Many of the arguments presented boil down to, "so that matters to you - well it doesn't matter to me - so it doesn't matter".
It could just as easily be boiled down to "I've decided all drow have the exact same Vantablack skin tone and if your drow is different I'm going to raise a giant stink until you change it to match my specific, narrow, rigid interpretation of what drow are".
If you like the older lore? Use the older lore. Nobody's stopping you. DDB's chopping the books, yes, and a lot of people are pissed about that. There's an argument to be made there, but the older text is still available, and most of the people arguing about drow skin tones here are arguing it from forty year old material they haven't touched in literal decades. If you still have that material and want to use it? Go for it. I prefer a little more subtlety and nuance in my worldbuilding than "BLACK ELVES EVIL, WHITE ELVES GUD", but who am I to say what happens at your table?
It has always been true that people could always use any adaptation of lore they wanted.
The prior lore was that the drow were black-skinned which could still have worked fine as a baseline. We already have orcs as a grey-skinned race.
I played in a great game in which the dark-skinned drow were the good guys fighting against the tyranny of the corrupt high elves in the lands above. The drow were only evil when in context of the influence of Lolth.
As I said, "I love the idea of Eilistraee and others being dark-skinned forces for good and would have liked WotC to have stuck with these developing themes." That's just my opinion though I shouldn't describe you as making a giant stink about me having it. That would be a low blow.
Many of the arguments presented boil down to, "so that matters to you - well it doesn't matter to me - so it doesn't matter".
It could just as easily be boiled down to "I've decided all drow have the exact same Vantablack skin tone and if your drow is different I'm going to raise a giant stink until you change it to match my specific, narrow, rigid interpretation of what drow are".
If you like the older lore? Use the older lore. Nobody's stopping you. DDB's chopping the books, yes, and a lot of people are pissed about that. There's an argument to be made there, but the older text is still available, and most of the people arguing about drow skin tones here are arguing it from forty year old material they haven't touched in literal decades. If you still have that material and want to use it? Go for it. I prefer a little more subtlety and nuance in my worldbuilding than "BLACK ELVES EVIL, WHITE ELVES GUD", but who am I to say what happens at your table?
Honestly, it would be nice if WotC would use their own original cosmos for their 'new' lore rather than retconning existing and beloved worlds/lore.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Any time Wizards releases any content,whatsoever, for a world/setting/cosmos other than the Forgotten Realms, people lose their collective minds. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount was widely lambasted in this forum for being "a total waste of a book" because it dealt with Exandria rather than the Realms. Eberron was similarly, if less extensively, panned for being about a non-Realms D&D setting, and in many places I see constant scorn for Eberron due to its radically different emphases and nature. The noir-spellpunk bent of Eberron is often held up as a deep perversion of True And Proper D&D and, once again, a complete waste of time and books that could've been spent reproducing Forgotten Realms content word-for-word from older editions, just with the serial numbers filed off and the mechanical bits kibitzed to fit 5e.
If Wizards tried to build a 'new' world for their modern audience while leaving the old racist, sexist, specist lore alone, people would shriek their heads off that their favorite world is being abandoned and Wizards is Ruining D&D Forever by no longer supporting the Forgotten Realms. If Wizards tries to make the Forgotten Realms less whatever-ist, people shriek their heads off that their favorite world is being mangled and Wizards is Ruining D&D Forever by not keeping all the lore completely and exactly the same as when it was written forty-five years ago. If Wizards does what all the shriekers actually want and reprints 2e content literally word-for-word with only the smallest possible changes made to accomodate the new underlying mechanical skeleton, they lose most of their market share because modern players will look at a system where every species save human is considered Always Chaotic Evil, where women have a Seduction score instead of a Charisma score and take drastic penalties to their every physical stat, and where the whole thing just kinda reads like a bad He-Man fanfic and decide "Y'know what? Nah. I'll find something else to spend money on."
And the shriekers won't buy it anyways, because they already have all the 2e books and see no reason to bother with the new stuff.
People are going to complain regardless. IMO they are less likely to complain about new worlds. I'm not interested in Exandria, but I'd play there, and the lore there is the lore. PoL was a great idea in 4e, and while I wasn't a fan of some of their lore, it didn't bug me because it's a different world, not a retcon of one that I love.
Also, I think you are exaggerating more than a little. Even the drow were not inherently evil in 2e. Their society was evil and drow raised there tended to be evil.
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Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Also, I think you are exaggerating more than a little. Even the drow were not inherently evil in 2e. Their society was evil and drow raised there tended to be evil.
Older editions absolutely had default prescribed alignments for various races. They considered alignment to be some creature's intrinsic characteristic, instead of an acquired characteristic. Not so much that a creature had become bad, but that it was inherently bad as a result of existing at all. It was more than a little problematic by today's standards (and TBH always was problematic even if it wasn't recognized as such at the time by society at large)
And, while that may make sense for something like a demon, a creature that is formed from some horrific distillation of evil souls or whatever, it is a problem for natural born sentient/sapient creatures with free will.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Beyond the ethical ramifications of "This species of sapient, self-aware humanoids, ostensibly gifted with free will and the spark of true intelligence, is 100% irredeemably Chaotic Evil and must be expunged from the Realms forever even though you can make PCs of this species"...drow are simply incredibly popular as a player option. People love them, both playing for and against type, and giving the incredibly popular player option the same range of freedom as most any other PC species just kinda makes sense. DMs can always reimpose restrictions, especially if they've been playing with the older lore for decades. If your drow are purely black-skinned Always Chaotic Evil Lolth-worshipping slavers that cannot be redeemed, reasoned with, or anything-but-murdered, then so long as your players are on board, go for it.
And frankly even I'm willing to admit that plastic figurine just looks off. But that often tends to happen with plastic toys; his face looks like it's made of plastic there, and not because it actually is. It's bizarre - they did a great job on his armor and gear, but man they dropped the ball on his face.
Just as an aside, and because we're all here anyways - what's everybody's favorite drow character/concept? I ran into an Internet meme a while back I've wanted to play really badly ever since, some 4chan thing of "you see a drow rogue, dressed in dark leathers with her hood drawn up over her head, idly toying with a dagger while keeping to herself in a shadowy corner of the tavern. Upon further inspection, and daring a conversation with the brooding young antiheroine, you discover...
She's actually very friendly! She's hopiong to find work but has been having just the worst luck, and is so glad you came over to talk to her.
She's 'brooding' because she's painfully shy, and all the loud, boisterous mead-chugging and rabble-rousing is kinda overwhelming to somebody used to long stretches of silence and solitude on the roads.
She's dressed in dark leathers because bright, colorfully dyed leathers are way more expensive and she just can't afford them. Plus in her line of work, your working clothes are dull and dark and your for-fun clothes are brightly colored...if you could afford for-fun clothes, anyways...
Her hood is up and she's lurking in the shadows because all the bright firelight from the rest of the tavern hurts her eyes, and she's trying to give them some rest.
The dagger she's playing with is actually a keepsake from her mother, who gave it to her when she helped her daughter escape the [cruelty of the Spider's web/rigid soul-recycling 'destiny' of the Krynn Dynasty]. It's got her family's crest embossed on the pommel, and it's one of her dearest treasures.
She's keeping to herself because she knows her people's reputation outside the Underdark/Dynasty and she's already had some real bad trouble just trying to get by. She's learned that it's better to survey the situation first, second, and possibly even third before stepping a foot out of place and starting another riot just because she's a drow...
I've wanted to play that rogue for forever, but the chance just never comes up. It's maddening. I love it to death and would dive wholeheartedly into the role, but it turns out that chances to play a fish-outta-water drow rogue Nice Girl who's just trying to get by and find her way in strange lands are far fewer than one might assume. Glugh.
After playing Queen of the Demonweb Pits in the early Nineties and killing Lolth (yeah seems that shouldn't have been possible canon wise) I played a Drow Cavalier/Wizard. He was a kind but just person, not interested in petty crimes, only in combatting the larger enemies of good. We used a mixture of 1st and 2nd edition rules. He was LG was one of three adventurers who survived a Ravenloft campaign, were able to leave it and arrived on an unknown world. Alas, soon after the campaign ended as the DM and on the other survivors got into an ugly divorce. I found the character creation sheet a while back when I was going through some old stuff.
My favorite Drow character was a Necromancer who was a perky goth who filled her spellbook with doodles of puppies, loved sunshine, was friendly with everyone she met, and was a total daddy's girl. Basically the exact opposite of every Drow stereotype I could think of. The entire party regarded her as their adorable but surprisingly dangerous younger sister.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I like to think the best answer is, its DND and your character can and should be how ever you want them to be! :) No need to be lore accurate or anything. Just let your imagination run wild.
I like to think the best answer is, its DND and your character can and should be how ever you want them to be! :) No need to be lore accurate or anything. Just let your imagination run wild.
Agreed. I've been running home brewed worlds for decades now. The last stock world I used was 1e Kara-tur. All this 'but the lore!' handwringing implies that there is something wrong with those of us who make our own lore.
Especially given that all kinds of lore gets changed on a regular basis anyway. There's only a few specific bits of lore that people get upset about if it gets touched. I mean, 3rd Edition had seriously different depictions of Tiamat and Bahamut compared to Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, but do you hear anyone complain about that? Is there a major clamor to get the Forgotten Realms connection to Earth reestablished? How about the fact that giants and dwarves no longer have any special enmity with each other? Or the enmity between dwarves and elves, for that matter? Lots of things have gotten changed and hey, nobody actually cared.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Any time Wizards releases any content,whatsoever, for a world/setting/cosmos other than the Forgotten Realms, people lose their collective minds. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount was widely lambasted in this forum for being "a total waste of a book" because it dealt with Exandria rather than the Realms. Eberron was similarly, if less extensively, panned for being about a non-Realms D&D setting, and in many places I see constant scorn for Eberron due to its radically different emphases and nature. The noir-spellpunk bent of Eberron is often held up as a deep perversion of True And Proper D&D and, once again, a complete waste of time and books that could've been spent reproducing Forgotten Realms content word-for-word from older editions, just with the serial numbers filed off and the mechanical bits kibitzed to fit 5e.
If Wizards tried to build a 'new' world for their modern audience while leaving the old racist, sexist, specist lore alone, people would shriek their heads off that their favorite world is being abandoned and Wizards is Ruining D&D Forever by no longer supporting the Forgotten Realms. If Wizards tries to make the Forgotten Realms less whatever-ist, people shriek their heads off that their favorite world is being mangled and Wizards is Ruining D&D Forever by not keeping all the lore completely and exactly the same as when it was written forty-five years ago. If Wizards does what all the shriekers actually want and reprints 2e content literally word-for-word with only the smallest possible changes made to accomodate the new underlying mechanical skeleton, they lose most of their market share because modern players will look at a system where every species save human is considered Always Chaotic Evil, where women have a Seduction score instead of a Charisma score and take drastic penalties to their every physical stat, and where the whole thing just kinda reads like a bad He-Man fanfic and decide "Y'know what? Nah. I'll find something else to spend money on."
And the shriekers won't buy it anyways, because they already have all the 2e books and see no reason to bother with the new stuff.
But I still like 2nd :-( I also think there is room for all editions, even fourth.
I like the shades of gray link but those are shades. Hues are like adding some blue, red, green, cyan, magenta, yellow, etc to a grayish color. What I'm worried about, is that the canon shifts average Drow to the plastic model's skin color. Which is a grayish skin tone with a blueish/purpleish "hue" (depends on the lighting, I don't have the model).
I know it says tends to... and I can do what I want in D&D as long as it's not emotionally harmful out of respect to other players. It's just a matter of principle. And I know I'm sounding pedantic. It's just going to be sad, when I open up a 5.5E or 6E book and there's crowds of Drow depicted with these chalky blue/purple gray colors. That's why I'm pushing back on it.
It's not well lit in the Underdark. Like you have to you have to use darkvision. In darkvision everything is a shade of gray. So yeah, hue doesn't matter. I don't know the shade of the stone in the Underdark. It's probably all kinds of shades depending on the area. It's a big place. I guess having deep black skin wouldn't always be the best camo. You would wear clothes suited for the area and paint your skin anyways.
Beyond the ethical ramifications of "This species of sapient, self-aware humanoids, ostensibly gifted with free will and the spark of true intelligence, is 100% irredeemably Chaotic Evil and must be expunged from the Realms forever even though you can make PCs of this species"...drow are simply incredibly popular as a player option.
The drow weren't originally irredeemably evil. There were a variety of canonically documented drow of good persuasion. as far back as at /least/ 2e. My 1e lore isn't as solid, I'd have to defer to someone like Ed Greenwood, but I am pretty sure that he has Eilistraee around as early as 1e. I just don't know how canon her and her followers are in the 1e time period.
That didn't happen until 4e, when for some reason WotC made the decision that /all/ drow should be evil so that Drizzt would feel more unique. I seem to recall an interview with Perkins where that was admitted, but it was so long ago I can't source it properly any more. That's why Salvatore had to kill off Tos'un Armgo (he was no longer allowed to be good) and Cattibrie went down the path of orcs are all irredeemably evil in the books. It was all because WotC made some really stupid choices in 4e lore-wise that removed racial agency from intelligent races. That choice really hasn't aged well, and here we are, with more ham fisted retcons to fix what they shouldn't have broken in the first place...and rather than try to use a scalpel to adjust things, they use a sledge hammer for their surgery.
Honestly WotC isn't very good at lore. They're very good at crunch and mechanics, but they are utter hogwash at lore. I wish they would stop trying and let DMs and 3rd party people write that.
Lore certainly represents a regular realm of failure for WotC but wouldn't judge them so highly on mechanics. (For d&d participants who would like to aim for balance in their games, they seem to make liberal releases of new highly powered content to extents that some DMs find that they are required to formulate increasingly long lists of house rules just to cope with them all).
I grew with D&D with a view that drow are black. I don't see the point of them changing something that they've established. I love the idea of Eilistraee and others being dark-skinned forces for good and would have liked WotC to have stuck with these developing themes.
As I said, "I grew with D&D with a view that drow are black. I don't see the point of them changing something that they've established."
It's retconning past lore which for me is unnecessary and unwelcome.
If you would have clicked the links you would have noticed that the colours are dark. You're just arguing semantics.
Well done. You have selected 3 shades of dark grey. If WotC had specified dark grey that would have been something.
From the WoTC post: : "Your kin tend to have stark white hair and grayish skin of many hues." The link to that post. https://dnd.wizards.com/dndstudioblog/sage-advice-book-updates You are not only discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but also their gender and hobbies. You just want to argue because it's not 100% how you want it.
This is not even a lore discussion. A lore discussion would be more in the trend of how bad or good WoTC introduced those two examples of non Lolth worshipping Drow in an article about one of the worst pc games using the DnD IP. https://dnd.dragonmag.com/2021/05/21/beyond-the-underdark-secrets-of-the-drow/content.html. That's would be a lore discussion. Not if "grayish skin of many hues" includes or excludes dark grey.
Also, I think you are exaggerating more than a little. Even the drow were not inherently evil in 2e. Their society was evil and drow raised there tended to be evil.
Older editions absolutely had default prescribed alignments for various races. They considered alignment to be some creature's intrinsic characteristic, instead of an acquired characteristic. Not so much that a creature had become bad, but that it was inherently bad as a result of existing at all. It was more than a little problematic by today's standards (and TBH always was problematic even if it wasn't recognized as such at the time by society at large)
And, while that may make sense for something like a demon, a creature that is formed from some horrific distillation of evil souls or whatever, it is a problem for natural born sentient/sapient creatures with free will.
That's certainly not true of the drow. While they had a listing of CE in the MM, a browse of the rather definitive "Drow of the Underdark" book on the topic says otherwise.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
My favorite Drow character was a Necromancer who was a perky goth who filled her spellbook with doodles of puppies, loved sunshine, was friendly with everyone she met, and was a total daddy's girl. Basically the exact opposite of every Drow stereotype I could think of. The entire party regarded her as their adorable but surprisingly dangerous younger sister.
That sounds great! Heh, I do love the Cuddly Sunshine Necromancer tropes, especially when they don't detract from the powerful-dark-magician aspects of the character. May have to pin that idea on the back burner myself, it sounds positively delightful. Appreciate you sharing the story, 6LG.
I am on page four of this discussion which I have seen appear every now and again..
And not ONCE has anyone raised the question of where the Drow’s elegant “Sam Elliot” handlebar moustaches went!!!
All my old D series modules showed guys with face fuzz!!!
Read post six. I don't call then "Sam Elliot" but I call then powerstaches, they;'re the only thing I really assert in these threads, along with the aggressive widow's peak and photonegative skin tones and general KISS coverband of the Underdark vibe. Drow can rock anyway you want them, all night, and will party every day when granted the ability to do so.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Point is, none of us gets to decide what someone else is or is not offended by.
True true. Good words.
Maybe I got offended today because I like some consistency in my world building. I remember going to Menzoberranzan…
Fun fact. Literally none of that lore has been changed in the slightest. It’s just specific to the Forgotten Realms, as it always has been, and is no longer presented as a ‘default’ for all settings.
the drow of the forgotten realms have a different history and culture than the drow of Eberon, or Greyhawk, or Dark Sun, or Wildmount, or…
I will also add that as far as I remember back to the G&D Drow Days, there was part of the D encounter tables which discussed Drow “Prisoners with Jobs” who were sometimes of a range of heritages combined with the local Lolthian lines resulting in a variety of appearances. Alignments other than complete CE were mentioned as well, which was meant to represent how these outcasts rebelled against the local Erelhei-Cinlu residents..
I will also add that as far as I remember back to the G&D Drow Days, there was part of the D encounter tables which discussed Drow “Prisoners with Jobs” who were sometimes of a range of heritages combined with the local Lolthian lines resulting in a variety of appearances. Alignments other than complete CE were mentioned as well, which was meant to represent how these outcasts rebelled against the local Erelhei-Cinlu residents..
Random encounter tables of the Q1 had rebellious Drow youth in Erelhei-Cinlu. I've stated this before, but it gets ignored. There have been numerous, lore based, examples. In GH and in FR to just use the two more classical DnD worlds.
I will also add that as far as I remember back to the G&D Drow Days, there was part of the D encounter tables which discussed Drow “Prisoners with Jobs” who were sometimes of a range of heritages combined with the local Lolthian lines resulting in a variety of appearances. Alignments other than complete CE were mentioned as well, which was meant to represent how these outcasts rebelled against the local Erelhei-Cinlu residents..
Random encounter tables of the Q1 had rebellious Drow youth in Erelhei-Cinlu. I've stated this before, but it gets ignored. There have been numerous, lore based, examples. In GH and in FR to just use the two more classical DnD worlds.
Did rebellious drow have their facial hair specified? I mean, let's stick to what really matters, folks. In their rebellion did they also reject their ancestors' hard rocking ways?
It was called spellJAMMING for a reason, space cowboys.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
It has always been true that people could always use any adaptation of lore they wanted.
The prior lore was that the drow were black-skinned which could still have worked fine as a baseline. We already have orcs as a grey-skinned race.
I played in a great game in which the dark-skinned drow were the good guys fighting against the tyranny of the corrupt high elves in the lands above. The drow were only evil when in context of the influence of Lolth.
As I said, "I love the idea of Eilistraee and others being dark-skinned forces for good and would have liked WotC to have stuck with these developing themes." That's just my opinion though I shouldn't describe you as making a giant stink about me having it. That would be a low blow.
Honestly, it would be nice if WotC would use their own original cosmos for their 'new' lore rather than retconning existing and beloved worlds/lore.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Any time Wizards releases any content,whatsoever, for a world/setting/cosmos other than the Forgotten Realms, people lose their collective minds. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount was widely lambasted in this forum for being "a total waste of a book" because it dealt with Exandria rather than the Realms. Eberron was similarly, if less extensively, panned for being about a non-Realms D&D setting, and in many places I see constant scorn for Eberron due to its radically different emphases and nature. The noir-spellpunk bent of Eberron is often held up as a deep perversion of True And Proper D&D and, once again, a complete waste of time and books that could've been spent reproducing Forgotten Realms content word-for-word from older editions, just with the serial numbers filed off and the mechanical bits kibitzed to fit 5e.
If Wizards tried to build a 'new' world for their modern audience while leaving the old racist, sexist, specist lore alone, people would shriek their heads off that their favorite world is being abandoned and Wizards is Ruining D&D Forever by no longer supporting the Forgotten Realms. If Wizards tries to make the Forgotten Realms less whatever-ist, people shriek their heads off that their favorite world is being mangled and Wizards is Ruining D&D Forever by not keeping all the lore completely and exactly the same as when it was written forty-five years ago. If Wizards does what all the shriekers actually want and reprints 2e content literally word-for-word with only the smallest possible changes made to accomodate the new underlying mechanical skeleton, they lose most of their market share because modern players will look at a system where every species save human is considered Always Chaotic Evil, where women have a Seduction score instead of a Charisma score and take drastic penalties to their every physical stat, and where the whole thing just kinda reads like a bad He-Man fanfic and decide "Y'know what? Nah. I'll find something else to spend money on."
And the shriekers won't buy it anyways, because they already have all the 2e books and see no reason to bother with the new stuff.
Please do not contact or message me.
People are going to complain regardless. IMO they are less likely to complain about new worlds. I'm not interested in Exandria, but I'd play there, and the lore there is the lore. PoL was a great idea in 4e, and while I wasn't a fan of some of their lore, it didn't bug me because it's a different world, not a retcon of one that I love.
Also, I think you are exaggerating more than a little. Even the drow were not inherently evil in 2e. Their society was evil and drow raised there tended to be evil.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Older editions absolutely had default prescribed alignments for various races. They considered alignment to be some creature's intrinsic characteristic, instead of an acquired characteristic. Not so much that a creature had become bad, but that it was inherently bad as a result of existing at all. It was more than a little problematic by today's standards (and TBH always was problematic even if it wasn't recognized as such at the time by society at large)
And, while that may make sense for something like a demon, a creature that is formed from some horrific distillation of evil souls or whatever, it is a problem for natural born sentient/sapient creatures with free will.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
I am on page four of this discussion which I have seen appear every now and again..
And not ONCE has anyone raised the question of where the Drow’s elegant “Sam Elliot” handlebar moustaches went!!!
All my old D series modules showed guys with face fuzz!!!
My favorite Drow character was a Necromancer who was a perky goth who filled her spellbook with doodles of puppies, loved sunshine, was friendly with everyone she met, and was a total daddy's girl. Basically the exact opposite of every Drow stereotype I could think of. The entire party regarded her as their adorable but surprisingly dangerous younger sister.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Thank you for giving me this idea. It is now going into my homebrew world.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
I like to think the best answer is, its DND and your character can and should be how ever you want them to be! :) No need to be lore accurate or anything. Just let your imagination run wild.
Especially given that all kinds of lore gets changed on a regular basis anyway. There's only a few specific bits of lore that people get upset about if it gets touched. I mean, 3rd Edition had seriously different depictions of Tiamat and Bahamut compared to Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, but do you hear anyone complain about that? Is there a major clamor to get the Forgotten Realms connection to Earth reestablished? How about the fact that giants and dwarves no longer have any special enmity with each other? Or the enmity between dwarves and elves, for that matter? Lots of things have gotten changed and hey, nobody actually cared.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
But I still like 2nd :-( I also think there is room for all editions, even fourth.
From the WoTC post: : "Your kin tend to have stark white hair and grayish skin of many hues." The link to that post. https://dnd.wizards.com/dndstudioblog/sage-advice-book-updates You are not only discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but also their gender and hobbies. You just want to argue because it's not 100% how you want it.
This is not even a lore discussion. A lore discussion would be more in the trend of how bad or good WoTC introduced those two examples of non Lolth worshipping Drow in an article about one of the worst pc games using the DnD IP. https://dnd.dragonmag.com/2021/05/21/beyond-the-underdark-secrets-of-the-drow/content.html. That's would be a lore discussion. Not if "grayish skin of many hues" includes or excludes dark grey.
That's certainly not true of the drow. While they had a listing of CE in the MM, a browse of the rather definitive "Drow of the Underdark" book on the topic says otherwise.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
That sounds great! Heh, I do love the Cuddly Sunshine Necromancer tropes, especially when they don't detract from the powerful-dark-magician aspects of the character. May have to pin that idea on the back burner myself, it sounds positively delightful. Appreciate you sharing the story, 6LG.
Please do not contact or message me.
Read post six. I don't call then "Sam Elliot" but I call then powerstaches, they;'re the only thing I really assert in these threads, along with the aggressive widow's peak and photonegative skin tones and general KISS coverband of the Underdark vibe. Drow can rock anyway you want them, all night, and will party every day when granted the ability to do so.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Fun fact. Literally none of that lore has been changed in the slightest. It’s just specific to the Forgotten Realms, as it always has been, and is no longer presented as a ‘default’ for all settings.
the drow of the forgotten realms have a different history and culture than the drow of Eberon, or Greyhawk, or Dark Sun, or Wildmount, or…
Midnight_Plat,
I stand corrected.
I will also add that as far as I remember back to the G&D Drow Days, there was part of the D encounter tables which discussed Drow “Prisoners with Jobs” who were sometimes of a range of heritages combined with the local Lolthian lines resulting in a variety of appearances. Alignments other than complete CE were mentioned as well, which was meant to represent how these outcasts rebelled against the local Erelhei-Cinlu residents..
Random encounter tables of the Q1 had rebellious Drow youth in Erelhei-Cinlu. I've stated this before, but it gets ignored. There have been numerous, lore based, examples. In GH and in FR to just use the two more classical DnD worlds.
Did rebellious drow have their facial hair specified? I mean, let's stick to what really matters, folks. In their rebellion did they also reject their ancestors' hard rocking ways?
It was called spellJAMMING for a reason, space cowboys.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Nit, but that would be D3. Q1 occurs in the Demonweb Pits.