Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="PHATsakk43" data-source="post: 9539797" data-attributes="member: 7041071">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.</blockquote>

Verification