Exultation's page

A note before I begin: my issue is only tangentially related to the Blood of Shadows thread, which is why I'm not posting this there.

Perhaps it's something about the season. A year ago we had a newcomer to the board asking if it was legal to play a drow-descended elf or half-elf. He was told this wasn't legal, and someone suggested that he just play a dark-skinned half-elf and imagine it to be half-drow inside his own head. And that's where the conversation took a turn.

Several posters jumped in to argue that elves were only ever lily-white, and that playing an elf or half-elf with darker skin was illegal. Others pointed out that per the ARG elves have the same variations in color as humans, that Golarion has an existing example of darker-skinned elves in the Ekujae, and that half-elves could well take after a human parent in any case. Unfortunately, many in the former group were adamant that playing an elf with skin darker than snow was reskinning a drow, and thus grounds for dismissal from the table.

Mike Brock eventually closed the topic with the statement "You can't reskin a character to look like a drow," and said that this would be documented where necessary.

The problem is, it's been a year (and a day), and no documentation or guidelines have been forthcoming. And because the most notable aspect of drow appearance is dark skin (not actually certain if it's black, blue, or purple in Golarion), that essentially leaves the rule as "A GM may, at his own discretion, decide that a character's skin is too dark to be legal for play."

Which is, quite frankly, a horrible rule.

Now it's possible that Mike just didn't get to the issue before he left, which is what I'm hoping. In which case, hopefully we can get the issue resolved now. Could someone in campaign leadership give us some guidelines on what exactly "no looking like a drow" means?

Ideally, guidelines that don't allow a GM to kick out a player for saying "My character is Black."

Looking through the Additional Resources list recently, I noticed that there's some allowed equipment in AP 9: Escape from Old Korvosa. Among that is the urumi, a weapon so ridiculous I decided I had to build a character who used one. Or better, two.

In discussing things with some of the local GMs, however, I was told that the urumi had been changed in one of the later books, and that the new version no longer had reach, amongst other changes. We assumed that characters are required to use the newer version, though I couldn't find any specific ruling to this affect. Most likely explanation is that this is just a glitch: AP 9 is old, and possibly out of print, and thus it's possible that whoever's updating the Additional Resources list didn't even realize what was in it.

So, two things:

1. Where more than one version of an item (or feat, spell, what have you) exists, is there a general ruling on which one is legal and which one isn't? We assumed the newer one is required, but I'd like to be sure.

2. You may want to take a look at AP 9 the next time the Additional Resources list is updated. It's possible that all of the weapons there have since been revised.