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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 8299331" data-attributes="member: 8863">Yeah, I've never read Moorcock's stuff, but I suspect there's a lot of Elric in drow just from what I know of the Elric stuff.  Take that stuff, mix it with Norse mythology and add a big dose of fair folk, and that's where drow come from.  Possibly some of the matriarchal stuff was there as a contrast with the other typical evil races which mostly got a lot of toxically male patriarchies.  Then again too, there's all the spider imagery which may lend itself to the matriarchal elements.Gray elves and high elves were Tolkien rip-offs of course, but the characterizations got all jumbled.  There's also the difference between the different flavors of elf in each of the campaign settings too.  There's the generic core stuff that got made up around the late 70s or early 80s in Dragon and became more or less official.  Some of that is used directly in Greyhawk, but the generic core stuff is sometimes more open ended and/or broad strokes for the DM.  Ed did his own thing with the Realms, so while there's probably common sources from Tolkien and his sources, Realms elves are unique in certain ways.  Dragonlance has its own thing going too, but there's less separation between the Silvanesti and Qualinesti than the standard high elf/gray elf split. The issues with elf haughtiness and/or isolationism I would attribute to all the various different things that have been written about elves over the years.  There's various interpretations from Dragon, The Complete Book of Elves, Races of the Wild and other various 3e splats plus campaign settings and whatever individual DMs want to do. The isolationism in part isn't always due to racism by the way.  There are times when it's attributed to elves' longer natural lifespan, and that they withdraw because they don't like dealing with the sorrow of seeing non-elves die more quickly and more often.  The whole longer lifespan thing is where a lot of elven attitudes comes from, they live so long they don't perceive the passage of time in the same way as other races.  But some players don't RP that very well and play elves as snotty humans with pointy ears.I think that's the first time I've seen anyone use the word "perfection" in conjunction with Synnibarr.</blockquote>

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