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I wonder what would happen if I show up to a game with a Drow Solarian named Drizz't Du'Skywalker.
Yes, my assumption is I would be the first to die.
But, that's why you bring a backup.
What a curious game you are playing at Captain Yesterday, the only winning move is not to play.
{next in line for airlock} GENIUS!
This feels like a relevant link.
Only if you give him red hat and robes and a purple scarf. Otherwise I'm not playing with you.
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Of course, otherwise it just wouldn't be Orko.
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So far from what I'm reading here in the post, I really like the Drow. I see nothing wrong with have one of the few remaining Matriarchal societies still existing in this setting. Beside some inetersting things can happen when females have such power. Now if you excuse me my Drow Mistress requests me to return to bed.
>.>
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I'm still absorbing the Setting information in the Core Rulebook so I can then see where drow fit within my version of the Golarion universe. But here are is one initial ideas:
D.R.I.D.E.R (Societal and Genetic Purity Agency)*
Officially D.R.I.D.E.R is a terrorist organisation that holds archaic, long since abandoned, ideals of the drow genetic and cultural superiority over all other races. All known members of D.R.I.D.E.R. have warrants out for their arrest on Apostae and the Drow government rigorously enforces it's extradition treaties within the Pact Worlds so that all members of this terrorist agency can be found and brought to Drow justice. Their crimes include conspiracy to inflict terror, murder for hire, mass murder and destruction of property.
Unofficially D.R.I.D.E.R. is the intelligence arm of the Drow government. All missions they carry out is at the behest and direction of the drow government. They use the extradition treaties to secure their assets and in cases of gross incompetence they do carry out quick trials and then perform public executions to keep up the appearance of D.R.I.D.E.R. being a terrorist organisation.
All members of D.R.I.D.E.R have the ability to transform into an actual drider as a standard action.
* D.R.I.D.E.R's acronym only works when written in the elven tongue.
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So far from what I'm reading here in the post, I really like the Drow. I see nothing wrong with have one of the few remaining Matriarchal societies still existing in this setting. Beside some inetersting things can happen when females have such power. Now if you excuse me my Drow Mistress requests me to return to bed.It's not that they are matriarchal so much as there are no truly patriarchal societies. We have matriarchies and then equal societies. I just dislike the double standard.
In a world with thousands of races, its shouldn't be weird if at least one race/culture is matriarchal/Patriarchal. And that brings me to the issue of the Lashunta uniqueness that was taken away was taken away. Though I both understand and agree with Paizos choice since they are now a Core race.
My biggest gripe with Drow is the fact that their society makes no sense. Why would anybody trust a bunch of extremely treacherous CE demon-worshippers. They might not deliver the goods after all its in their nature/culture. They would have made more sense as pirates or outlaws rather than arms-dealers or even "regular pact members.
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My biggest gripe with Drow is the fact that their society makes no sense. Why would anybody trust a bunch of extremely treacherous CE demon-worshippers. They might not deliver the weapons they claimed they were going to. In my opinion they would have made more sense as pirates or outlaws rather than arms-dealers.
...probably haven't worked in a money-hungry corporation before, right??
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So far from what I'm reading here in the post, I really like the Drow. I see nothing wrong with have one of the few remaining Matriarchal societies still existing in this setting. Beside some inetersting things can happen when females have such power. Now if you excuse me my Drow Mistress requests me to return to bed.It's not that they are matriarchal so much as there are no truly patriarchal societies. We have matriarchies and then equal societies. I just dislike the double standard.In a world with thousands of races, its shouldn't be weird if at least one race/culture is matriarchal/Patriarchal. And that brings me to the issue of the Lashunta uniqueness that was taken away was taken away. Though I both understand and agree with Paizos choice since they are now a Core race.
My biggest gripe with Drow is the fact that their society makes no sense. Why would anybody trust a bunch of extremely treacherous CE demon-worshippers. They might not deliver the goods after all its in their nature/culture. They would have made more sense as pirates or outlaws rather than arms-dealers or even "regular pact members.
Drow are greedy opportunists that enjoy spreading chaos, that more than likely pay quite a bit of money fo public relations, so imho they can be trusted to do what is in their best interest. Add to the fact that worlds that exist outside the pact may have never had Drow of their own in their world, you can see where desperate, or equally sinister people would have no qualms in buying from them.
Scared that the Vesk, or Azlanti might come knocking at your door, the Drow might be the only ones willing to risk coming to your neighborhood to sell you what you need.
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In the Man-Kzin Wars series you learn that their females were turned into that - they no longer have enough intelligence to think of equality, much less actually try to fight for it. They are basically living incubators and nothing more.For my home game all I did was bring back the Drugar (the Dwarven version of the Drow) but I made them a male dominated version of the Drow because I felt the game needed a mirror of the same. ]Eh, I always felt that the "evil patriarchy" counterpart to the drows "evil matriarchy" was the orcs. I mean, if you look at the orc pantheon, only one of their 10 gods is a woman, and that's Dretha, who's pretty much the goddess of being "barefoot and pregnant" (or whatever you call the more barbaric orcish equivalent to that idea). Sure, she doesn't seem happy about it, but she still is. I doubt many drow men like being treated as second class eitherAnd if you think that this is not patriarchalic enough:
In the German RPG "The Dark Eye" orcs do not recognize their female brethen as orcs but as animals bearing orcs...
Just to double down on that, the Kzinti empire is literally called the Patriarchy, their monarch is 'The Patriarch', not 'King', 'Emperor', or similar.
But, like Drow, and Orcs, the Kzinti are evil adversaries.
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Given a technologically advanced, industrialized society, can the drow ignore their light blindness racial quality with a 5-credit pair of Ray-Bans?Now I’m imagining people giving traveling drow crap for their shades thinking they’re attempting to capitalize on “the cool factor.”
“LOL, look at the drow edgelord trying so hard to look badass and mysterious with their “cool” sunglasses!”
“I HAVE LIGHT BLINDNESS, YOU ASS! THESE ARE PRESCRIPTION!”
(^•_•)-
(^•_•)>⌐■-■
(^⌐■_■)
♫♪ "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades" ♫♪
...probably haven't worked in a money-hungry corporation before, right??
My biggest gripe with Drow is the fact that their society makes no sense. Why would anybody trust a bunch of extremely treacherous CE demon-worshippers. They might not deliver the weapons they claimed they were going to. In my opinion they would have made more sense as pirates or outlaws rather than arms-dealers.
Ok sure. I am not going to much into real life on. But yes I know there are some horrific cases of this (Guatemal and UFC). But I feel drow are on another lvl. And they worship demons...You are of course right. I may be a little scarred by FR where the drow are umiversally hated.
Chaotic Evil isn't the same thing as Stupid. The drow are violent and anarchic and don't care about the wellbeing of anybody but themselves, but this doesn't keep them from being functional businesses and diplomatic states. They will just be businesses and states heavily informed by the cultural ideologies at work.
The comparison with Rapture-esque Randians is not a bad one; the key difference being that they have enough common cultural touchstones to keep things functional. Primarily, a cultural paranoia about the universe trying to destroy them. Thus, you get infighting and backbiting and treachery... that very quickly turns off or burns out the moment there's an external threat. A drow scheming and betraying and murdering for their own benefit is Just Good Practice. . . until the moment it starts looking like Selling Out The Drow. Then the offending drow finds that all knives are united against them.
FR drow are very much Stupid, being that they are also influenced by Demons who are very often the manifestation of impulsive and murderous. But you have point.
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The evils of demon worship are small potatoes compared to the evils of CAPITALISM!!Not that Communism is any better. Everybody is equal. except managers, party officials, "elected" leaders, etc.
Communism (members of the community share ownership) is not necessarily the same as Socialism (ownership is held by the government/society).
Of course, people can be counted on to mess up pretty much any economic or political organization at some point...
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While matriarchy is as bad as patriarchy, living in a current patriarchy means that some people won't like the fictional ones. There is the issue of reception, as there are plenty of people who will be offended by that.
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You might as well just have an excerpt about ritualistic drow puppy kicking for all that it really adds.
Given a technologically advanced, industrialized society, can the drow ignore their light blindness racial quality with a 5-credit pair of Ray-Bans?Now I’m imagining people giving traveling drow crap for their shades thinking they’re attempting to capitalize on “the cool factor.”
“LOL, look at the drow edgelord trying so hard to look badass and mysterious with their “cool” sunglasses!”
“I HAVE LIGHT BLINDNESS, YOU ASS! THESE ARE PRESCRIPTION!”
<3
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This thread is making me picture the Drow like the Centauri from Babylon 5. Hair and everything. I may have to make this happen in my game.
I'll have them saying things like, "In the old days of the Drow Empire..." and getting confused when anyone questions them on it. (It happened during the Gap, but did it really happen, or did someone just make it up?)
* D.R.I.D.E.R's acronym only works when written in the elven tongue.
They used elf tongues to write? Savage!
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So I'm thinking of introducing a drow NPC into my homegame as kind of an antagonistic friend. I'm thinking of making him super arrogant and he fancies himself a smooth operator, but he and the PCs are working toward the same goal, and he's . . . Unsettlingly good at getting the PCs the information they need.
Like some said, this could easilly be seen as the whole matriarchy is a evil thing. Like it cant be done by neutral or good people, it is directly evil like cold blooded murder and those that perpetuate it are all evil beings.
So you could easilly make good forces, like angels and what not, also atk and fight the drows simply because they are a matriarchy, which is again evil, and to change this is actually a good cause, like saving the oppressed males.
In a way, this flips the double standards around, since it directly demonizes a matriarchy society while there is no patriarchy under fire in the game.
Ofc, if this is what the paizo guys will go to or not, only time will tell.
At least in a matriarchy the "opressed" half of the population still has certain rights and they are needed (and not as genitors). In a patriarchy the opressed half has often no rights and are often not more than incubators. Thus a patriarchy is always more evil.
It should be that the Matriarchy has graduated to Corporate Leadership.
Give about two or three hundred years, it'll change. Maybe.
...those poor, poor Drow.
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At least in a matriarchy the "opressed" half of the population still has certain rights and they are needed (and not as genitors). In a patriarchy the opressed half has often no rights and are often not more than incubators. Thus a patriarchy is always more evil.
Not necessarily. A matriarchy is a lot freer to kill off as much of the oppressed male population as they want, as far fewer males than females are needed to keep a society going. What "rights" would a male drow necessarily have in a matriarchy? Every non-reproductive task can be done as easily by females as males.
Like some said, this could easilly be seen as the whole matriarchy is a evil thing. Like it cant be done by neutral or good people, it is directly evil like cold blooded murder and those that perpetuate it are all evil beings.
So you could easilly make good forces, like angels and what not, also atk and fight the drows simply because they are a matriarchy, which is again evil, and to change this is actually a good cause, like saving the oppressed males.
In a way, this flips the double standards around, since it directly demonizes a matriarchy society while there is no patriarchy under fire in the game.
Ofc, if this is what the paizo guys will go to or not, only time will tell.
Well, the matriarchy is evil - directly oppressing half the population. But it's far from the only thing evil about the Drow, so it's not like that will be the sole reason good forces oppose the Drow.
They pretty much revel in their evilness.
Ofc, but that is a macro level, atleast in my experience in the micro level, which is what most people play in, you could put groups of good people facing diferent aspects of drow evil directly. So you could have good groups that directly targets the matriarchy, you have groups that directly target slavery in pathfinder for example, ofc there are groups that target other aspects and so on.
At least in a matriarchy the "opressed" half of the population still has certain rights and they are needed (and not as genitors). In a patriarchy the opressed half has often no rights and are often not more than incubators. Thus a patriarchy is always more evil.
That as far as fantasy goes isnt true at all. The use of males as pretty much only "physical labor" isnt that uncommon i believe and of the top of my head i remember watching that series, rick and morty, recently and they had an episode where males were literally abandoned on a barren planet surfice to be used only as breeding stock for the highly advanced females. Probably people can list other examples.
Ofc there are other tropes that bring about similar things, like genders at war and thus separated from one another, enclosed gender societies where the other gender is used from outside and only as breeding stock...
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Wait, are you guys saying that Drow are the space elves and I'm a planetary elf? *Gracefully sips his elf-wine (from a glass, not a zero-g beverage pouch) as a single elf-tear slides down his elf-cheek.
I wasn't trying to say that patriarchies are more evil, it's just that it makes played more uncomfortable. A large fan base wouldn't like that, so paizo has to be careful.
Whereas for Drow, paizo has taken great steps to represent women in all aspects. Good, evil, and neutral. It's why there are a lot of female villains, and they took specific measures in Iron fang to just make female scoundrel.
So patriarchy is as bad as a matriarchy, it's just that one is a bit riskier to include in a game. To make money companies have to be careful of story elements like this.
The problem with Drow, and this is entirely R.A. Salvatores' fault, every Drow character is a Drow who left their culture. In previous versions, Pathfinder, DnD and so on. Drow are incredibly isolationist, killing most anything that came in contact with their society. So as a result anyone who played a Drow, unless the game was everyone Drow, they always left. This isn't bad, inherently, but it is the only possibility.
And this is why Paizo dropped the ball, the Gap, while long enough that most humans and other species would have had major changes through their generations, was within 1-2 for the Drow and other longer lived species. This is the perfect time for Drow to have them expand into various Planets, because they have no home planet and cannot continue their isolationism, and are not solely able to interact with their previous planets inhabitants, with the Elves, f&~~ing off to be hermits, the Dwarves getting plastered on 100's of different species kinds of boozes, Goblins still being goblins and for Humans to know too much about the Drow to rely on commerce that way. This would be a massive shift in their culture to be so open in commerce and society. Even if the Matriarchy is controlling of the information the masses see, example China, the rest of the world can see everything they are doing anyway.
I would imagine most Drow stories to be similar to how, again, China was coming into the modern age, the mass extermination of those who want to change the status quo, e.g. the men and more recently born females who want to model their society on the more established xeno cultures, and the attempted control of outside influence.
That's what should be done with them as it is viewed as a schism in their society as their dynasties try to protect their old traditions of control while in turn expanding and improving in nearly every aspect of their current position.
Or if you wanted a more how to say, destructive view of it, liken it to Majority Islamic countries, where women are kept as second class citizens, where backwards laws about education, positions in jobs, the home and even basic society are now being subject to the scrutiny of the outside world and then you can have various factions within Drow culture who are now causing many civil wars, starting s+*% with the other aliens for damaging their way of life and so on.
There are plenty of interesting stories and concepts to use for a society like the Drow to suddenly have that isolationism taken from them when their generations have not gradually acclimated to the changes. But instead they were kept as, Matriarchy, still evil, instead of spider goddess it's companies now, still evil. Pretty lazy and their was plenty they could do with it and I hope that what I said could inspire others to consider options beyond the bare bones or even just as one poster said, Drizzt Du'Skywalker.
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While your points are valid and provide some REALLY good seeds for storylines, I think you’re underestimating the power demons have on drow society. Back in Pathfinder, part of what made the drow the drow was the fact that early in their history, the various demon lords approached them and said “in exchange for your loyalty, we’ll help you not only survive down here in this hostile realm, but THRIVE,” and each Noble House was patronized by a different Lord of the Abyss. That doesn’t stop with the Gap. Even if the drow can’t remember a chunk of history, the demons would be quick to remind them of those obligations, especially when those obligations are rewarded with power. Drow society may have shifted more towards capitalism and modernity, but servants of the Abyss are still venerated among their elite, and the rest of their society follows suit. That’s a hard influence for drow society to shake.
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Instead of being slaves, the males are now WAGE SLAVES.
Brave new world.
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While your points are valid and provide some REALLY good seeds for storylines, I think you’re underestimating the power demons have on drow society. Back in Pathfinder, part of what made the drow the drow was the fact that early in their history, the various demon lords approached them and said “in exchange for your loyalty, we’ll help you not only survive down here in this hostile realm, but THRIVE,” and each Noble House was patronized by a different Lord of the Abyss. That doesn’t stop with the Gap. Even if the drow can’t remember a chunk of history, the demons would be quick to remind them of those obligations, especially when those obligations are rewarded with power. Drow society may have shifted more towards capitalism and modernity, but servants of the Abyss are still venerated among their elite, and the rest of their society follows suit. That’s a hard influence for drow society to shake.Wasn't even demons. It was, originally, one evil God. Her name was Lolth the Spider Queen.
In fact she *created* the Drow by kidnapping a bunch of Elves and turning them into Drow. That's where Dryders came from as well.
Drow were, initially, a unique group of Elves that ONLY existed on Faerun. They technically shouldn't even be on Golarion. They were meant to exclusively be the servants of Lolth.
This is true, but I’m specifically looking at this from Path/Star-Finder’s in-universe perspective, rather than from a meta-contextual one. The entry on the drow in Inner Sea Races gives a detailed history of the drow as a race, and it depicts multiple demon lords manipulating drow society through the noble houses they patronize, rather than a monolithic dedication to Lolth because in Pathfinder AND Starfinder there IS no Lolth.