We played the audio CD for Mark of Amber to a French speaker once. I think he started developing hives because of just how bad the accents were. Which is really sad because the original line editor for Mystara line editor was a fluent French speaker
Demonic gnolls in a multiverse setting don't make a lot of sense, as several of them gave them completely different origin stories. Mystara they were magical creations that went a bit loopy when their creators got snapped out of existence due to some major naughtiness.
They wanted to make the shadow elves look more like other underground types from fiction. Morlocks or the humans from the Planet of the Apes series. Drow were originally going to have alabaster skin; problem was when it went to print in the first modules, it looked awful. So they palette...