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What have you done to Drow in your world?

bmadden

First Post
Drow in my game were banished from the surface (or chose to descend to the Underdark) as punishment for using defiler magic (per Dark Sun)
They worship the goddess Taya (Mistress of the Dark) who manifests as a beautiful Dark Naga.
Yuan Ti in my game are gift given to the Drow from Taya. Many devout Drow desire that they or their offspring be allowed to inherit this gift.

The mechanics of the race are not relevant; no one has ever chosen to be one as a PC in all my years of DMing.
 

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Satori

First Post
rossik said:
oh...anime-hate detected! :)

I should have expected that.

What were the three "Forbidden DnD Topics?"

Drow, Katana, and Anime?

:p

Actually, I really like anime and anime themes. I've always wanted to play in an anime themed game, where everyone could jump REALLY high and call on all sorts of nifty powers. A world where a guy could walk around with a horn on his forehead, and people wouldn't care.

A world where I can kill you with my shape changing gun-axe-whip-laser-kitten +4.

Personally, though, putting anime-style characters into a Gygaxian setting just feels wrong.

Of course, there is no such thing as BADWRONGFUN. Lots of people like a conglomerate of anime/steampunk/pulp (cough*Eberron*cough...actually, Eberron succeeded in converting me to a genre I swore I would never like, but that is another topic).

In my opinion, though, the flavor is just a bit off...and in a story based, imaginative game like DnD, even a slightly off taste can ruin the atmosphere (in my opinion, of course).
 

Dog Moon

Adventurer
In my world, Drow retain their color, but that's because they have natural ties with darkness/shadows. They have a limited sort of capability to manipulate the shadows. In recent years, due to their near annihilation by a certain also modified race of Dwarves, they have used this ability to hide well.

Their physical appearances are also modified by various Demonic traits due to their insistence on mating with Demons in an attempt to strengthen their blood lines. While trait strength varies among the Drow, those who resemble the stronger Demons rather than the weaker ones are more greatly respected and feared. Imps [IIRC, Imp is a Demon; I keep forgetting] are quite common among the Drow arcane spellcasters.
 

Nifft

Penguin Herder
IMC Elves in general are a bit different.

There are no Drow on Earth, for example. The critters that use the stats for Drow are called Thern, and they are albino ("bone white") cave-dwellers on a low-gravity world where caves are the best place to find abundant water and air. Thern speak Elven, because they are Elves.

(If you are a player in my game, don't open the spoiler blocks!)


[sblock=Shaderiven]There is a difference between the darkness of the high night sky and the darkness of truly deep places. The night is merely a passing shadow, but in the deep places, there is a texture to the darkness that does not flee before light. It's said that if you go deep enough into that darkness, you can find a darkness that has never seen light -- a darkness that is the memory of the time before there was light, before the arise of the two, the three, and the ten-thousand things.

The darkness in the deepest places of a world is kin to the darkness between worlds, and kin to the darkness within all other worlds. They form a dark river, plied by Gith in their godbone skiffs, Dwarves in their great stone galleons, and Yugoloths in war canoes stitched from the living flesh of their damned oarsmortal slaves.

Anyway. Darkness within worlds = "Shaderiven" = transportation, and that's why you find big monsters rising from deep places. Shaderiven is also somehow kin to the universal darkness which preceded time and space, so it's not something to mess with, unless you enjoy temporal paradoxes.[/sblock]


[sblock=Thern]Elves are not religious, because they know the origin of the gods. Well, most elves aren't religious. Thern are. Their goddess is Lolth, the demon-queen of spiders, and the first lich ever to attempt an ascent to divinity.

Lolth was cursed by the other gods of her original world, her undead form twisted into a foul mockery of living flesh. Now she can only survive in a similarly corrupt and twisted layer of the Abyss. She is suspended between undeath and immortality. Unlike other gods, she is not tied to any particular world, but rather her power flows through any Abyssal gate or menhir; unlike other gods, she does not shelter the souls of her followers, but rather consumes them; unlike other gods, she was never a protector against the alien evils which eternally batter the barriers around the mortal worlds -- she is one of them.

Many elves saw this and turned from the worship of all gods, when they fled their original world's devastation. Some settled on Earth. These elves may be Druids or Rangers, but not Clerics or Paladins.

The thern chose differently. They fled the apocalypse to a different world, a world long dead, having been lost to the Hells thousands of years previously. They were able to find the necessities for life buried deep: ice and air, silt and soil. The rest they were able to manufacture (or steal) with their magic, and today much of the surface is livable, though the deep places are more comfortable in terms of water and atmosphere.

They have a fragile peace with the Diabolic forces who own their world. They keep their own population low, and sacrifice the blood of a thousand slaves each year. As life progresses across the world's surface, Fey spontaneously arise, and the thern hunt these fey mercilessly as a part of their Diabolical pact.

However, the thern know damn well that Diabolical pacts usually turn out poorly, and they intend to corrupt theirs to the fullest degree possible. In the deepest parts of their world, they have toiled for centuries, constructing a massive magical apparatus. They are condensing the darkness of Shaderiven, threading it with the souls of their slaves, hunting trophies, and captured fey. It is because of this condensation that their world is now heavy enough to hold a half-way reasonable atmosphere.

The few scholars who know of the world-spanning apparatus differ in their guesses regarding its purpose. Some think it is intended to breach time and steal the essence of their dead world's gods when they were quick. Others conjecture that the apparatus will eventually be triggered to consume their world entirely, feeding all of its magic and vital potency to Lolth directly. A third hypothesis is that the apparatus will allow them to fragment their world into a maze of linked extra-dimensional spaces, which presumably would somehow negate an important clause of their Diabolical pact. A fourth group wonders if the apparatus is intended to steal or siphon some resource, perhaps souls or magical potency, from other worlds through the Shaderiven's flow. Finally, some claim that the apparatus is constructing (or gestating) a new physical avatar for Lolth, who will be bodily reborn into the prime -- with unknown consequences for the thern's world, and the material plane in general.[/sblock]

Cheers, -- N
 

Arkhandus

First Post
Hmm. As far as my main, most-developed home campaign settings go....

1) Azeria - Drow are good and crazy here, like they ought to be. Sadistic, self-serving, conniving, always trying to get an upper hand and lord it over everyone else, but generally just trying to get away with as much wicked fun and plundering as they can without getting caught/killed.

Mostly like the core-rules drow, no spider-fetish though, no Lolth, instead their patron goddess is Luna, Goddess of Night and the Moon, patron of assassins, thieves, and spies, among other things. Still, the drow of Azeria make significant use of monstrous spiders and other poisonous insects, and driders are cursed drow as normal. Half-fiendish drow are not that rare, either, and the drow make deals with all kinds of creatures to further their personal agendas.

Good drow in Azeria are almost unheard of, since they're naturally inclined to villainy, and it takes a lot of effort to make a drow child grow up into a halfway-respectable person, if anyone even wants to bother trying. The evil drow have enclaves in many parts of Azeria, mostly underground, but they also control a significant portion of an evil empire along the eastern edge of the main continent.


2) Rhunaria - There aren't 'drow' per se, but there are dark elves, with roughly the same appearance as the drow of the core rules. Dark elves are a Lawful Evil society in Rhunaria, the creation of an earlier elven Mage-King, who experimented on all kinds of creatures, even other elves. Dark elves are one of the two elven subraces created from those experiments (the other being aquatic elves, who were sort of a failure, retaining their original minds and free wills).

The Mage-King transformed some elves into dark elves to empower their spellcasting ability, making them the most effective casters in the elven army. And the process also made them completely loyal to the Mage-King's will, even in later generations of dark elves born from the first ones. However, a few dark elves are born without the instinctive compulsion to behave according to the ingrained doctrines of the Mage-King, a fluke of nature or Rhunaria's abundant magical forces. These few have the potential for chaos or good, but more often than not simply tend towards neutrality, finding their comrades' attitudes strange and unnatural. They tend to be more selfish and wary than other dark elves, but the dark elven society still makes most of them become some shade of Evil, or Lawful Neutral.

Rhunarian dark elves have a sort of Middle Eastern and sort of Indian flavor, though their leadership is a magocracy rather than a theocracy. Arcane power is of utmost importance to Rhunarian dark elves; one cult-like organization of sorcerers among them, the Sons of Ishala, is well-known for dealing and breeding with fiends to increase the magical talents within their bloodlines. However, it is a wizardly organization that leads the dark elves, founded by the Mage-King's closest advisors and servants after his disappearance. They use titles like bey, shah, and emir to signify their rank within the magocracy and the guild.

Other arcane groups are more like lesser nobility, while the remainder of dark elves are mostly looked down upon as grunts and laborers, even though many are skilled soldiers, shamans, assassins, and more. The ones who actually strike out most of the time against surface-dwellers. Religion is treated as something important in dark elven society, but it's largely lip-service, with arcane practices considered more important and useful.

The dark elven priests serve the Spirit King, though priests are rare amongst their kind, and they consider it a sacred duty to enslave the other races and subjugate them to the enlightened ways of the dark elves, as well as to bring the other elven subraces "back into the fold" as minions of the Mage-King's will and the supposed gospel of the Spirit King, since the jungle elves and aquatic elves each went into hiding after the fall of the Mage-King's dominion. In truth, the dark elves are just clinging to the old ways of the Mage-King, from the last glory days of their kingdom, and hiding underground to avoid the collective wrath of the humanoid and monstrous races their kind had once enslaved. Trying to build up their numbers and arcane powers to someday reclaim the surface from the non-elves.

Rhunarian dark elves have different stats (and no ECL) compared to the core rules version.


3) Aurelia - No 'drow' here either, but there is a subculture among elvenkind, a scattered group of elves that have largely turned their back on Nature, and are called "dark elves" by others. They look like any other elves, but develop a few different traits as their traffick in dark powers and seek personal superiority, shunning Nature which shuns them in turn. The dark elves have some dealings with the dark fey of the Unseelie Court, but are still largely independant and self-motivated. Any elf can become a dark elf, though few do. Their lore and supernatural powers are forbidden among other elven societies.

Their tapping into dark powers makes them sneakier and better spellcasters to an extent, but has some drawbacks as well. Dark elves generally live alone or in small enclaves, far from other elves, since their tainted aura is easily detected by fey, priests, and paladins. They're explicitly nongood in alignment, though they don't necessarily have to be evil. That's just where the so-called Dark Road tends to lead them. Dark elves can use magic or psionics to try and mask their auras from detection, but fey can always sense their taint on sight, regardless; no dark elf can hide its betrayal of Nature from any true spirit of Nature. Nonetheless, it is fairly easy for them to plot and work in secret among non-elven societies and even some elven ones.

Aurelian dark elves are just normal elves that have taken one or more feats along the Seeker of the Dark Road feat tree.
 

Knightfall

World of Kulan DM
Archade said:
I've replaced drow with neogi, who slave and merchant from the underdark.
I've replaced drow with morlocks (half-gnomes/half-trogs) from Green Ronin's Bastards & Bloodlines. Drow never developed naturally on the World of Kulan, although they did invade it in its distant past.

They were defeated, and their idols and fledgling communities were crushed by a combined force of Underearth-dwelling races. The morlocks rose from the ashes of this to dominate a great deal of the Underearth.

The only legacy of these drow are shattered ruins and a race of surface-dwelling half-drow called the Nevaequariani or Nevae *, for short. The nevae are rare in the western lands of the continent of Kanpur and unheard of almost everywhere else. *From Bluffside: City on the Edge, which I've dropped into my world.
 
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blargney the second

blargney the minute's son
In my Eberron game, the party was exploring ruins just outside the Ring of Storms in Xen'drik. One of the PCs was a regular elf that was raised by the scorpion-worshipping drow of Xen'drik. She kept expecting to run into some drow while they were down there...

Some drow inhabited this dungeon, with a soulknife leader and a whole passel of warlock mooks. The warlocks had the spider climb invocation and could summon swarms of spiders. When the PCs finally got a closer look at one of the bodies and the arachnoid motifs on their armor, the players all had the funniest looks on their faces. The elf's player cried, "Oh my god, they're THAT kind of drow!"

If you're using the umbragen drow, do the spider thing. Totally worth it. :)
-blarg
 

rossik

Explorer
Satori said:
I should have expected that.

What were the three "Forbidden DnD Topics?"

Drow, Katana, and Anime?

:p


i see...thats the end of my "what about a kawai double katana drow" topic...

;)

i understand the flavor thing, as i do it myself. and i do like manga/anime too.

and i dont like the "mangalization" of characters pictures, like the new drizzt with thin scimitars.

just thought the the word "anime" was used to write about bad things..

oh well, thats just me, lets get back to topic then :)


i like the black drow cause i do the "cursed elf" thing. i understand the logic behind make them white , but i dont play much for the logics of it. also, my players dont like much (as i) changes like that, when you already have a mental picture of the creature and try to change it.

thats why we never like the "little elf" halfling of 3ed
 



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