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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 1645905" data-attributes="member: 151">Well, blame the mid-80s fascination with Ninjas for that.  A good oriental setting can make for fantastic role-playing.  Of course, an oriental setting means different things to different folks: some just want Rokugan, while others really want something like Inu-Yasha, and still others want Ninja Scroll.  And then are folks like me, who ran a game tied more closely to myth.  I ran a game in the Ashikaga shogunate, at the time of two courts.  My players were a shinto priestess, a ronin, a buddhist monk and...a silk merchant.  Their adventures included escorting a tea master to a ceremony with a fox (as a result of a drunken bet), banishing ghosts from a haunted inn, fighting the Angry Stump God and secretly supporting what would become the Go-Daigo rebellion.  Oh, and there were ninja, too.  They tended to die a lot, but they did manage to poison the ronin.  But that's another story.  As for Dark Elves...they're overexposed, politically dicey and far too popular with the fanboy element for some.  They were once considered the big bad guys of D&D, but then became too familiar.  I also agree that people were playing them poorly prior to Drizzt...but he validated the concept for many, unfortunately.  That, and the perception that adding in 'drow' substitutes would constitute broader intellectual theft, legal or not.  Oh, and where does Jordan's Wheel of Time have elves of any kind, let alone the drow variety?  What's amusing is how many fictional series actually draw upon actual D&D games, which some changes.  Ray Fiest's Riftwar Saga took directly from Tekumel/Empire of the Petal Throne...so much so that Barker threatened to sue him and Daw books, as I recall (but notice he had his mordhrel, the dark elves).  Steven Brust's Jhereg series comes from a game he ran back in the day.  Rosenberg's is about D&D players who actually get transported to a D&D world.  There are others.  You get the idea.</blockquote>

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