neat approaches to character development and pacing. It's more Hobbit than LOTR in terms of how you should play things, at least from the core book. Don't have any of the supplements.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:31
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I'm in Alabama, where "Mark of Cain" and "Curse of Ham" are both still taught regularly. I've had people I thought were fairly normal argue that black skin was the mark of cain in the 2000s. Even worse was WOTC's attempts to fix it: Aha, Drow's skin is black because they were cursed for being evil? That's bad. We'll change is so that Dark Elves were brown, and are now black because all their ancestors had sex with a demon, which totally fixes the problem and gives us a justification for Drow being always-evil! Of course, this is explained in a novel, so the way you find out about it unless you are an FR nerd is the "You are reborn as a normal elf baby!" epic destiny. You guys know I love Mystara, but their underground elf antagonists were also pretty terrible. They are: A diaspora people who wandered a desert for 400 years until their monotheist god gave them 10 commandments and a body of tribal purity laws and lead them to a promised land. They are also secretly infiltrating and controlling world governments and are behind the "savage" races, using them to weaken the "normal" ones.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:50
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Mormon Star Wars posted:You guys know I love Mystara, but their underground elf antagonists were also pretty terrible. They are: Wait, what? That sounds like serious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" stuff. How did that get through editing? Davin Valkri fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 17:54
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Mormon Star Wars posted:the way you find out about it unless you are an FR nerd is the "You are reborn as a normal elf baby!" epic destiny Haha what book was this in? My gut said the FR Player's Guide but the only ED I see in there is Chosen.
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Aug 17, 2014 17:56
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Zombies' Downfall posted:Haha what book was this in? My gut said the FR Player's Guide but the only ED I see in there is Chosen. Dragon Magazine 367. The funny thing here is that the article does a terrible job at explaining the change, so if you read the article you know that they are being reborn as a Dark Elf baby, but if you don't waste your time reading DROW NOVEL 20: THE DROWNING then it looks even worse: It looks like the reward is being reborn as a white elf. Davin Valkri posted:Wait, what? That sounds like serious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" stuff. How did that get through editing? People stop being able to recognize troublesome RL ethnic stereotypes as soon as you put pointed ears on them and add a bunch of apostrophes to their names.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:02
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It's Redeemed Drow, and it's from Dragon Magazine.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:04
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Gravy Train Robber posted:
TOR is great but has a few WTF aspects to it, thankfully easily solved with some judicious house ruling. Supplements have been very well done and the art design is fantastic throughout. There's a new revised rulebook out for it in early September, replacing the slipcase and books. It's going from one of the worst indexes in rpg history to one of the best. Doesn't seem to get a lot of discussion on TG though, or at least the thread on it appears to have vanished.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:06
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PST posted:TOR is great but has a few WTF aspects to it, thankfully easily solved with some judicious house ruling. Supplements have been very well done and the art design is fantastic throughout. There's a new revised rulebook out for it in early September, replacing the slipcase and books. It's going from one of the worst indexes in rpg history to one of the best. Frankly, it's fairly odd to me that they haven't expanded the field of play in official supplements.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:11
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First time I used the drow it was by removing the race entirely and making the name refer to people who worshiped Lolth, the goddess of night and deception. Still mostly fey. Still forced underground when Lolth started and lost her war. It worked out well enough to ease my inner sjw. For the next game I run, I'm considering making them into Silver Elves, who serve as prison guards and grave minders to all the things dwarves unleash when they dig too deeply, and literally have silver in their blood.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:14
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LeSquide posted:Oh, they're supporting FR as the core setting just like they supported Grayhawk as 3e's core setting! My phone ate this post so I'm going to note again that there was not 1 but 2 Greyhawk campaign settings produced during 3.0, not including the Living Greyhawk rules. You could get all the Geoff to stuff your face with that you wanted. Also the stunningly most 5e thing about them not printing a FR Campaign Setting is how incredibly myopic it is and how well that fits in with their whole style of things. Think about today's new D&D player, who reads about this COOL SETTING from everything - the core rulebooks, the starter set, even the adventures they're releasing. And then they look for more details and WotC's response is essentially "heh. you should know what to read already, noob." It's the most nerdy gatekeeping groggy thing ever - this is too cool to share with you.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:21
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Effectronica posted:Frankly, it's fairly odd to me that they haven't expanded the field of play in official supplements. Rivendell is out (in PDF at any rate) and expands into Eriador. In general it's excellent, though i think the method of 'balancing' Dunedain and Noldor (High Elves) is clumsy and poor, but it's an easy fix. There's an adventure book for Eriador coming this Autumn as well as a player's book which will include some new cultures (Bree, Lorien, Blue Mountains and Gondor have been mentioned). I think the wasn't well handled in the amount and speed of releases until this summer (Rivendell was announced 2 years ago) but they seem to have turned it around, and as long as everything on the list comes out then it's going to be in good shape going into next year.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:23
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Arivia posted:It's the most nerdy gatekeeping groggy thing ever They literally hired consultants to make this happen. 
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Aug 17, 2014 18:24
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Error 404 posted:They literally hired consultants to make this happen. By the way, I keep missing you on IRC, but you're doing great work on the whole consultants thing. For all my voice counts for, you're definitely not a hanger-on.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:31
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PST posted:Rivendell is out (in PDF at any rate) and expands into Eriador. In general it's excellent, though i think the method of 'balancing' Dunedain and Noldor (High Elves) is clumsy and poor, but it's an easy fix. There's an adventure book for Eriador coming this Autumn as well as a player's book which will include some new cultures (Bree, Lorien, Blue Mountains and Gondor have been mentioned). Oh, that's fairly good news. I kinda wish they'd add Dunland, Harad, and Rhun as playable cultures, but I know that's realistically never going to happen.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:32
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Effectronica posted:Frankly, it's fairly odd to me that they haven't expanded the field of play in official supplements. The stated plan (not sure if this is the case anymore) was that they wanted to pull something like FFG's Star Wars games: TOR is focused specifically on Rhovanion in the years after the Battle of Five Armies, and there will eventually be other core books focused on other areas/times (IIRC they plan to have one focused on Gondor/Rohan around the time of the War of the Ring).
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Aug 17, 2014 18:34
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Here's how I'd redo Drow: The Underdark is the original elf homeland. All surface-dweller elves are the descendants of principled rebels against the underground societies, which, although varied in their particular wrongdoings, are basically all pyramid schemes with demons at the apex. This is because those underground kingdoms border Hell, the place where they invented jerks. Underdark food is rich in exotic minerals, especially silver, which accumulates in the body, giving its natives a deep blue-gray complexion and shiny hair, and also an extreme sensitivity to sunlight; if you live on surface food you won't be dark blue.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:36
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Lemon Curdistan posted:The stated plan (not sure if this is the case anymore) was that they wanted to pull something like FFG's Star Wars games: TOR is focused specifically on Rhovanion in the years after the Battle of Five Armies, and there will eventually be other core books focused on other areas/times (IIRC they plan to have one focused on Gondor/Rohan around the time of the War of the Ring). They apparently scrubbed that plan because they felt that having everyone buy 3 different basic sets was unfeasible.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:40
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GISing colloidal silver because I was cracking up about the idea of Drow getting their complexions from silver abuse revealed to me that there is a conservative libertarian with argyria who's run for the US senate and governor of Montana twice each. Thanks thread.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:45
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Shadow Elves are still my favorite take on the drow.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:46
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 We are the Silver Folk
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Aug 17, 2014 18:57
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Lord Frisk posted:
Drow? or Papa Smurf cosplayer?
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Aug 17, 2014 18:58
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Lord Frisk posted:
My god is that what silver poisoning looks like? That's horrifying.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:59
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Arivia posted:My god is that what silver poisoning looks like? That's horrifying. RON PAUL 2012 RON PAUL FOREVER.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:59
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I'm in the process of retiring them in my game. I don't like the unfortunate connotations around them, though I think a lot of it accumulated haphazardly from some innocent inspirations. At one time I thought that was enough to keep them around but no more. On the other hand, the D series are good modules and worth running. So once I run them again to my satisfaction, they're done. Until then, the drow in my game are elves who are dipped into the blood of a titan, which takes the form of an Invisibles-style magic mirror substance that reflects the dead stars at the end of the universe, and gives them some innate magical abilities. Some of them can vomit or push it out from a wound for Vampire Obtenebration style stuff. Drow who don't get dipped look like other elves.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:00
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homerlaw posted:RON PAUL 2012 RON PAUL FOREVER. They're YELLOW EWWWWWWW
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Aug 17, 2014 19:01
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Kemper Boyd posted:They apparently scrubbed that plan because they felt that having everyone buy 3 different basic sets was unfeasible. Yeah, that makes sense in light of the Rivendell book, then. Bongo Bill posted:Here's how I'd redo Drow: The Underdark is the original elf homeland. All surface-dweller elves are the descendants of principled rebels against the underground societies This is still "evil black elves" and therefore doesn't fix any of the problems with drow. All you've done is invert it so it's no longer "good white folk fell from grace and became black" and is instead "black people learned better than their savage ways and became civilised white folk," which is somehow even more racist. If you want drow/Lloth, consider listening to Quinn Murphy instead: https://storify.com/overclicked/stereotypes-in-fantasy-races
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Aug 17, 2014 19:16
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Where did the dark elf thing even come from, anyway? If you wanted evil elves from day one, couldn't you just use...I dunno, radical ecoterrorist normal elves? Smug gits who don't need medicine, so they take it away from all the humans and halfling types and leaves them to die in a nature of their own creation or something?
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Aug 17, 2014 19:22
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Or just, you know, elves who have a major disagreement on policy with other elves and who fight each other while being the same species. It's always been weird that every elf subspecies in D&D is like a literal separate species, as if they can't stomach the idea that elves of the same species would murder one another.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:30
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Davin Valkri posted:Where did the dark elf thing even come from, anyway? If you wanted evil elves from day one, couldn't you just use...I dunno, radical ecoterrorist normal elves? Smug gits who don't need medicine, so they take it away from all the humans and halfling types and leaves them to die in a nature of their own creation or something? Norse myth was interpreted by Gary Gygax very loosely for the GDQ adventures, then incorporated into the Realms and expanded upon by RA Salvatore, especially in the Crystal Shard and the Menzoberranzan box set.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:30
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Most D&D poo poo was a long, messy game of telephone, right up until it became unchangeable dogmatic truth.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:36
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Here's another storify by Quinn, going into more detail on his homebrewed drow. Yeah, I do like the drow enough that I've played them as PCs in several games over the years, but I do feel weird about all the baggage surrounding them. So why not get in all these homebrewed revisions? Tell me what you think of mine, especially if I accidentally end up making it worse: In ancient times the elves traversed the majority of the known world and planes beyond. The ancestors of the drow lived in the mountainous regions of the elven empire. Eventually a cataclysm came, blackening the sky and sending storms to ravage all but a few well-located settlements. The elves recreated into the protection of the stone, vowing to never come out until it passed. Cut off from the empire in more ways than one, they extended trade routes to dwarven settlements, unearthed passages to hidden valleys, and mastered weather magic to carve out points of calm in the midst of the magical storm. During their journeys through the mountain they encountered many strange and foreign entities, some of them friendly, some not. They allied with and adopted the worship of various Underdark entities which helped them survive, including Lolsher the Spider. Not all drow live underground, and some of their settlements are near the surface to grow foodstuffs (much like the dwarves). Common physical features include gray skin and red and blue eyes. Hair color ranges from stark white to black, red, and blonde. Isolation made them sufficiently removed from high elven culture to divert into a radically different society, but in recent decades they made inroads connecting with the rest of the world. There are those who hate and fear the drow; elven nationalists view them as "corrupted" for adopting the customs of foreign gods. Some dwarven kingdoms warred with them over resources. Those inclined to hate high elves hate drow as well. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 19:37
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Why do I feel like we've had this exact same conversation in another thread? Must be having Drowja vu.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:38
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I've floated the idea of argyric elves for a game myself. I think the idea is really rad. It looks really, really bizarre and has the bonus of not needing to have a separate species for a particular cultural group but still having a way to physically distinguish them. I really hate the whole idea of "always evil" races anyway even if that's been watered down to "almost always" over the years with the introduction of characters like Drizzt and their lovely epic destiny.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:42
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