Just to reiterate: this thread contains spoilers concerning Second Darkness and speculation about Drow Elves and redemption. Don't read further if you don't want to have one of the big surprises of Second Darkness to be ruined for you.
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Given the strong theme of redemption inherent WotR, I was thinking about how this might work with the corruption inherent in the Drow Elves. As I mentioned above, Second Darkness Spoilers here: Drow Elves are in fact regular elves who, due to some aspect of the Darklands and possibly the influence of demon lords and/or a certain captive God of Destruction, had their hair and eyes bleached white, and skin turned black, during Earthfall.
When the elves returned to Golarion and discovered the Drow, they worked hard to cover this up. There was a reason for this: it seems that an evil elf that does something fairly horrific can spontaneously transform INTO a Drow Elf. Thus, the evilness of Drow is inherent and even contagious in a manner of speaking.
However, thanks to a certain middling author, "noble" Drow Elves is a big thing among gamers, and inevitably ends up appearing in quite a few games. And this got me thinking. When a Drow elf realizes it is good and tries to overcome its inherent darkness... might there not be a point in which it overcomes the "curse" element and literally transforms into a pale-skinned elf?
Something akin to this can be found with the Dark Elves (or moredhel) from the Riftwar Saga: While most moredhel are dark-haired, you can find a few occasional blonde moredhel... and while most elves in the Riftwar Saga are blondes, there are dark-haired elves as well. Because they can convert - sometimes an elf realizes it doesn't agree with elvish philosophies and goes off to join the moredhel, while more rarely a moredhel may survive long enough to realize it isn't bloodthirsty like its kin and returns to the elves.
It may be an interesting twist to pull on a player with a Drow character; have the character slowly gain redemption points... and if he gains enough, have him suddenly transform, his skin growing pale, his eyes darken, his hair coloring. You could even negate the vulnerability to light but let him keep other abilities if you're feeling generous... or even adapt the character using the Advanced Race rules that include Drow heritage.
Given that I'm playing a Drow in a Wrath of the Righteous campaign, yes, I think this would potentially be a memorable plot development, if the GM built up to it. By which I mean, the process of redemption of the drow character would have to be something both the player and the GM emphasized before that point.
Maybe it's because I'm black, but that idea makes me very uncomfortable, even though I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it.
No, I literally didn't mean anything of it. Because as I said, in "Second Darkness" you can (and do) witness a pale-skinned elf, after doing an act of madness and evil, have his skin spontaneously change black, his eyes white, and his hair white. In short, Drow elves are just elves. And something about Golarion itself can make a surface elf go Drow.
Personally, I dislike this view of Drow. In my world, Dark Elves are albino. They are called "Moon Elves" because they raid above-ground during the night and have the palest of skin. Meanwhile, there are two groups of dark-skinned elves that are not Evil, the Jungle-dwelling elves and the Desert elves.
(And as an aside, while I'm white an NPC Paladin I'm running in my RoW campaign is black. Part of this was an homage to Roy from "Order of the Stick." And he's actually a very effective character who has told the party outright they're not allowed to use those scrolls of Animate Dead they found and that he will destroy any undead they create because they are an abomination. Outside of that he's not in their face about their actions, and didn't blink twice when one player was revealed to be a goblin riding in a human-sized suit of full plate armor who thinks he's a gnome. Yes, I run weird games.)
Asides aside, my entire point of bringing up the transformation of a Drow back to Surface Elf was because of the concept of Redemption inherent in the game... and the fact that Second Darkness already has shown the Drow to be "Fallen" Elves. Thus why not have the reverse happen?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not accusing you of anything, least of all racism. I just found it odd that "Guy turns good and his skin gets lighter" automatically threw up a red flag in a corner of my mind. Especially since the original idea didn't.
Racism aside. I would perfectly accept this kind of elven intrigue. Remember, in your game world you are not by any means obliged to use the Tolkien like Elves, Dwarfes or even Humans.
In a story I am preparing the role of Elves will be taken over by a form of Dhampir and there will be no such thing as Dwarfs. There will only be Duergar (who will use all the statistics of norm dwarfs and not be all that evil, but that's just to throw my players off track.)
I don't like the idea of elves transforming into Drow -- until that bit in SD I figured it was the elves adapting to the underground the same way that they adapt to other environments, and they went evil because they were in a super harsh environment where they had to fight everyone, including each other, to survive, and also because of the influence of Rovagug, the aboleths, and the other evil darklands creatures.
Unfortunately it's canon for Golarion.
Of course, if you never run Second Darkness, then you can just handwave it away as not being true in your campaign. Heck, you can even handwave Drow being black- (or actually closer to a very dark purple-) skinned species of elf and instead have them be albino subterranean elves as honestly makes sense. (And it also gets away from the whole "dark is evil" thing that also makes me a tad uncomfortable with Drow.)
Or if you’re in the mood to tweak players’ expectations, you could flip it, like I’m playing with for a homebrew — play the ‘dark’ elves as the good guys and the ‘light’ elves as the jerks. In Forgotten Realms terms, imagine how things would play out if Eilistraee was the primary goddess of the drow (and perhaps the only notable one!), but the only ‘light’ elves around were the sun elves and their political leadership was a coalition of the fey’ri and the Eldreth Veluuthra. :-X