Doodledibob |
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Doodledibob wrote:I really hope this doesn't mean that the Drow on Apostae will be erased like they were in 2e.
I still take issue with the characterization that they are little more than sexist & racist tropes that needed to be completely removed from the game.
That is not why drow were removed. It was because they are a WotC IP whose use in Pathfinder was reliant on the ogl.
I was openly critical of how Paizo handled the actual process of their removal, and I stand by what I said back then, but keeping them around 100% unchanged with the serial numbers still on was never an option, and none of Paizo's decisions there were motivated by wokeness.
Not saying Drow didn't have bad things about them that could and should have been further altered. But rather than try to salvage anything from them, Paizo just turned around and completely erased them from existence. Nevermind that the whole idea of "dark elves" is something that exists in other media - whether we are talking about the Dumner, the Drukhari, or Kaldorei, there have been plenty of high-profile non-D&D dark elves over the past 20 years.
Rather than renaming the Drow to something else, Paizo just threw them out. Other than concerns about the OGL, the only reason Paizo gave was the excuses about there being problems with their lore. Which you can say about pretty much everything in Pathfinder at one point or another - that doesn't mean those things should be thrown out completely. Hell, take the current PF2E Beginner Box adventure, where you are tasked with wiping out the 'primitive/savage' Kobolds who are causing problems for the human settlement after the humans drove them out and away. That's some pretty awful colonialist framing right there, but that doesn't mean we should wipe Kobolds, humans, or Otari off the map - it means we should rework these things to better show the nuance of the situation.
In the same vein, the lore regarding Drow could have been reworked, possibly leveraging their presence on Apostae in Starfinder to expand their lore in Pathfinder.
As it stands, I have little faith in Paizo's commitment to existing lore and the previous stories that were told in the setting.