I'll be honest. I'm not a huge fan of Drow. Waaaay back when, Paizo published Dragon issue 298, which had a giant article on Drow. I read it, absolutely hated it, and swore that I wouldn't touch the Drow again with a 150' pole. I reinvented the "dark elves" of my homebrew, keeping a few attributes that are sort of "universal" (matriarchies, dark skin, underground), but I got rid of their spell-likes and sociopathic penchant for killing everyone around them.
As devotees of Lisseth, goddess of pain and learning, they are self- and other- mutilators, believing that through pain they gain enlightenment. They're sadistic and masochistic, but they're not likely to just murder someone. After all, death leaves no chance to learn, and they're all about teaching the weak surface dwellers the true nature of reality, as they have learned it from their deposed, wrongly villified goddess. It should be noted that Lisseth herself isn't evil (she's true neutral), but many of her followers are. In general, the kage elves that I created have worked out rather well, and actually do have a much more functional society. They don't just cut you whenever the chance arises, but they do believe in harsh but lasting punishments in order to teach one the error of his or her ways.
What Paizo's doing with Golarion's Drow is much better than what they did with the Drow of issue 298, and I'm playing through Second Darkness right now (we're currently in chapter 4, running around learning the society relatively well), but it still doesn't seem like the best way to make a society function. Perhaps it's not being run right by my DM, or it's not filtering through right based on how we're seeing it, but it still isn't a society I'd imagine would be capable of the level of sophistication I'm lead to believe that they possess. I like them well enough as monsters go, but I just don't like them enough to consider using them instead of my own dark elves.
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I'll be honest. I'm not a huge fan of Drow. Waaaay back when, Paizo published Dragon issue 298, which had a giant article on Drow. I read it, absolutely hated it, and swore that I wouldn't touch the Drow again with a 150' pole. I reinvented the "dark elves" of my homebrew, keeping a few attributes that are sort of "universal" (matriarchies, dark skin, underground), but I got rid of their spell-likes and sociopathic penchant for killing everyone around them.
As devotees of Lisseth, goddess of pain and learning, they are self- and other- mutilators, believing that through pain they gain enlightenment. They're sadistic and masochistic, but they're not likely to just murder someone. After all, death leaves no chance to learn, and they're all about teaching the weak surface dwellers the true nature of reality, as they have learned it from their deposed, wrongly villified goddess. It should be noted that Lisseth herself isn't evil (she's true neutral), but many of her followers are. In general, the kage elves that I created have worked out rather well, and actually do have a much more functional society. They don't just cut you whenever the chance arises, but they do believe in harsh but lasting punishments in order to teach one the error of his or her ways.
What Paizo's doing with Golarion's Drow is much better than what they did with the Drow of issue 298, and I'm playing through Second Darkness right now (we're currently in chapter 4, running around learning the society relatively well), but it still doesn't seem like the best way to make a society function. Perhaps it's not being run right by my DM, or it's not filtering through right based on how we're seeing it, but it still isn't a society I'd imagine would be capable of the level of sophistication I'm lead to believe that they possess. I like them well enough as monsters go, but I just don't like them enough to consider using them instead of my own dark elves.
That sounds amazingly like the Yuuzahn Vong in the New Jedi Order.
Now I have this awesome idea for a tiny race of rat humanoids who live in the shadows of drow society, emulating their ways. Like Desperaux I suppose.That rocks. An evil race of rodents out to destroy the world of the big people.
Fritz Leiber, The Swords of Lankhmar.
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Fritz Leiber, The Swords of Lankhmar.Now I have this awesome idea for a tiny race of rat humanoids who live in the shadows of drow society, emulating their ways. Like Desperaux I suppose.That rocks. An evil race of rodents out to destroy the world of the big people.
For as long as I've played I've never gotten around to reading Fritz's stuff. Guess I will have to take a look now.
This also got me thinking of pygmy drow, who worship death and collect shrunken heads, living beneath the jungle floor in subterranean lairs. They could be just as tall or slightly shorter than halflings.
That sounds amazingly like the Yuuzahn Vong in...
Huh. Never read the New Jedi Order books, so I know next to nothing about the Yuuzahn Vong - just something about organic weapons, a la Tyrannids. Interesting how often I come up with ideas that I then discover someone else had too (like large swathes of Golarion, actually...).
Creative Director
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For as long as I've played I've never gotten around to reading Fritz's stuff. Guess I will have to take a look now.
This also got me thinking of pygmy drow, who worship death and collect shrunken heads, living beneath the jungle floor in subterranean lairs. They could be just as tall or slightly shorter than halflings.
You should. There are very few writers whose works you can read and say, "What? This sounds EXACTLY like D&D!" Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales are exactly that, especially when it comes to urban D&D type games. Not only is the game's take on the wererat pretty much lifted 100% from Leiber's stories, but spells like true seeing are as well. And perhaps most importantly, the entire thief/rogue class is ABSOLUTELY taken from Leiber. It's really kind of cool to see how key Leiber's words were in inspiring these parts of the game by reading them.
Also fun is the fact that Leiber's style of writing has a really great combination of light-hearted comedy and grim and gritty horror. Which means his stories fit particularly well into the Paizo style of story... or actually, the reverse, since Leiber was there first! :-)
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Now I have this awesome idea for a tiny race of rat humanoids who live in the shadows of drow society, emulating their ways. Like Desperaux I suppose.That rocks. An evil race of rodents out to destroy the world of the big people.
Take the Slitheren ratmen from The Creature Collection and Creature Collection II. Make them the result of Drow Fleshcrafting, and there you go.
~unabashed fanfare~
I just want to pile on here and add that it is never too late to discover Leiber -- I never read him until the good folks here at Paizo got me to rectify that oversight. He was definitely not a case of "I bet I'd have enjoyed this when I was younger," but still very enjoyable.
Now I have this awesome idea for a tiny race of rat humanoids who live in the shadows of drow society, emulating their ways. Like Desperaux I suppose.That rocks. An evil race of rodents out to destroy the world of the big people.
What are going to do tonight Brain?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.
I won't debate this, but I will clarify my point. My point was that as written, it might not be reasonable to believe that the drow could ever possibly form a civilization, society, or political entity.Belief is best left in the church, where reality doesn't laugh in its face. Reality meaning, of course, in-game reality, because in actual reality, no elves exist.
My very point was that whatever one might want to belief of think or assume, they have nations and societies and the whole nine yards on those worlds. Worlds that have things like flying eyes with more eyes that can do weird stuff with those eyes. And gigantic reptilian creatures that despite everything that should be universal fact can fly. And a googol other things that, if we were talking about the real world, I would find laughable to even consider, I accept in worlds whose defining quality is that they're not reality.
I believe what jscott991 is refering to is verisimilitude, which he evidently feels is lacking in most drow descriptions.
I liked the drow as a pc race.
best stats to use for the drow as a pc are the elf stats in the pathfinder rpg core rulebook.even more so since they are not going to make official ones outside the monster in the bestiary splat.
You can't use the elf stats because later in the Pathfinder Rule book it mentions that Drow are more powerful than regular PC races in the DM sections.
The best stats to use are the 3.0/3.5 stats. One thing I loved about Wizards later products is how easy they made templates to use for almost all races. Want to create a Dryad sorceress? Here are the adjustments.
That's something I really miss. I love the idea of nonstandard races having class levels. It just makes the world more consistent.
I was merely talking of furry half-hamster things that are called drow comment more than anything.
But they're the exact opposite: Creatures that behave like drow but aren't called drow.
They are Aimal-ing
You should. There are very few writers whose works you can read and say, "What? This sounds EXACTLY like D&D!" Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales are exactly that, especially when it comes to urban D&D type games.
I could, If I could read those books. But I can't. They may be very D&D, but in my opinion, they aren't very good.
One of the very few instances where I bought a whole series of books at once because everyone was praising it and then wound up reading only a book or two before putting them away bored.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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You should. There are very few writers whose works you can read and say, "What? This sounds EXACTLY like D&D!" Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales are exactly that, especially when it comes to urban D&D type games.I could, If I could read those books. But I can't. They may be very D&D, but in my opinion, they aren't very good.
One of the very few instances where I bought a whole series of books at once because everyone was praising it and then wound up reading only a book or two before putting them away bored.
*hands KaeYos soem Rose Estes*
Everything reads better after Rose Estes!
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Take the Slitheren ratmen from The Creature Collection and Creature Collection II. Make them the result of Drow Fleshcrafting, and there you go.
Thats' amusing. I love the Scarred Lands dark elves and have stacked some of their stuff into my own Drow.
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Creative Director
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The best stats to use are the 3.0/3.5 stats. One thing I loved about Wizards later products is how easy they made templates to use for almost all races. Want to create a Dryad sorceress? Here are the adjustments.
That's something I really miss. I love the idea of nonstandard races having class levels. It just makes the world more consistent.
That still works perfectly fine in the Patfhinder RPG... it's just that the Bestiary's not out yet so the 350 or so monsters in there aren't yet publicly available to do this with.
That still works perfectly fine in the Patfhinder RPG... it's just that the Bestiary's not out yet so the 350 or so monsters in there aren't yet publicly available to do this with.The best stats to use are the 3.0/3.5 stats. One thing I loved about Wizards later products is how easy they made templates to use for almost all races. Want to create a Dryad sorceress? Here are the adjustments.
That's something I really miss. I love the idea of nonstandard races having class levels. It just makes the world more consistent.
Will the bestiary have the template section that later Wizards Monster Manuals had? The racial adjustments template (especially for things like vampires and other undread, plus fey races) was the best thing about 3.0/3.5.
But, like you said, even if Paizo doesn't put this information out or alter it, it's all still available in 3.5 products.
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Creative Director
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Will the bestiary have the template section that later Wizards Monster Manuals had? The racial adjustments template (especially for things like vampires and other undread, plus fey races) was the best thing about 3.0/3.5.
But, like you said, even if Paizo doesn't put this information out or alter it, it's all still available in 3.5 products.
OH! I misunderstood.
We'll have a section that presents a monster's racial traits similar to how we present the elf, dwarf, gnome, and the rest of the core races in Chapter 2 of the Core RPG for all of the monsters that lack racial hit dice (things like drow, goblins, kobolds, tengus, tieflings, aasimars, duergar, svirfneblins, hobgoblins, orcs, and the like)... and these races, lacking racial HD as they do, will make for pretty good PC choices (although some will be a little more powerful than the standard races and some a little less powerful).
Once a monster gets a racial HD, it no longer gets this treatment. It's designed to serve as a monster, not a PC race. That said, these monsters are still built using the same rules, so you can easily advance ANY monster's power by giving them class levels. The complicated part of this isn't adding class levels to a monster, but determining what CR the final advanced monster is worth; there's a pretty large section of the back of the Bestiary that talks about how to determine this, though.
And there ARE still some full-on templates, like lich and lycanthrope and vampire.
But the book cannot afford the space to present "as a PC" rules for every monster. That's the topic of an entirely different book we haven't even started to work on yet, and might NEVER work on...
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...but that's ok because of the backwards compatibility to 3.5. If I want to play a Centaur I just use their rules from Masters of the Wild, and then convert a little here and there until he's PFRPG equivalent.
I'm pretty averse to working very hard on roleplaying conversions, and I'd still be more than willing to do that.
And there ARE still some full-on templates, like lich and lycanthrope and vampire.
That's good to hear. For some reason I was terrified that you'd drop monster templates, which I think are one of THE great ideas from 3/3.5.
Hmm, that said... I do have to kinda agree with the people who wonder how the various so-insanely-evil-it-isn't-funny races manage to live together, or even reproduce, without it all ending in a massacre. Whether it be D&D drow and orcs, DC Comics' Apokolips, or the "vermin" characters of the Redwall series... any ideas on how the Chaotic Evil gangs manages to keep everyone focused on the 'real enemy', as compared to simply slaughtering themselves into extinction?
however I dont like the ecl and la in the 3.x version, and here is why, their abilities did not go up in power as they passed the cast as a sorcer of lvl, so oat that point it was worthless.
and a Drow without those powers are just an elf with dark skin.otherwis I agree, but if you dont have the book with the drow in it, or dont want to use the wotc stuff whatso ever... the elf stats are just fine.
Except for spell resistance, which did scale with their levels, unlike the poor ogre mage.
And there ARE still some full-on templates, like lich and lycanthrope and vampire.That's good to hear. For some reason I was terrified that you'd drop monster templates, which I think are one of THE great ideas from 3/3.5.
Hmm, that said... I do have to kinda agree with the people who wonder how the various so-insanely-evil-it-isn't-funny races manage to live together, or even reproduce, without it all ending in a massacre. Whether it be D&D drow and orcs, DC Comics' Apokolips, or the "vermin" characters of the Redwall series... any ideas on how the Chaotic Evil gangs manages to keep everyone focused on the 'real enemy', as compared to simply slaughtering themselves into extinction?
Alot of cowards?
Take orcs (please, ba-da-da!) for example. The biggest badest mofo is the one ruling the tribe, and while most of the other orcs probably would love to rule the tribe, they are (a) too scared to risk their neck to get it or (b) know that even if they got it they would be immediately killed by someone else who wanted their spot. It is much easier to beat on the outsiders/slaves than to challenge those with power above you.
Here's a question. Are the Drow in Golarion just the elves that didn't flee Golarion before the earthfall? Were there other elven communities that didn't flee? Did they become other elven subraces, like woodelves?
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Here's a question. Are the Drow in Golarion just the elves that didn't flee Golarion before the earthfall? Were there other elven communities that didn't flee? Did they become other elven subraces, like woodelves?
The drow are elves that went underground when the earthfall occurred. They went so deep they encountered Rovagug's prison and the god transformed them into drow. They fled the prison and began their own society, and upon seeing the elves return to golarion were attacked by them when they refused to kneel before the "better elves".
The result is an age old feud that sees the drow trying to destroy the elves.
Oh and the elves are scared to DEATH of the drow, because of things that happened during those initial engagements.
If you are playing second darkness, do not click this spoiler at all, it will ruin a great part of the campaign...
It's implied that non-drow "subraces" are just the result of individual elves living in particular environments so long that they adapt to them.
Here's a question. Are the Drow in Golarion just the elves that didn't flee Golarion before the earthfall? Were there other elven communities that didn't flee? Did they become other elven subraces, like woodelves?
The so called Wild Elves of the Mwangi Expanse did not flee Golarion, either. But their origin is shrouded in mystery.
Here's a question. Are the Drow in Golarion just the elves that didn't flee Golarion before the earthfall? Were there other elven communities that didn't flee? Did they become other elven subraces, like woodelves?
Subraces in general don't have anything to do with sub races.
Drow are a special case, because the destructive power of the Earthfall, combined with Rovagug's god-power and the ambient weirdness of the Darklands, turned them into something else.
The rest is just elves living in different places - just like human sub races.
And it's quite possible that the Pathfinder Bestiary will make them just that: different ethnicities rather than distinct sub-races with different stats.
Here's a question. Are the Drow in Golarion just the elves that didn't flee Golarion before the earthfall? Were there other elven communities that didn't flee? Did they become other elven subraces, like woodelves?Subraces in general don't have anything to do with sub races.
Drow are a special case, because the destructive power of the Earthfall, combined with Rovagug's god-power and the ambient weirdness of the Darklands, turned them into something else.
The rest is just elves living in different places - just like human sub races.
And it's quite possible that the Pathfinder Bestiary will make them just that: different ethnicities rather than distinct sub-races with different stats.
And thank goodness for that!