D&D General Drow as in Cow or Drow as in Snow: Where did the Dark Elves Come From?

I've always pronounced drow so it rhymes with "cow" and so did all my friends and it confused me deeply the first time I heard someone rhyme it with "grow."

Re: racism/sexism: I've long taken the approach that most common folks in a setting know next to nothing about the "monsters" that live on their borders, and so the cultures are ripe with misinformation, exaggeration, and superstition. All it takes is some townsfolk to get their butts handed to them in a surprise encounter with a strange group of female elves while exploring a cave and all of a sudden it's "but they used magic! and they were evil! SO eeeeevil! their skin was black as pitch and they moved so silently nobody could have heard them coming! . . . and they totally dominated the menfolk! and they totally worship spiders. Yeah, spiders!"

How true is any of that? Who knowns, and really - how often does it come up anyway?
 

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I think the drow are cool. They are super loosely based on myths, but the version we have is almost completely a unique D&D-thing.

But how I would interpret them (and same goes for many other "evil" species,) is that whilst the general idea of the lore is true, the version we get is the one written by their enemies. It is the patriarchal humans and racist surface elves who tell the stories of drow being evil. An sure, they can be not-nice, like everybody, but they're no more evil than those who deride them and perhaps even less so.

Re: racism/sexism: I've long taken the approach that most common folks in a setting know next to nothing about the "monsters" that live on their borders, and so the cultures are ripe with misinformation, exaggeration, and superstition. All it takes is some townsfolk to get their butts handed to them in a surprise encounter with a strange group of female elves while exploring a cave and all of a sudden it's "but they used magic! and they were evil! SO eeeeevil! their skin was black as pitch and they moved so silently nobody could have heard them coming! . . . and they totally dominated the menfolk! and they totally worship spiders. Yeah, spiders!"

How true is any of that? Who knowns, and really - how often does it come up anyway?
This is a good approach, but it requires conscious implementation on the part of the DM, of course.

If I want to run the GDQ series, I'll need to make updates to D3.
 

Drow=cow.

I do not use Drow/dark elves in my games. I took the concept of Winter Elves from Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series and developed my own backstory and mythos.

In my current campaign world, you have the Winter Elves and Summer Elves along with Moon Elves and Wood Elves.

The Winter Elves have pale, cream to alabaster skin with white hair and often blue, green, purple gem colored eyes. They do live underground and largely hate their cousins for associating with humans although their most hated enemies are Orcs. They practice ancestor worship and are raised in communal creches. They are not an evil race but they are often associated that way because they do not like other races and believe themselves superior to all others and anyone who enters their lands without approval are met with death.

I never liked the Drow, usually, because the folks who wanted to play them were all Drizzt clones and they were just old and tired as a concept.
 

This is a good approach, but it requires conscious implementation on the part of the DM, of course.
In general I'm not a fan of the very literal (and kind of juvenile) the-gods-did-it-and-they're-literally-big-monsters-who-exist-and-you-can-visit/fight-them approach to D&D's world building. I like to handle things on a mythological level; the only gods I use as big monsters are Cthulhu Mythos type deities, since they ARE big monsters and are indifferent to hostile in their approach.

That statement may seem irrelevant to the conversation at hand, but I like to handle most worldbuilding the same way. What do the characters/people in the world actually know, and what can they prove? I find this approach both helps a world feel more real and allows me great leeway to surprise (and hopefully delight) my players since they can't ever be certain the know exactly what's true and what's not in-game.
 

In general I'm not a fan of the very literal (and kind of juvenile) the-gods-did-it-and-they're-literally-big-monsters-who-exist-and-you-can-visit/fight-them approach to D&D's world building. I like to handle things on a mythological level; the only gods I use as big monsters are Cthulhu Mythos type deities, since they ARE big monsters and are indifferent to hostile in their approach.
A sourcebook/mini-game like Dawn of the Orcs, but for drow, would probably be very compelling.
 

The original word definitely rhymes with and is a variation on Trow aka Troll. As a kid I assumed Drow rhymed with snow, and thought rhyming with cow sounded absurd, but made myself get used to it after Dragon issue 142 (Feb 1989) officially told us that it rhymes with cow:

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I vividly remember that day when we were sitting in a classroom for our lunchtime D&D game as the DM pulled out the Dragon magazine to read that exact question/answer to us. Cue our shock/amazement/slight disbelief, as we had all been pronouncing it to rhyme with snow as, indeed, rhyming with cow sounded funny to us.

A few months later it was just what it was and sounded as natural/'right' as anything else.
 


Context, though. Back then they wanted to save D&D and legitimize their succession to preserving it, and the overarching narrative was still that Gary was the paterfamilias of the hobby who had been brutally cheated and hounded from the company he started.

Unusually informed people within the hobby knew he had been legally harassed by TSR in his subsequent projects like Dangerous Dimensions, but almost no one knew the damage he had done to the company, and practically no one outside TSR (and precious few within it) knew the details of the takeover and buyout which have now come to light in publications like Game Wizards and When We Were Wizards.
Yeah, it’s weird as an old guy who started right after 2E started and stopped around 2000 so had literally zero idea of who Gygax or Arneson were as they had the least amount of references in the front matter of stuff of the at era.

Then I missed the Gygax on the Forums of the 2000s. My introduction into the history was the Blackmore doc on Amazon a couple years back and then picking up a second hand copy of Game Wizards at an airport last year.

Being able to look at all of it solely with several years of decades of history is probably the best way to view it.

It’s odd that the first association I had with “dark elves” was Tolkien with his rather literal interpretation of the term. They were elves that literally lived before there was the light of the sun and never saw the light of the trees in Arvandor (edit: Valinor—Arvandor is one of the outer planes in the Great Wheel cosmology of AD&D) prior to being consumed by Shelob (edit: Ungoliant—Shelob was the big spider in LotR, not the one from the First Age) Herself rather Lloth-like and the only real connection between Tolkien’s elves and D&D drow I can recall.

The closest to a drow would probably be the Noldor along with their kinslaying of the sea elves and oath swearing of vengeance against Morgoth—albeit except for that specific incident of violence against their fellow elves—the Noldor seemed to be more closely the influence for the grey elves.

Oddly, in Tolkien’s case, he also used the term gnomes somewhat interchangeably with the Noldor as they were more likely to be craftsmen and shared their love of craft with dwarves actually.

Anyway, given how much Tolkien there is in D&D, it seems that many want to diminish his influence in lieu of pointing more towards the pulpy influence of Howard & Co. Personally—and this is based on my reading of the game works not necessarily what those involved wrote about what they wrote—is that Tolkien flavored the game more than anything else, but that the pulp writers flavored the story.

Drow are a weird bunch really. I get the idea that they were always just a bunch of purely evil creatures, but that really fails to look at what was actually written in the early years. It’s been mentioned about the not-so-evil drow even in the old GDQ adventures. Greenwood talks about how roughly 1 in 10 drow even in drow civilizations in the Underdark are not evil and even good. He likewise mentions that Menzo is not a typical drow city, nor are most of the drow cities so overwhelmingly ran by radical Lloth clergy.

Granted, this was rather overlooked because it was sort of in line with the edgy type of game WotC wanted to have especially with the tail end of 2E and 3-4E. By the mid 2000s you end up with the batshit Dragon article about how f-ed up drow are which gets into all kinds of stuff that is really beyond the pale of what needed to be said. I’m sure some folks know of the article I’m talking about, but I’m not really interested in digging it up to post, but it’s pretty out there.

Anyway, I’ve decided that my my drow and elves in general are actually more akin to Tolkien’s work. To do this, I’ve sorta smashed some bits of random lore together. Specifically, how the eladrin originally in 2E were a type of elf that lived in the outer planes. I’ve just reversed it, so that the prime elves are actually originated in the outer planes and have become habituated to the prime at some level. Sort of like the Noldor of Tolkien. The history of the fall and a that is just misremembered stories of ancient pasts, with the drow being abyssal eladrin opposed to arborean eladrin. They have simply existed for so long they mix up their planar origins with their prime ones. Either way, elves are dwindling in the prime.

It also makes for a good origin of lots of other classic D&D species as most of them had by the introduction of the Great Wheel in the 1E Manual of the Planes godly realms filled with denizens that were identical to the ones in the prime. No reason goblins, orcs, trolls, giants, dwarves, and the rest weren’t likewise original from their pantheon’s realms.

Anyway, I’m not sure if that reduces the inherent racial associations regarding drow or not.
 
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So, I've had a campaign running off-and-on since 1987 where the Drow (sounds like "cow") have served as the antagonist to the story since the very beginning. I have found the Drow Elves to serve as an excellent foil to the party's moves and the Dark Elves' continuous attempt to reclaim the land that was once theirs. I'm fascinated and intrigued by the current commentary on the Drow, but as an RPGer of 40+ years, I look at all of it through the non-judgmental lens of history.
 

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