Director of Brand Strategy
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They were removed for entirely out-of-game reasons. These reasons were discussed in panels at PaizoCon and you can find further elaboration in subsequent threads here on the forums.
Fans who want to keep using them can, because all the original source material and rules for them all exists.
They just won't be mentioned or expanded upon in official Paizo sources going forward, and references to past mentions will be retconned for future consistency.
They were removed for entirely out-of-game reasons. These reasons were discussed in panels at PaizoCon and you can find further elaboration in subsequent threads here on the forums.
Fans who want to keep using them can, because all the original source material and rules for them all exists.
They just won't be mentioned or expanded upon in official Paizo sources going forward, and references to past mentions will be retconned for future consistency.
Golarion's dark elves were a casualty of the OGL debacle that started off 2023.
I mean, what you need to do about Darklands elves going forward will depend on what you had used them for in previous Pathfinder games that you consider canonical for your table. There are still going to be elves in the Darklands, they are just going to be very different than you expect if you are expecting Drow things (like, they are for sure nicer to outsiders.)
I don't think any games I was in used Drow for anything except "that elf looks different." So I have very little to do. If you played Second Darkness with your table, you will have more work to do. The exact nature of this work is not something Paizo can predict, but people on the boards here can certainly help with.
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So cast undelete spell. The erasing of Drow seems rather lazy. "Oh it was some dude who lied"? Paizo is surely more creative than that!
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So cast undelete spell. The erasing of Drow seems rather lazy. "Oh it was some dude who lied"? Paizo is surely more creative than that!
You're not getting it.
The unexplained removal of the Drow is not something that Paizo wanted or planned to do. It was forced upon Paizo by WoTC. Even directly explaining their disappearance the Drow is legally perilous, as Paizo would be forced to mention the dark elves.
Yes, a particular table could still "undelete" Drow. A player group could also import Beholders, Yuan-Ti, or Dragonborn. But, Paizo cannot.
Yes, it s#%ks. I doubt that Paizo's developers would disagree. But, such is life.
So cast undelete spell. The erasing of Drow seems rather lazy. "Oh it was some dude who lied"? Paizo is surely more creative than that!You're not getting it.
The unexplained removal of the Drow is not something that Paizo wanted or planned to do. It was forced upon Paizo by WoTC. Even directly explaining their disappearance the Drow is legally perilous, as Paizo would be forced to mention the dark elves.
Yes, a particular table could still "undelete" Drow. A player group could also import Beholders, Yuan-Ti, or Dragonborn. But, Paizo cannot.
Yes, it s#%ks. I doubt that Paizo's developers would disagree. But, such is life.
Yes, I am getting it. I know exactly why they are being removed. Because WOTC is frankly, doing some scummy business practice with their OGL stuff. It only sucks so much in that it really screws with some lore and events that happened as another poster pointed out. Do dark skinned elves still exist though? I'm guessing not in the skin tones drow had?
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With most of the 'quietly fading into the scenery' OGL errata, those things either don't occupy a large enough space in the lore for any part of the setting to be changed, or else can easily be replaced by something that serves functionally the same role without much fuss. No matter how much a person may love owlbears, owlbears not existing doesn't change the setting in any fundamental way that can't be replaced by llamabears, bearjays, or the beloved bear classic.
The drow aren't like that. The drow were said to dominate the Darklands. To never do a story with the drow again means avoiding any part of the Darkland where drow lived--including never being able to say "They all disappeared somehow" because that is also a story in which drow existed in the setting.
Theoretically it could have been possible to say "well, instead of the drow, let us have a not-drow with the serial numbers filed off." The problem with this approach is that at least half the draw of the drow is that they are the drow. There would be no way to replace them without changing them too fundamentally to still be what people want with the drow, and then you'd still have a knockoff drow that drow fans don't like. To add to this, the designers decided, you know what, it's fine if the game that gave us the drow gets to keep them.
So instead, the sekmin, Paizo's original sneeple who have deep roots in the setting, get to take up a slightly larger role now that they're not being crowded out by everybody's favourite evil elves, and there's a lingering mystery with what's going on in that abandoned city that the sekmin don't want anybody to enter.
Part of the reason why we don't have a big, formal answer to many of these questions is that the Remaster is still in-process, and even if it weren't, niche lore questions like "what is happening in the lore spaces formerly occupied by the drow" has no business being answered until the authors (whether in an AP or a setting book, etc) actually go to those regions and give us answers--which means the devs have to figure out what they need those answers to be in advance of that happening.
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Creative Director
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The main and primary reason we haven't done a "big formal answer" to this is because we had to scramble and make a lot of big decisions in a very short amount of time, and "what to do with the drow and all the other OGL creatures that live in the Darklands" ended up having a patch in the form of an article I wrote at the last minute for the final Sky King's Tomb volume.
If and when we do a big Darklands book or adventure/Adventure Path, that'll be where we give our "big formal answer" to all this. The wall of quotes from me above was in large part me trying to grapple with a very complicated question in public in real-time, and shouldn't be taken as anything other than an insight into my thought process on the problem. Those posts will help inform what we do with the Darklands at some point in the future... won't be this year though, and probably won't be next year.
In the meantime, feel free to use whatever we've published for any edition in your home games. What is and isn't in a private game isn't really impacted by the OGL fiasco that caused so much chaos for us in 2023.
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I suspect a lot of the reason the Hyringar got a glow up to be clearly distinct from but fill a similar narrative niche as the Duergar so as to leave the "Darklands Dwarves" thing mostly intact had a lot to do with Paizo developing a lot of really Dwarfy books at the time the OGL nonsense happened, so there was clearly mindshare to think about this and pages in books to fit it in.
Had there been different books in development at the time, different things likely would have happened, but there was a reason to address the Duergar to begin with, since "slavery" was kind of their deal but is something Paizo has (correctly) tried to excise from the setting.
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Just keep encouraging everyone to never support any WotC product or service ever again. A massive number of us have been doing this in our gaming groups and Local Gaming Stores for well over a decade (some even since 1999). Keep explaining to other gamers and interested gamers what kind of company WotC is and encourage them to take a look at Paizo instead.
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Creative Director
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I suspect a lot of the reason the Hyringar got a glow up to be clearly distinct from but fill a similar narrative niche as the Duergar so as to leave the "Darklands Dwarves" thing mostly intact had a lot to do with Paizo developing a lot of really Dwarfy books at the time the OGL nonsense happened, so there was clearly mindshare to think about this and pages in books to fit it in.
Had there been different books in development at the time, different things likely would have happened, but there was a reason to address the Duergar to begin with, since "slavery" was kind of their deal but is something Paizo has (correctly) tried to excise from the setting.
This is absolutely the case. "Sky King's Tomb" was already well into being created when the OGL thing happened and we had to scramble to fix things, in particular, in light of what seemed at the time a very real possibility of the OGL being utterly revoked. As it played out, things didn't go that nuclear since (as we know) the OGL can't be revoked and it ended up being safe (for now, at least), but by that point we'd already course-corrected Sky King's Tomb enough that we had to keep going with the duergar-replacement stuff. Which created ripple effects for the rest of the Darklands, even though the Adventure Path itself is very micro-focused on that region.
The fact that duergar are so traditionally defined as being slavers with everything else being secondary, and us wanting to move away from slavery stories, was a one-two punch that made making the changes to them to rebuild them as hyringar the right time and right place to do it.
Had instead "Sky King's Tomb" been called "Elf Queen's Tomb" and it was about drow vs. elves instead of duergar vs. dwarves (oversimplification, yes), then we would have instead put all that work in print on changing drow, while leaving the duergar to the side for later. That wasn't the Adventure Path we had deep in the works at the time the OGL fiasco hit us though, so there ya go.
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Slavery still exists in Golarion though doesn't it? I think I've seen references to it in some 2e books. I know some of the pathfinder society books even had adventures about it. There was one with some guy enslaving Geni/Djin and he was mad the Pathfinder society screwed up his big plans.
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Creative Director
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Slavery still exists in Golarion though doesn't it? I think I've seen references to it in some 2e books. I know some of the pathfinder society books even had adventures about it. There was one with some guy enslaving Geni/Djin and he was mad the Pathfinder society screwed up his big plans.
It exists there if you want it in your games. We decided to turn away from those stories and seek other stories a few years after 2nd edition started. You can, in fact, take the Age of Ashes Adventure Path as "the one where the PCs helped end the slavers" campaign.
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The way I would think of slavery in Golarion is that it exists below the Pathfinder baseline. On page 486 of the original CRB (I'm not sure where it is in the remaster if at all) is a discussion of things you should probably avoid in the game (e.g. excessively gross or steamy stuff) and things you should definitely avoid in the game (one of which is slavery). It mentions that villains might engage in the sort of "absolutely not stuff" off screen, but you shouldn't really dwell on it.
So "Slavery might exist in Golarion" but we're not really going to put in the forefront of adventures of adventure books, so the sociopolitcal structure of Cheliax, the economy of Okeno, the agenda of the Andoran Navy, and the culture of the darklands Dwarves all needed to be altered slightly so that these are things that are better suited for "games you play for fun with your friends."
Another way of thinking about the Pathfinder baseline is that whatever the most horrific depraved thing you can conceive of is (please don't tell me) there is most likely some denizen of Hell or the Outer Rifts who is *really* into whatever that is. You probably should not include that entity in your game, but the outer planes are large and that individual is probably there.
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I, for one, welcome our new Cavern Elf overlords.
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Another way of thinking about the Pathfinder baseline is that whatever the most horrific depraved thing you can conceive of is (please don't tell me) there is most likely some denizen of Hell or the Outer Rifts who is *really* into whatever that is. You probably should not include that entity in your game, but the outer planes are large and that individual is probably there.
Also Abbadon ...
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Still not entirly clear why drow needed to be removed but the current version of Kobolds got to stick around (Since if I'm not mistaken the reptile part is more wizards thing than what Kobolds in folklore look like)
"Bree yark!" (sorry, couldn't resist)
Kobolds were reptilian-ish back in the AD&D/BECMI D&D days: scaly, just with heads resembling dogs in shape. Even 3.x kobolds were similar (see the 3e picture on the Forgotten Realms wiki from the 3.0 and 3.5 Monster Manual).
Dragon-themed kobolds are Paizo's take in Pathfinder.
Drow, on the other hand are very much AD&D/D&D intellectual property going back to the old GDQ (Against the Giants G1 to G3, Descent into the Depths of the Earth/Vault of the Drow D1 and D2, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits Q1 modules) and Temple of Elemental Evil adventures.
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Still not entirly clear why drow needed to be removed but the current version of Kobolds got to stick around (Since if I'm not mistaken the reptile part is more wizards thing than what Kobolds in folklore look like)
Dragonborn are just kobolds with dignity and exist because WotC are cowards, change my mind :V
But more seriously, I genuinely don't think I'll miss the draw. For one thing, they play into some uncomfortable tropes about "degeneracy" that I think we should be a lot more leery of than people were when they were created. Secondly, although the name is still public domain the conception of what we recognise as a Drow is inarguably tied to WotC's version which is hard to escape. And thirdly, scrapping the Drow's dominence of the Darklands gives Paizo and DMs a canvas to build something new with. I quite like the idea of the Serpentfolk filling their niche, and it gives Paizo an opportunity to flesh them out beyond the barebones characterisation they previously had as a sleeping menace by making them an active threat. But for those who still want some Drow flavour, having the Cavern Elves still leaves that option open.
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Still not entirly clear why drow needed to be removed but the current version of Kobolds got to stick around (Since if I'm not mistaken the reptile part is more wizards thing than what Kobolds in folklore look like)
We went over this in great detail in the initial threads after the Drow ball dropped, but the long and short of it is that basically everything about "Drow" as in a subterranean elf with dark skin tones with a matriarchal society with themes about poison and spiders is a D&D creation. The word predates D&D but the original sense of "Drow" was basically just another way of saying "Troll."
There is a much deeper well of folklore to draw from when it comes to Kobolds. Still, I suspect the PF2R Kobold might be pretty different from the pre-remaster one.
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Still not entirly clear why drow needed to be removed but the current version of Kobolds got to stick around (Since if I'm not mistaken the reptile part is more wizards thing than what Kobolds in folklore look like)Dragonborn are just kobolds with dignity and exist because WotC are cowards, change my mind :V
But more seriously, I genuinely don't think I'll miss the draw. For one thing, they play into some uncomfortable tropes about "degeneracy" that I think we should be a lot more leery of than people were when they were created. Secondly, although the name is still public domain the conception of what we recognise as a Drow is inarguably tied to WotC's version which is hard to escape. And thirdly, scrapping the Drow's dominence of the Darklands gives Paizo and DMs a canvas to build something new with. I quite like the idea of the Serpentfolk filling their niche, and it gives Paizo an opportunity to flesh them out beyond the barebones characterisation they previously had as a sleeping menace by making them an active threat. But for those who still want some Drow flavour, having the Cavern Elves still leaves that option open.
Cavern elves are definitely not WotC's Drows.
People who want Drow flavor in Golarion can just use the pre-Remaster products that included Drows.
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I honestly have no idea why Paizo decided to remove drow from the game entirely. If they are seriously concerned about not getting sued by Wizards of the Coast, simply removing the word "drow" and just calling them "dark elves" would be enough, just like they did with duergar, wouldn't it? And if Paizo doesn't want to anger black people by saying that elves with dark skin is evil, then simply saying that "the descendants of elves who escaped Earthfall by descending into the Darklands still retain white skin and they are genetically 100% identical to the surface elves. But they are called dark elves because they worship demons and do evil things." would be enough, wouldn't it? Even the dark elves in the Old World (which means, Warhammer Fantasy) are called such not because of their skin color (their skin is as white as high elves) but because of their evil deeds. So why Paizo decided to remove the most powerful and prosperous race in the Darklands, instead of simply renaming and reskinning them, is completely beyond me. I heard there are cavern elves in the Darklands now but they don't seem evil or powerful at all.
Now I come to think of it, if there have never been drow on Golarion, what's the point of the Lantern Bearers, an elven organization which is devoted to the redemption and eradication of drow? Was their supposed goal just another deception to hide the truth that humans are not meant to know?
Removing drow raises another question. If Monster Codex and Darklands Revisited are published after the publication of Pathfinder Remaster, which monster would have been included in those books, since drow surely would not have been allowed to join?
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If they are seriously concerned about not getting sued by Wizards of the Coast, simply removing the word "drow" and just calling them "dark elves" would be enough, just like they did with duergar, wouldn't it?
Not legal advice (I'm sure Paizo got that in spades from either in-house or third-party counsel), but in a word, no. Filing the serial numbers off a work or element of a work does not in and of itself mean that the work or element is not infringing.
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I honestly have no idea why Paizo decided to remove drow from the game entirely. If they are seriously concerned about not getting sued by Wizards of the Coast, simply removing the word "drow" and just calling them "dark elves" would be enough, just like they did with duergar, wouldn't it? And if Paizo doesn't want to anger black people by saying that elves with dark skin is evil, then simply saying that "the descendants of elves who escaped Earthfall by descending into the Darklands still retain white skin and they are genetically 100% identical to the surface elves. But they are called dark elves because they worship demons and do evil things." would be enough, wouldn't it? Even the dark elves in the Old World (which means, Warhammer Fantasy) are called such not because of their skin color (their skin is as white as high elves) but because of their evil deeds. So why Paizo decided to remove the most powerful and prosperous race in the Darklands, instead of simply renaming and reskinning them, is completely beyond me. I heard there are cavern elves in the Darklands now but they don't seem evil or powerful at all.
Now I come to think of it, if there have never been drow on Golarion, what's the point of the Lantern Bearers, an elven organization which is devoted to the redemption and eradication of drow? Was their supposed goal just another deception to hide the truth that humans are not meant to know?
Removing drow raises another question. If Monster Codex and Darklands Revisited are published after the publication of Pathfinder Remaster, which monster would have been included in those books, since drow surely would not have been allowed to join?
Literally two posts above yours is a detailed explanation, but continue to ignore if you must.
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I honestly have no idea why Paizo decided to remove drow from the game entirely...
This thread right here from page 6 onwards is filled with various answers to the question from angles of legal stuff, goes through several what ifs, why Drow need to go but Duergar can be renamed and kept in, considerations on how if paizo had 2-5 years more they could have been kept, how it was painful to make this decision to let go of the Drow but ultimately it had to be done.
As for what happens to the lore things where Drows used to be related to, we'll see. It is possible that future books and AP extras will illuminate these things, but they come when (and if) they come. The Sky King's Tomb backmatter seems to have illuminated situation in Darklands.
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This does bring a question to mind, however. So many other properties use Dark Elves, purple or grey or even obsidian skinned elves that live in dark places and commit evil acts.
What about Pathfinder's 'drow' made them more subject to it than, say, the druchii from Warhammer? Purple and black armors, massive dark gothic structures, a matriarchal society, a heavy focus on slavery and dark evil magic... is it just the skin tone?
I'm not debating why Paizo needed to remove them. I just wonder why other properties get a pass. Elder Scrolls have dark elves, also, and Final Fantasy 14 has creatures called Mind Flayers (the last patch introduced a furnishing item based on one with their name as well, even). Is it the FORM of media, being a ttrpg, that makes Paizo exceptionally vulnerable?
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Creative Director
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This does bring a question to mind, however. So many other properties use Dark Elves, purple or grey or even obsidian skinned elves that live in dark places and commit evil acts.
What about Pathfinder's 'drow' made them more subject to it than, say, the druchii from Warhammer? Purple and black armors, massive dark gothic structures, a matriarchal society, a heavy focus on slavery and dark evil magic... is it just the skin tone?I'm not debating why Paizo needed to remove them. I just wonder why other properties get a pass. Elder Scrolls have dark elves, also, and Final Fantasy 14 has creatures called Mind Flayers (the last patch introduced a furnishing item based on one with their name as well, even). Is it the FORM of media, being a ttrpg, that makes Paizo exceptionally vulnerable?
None of those other companies you list call their dark-skinned elves Drow, or base their game-play statistics and lore on open content directly available from Dungeons and Dragons through the SRD and the OGL. They did from the start what we only began to really do with the remaster—make their own names and lore up for EVERYTHING, rather than just some things.
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This does bring a question to mind, however. So many other properties use Dark Elves, purple or grey or even obsidian skinned elves that live in dark places and commit evil acts.
For the most part it's because other fictional worlds with "dark elves" used them for a lot more than Pathfinder did. Like if Hasbro comes to Microsoft and says "Blizzard's Night Elves and Bethesda's Dunmer are ripping off our intellectual property with the Drow" each of those companies can produce reams and reams of lore to make the argument that "actually, the similarities are mostly superficial".
Whereas Pathfinder pretty much presented the Drow exactly as D&D did, and Hasbro's lawyers could point out that this was deliberate. Since Paizo's initial audience was "people who liked D&D 3.5 and wanted more of it" and the Drow were particularly popular with that set. This is something that was entirely above-board under the OGL, but it's a problem if you're trying to get away from it.
Notably Pathfinder is going to have "Dark Elves" going forward, they're just going to be different from "Drow" in meaningful ways. We haven't really learned much about their plans for them yet. We can infer that they're going to share some things with Golarion's Drow- they live in the Darklands, they went there because of Earthfall, they have lilac skin, etc. But in terms of "making them legally distinct from WotC's Intellectual Property" the most important change is "use a different name" and the second most important change is "give them a different culture" (the new "Dark Elves" are nomads who live in small bands that offer hospitality to strangers, for e.g.)
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Creative Director
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And from a purely personal viewpoint... I'm kinda tired of having rugs ripped out from under me when it comes to building a fantasy setting that we all play adventures in, so changes like this are intended to keep our rugs firmly in place and under our own control so we don't have to go into scramble mode ever again.
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Creative Director
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Notably Pathfinder is going to have "Dark Elves" going forward, they're just going to be different from "Drow" in meaningful ways. We haven't really learned much about their plans for them yet. We can infer that they're going to share some things with Golarion's Drow- they live in the Darklands, they went there because of Earthfall, they have lilac skin, etc. But in terms of "making them legally distinct from WotC's Intellectual Property" the most important change is "use a different name" and the second most important change is "give them a different culture" (the new "Dark Elves" are nomads who live in small bands that offer hospitality to strangers, for e.g.)
We're still working on it, but my take: the underground-dwelling elves you're speaking of aren't going to be called "dark elves" and won't have dark colored skin and won't do anything drow-themed. Their role in the Darklands will be completely different than that previously played by drow.
And from the office of expectation management... don't expect us to really have much more to say on the topic for a year or two, if not more.
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I mostly said "Dark Elves" because I was having trouble remembering "Ayindilar" since I haven't had cause to use it much. Plus "Dark" is still a somewhat appropriate appelation for something that lives in the Dark (my homebrew has subterranean Elves who are pallid like cave salamanders who get called "Dark Elves" for this reason.)
But the Ayindilar are going to be like the Jinin, in that their ancestors fled into the Darklands to avoid Earthfall instead of going to Sovyrian right? I hope we're going to learn more about the Jinin in the Tian Xia book that's coming out this year.
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None of those other companies you list call their dark-skinned elves Drow, or base their game-play statistics and lore on open content directly available from Dungeons and Dragons through the SRD and the OGL. They did from the start what we only began to really do with the remaster—make their own names and lore up for EVERYTHING, rather than just some things.This does bring a question to mind, however. So many other properties use Dark Elves, purple or grey or even obsidian skinned elves that live in dark places and commit evil acts.
What about Pathfinder's 'drow' made them more subject to it than, say, the druchii from Warhammer? Purple and black armors, massive dark gothic structures, a matriarchal society, a heavy focus on slavery and dark evil magic... is it just the skin tone?I'm not debating why Paizo needed to remove them. I just wonder why other properties get a pass. Elder Scrolls have dark elves, also, and Final Fantasy 14 has creatures called Mind Flayers (the last patch introduced a furnishing item based on one with their name as well, even). Is it the FORM of media, being a ttrpg, that makes Paizo exceptionally vulnerable?
Makes sense; I'd still argue Warhammers dark elves are close enough to be considered clearly similar (they even have a name that starts with 'dr-') but I see what you mean.
In the long run this is for the best. Pathfinder deserves to be its own thing, completely and independently imo.
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Makes sense; I'd still argue Warhammers dark elves are close enough to be considered clearly similar (they even have a name that starts with 'dr-') but I see what you mean.
In the long run this is for the best. Pathfinder deserves to be its own thing, completely and independently imo.
Disagree with your assessment of Warhammer's "Dark Elves."
They're called "dark" because they are wholly evil.
Dark = Evil
The color of their skins are just as light as the High Elves' skins, if not lighter.
I do agree with you that Pathfinder's evil elves that live underground should be their own thing.
Maybe make their skins almost impossibly white (due to lack of any sort of pigmentation, or whatever) because they get no Vitamin D from Golarion's sun. You don't have to put it in those exact terms, but the idea's the same.
Heck, they don't even *have* to live underground, but, as we all should know, races that live underground tend to be more evil than races that don't...darkness (lack of light) being associated with evil in just about every culture ever and all that.
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Makes sense; I'd still argue Warhammers dark elves are close enough to be considered clearly similar (they even have a name that starts with 'dr-') but I see what you mean.
In the long run this is for the best. Pathfinder deserves to be its own thing, completely and independently imo.
Disagree with your assessment of Warhammer's "Dark Elves."
They're called "dark" because they are wholly evil.
Dark = Evil
The color of their skins are just as light as the High Elves' skins, if not lighter.
I do agree with you that Pathfinder's evil elves that live underground should be their own thing.
Maybe make their skins almost impossibly white (due to lack of any sort of pigmentation, or whatever) because they get no Vitamin D from Golarion's sun. You don't have to put it in those exact terms, but the idea's the same.
Heck, they don't even *have* to live underground, but, as we all should know, races that live underground tend to be more evil than races that don't...darkness (lack of light) being associated with evil in just about every culture ever and all that.
There are a number of assumptions here and I do not think all of them are well-supported, or at least not well enough to justify designing on those ideas alone.
For one, it doesn't matter what colour you make the evil elves who live underground, making the evil subgroup of any species a particular colour is absolutely loaded territory. I actually like the idea of pale white cave elves, but then elves have never needed much justification to take on ambient colours much less a biological one.
Meanwhile, there's the somewhat baffling notion that, because 'just about every culture' associates darkness with evil, things that live in caves must likewise be inherently evil... because... it's dark down there? "As we should all know" is a confusing assertion given that people who live exclusively in deep caves is solely a fantasy premise, and therefore just as arbitrary as what colour of dragon breathes what substance.
Finally, the association between darkness and evil is indeed very prevalent in many cultures across the world, but perhaps walk back that 'almost every' just a little bit, neither light and darkness, nor white and black, are always associated with good and evil. Just to name the first most prominent one that comes to mind, in Daoism darkness and light have nothing to do with good and evil, but rather active/passive cycles.
Even if it were true that in every single culture across the world, darkness was associated with evil, that would only make it seem all the more interesting of an idea to go against the grain and create a fantasy species associated with darkness which is not evil. I reject categorically the idea that the elves who live underground must necessarily be evil. Like any humanoid creature on Golarion, they have a full mental and emotional range similar to humans, so naturally there must be both good and evil members of their population, regardless what their culture teaches them to value, or the circumstances of their environment. That, I think, would make them more interesting, which I suppose is why it's not surprising to see both WotC and Paizo move away from 'always evil cave elves', even before the mess with the OGL came along.
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Makes sense; I'd still argue Warhammers dark elves are close enough to be considered clearly similar (they even have a name that starts with 'dr-') but I see what you mean.
In the long run this is for the best. Pathfinder deserves to be its own thing, completely and independently imo.
Disagree with your assessment of Warhammer's "Dark Elves."
They're called "dark" because they are wholly evil.
Dark = Evil
The color of their skins are just as light as the High Elves' skins, if not lighter.
I do agree with you that Pathfinder's evil elves that live underground should be their own thing.
Maybe make their skins almost impossibly white (due to lack of any sort of pigmentation, or whatever) because they get no Vitamin D from Golarion's sun. You don't have to put it in those exact terms, but the idea's the same.
Heck, they don't even *have* to live underground, but, as we all should know, races that live underground tend to be more evil than races that don't...darkness (lack of light) being associated with evil in just about every culture ever and all that.
If I described to you purple-and-black-clad elves lead in part by a dark magic wielding matriarch who serves an evil violent god, who are known for dramatic goth architecture and have an economy based heavily on slaves, whose ethnicities name starts with the letters 'dr' you could say either Drow or Druchii, which is what I meant.
I never said the druchii were dark skinned, nor did I say the drow needed to be either (the paizo direction before OGL issues was to make them lavender, anyways).
Slavery still exists in Golarion though doesn't it? I think I've seen references to it in some 2e books. I know some of the pathfinder society books even had adventures about it. There was one with some guy enslaving Geni/Djin and he was mad the Pathfinder society screwed up his big plans.It exists there if you want it in your games. We decided to turn away from those stories and seek other stories a few years after 2nd edition started. You can, in fact, take the Age of Ashes Adventure Path as "the one where the PCs helped end the slavers" campaign.
Slavery is still mentioned somewhat briefly in some places though and its still around in stories? The first pathfinder society adventure I did in 2cd ed had us fighting a guy who was mad the pathfinder society ruined his attempts to be some big deal genie slave master? So the stories are still there?
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James Jacobs has made this point many times, but Errata for lore is very difficult to do, especially getting it to stick.
Slavery was removed as a topic of stories for Pathfinder adventures a couple of years after the start of PF2. So there are still some early adventures that mention it in PF2 terms and people will probably always be confused as to why those story lines don't really continue forward, but it just is what it is.
The Drow are in a similar boat. There are stories out there for people who want them. There won't be anymore, and future stories may override what those past stories have said. Paizo is not beholden to fix those those stories until they tell new stories that directly interact with them.
That is unsatisfying for many players, but a game world is actually millions of different game worlds so all of it only really matters for people trying to publish and profit off of telling specific stories tied to different license agreements...something most players should just not concern themselves with.
I am sure paizo folks would love to be able to time machine some early choices and just have made different ones with knowledge of the future, but we don't have those spells available to us in this world. Thankfully, PF2 has proceeded from the beginning with acknowledgement that lore is messy and different story tellers will create different lore for the stories they want to tell. This is true at the table with GMs and players, but it is even true with the narrators of the rules line books, not to mention all the lost omen line Golarion Lore. Maybe all the third party lore keepers should just try to clarify that on their own Wikis/books to begin with. "According to xyz, this is what we know about [city/place/time/society]."
I dont know if the adventure I did for 2e PFS was early or not. I played it like sometime last year I think? I don't think its that old...so there are adventures with slavery at the forefront?
I dont know if the adventure I did for 2e PFS was early or not. I played it like sometime last year I think? I don't think its that old...so there are adventures with slavery at the forefront?
I haven’t read every single scenario, so I don’t know for certain, but if you remember the title we can look it up. That said, the “no stories centering slavery” decision was a company-wide decision, so it is incredibly unlikely to be a recent story. Maybe a GM with familiar of an NPC’s past drew more attention to that fact than the story itself did?
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I dont know if the adventure I did for 2e PFS was early or not. I played it like sometime last year I think? I don't think its that old...so there are adventures with slavery at the forefront?I haven’t read every single scenario, so I don’t know for certain, but if you remember the title we can look it up. That said, the “no stories centering slavery” decision was a company-wide decision, so it is incredibly unlikely to be a recent story. Maybe a GM with familiar of an NPC’s past drew more attention to that fact than the story itself did?
The decision to no longer do slavery stories was made only a few years ago, so there were indeed some 2nd edition adventures that featured these themes (including the Age of Ashes Adventure Path).
