What have you done to Drow in your world?

[Satori]

Wait, keep reading! Don't give up now!

This is part rant, part question. If you don't care about the rant, skip to the bottom.

[RANT]I like Gygaxian (may he rest in peace) Drow.

They were a twisted, weird, otherworldly and sinister species that truly amazed and terrified players in D3. In that adventure, you travel into the depths of the Abyss, traffic with demons, duel a vampire/succubus couple, and otherwise fight for your life.

Drow, since then, have changed.

A lot.

Duh.

Back in the day [Grognard] "If demons had teeth, then Drow had fangs!" [/Grognard].

Now, I've seen a number of supplements aimed at returning Dark Elves to their roots. I think "Quintessential Drow" by Mongoose Publishing and "Plot and Poison" by Green Ronin did an admirable job.

Unfortunately, this still doesn't do it for me. In many ways, they're still "Pansy Drow", but with nastier flavor text.

This has forced me to heavily retool Drow in an effort to recapture the "Gygaxian Feel".

[/RANT]

[Houserule]

No matter how nasty I change the fluff, modern Drow still seem to defanged. So, I've made the following changes IMC.

-All "Noble" Drow are Half-Demons.

-All "Lesser/Commoner" Drow are some manner of Tiefling (symbolizing the dilution of the "Pure" drow).

-Lloth is not a goddess, but a Demon Queen...of Spiders...like her title says.

-All Drow are Evil, and only "Lesser/Commoner" Drow have the potential for Neutrality. Good alignments are simply not possible, as "Social Conditioning" is no longer the only reason for their evil behavior.

-Drow are not black skinned, white haired, and red eyed because of a curse from Corellon...but because Lloth (a DEMON Queen) began to "strengthen" her initial tribe of followers through demonic breeding.

[/Houserule]

I initially wanted to pose a "How have you changed the core races in your campaigns?"...then I realized that the "Drow Issue" is so strong and pervasive that I have a feeling that a LOT of you folks have done amazingly creative things with this infamous species.

So...what have you done to everyone's favorite Emo Elves?

 

[Crothian]

Drow are not a PC race. That is the first step.

The second step was to make them practically extinct, after losing a genocide war with the truly evil elf like beings of my world.

Lolth is a demi goddess but she was trapped in frozen combat with a demigod of the evil elf like things that killed most of the Drow.

The PCs found Lolth and the other Demi god and choose to side with Lolth. The other Demi goddess died and Lolth went out into the world to find that her people were all dead. Or so everyone thought. In the WLD there were a few Drow left and that campaign saw them being freed. Lolth came and got her children and they went to parts unknown to forge their own destiny.

What the Drow were is completely changed. They are no longer evil, just a once forgotten sub race of the main elf line that didn't die out.

 

[Grymar]

Mechanically, nothing. But being Eberron Drow are a) not an available player race, and b) confined to Xen'drik (a southern continent far removed from my campaign).

Point "a" is significant because I allow many other types of monster races (gnolls, goblins, kobolds, orcs, hobgoblins, etc.).

In essence I've changed them by removing them from the game.

 

[billd91]

The Drow in my Greyhawk game are:

- pale skinned, white/silver haired
- males have the favored class of sorcerer, females cleric
- very rare
- referred to in ancient elven texts as "dark" elves because of the darkness they embraced
- given the two-weapon fighting feat as a bonus feat to reflect their ambidexterity

Lolth is a lesser goddess of seduction, arcane knowledge, and spiders. She seduced the Drow in deep history by providing blasphemous arcane power. She become a power in the Abyss by killing her predecessor and taking over his domain. Various relics of the demon she slew are distributed by her favored priestesses in their plots to enable easier monitoring and domination (carriers suffer a -2 on all saves vs Drow magic).

 

[rossik]

well, im playing 1ed greyhawk, so drow are what they suppose to be

 

[Dice4Hire]

Banned them, mostly.

 

[Sound of Azure]

The drow in my world are spindly, pale-skinned and wretched creatures that live in the small places under the earth.

An ancient high elven king punished the people who would become the drow for crimes against their kind by being forcing into elf-shaped tunnels that led deep into the earth. The tunnels warped and twisted, forcing the elves' bodies to reshape and warp or be unable to move forward. The dark elves went mad in the cloying darkness and embraced this madness. Eventually they became mad enough that they slipped the bounds of the Prime material and became touched by the far realms, and became thralls of Tharizdun.

Basically all drow have either the pseudonatural or farspawn templates, and others have more exotic alterations as time has gone on. They always have natural weapons and most have long reach and fast movement due their twisted bodies. The drow of course, have immense emnity toward the elven race due to the cruel punishment of their ancestors.

For reasons unknown, drow will spill out of the earth and invade the surface every time there is a full solar eclipse, though they occasionally surface for other unfathomable reasons (ie when I feel like it ).

 

[rossik]

just curious, but...why do you guys changed drows?

why make them white?

 

[robertliguori]

IMC, the drow got into a war with the illithids which ended when the drow used their superior clerical mojo to start spectre-bombing illithid cities, and the illithids responded by making every lump of sickstone in the Underdark go supercritical in an instant. To this day, the Underdark is haunted by swarms of hyper-evolved incorporeal undead that cannot bear the touch of light, stalked by the occasional creature from the Far Realms that doesn't run on positive energy, and also inflicting continuous Con damage on anything organic and chipping away at anything magical. The Underdark stands as a testament to what happens when magic-using races take the gloves off, and is pretty much the reason why the way the various communities of good and evil humanoids interact with each other with small raids and not genocidal armies.

 

[Oni]

The drow in my world are spindly, pale-skinned and wretched creatures that live in the small places under the earth.

An ancient high elven king punished the people who would become the drow for crimes against their kind by being forcing into elf-shaped tunnels that led deep into the earth. The tunnels warped and twisted, forcing the elves' bodies to reshape and warp or be unable to move forward. The dark elves went mad in the cloying darkness and embraced this madness. Eventually they became mad enough that they slipped the bounds of the Prime material and became touched by the far realms, and became thralls of Tharizdun.

Basically all drow have either the pseudonatural or farspawn templates, and others have more exotic alterations as time has gone on. They always have natural weapons and most have long reach and fast movement due their twisted bodies. The drow of course, have immense emnity toward the elven race due to the cruel punishment of their ancestors.

For reasons unknown, drow will spill out of the earth and invade the surface every time there is a full solar eclipse, though they occasionally surface for other unfathomable reasons (ie when I feel like it ).

This is cool. I'd never thought of giving them pseudonatural ties, great idea.