Like we've established, though, the name itself being non-OGL doesn't mean much to the discussion. :P
I assume we're losing derro, too, so a niche of "people who went too close to Rovagug's prison and were turned into murderous Reaver-esque monsters" may be open.The Dero (the real spelling) are from real world occult lore. I don't think they are terribly different from the current Pathfinder version, since both creatures are malevolent diminutive subterranean creatures. As long as you use the Dero spelling you should be fine.
Very interesting; thanks to those with this info!
The "Dero" remind me a little of the creatures in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, the ones that may have inspired D&D's infamous meenlocks. Tiny little underground monsters who mess with people's heads.
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James Jacons shared this list of named Darklands critters and peoples mentioned in the SKT #3 article:
Algholthus, Ayindilar elves, Caligni, Chardas, Deros, Drathnelar gnomes, Fleshwarps, Ghouls, Gugs, Hryngar dwarves, Kaseshis, Morlocks, Munavris, Myceloids, Sekmins, Seugathis, Ulat-Kinis, Urdefhans, Xiomorns, Xorians, and Xulgaths.
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Oh, I'm so glad ghouls made it! Honestly, they're probably my favorite Darklands baddy alongside algholthus.
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Oh, I'm so glad ghouls made it! Honestly, they're probably my favorite Darklands baddy alongside algholthus.
I’m not sure if you play 5E, you may like an adventure/sourcebook from Kobold Press called Empire of the Ghouls(I think). I never read it myself though have heard if you like Ghouls in D&D and want a fresh take it’s an excellent sourcebook.
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I like my villains to be evil.
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In general, the best rule of thumb with those evil elf deities is that it's all essentially Corellon's fault.
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In general, the best rule of thumb with those evil elf deities is that it's all essentially Corellon's fault.
It's wild to me that TSR created a misogynistic Genderfluid deity, labeled them CG, and no one has felt a need to examine what that means. That's a wild story prompt that no one is willing to touch.
Like, it's okay for good characters to have blind spots. I played an CG halfling bard who hated giants and would even kill good giants. But that was clearly might as a bad thing, that I wanted him to learn to grow beyond. Instead, the GM railroaded him into being a mass murderer, which actually helps my point here. The GM felt that letting small evils go untreated would become larger evils. I read War of the Spider Queen; Corellon has made no forgiveness or apology to Lolth.
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I think a lot about the vestige of the elven demigoddess whose crime was that pre-evil Lolth told her she was an amazing archer, she got happy and flustered about it, and Corellon, worried she would think she was better than him, challenged her to an archery duel where the target was her own heart. She won.
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Despite being a long time drow fan, I am also a subscriber to the spotlight philosophy.
> Players explore the world casting a spotlight wherever they go. Everything further out than the spotlight is just an outline.
Drows have not been in the spotlight in the last... is it 6 years for me? I think it's 6 years. So, I don't expect this to affect me (sadly). If the spotlight is pushed to drow... I will likely conform it to expectations. I have drow statblocks, I have drow as a homebrewed playable ancestry with 15+ feats. I have the means. Or maybe, if Paizo publishes quality stuff that's better than my own (which happens often enough) I'll just use theirs.
It's a decision that I can push to when it's relevant, and evaluate on the basis of what I'm given.
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I don’t blame Corellion for not apologizing . If my wife at the time worked with my mortal enemy of the Orcish gods (Grumsh) to plan my death all so that she could gain more power at my expense. I wouldn’t be apologizing either. It’s amazing people forget that she not only was willing to betray Corellion the rest of the elvish pantheon as well simply for power and prestige. She was also responsible for causing elistraee to be banished because she magically cursed her daughter bow to hit her own father.
Corellion is no saint neither is Lolth.
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I don’t blame Corellion for not apologizing . If my wife at the time worked with my mortal enemy of the Orcish gods (Grumsh) to plan my death all so that she could gain more power at my expense. I wouldn’t be apologizing either. It’s amazing people forget that she not only was willing to betray Corellion the rest of the elvish pantheon as well simply for power and prestige. She was also responsible for causing elistraee to be banished because she magically gimmicjrd her bow to hit her own father.
Corellion is no saint neither is Lolth.
I'm... not sure I understand your point? Maybe I'm too far removed from D&D elf lore but what I saw was
"Did you know the good elf god once got jealous of the possibility that someone might think they were better than him so made an archery competition where her heart was the target and she (killed?) herself. Isn't that kind if messed up?"
"But don't forget the evil elf goddess also did bad things"
It doesn't seem relevant to the Pont that the evil god does bad things. That's par for the course, but the good god has something of a higher standard to live up to and still be regarded as 'good', so a story of hurting someone out of jealousy is a lot more significant.
But then maybe I'm misunderstanding the lore being alluded to here.
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Nothing, they're talking about D&D stuff there.
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I don't hate the fact that "I know basically nothing about Faerûn" is going to stop mattering every time we go underground.
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I don’t blame Corellion for not apologizing . If my wife at the time worked with my mortal enemy of the Orcish gods (Grumsh) to plan my death all so that she could gain more power at my expense. I wouldn’t be apologizing either. It’s amazing people forget that she not only was willing to betray Corellion the rest of the elvish pantheon as well simply for power and prestige. She was also responsible for causing elistraee to be banished because she magically gimmicjrd her bow to hit her own father.
Corellion is no saint neither is Lolth.
I'm... not sure I understand your point? Maybe I'm too far removed from D&D elf lore but what I saw was
"Did you know the good elf god once got jealous of the possibility that someone might think they were better than him so made an archery competition where her heart was the target and she (killed?) herself. Isn't that kind if messed up?"
"But don't forget the evil elf goddess also did bad things"
It doesn't seem relevant to the Pont that the evil god does bad things. That's par for the course, but the good god has something of a higher standard to live up to and still be regarded as 'good', so a story of hurting someone out of jealousy is a lot more significant.
But then maybe I'm misunderstanding the lore being alluded to here.
Also why were both portrayed this way ?
So many bad tropes at work there.
I’m not sure why you asking me about the whys and how’s of Drow Lore. I’m not the person who created or wrote it. Maybe check with Wotc.
It just seemed to myself at least that Corellion was made to be the main and only antagonist by some posters in the thread with Lolth being absolutely blameless in the entire situation.
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I've got nothing meaningful to add to the drow conversation besides the mental image of them all flying into the air singing "so long and thanks for all the fish"
I think it would more so long and thanks for all the Arachninds
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I don’t blame Corellion for not apologizing . If my wife at the time worked with my mortal enemy of the Orcish gods (Grumsh) to plan my death all so that she could gain more power at my expense. I wouldn’t be apologizing either. It’s amazing people forget that she not only was willing to betray Corellion the rest of the elvish pantheon as well simply for power and prestige. She was also responsible for causing elistraee to be banished because she magically cursed her daughter bow to hit her own father.
Corellion is no saint neither is Lolth.
Let's rewind to the start of the conflict. Corellion created the elves. Lolth was enamored with corellion and everything he/they touched. She saw mosquitos biting the elves and created spiders to protect them. She said "look Corellion, I can create things, too." He yelled and abused her for this. He abused his 'wife.' She went to the one safe place from his wrath and took comfort with Grumsh.
It's an abuse story, and like all abusers, Corellion is all "Look what you made me do" about the drow.
Also, Mr. Thing, saying "neither is a saint" is missing the point that the abuser is CG.
I don’t blame Corellion for not apologizing . If my wife at the time worked with my mortal enemy of the Orcish gods (Grumsh) to plan my death all so that she could gain more power at my expense. I wouldn’t be apologizing either. It’s amazing people forget that she not only was willing to betray Corellion the rest of the elvish pantheon as well simply for power and prestige. She was also responsible for causing elistraee to be banished because she magically cursed her daughter bow to hit her own father.
Corellion is no saint neither is Lolth.
Let's rewind to the start of the conflict. Corellion created the elves. Lolth was enamored with corellion and everything he/they touched. She saw mosquitos biting the elves and created spiders to protect them. She said "look Corellion, I can create things, too." He yelled and abused her for this. He abused his 'wife.' She went to the one safe place from his wrath and took comfort with Grumsh.
It's an abuse story, and like all abusers, Corellion is all "Look what you made me do" about the drow.
Also, Mr. Thing, saying "neither is a saint" is missing the point that the abuser is CG.
Where can I go to learn more about this fascinating history?
I don’t blame Corellion for not apologizing . If my wife at the time worked with my mortal enemy of the Orcish gods (Grumsh) to plan my death all so that she could gain more power at my expense. I wouldn’t be apologizing either. It’s amazing people forget that she not only was willing to betray Corellion the rest of the elvish pantheon as well simply for power and prestige. She was also responsible for causing elistraee to be banished because she magically cursed her daughter bow to hit her own father.
Corellion is no saint neither is Lolth.
Let's rewind to the start of the conflict. Corellion created the elves. Lolth was enamored with corellion and everything he/they touched. She saw mosquitos biting the elves and created spiders to protect them. She said "look Corellion, I can create things, too." He yelled and abused her for this. He abused his 'wife.' She went to the one safe place from his wrath and took comfort with Grumsh.
It's an abuse story, and like all abusers, Corellion is all "Look what you made me do" about the drow.
Also, Mr. Thing, saying "neither is a saint" is missing the point that the abuser is CG.
Unless they changed the history I would need a link to verify as nothing in the Wotc wiki points to any of that. If anything Lolth comes off as a power hungry abuser by FR lore even more so to her own people.
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Lolth
The link if anyone wants to read the wiki :
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Not a fan of that particular novels series. The ending especially swore me off almost buying 4E because the major change was done to make FR more in line with 4E. I won’t say more because I dislike how it was handled to this day and because it would require major spoilers.
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Personally I love a bit of unrepentant malevolence from my pantheon leaders. I love the idea of deity who is called absolutely good by his followers but who demands human sacrifice and annihilation of enemies at war. The contradictions make them interesting characters.
Odin, Zeus etc have horrific crimes attributed to them (by modern standards ) but are also deities of hospitality, law, justice. So I am quite happy when fantasy pantheons are as interesting as they are.
As Rysky said, this almost completely impossible in the alignment system. It's been a recurring issue to try to place Poseidon, for instance. So rejoice! Alignment is going away!
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Not a fan of that particular novels series. The ending especially swore me off almost buying 4E because the major change was done to make FR more in line with 4E. I won’t say more because I dislike how it was handled to this day and because it would require major spoilers.
It's about the only positive experience I have had with FR fiction, so we clearly have very different tastes.
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Odin and Zeus wouldn't have Good alignment by Pathfinder standards.
Yeah this is the problem. "Mythologically inspired capricious, multifaceted deities" and "objective concepts of good and evil that gods are paragons of" do not co-exist very well.
Which imo is part of why removing alignment is exciting. It makes it a lot easier to do weird or complicated things with deities because you no longer have to make sure they accurately represent an alignment as well.
I would prefer that removing alignment doesn't mean they all suddenly start being "morally grey"
I agree, I wouldn't want to see the gods change dramatically. Removing alignment does kind of smooth over existing problems though: "why is there a chaotic good god of traditional values and racism" or "Why is this lawful good god kind of murder-happy" stop being huge issues when you no longer have to assume they're representative of cosmic concepts of good or evil or law or chaos.
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Not a fan of that particular novels series. The ending especially swore me off almost buying 4E because the major change was done to make FR more in line with 4E. I won’t say more because I dislike how it was handled to this day and because it would require major spoilers.It's about the only positive experience I have had with FR fiction, so we clearly have very different tastes.
What was promised and what we received ended up totally being different. The ending especially was an huge bait and switch imo. I could say more I just don’t want to spoil it for other readers.
I understand that 4E changed, altered and removed much of the previous FR lore. What could have been done surgically with a scalpel with precision. Was instead run over with a bulldozer so it conformed to what Wotc wanted the 4E lore to be.
They are not an horrible read by any means though it felt like an also to older FR fans.
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I’m a big fan of the 4e Realms and the Spellplague… but it’s hardly on-topic at this point.