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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Capellan" data-source="post: 2011023" data-attributes="member: 6294">The Complete Guide to Drow has been out for some time, now, but a print version was just released, so it seems a good time to re-consider the original PDF.The book begins with an origin story, relating the aftermath of the Kinslayer Wars among the elves.  It's probably not a good sign that I find the snippets about the non-Drow subraces more interesting than the Drow themselves: particularly when the background promptly wipes out those subraces.The next section goes into the social and religious structure of the Drow.  The write-ups of the Drow gods are short but interesting, though they do raise some questions ... why are there male gods if - as the same section tells us - male Drow are seen as 'little better than slaves'?This section seems oddly organised: covering families, religion, cities, trade, war and poison (in that order) it seems to jump around a bit - especially when the rules for generating Drow families are then tucked away toward in a separate section toward the back of the book.  There's little 'fluff' here - the section is only 8 pages and even in those there are plenty of crunch-related details, including nearly a full page for poisons.Next, we look at Drow as characters: I can only hope this section got a lot of attention in the print edition, as there are some significant gaps in the rules presented here.  Male and female Drow have different ability modifiers, but the same 'CR modifier'.  CR?  Given that this was a 3.0 product, the lack of a Level Adjustment is understandable, but at the least it should offer an 'Effective Character Level'.  CR is useless for character creation purposes.Additionally, the CR modifiers provided are highly suspect.  Drow are listed as +1 ... they have Spell Resistance, for goodness sakes.There are some editing and rules problems here: Drow SR is listed as 11+ class level ... surely this should be character level?  Their +2 racial bonus vs enchantment is claimed to add to a +2 racial WILL bonus vs spells and spell like abilities, but both are the same bonus type ('racial').  Also, the +2 WILL bonus is only mentioned in this note - nowhere else in the race description.There is also a random table for the characters' social standing, giving some characters advantages and some disadvantages (how nice if you get the latter!).  These social modifiers include several references to getting Wilderness Lore (now Survival) 'for free' ... whatever that means.  As a class skill, maybe?  This smacks of a 2nd Ed 'free proficiency' being incorrectly translated to 3E.  There are similar problems in the spells section: for instance there is one spell that lasts only one round and gives a bonus to your 'next initiative roll' - but initiative is rolled only once per combat in 3E.The sub-races offered are similarly dubious, in terms of their statistics: especially Drider, which are listed as only '+2 CR', despite multiple spell-like abilities and their large size.  The book seems to consistently err on the side of overpowering: this continues with the classes - the Blood Druid is a variant druid who gets wildshape at 2nd level and wildshape to dire animals at 5th.  The Dark Blade has a non-standard (but near fighter-level) BAB, and also gets spells, sneak attacks (which can be used at any range with missile weapons), improved critical damage AND weapon specialisation.  Sign me up!  Then there's the Keeper: an 8th level wizard can become a Keeper and get better BAB, Saves and HP than in their core class, as well as full spell progression and multiple demon summoning class abilities.The power goes up another notch for Feats.  These include Combat Intuition (+2 Initiative and AC), Enhanced Spell Resistance (+4 SR, and can be taken multiple times), Reflexive Blocking (Reflex save to halve damage when you take a hit), Retaliation (multiple free attacks per round) and Shield Block (double your shield AC bonus, without limit) are all ludicrously overpowered.You're probably seeing a theme by now, and it continues through the spells (Summon Dark Ally III is a 3rd level spell that allows the caster to summon a Kyton) and the monsters (a small venom zombie is CR 1, but every hit it scores functions as a poison spell, and it can spit poison capable of doing a total of 3d6 Con damage).Summation: there are some interesting ideas buried in all this, but - unless you like a *really* high octane campaign, or don't mind the bad guys having some major advantages over your PCs - the game balance is way off.  It's possible some of these issues have been resolved in the print version - certainly the Venom Zombies have been revised (they are now a template), but unless those changes get filtered back to the PDF version, you're going to have a lot of work on your hands to make this material usable.</blockquote>

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