Homebrew Astral Drow Species Details

Children of moonlit shadow and starlit grace, Astral Drow are rare beings born of both the Underdark’s enigmatic drow and the astral elves who sail the stars. They embody the tension between darkness and light, their souls echoing with both the whispers of ancient webs and the hum of celestial song.

Their skin often glimmers like polished obsidian dusted with faint starlight, and their eyes shimmer with silvers, violets, or soft blues—mirroring the night sky. Astral Drow move with a dancer’s poise and a dreamer’s stillness, equally at home in shadowed caverns or drifting among planar currents.

Caught between two worlds, they often become wanderers, seers, or warriors—guided by intuition, dreams, or destinies written in constellations and shadow.

Creating Your Character

When you create your D&D character, you decide whether your character is a member of the human race or one of the game’s fantastical races. If you create a character using a race option presented here, follow these additional rules during character creation.

Ability Score Increases

When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one of those scores by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. Follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy.

The “Quick Build” section for your character’s class offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You’re free to follow those suggestions or to ignore them. Whichever scores you decide to increase, none of the scores can be raised above 20.

Languages

Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player's Handbook offers a list of widespread languages to choose from. The DM is free to add or remove languages from that list for a particular campaign.

Creature Type

Every creature in D&D, including every player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters are of the Humanoid type. A race option presented here tells you what your character’s creature type is.

Here’s a list of the game’s creature types in alphabetical order: Aberration, Beast, Celestial, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Humanoid, Monstrosity, Ooze, Plant, Undead. These types don’t have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the text of the cure wounds spell specifies that the spell doesn’t work on a creature that has the Construct type. (The autognome is a noteworthy exception because of its Healing Machine trait.)

Life Span

The typical life span of a player character in the D&D multiverse is about a century, assuming the character doesn’t meet a violent end on an adventure. Members of some races, such as dwarves and elves, can live for centuries—a fact noted in the description of the race in question.

Height and Weight

Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world. If you’d like to determine your character’s height or weight randomly, consult the Random Height and Weight table in the Player's Handbook, and choose the row in the table that best represents the build you imagine for your character.

Astral Drow Traits

As an Astral Drow player character, you have the following traits.

Creature Type

You are a Humanoid. You are also considered an elf for any prerequisite or effect that requires you to be an elf.

Size

You are Medium.

Speed

Your walking speed is 30 feet.

Drow Magic

You know the dancing lights cantrip. When you reach 3rd level, you can cast the faerie fire spell once with this trait and regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. When you reach 5th level, you can cast the darkness spell once with this trait and regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest.

Your spellcasting ability is either Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma (choose when you select this race

Superior Darkvision

You can see in dim light within 120 feet of yourself as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.

Fey Ancestry

You have advantage on saving throws you make to avoid or end the charmed condition on yourself, and magic can't put you to sleep.

Keen Senses

You have proficiency in the Perception skill.

Starlight Step

As a bonus action, you can magically teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space you can see. You can use this trait a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Trance

Elves don’t need to sleep. Instead, they meditate deeply, remaining semiconscious, for 4 hours a day. (The Common word for such meditation is “trance.”) While meditating, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.