Drow-a-go-go

I found this comment about the Drow over on the WotC website and found it interesting to hear, after all those debates we used to see about the frequency of Drow PCs. I have no idea how old this article is, so please don't flame me about how "everyone" knows about this already.

The link is: right here.


R.A. Salvatore's Thoughts on the Drow: Past, Present, and Future

The beauty of the drow is that they're supposed to remain mysterious. They've got a veil of mystery over them that makes them beautiful and ultimately deadly. They're supposed to be among the primary antagonists in the various D&D worlds. When an adventuring party sees a dark elf, they're supposed to be afraid. They're supposed to be looking over their shoulders or squinting nervously at every shadow. That's how we play the dark elves in our D&D game here.

This will sound strange, I know, but I'm almost a bit saddened by the success of Drizzt. He was the "different" drow, but because of his popularity, others are emulating him more and more. Why does that make me sad? I fear for the integrity of the evil drow race as antagonist. I fear that gamers will adventure into the depths and see a dark elf and ask, "Does he have purple eyes?" instead of cowering in fear. I know that this lifting of the veil of mystery is a logical evolution of the race in a game that becomes more and more detailed, but I can't help but feel that something was lost in the process. Elves like the drow are as common as the typical surface elf in games like EverQuest now.

As a consultant on War of the Spider Queen books, I feel that my role in the series is that of an editor of tone. I try to make sure that the dark elves do not simply become like everyone else, only with different physical features. Drow have to think differently all the time. And even though Wizards of the Coast is doing a series about the drow culture and gods, we have to try to keep that veil of mystery as tightly drawn as possible.

If he really wanted it to stay mysterious, he shouldn't have written several series of books about them! He does have a point. IMC, I've replaced the drow's role in the underdark with several other races, including a race of blind, psionic albino halflings. They're cannibals, and they've adapted quite nicely to the underdark.

As an alternative, just give your drow purple eyes... and then have them attack the PCs mercilessly! "It's Driz... urrkll!"

i personally hate drizzt....he made drow become friendly and tolerable. The veil of mystery is shredded and now they are revealed for what they are: evil elves. Well to me the drow will alway been Enclavadra from the GDQ series. Mysterious, evil, cunning, chaotic, and downright cruel. With this drizzt deal he took one of the most 'underground' of underground races and made them a family dinner conversation. PAH! I liked the books, but now the drow are about as scary as disney monsters. I am all for having a book where drizzt gets mercesselly killed by his own kind and dragged down into the underdark for his body to be sent to the spiderqueen. now THATS a book i would buy!

This thread wins my prize for "best subject title of the day".

I agree with PC, if Salvatore is really broken up inside that Drow are common as muck then he should have turned down those writing deals (he'd have been a moron to turn it down though). The statement strikes me as more of a Mea Culpa than anything else.

Also, I'm not sure that this is entirely Salvatore's fault. Game worlds have been growing for over 20 years now. Unless you pull a Wiess&Hickman and blow everything up on a regular basis, sooner or later you're going to run out of new territory.

Salvatore is right; the drow are somewhat spent to those who aren't new to them. But I think that the dark elf mystique can live on elsewhere.

Not all dark elves need be drow - taking a fey, Unseelie Court angle on them (rather than a dungeon skulk one) re-enchants them. For instance, consider the imprisoned dockalfar prince who - risen by PC bumbling from a slumber of a thousand years of exile, imprisoned inside a magical sarcophagus in a forgotten tower within sylvan surrounds - resumes the plots he began a millenium ago without missing a beat.

He looks like any other elf, but is regal and beautiful, and represents an insane and jovial, yet utterly sinister evil that only immortal fey know. And because of the colour of his skin doesn't betray the soulless void at the centre of his being, the PCs may trust him to the end. Resultingly, and because of the questions his existence poses, he is more mysterious and sinister to me than a city full of drow.

I think that the Dragonlance team were on to something when they omitted drow from the setting, and instead made them fallen elves. A redcap (an insanely evil brownie, so called because they dip their caps in the blood of their former human patrons) draws upon the same set of concepts - each evil fey is a riddle, as to why they turned out that way. The drow dispel this dimension, for only the tale of why their entire race turned to evil is interesting - and that's all history.

I think that this sort of material is why one of my most favourite monsters is the Quickling, being fey who dabbled too much in the dark arts. Which dark arts, and why? What could turn these creatures so? That's the essence of a dark elf to me - they represent something twisted and unnatural, and from this they derive a goodly amount of their mystique.

It is ironic that RAS has these comments. But to me even more that he thought people should be afraid of Drow. I mean, I've read two series with the Drow from him and the Drow have barely even won a skirmish, let alone any battles. Drizzt kills them right and left, sure, but so do elves and just about everyone else. I agree Drow should be scary. But to be scary you actually have to win battles sometime. And I don't mean Drow house v. Drow house either.

But to be scary you actually have to win battles sometime.

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Insightful - and that goes for all villains, really. Heroics are made much more possible when almost all hope is lost, and the odds seem insurmountable - and it's the villain's job to create that illusion or atmosphere.

I think DMs owe it to their players to occasionally make scenarios designed specifically for the villain to get their way somewhat, where the only victory likely to be possible is a partial or pyrrhic one - like life, D&D's challenges perhaps shouldn't always be fair. If the villain makes real, murderously effective advances and seems unstoppable, stopping them truly means something - and that element is missing from a lot of D&D campaigns and novels, IMO.

Suppose the drow find a way to permanently block out the sun very early in the campaign, and start enslaving entire surface cities as crops and forests die from lack of sunlight. Now what, oh heroes?

For some reason I never found the Drows any more scary than a babe standing in a tight leatheroutfit with a whip saying:"You are my slave" and since I'm not really into that kind of stuff....

The FR team clearly has something brewing with the drow...I wonder if a major change in direction is coming?

I like the daemonfey idea...another group of nasty elves to deal with.

Drizzt's popularity as PC inspiration is attributable to his angst (teenagers, especially, like playing a totally alienated yet heroic figure), his frightening munchkinism (at least in earlier editions, where there was no decent mechanic for powerful "monster" PCs), and...well, his legitimate coolness (he goes against the stereotypical Arnold the Barbarian with a twenty-pound sword style of fighting).

I hope that the Lord of the Rings movies will help restore some mystique to regular elves.

rounser said:

Suppose the drow find a way to permanently block out the sun very early in the campaign, and start enslaving entire surface cities as crops and forests die from lack of sunlight. Now what, oh heroes?

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I think it's the Drow domain that has a Cloak of Darkness spell, negating all disparaging effects of sunlight (which I am desperately trying to figure out a way to gain access to, for my current PC, a Ftr4/Rog3/Duelist4 human vampire with absolutely no contact with divine-spellcasting drow). I also hear Lords of Darkness has a Daylight Adaptation feat for drow.

Anyway, just like any other monster, the only way your PCs will fear them is if you make them afraid! Once a drow scouting party cuts down one or two of the PCs with extreme prejudice, they'll start learning to keep on their toes, or else.