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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6866940" data-attributes="member: 6777454">The issue is this...If the race is moved to the surface, if they no longer have a connection to a dark spider goddess or spider deity, if they are no longer feared and they are no longer versed in the specific Drow society... in what way are they still Drow?Look over the Drow racial features. Every one of them is either about being adapted to living in the darkness or using dark magic to use the darkness to destroy others. None of that, none of it, would be applicable to your Always Altruistic Surface "Drow". In fact, every single thing that separates them from being just like a Wood Elf other than skin color has been completely removed by these concessions.So you ought to just treat them as a typical Wood Elf with dark skin because that's what they really are. And it also really destroys any sense of danger, urgency or fear they previously instilled having these surface Drow hippie communes spread across the surface in such numbers that everyone is completely familiar with them. In fact, it makes the whole premise of the Drizzt books and how Drow are written in any other case purely comedic.I am not arguing they need to be universally evil, but rather that they would still be steeped in their particular society with their particular norms used to people acting in particular ways regardless of whether they ultimately fall into the category of being more altruistic than selfish... Even if within a brutal lawless society, the individual's experiences are such that they decide they aren't going to backstab allies for personal gain... they have still been raised to know that allies are likely to backstab them for personal gain and take measures to avoid being backstabbed.If you are from a society that practices slavery and torture and enacts brutally harsh punishments, as an individual you may find these things distasteful... but any chance that you would jump up and down and make a big stink about it thus making you a target would have been broken from you at a young age or you wouldn't have survived long. Either you compartmentalize these elements and either don't utilize them but find it generally tolerable when others do, or when you engage in such things you try to be more merciful, reasonable and understanding rather than embracing them with zeal.Although, alignment is not something that usually applies well and should generally be considered at best a general tendency rather than a universal governor of all behaviors, particularly when a single alignment is applied to an entire society and much more so an entire race. Sometimes it seems all it really means is "friendly to humans=good" and "unfriendly to humans=evil", because the idea that you could have whole societies that would survive past a single generation where everyone acts altruistic all the time without regard for their own safety or survival or acts selfish and destructive all the time without fostering and enabling the success of their fellows and the next generation are both unworkable when you try to apply any reason to them.I am vaguely aware of them. But that is an issue of Orcs becoming good by being changed by a definitively non-Orcish deity. Instead it is an example of them being broken and tamed by a human deity. My example would be to create a definitively good-aligned and pacifist Orcish deity to rule over the "Light Orcs". Unless I am misunderstanding and you are claiming Eldath is an Orcish deity.The general idea tends to be that generally evil aligned humanoids do not get good aligned deities among their pantheon and typically good aligned humanoids do not get racial-exclusive evil deities (unless it is for the one evil subrace).Actually, to be honest.... this is sillier than that.It would be like having a group of Light Orcs who live on the surface, like the daylight and are pacifistic all aligned under one Orcish Deity who opposes Gruumish and then having that deity have a child who somehow encourages this one single group of "Light Orcs" to act evil.</blockquote>

Verification