What have you done to Drow in your world?

[Loonook]

Drow are... interesting, to say the least. But as they stand you alway seem to have two types of players playing them... and both get on my nerves. So, we usually adjust them to fit the game played:

- Homebrew 1: Serve as attaches to the kingdoms of dreams and imagination. Tricky little buggers, always obsessed with trying to make their way into the real world. Psuedonatural isn't too uncommon, but mostly they take on characteristics of Night Haunts and other similar fey/outsiders that prove interesting. Colors range the gamut, but they are almost exclusively extraplanar. SR and a handful of useful spells alongside their natural inclinations make them great harbingers of the Nameless One and other creatures trapped in the demiplanes.

- Homebrew 2: Morlocky Drow, some practicing Psi, some Magic, most twisted by not being out in the sun. However, they aren't exactly the only ones stuck under ground for large portions... that bright bright burning sun makes life difficult, and too many representatives of the Solar Empires enjoy taking them and turning them into Dreadnoughts and performing other experimentations.

- Modern: Most Drow are associated with Autumn, a time of loss and weakness in the borders of the planes. Some travel amongst other groups (the Lost Tribe or the Keepers of the Signs), though a few live for the moment. A couple of young up-starts became well-known as 'African witchdoctors' in the late 19th and early 20th century, and decided to keep it up. They still hold onto rich kingdoms in Africa, assisting their human counterparts for personal gain but serve as strangely benevolent dictators. Also had one who became obsessed with blaxploitation and samurai films (having learned English and Japanese through them, respectively) and became a white-afro'd fixer for the King of 110th Street in New York.

Of course, we also have 'traditional' Dark elves, but I guess those don't count on the list, right?

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[DragonLancer]

IMC setting, Drow are not a playable race. They are a fey people, based on the unseelie fey of lore. Raiding out of the faerie realm on certain nights of the year to cause terror, abduct slaves and swap over children for evil fey changlings. They are definately not spider worshippers.

 

[Herzog]

mmm.

Two campaigns I'm running:

1. Wrath Of The Immortals (OD&D/RCD&D campaign).
In Mystara, there are underground elves, called Shadow Elves or Schattenalfen (depending on the location) that have pale skin, white hair, and are evil.
I introduced both mindflayers and drow during an adventure where evil, gigantic (and in hindsight) pseudonatural creatures forced into an eternal slumber by the immortals where transferring some of their power to humanoids to attempt to escape the curse.
There was an octopus-like creature producing small octopi that people had to start wearing as a kind of hat. Slowly, it would consume the skull, and replace the outside of the head, transforming the humanoid into a mindflayer.
(I lost 1 character to that due to a rather unfortunate sequence of missed and saved saving throws)
A second, spiderlike creature was performing simmilar experiments with the Shadow Elves, replacing their white skin with some kind of dark substance, turning them into Drow.

I haven't had a chance to do more with them up to now, partly because the campaign has gotten into a rut, and playing once a year or less has become the standard.....

2. Time Campaign.
Campaign run by alternating DM's, each running the same set of characters in each time a more recent period, starting at the stone-age.
My time period as DM: early iron age, celtic setting.
I introduced the land of the Faeries, where the elves are a little bit different from standard D&D elves.
-They are evil.
-They are fey/lycanthropes (think lycanthrope with cold iron weakness instead of silver weakness)
-They live in a kind of parallel world, and are trying to take over ours.

Not really drow, but interesting enough to share I thought, and this is as good a place as any.

Herzog

 

[Ashrum the Black]

In my Arcana Unearthed Homebrew I've renamed the drow to Quiless, and they have become something of a mystery to my players. On the one hand they are the descendents of a race of humans that worhsiped the personified force of chaos within the world. These orginators of the line used magic to become more like their god, and took up draconian charateristics through terrible rituals.

As time went on though, these forefathers of the quiless moved away from chaos as they became more focused on the stablitity required to have and administer their empire. This was a heresy to a small group within the empire and they slwoly distanced themselves from the rest of the empire. Subtley moving out of the empires heart and into the hinterlands. There they rededicated themselves to the forces of chaos, and in a ritual designed to prove theor devotion to the powers of chaos they once again changed their peoples forms, this time letting chaos itself choose for them.

They emerged from the ritual with achingly beautiful faces, dark skin, and pointed ears. This they took as a sign of their gods favor and so they began to plot the return of all that is to the promal forces of chaos. For the last thousand years they have worked torwards this goal, formenting chaos and destruction from behind the scences.

The players interactions hav had had one group of quiless helping them, another trying to kill them. This is because of splinter groups within the race that differ on how to accomplish the end of the world. And also because one group has broken with the powers if chaos and instead have aligned themelves with the powers of entropy. The Darkness.

This lack of focus from the race has confused the players to know end and has led to some wonderful roleplaying as they try to determine who they can and who they can't trust from the race. And of course even the ones they can trust, they truley can't sinc ethey know that eventually they will be betrayed when their goals no longer coincide.

-Ashrum

 

[Aus_Snow]

I've got a writeup for Drow somewhere, that I did for the [codename: ]Forsaken Realms. Haven't used them (or the mutilated Forgotten Realms) since.

It's a rather long story, and tied in with the general history and cosmology details, so probably not forum-friendly.

Anyway, in the end, they were kinda like the core Drow really, so as to more easily use more 'official' (WotC and 3rd party) material, and miniatures for that matter. Their backstory though. . . rather different. And they did end up pretty tall, with poison blood, and a bunch of racial levels whereby they could reclaim some of their otherwordly heritage. Still, you'd know it was a Drow if it zorched you, poisoned you, tied you up and sacrificed you to something, or bled you for power.

Much fun. For things prior to that campaign though, I didn't have any Drow at all, just some dark elves of another persuasion (kinda like fey), these ones ghostly pale but likewise thoroughly twisted and evil.

 

[Set]

I went the route of the OP, having the 'Drow' be half-breed lower-caste members of Dark Elven society, while their rulers are Half-Fiendish. Like all Elves, they aren't terribly fertile normally, but by mixing their blood with that of demons, they've become extremely fecund, and also gained spell-like abilities and spell resistance.

As for the skin, that's natural, for elves. The elves who live in the high mountains in bright sunlight are pale, pale white. The elves who live in the wooded areas are caucasian in coloration. The elves who live in the *deepest* woods, the Grugach and 'Wild Elves' are described as 'nut-brown.' The elves who live in the sea are blue or green-skinned. And the elves who live in the Underdark are black as night. Elves aren't humans. Melanin isn't an issue. Their skin coloration adapts over generations to their surroundings and the light level, so that elves who live under the sun are bone-white 'gray elves' and elves who live in the darkness grow darker in color. If there are elves in the elemental plane of fire, they are probably ruddy-skinned.

Lolth is/was a demon-queen. She also is/was a goddess, an elven goddess of destiny and knowledge, who was likened to a weaver, plucking at the strands of elven fates. Staring into her own tangled future, something stared back, and she was seduced by her future self into becoming the thing that she is now. The demon-queen of Spiders Lolth's attempts to trick her and steal elven worshippers would likely have failed, if not for the goddesses' own confusion. The mad goddess and the overconfident demon-queen ended up absorbed, one into the other, and only a single being survived. Even by the standards of demons, Lolth is mad, her mind fractured with the memories of two beings, and her violent whims are legendary, even among her fractious peers.

Status among Drow comes and goes in seconds, but one way for a 'low-born' Drow to gain the notice of her peers is to perform 'artistic' acts of cruelty, malice or deception. Tricking a surface community into sending their children into Drow slavery (thinking that they are sending them off to be tutored, or join the king's army, etc.) would be a 'good joke,' and worth 'points' in the eyes of jaded Drow society. Arranging for an elven hero to commit some horrible blunder that results in the death of other elves, or a war between elves and neighboring humans, would be a classic bit of 'artistry.' Anything to gain the favor of the demons and half-demons that rule them.

 

[Voadam]

Drow (rhymes with cow) are classic evil underdark dark elves who worship the Demon Queen of Spiders. They are on the decline, having been mostly supplanted by drau (rhymes with flow), drow who have gained demonic traits from succubus interbreeding and other demonic infusions.

This is a co-DM'd world and each of the three DMs has added to the story a bit as well as PCs adding to the world cannon in coming up with neat character backstories and backgrounds.

Drau have been represented mechanically in different ways. I modified the winged demonic drow from Complete Guide to Drow for one drau lolth priestess, while another had classic wingless drow form. The dwarves were getting cold iron for their war with the drau, while some the PCs have fought needed good aligned weapons to get past their DR. When my brother was Co-DMing the drau pirates we faced had various demonic mutations such as lobster claw hands, hair tentacles, etc.

Having a diverse range of demonic drow types has worked well for the chaos demon connection angle.

Oh, and since the campaign includes Ptolus they are barred from the city on pain of death and it is a capital crime in the city to harbor drau/drow in the city (most people don't know there is any distinction between drau and drow).