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Thanks for adding rhe clarity and insight from the design side- the side we only peek at! As another refugee from D&D, a game I loved for years, and love Golarion and hate to see it change. I DO like a lot of the new stuff, just will take getting used to. Will there be a new thing to replace the drow? A Golarion thing?
Fun Fact: in the 90s I didn't allow drow in my home games because they were a Forgotten Realms and everyone was obsessed with them, lol
It's been hinted at quite a few times that the drow mythology on Golarion was created as a 'cover' for ancient civilizations allegedly destroyed by the Azlanti and Cyclopean empires.
One of the more reliable sources about Darklands sorts of things was also doing his level best to suppress knowledge of some of the dangers in an effort to secure against them/prevent those dangers from being aware they'd been 'found out'.
He even quit his job in furious protest over it when his bosses decided to go to press anyways.
THIS... thiss is what I came for! Now I musssst ssssssilencsssse you and ssssslip back to my vault in Sssssssekamina....
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The ayindilar (cavern elves) are not intended to be antagonists of the Darklands the way the drow were. So i dont think it's a replacement for the drow unless what you wanted is just "underground elves".
The ayindilar (cavern elves) are not intended to be antagonists of the Darklands the way the drow were. So i dont think it's a replacement for the drow unless what you wanted is just "underground elves".
That would be a good and logical replacement for the "drow" in the Abomination Vaults AP. The word "drow" will forever forward be placed in quotes when referencing a Golarion race now, as we know better...mwahaha....
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"See, thi' i' th' kind' thin' tha' T'r'ch 's tryin' t' pr'v'n' fr'm 'pp'nin'. G'ss go'a get m' kid t' ge' ba' t' it. 'ndo b'r b' 'ppy 'bou' th'."
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As others have said, every time a setting has bothered with an "in-game explanation" for why things have changed drastically, it has just about always been a trainwreck.
In basic D&D way back when, "Elf" and "Dwarf" were character classes. When that changed, nobody really wailed and gnashed their teeth about the whys and wherefores.
When AD&D 1st edition made the jump to 2nd, the Assassin character class vanished in a puff of social opprobrium. Forgotten Realms tried to explain this by literally having the god of murder absorb them all for a power boost during a "let's explain some changes" mega-event, it was clunky and hamfisted, to say the least.
When AD&D 2nd edition gave way to third edition, there really wasn't much of an explanation for why dwarves could become wizards, where sorcerers came from, why specialty priests were completely erased, why alignment restrictions on several classes had loosened, and so forth. And you know what? Nobody really seemed to mind all that much after the initial kerfluffle had passed.
This too shall pass.
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I feel like the "diagetic explanation for some difference in errata or edition" is best left to each individual table to figure out. That way one table can spin "what happened to X" as a exciting story but a different table that doesn't care about that sort of thing doesn't have to worry about it.
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First and foremost this is a game. Sometimes things about the game change for reasons outside the game. This was one of those. it doesn't need an in game explanation because its not an in game change.
In fact if Paizo even tried to in game explain why drow never existed they would have to acknowledge an OGL game element to do it.
Its best left to say that there is an OGL pathfinder with the older OLG product line you can play and there's an ORC pathfinder you can play and when your at home do whatever you want, keep or remove what you want, explain it how ever you want.
My home games will still have dark elves. I wont make them drow because I never liked that story line anyway. If anything I am free to give dark elves a new background, they don't have to be subterranean, they don't have to be evil.
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I will say, of the APs I've played all the way through, Second Darkness was already so heavily-retconned that we probably won't miss it in terms of setting impact...
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Second Darkness is probably the one AP I'd want them to completely redo at some point. And not like a compilation; since it would need to be almost completely rewritten I think it would need to be part of the regular AP line.
We can hack and spackle most everything else, but that one needs to be completely revisited or retconned out of existence. Actually, I guess would take an adventure that heads to riddleport and explores how and why 2nd Darkness didn't happen exactly as it was reported, if that makes sense. Less work than a complete rewrite but still patches that part of the story.
As in, oh, "Echoes of Darkness: The pathfinder organization finds out that it has been duped by one of their own. The Chronicles have been systematically falsified, and it has gone unrevealed for centuries. Someone needs to investigate the truth of the Underdark denizens, and it has been decided that you are doing that investigating. Head to Riddleport, where the most recent 'reveal' took place. Find out what happened, and what is happening."
There. Lots of skill checks, exploration tasks, and combats all neatly bundled up. Could lead directly into a big event PFS scenario where Sekmin attack and Pathfinders throw themselves into the breach to stop them.
Creative Director
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Second Darkness is probably the one AP I'd want them to completely redo at some point. And not like a compilation; since it would need to be almost completely rewritten I think it would need to be part of the regular AP line.
We can hack and spackle most everything else, but that one needs to be completely revisited or retconned out of existence. Actually, I guess would take an adventure that heads to riddleport and explores how and why 2nd Darkness didn't happen exactly as it was reported, if that makes sense. Less work than a complete rewrite but still patches that part of the story.
As in, oh, "Echoes of Darkness: The pathfinder organization finds out that it has been duped by one of their own. The Chronicles have been systematically falsified, and it has gone unrevealed for centuries. Someone needs to investigate the truth of the Underdark denizens, and it has been decided that you are doing that investigating. Head to Riddleport, where the most recent 'reveal' took place. Find out what happened, and what is happening."
There. Lots of skill checks, exploration tasks, and combats all neatly bundled up. Could lead directly into a big event PFS scenario where Sekmin attack and Pathfinders throw themselves into the breach to stop them.
While Second Darkness would need more work than most other potential updates, it wouldn't have to be anywhere close to "completely rewritten." The basic plot still works fine. If I were to work on this as an official Remastered product, the three big changes I would work into the story would be:
2) Adjust the personality of the elves in the adventure to be more Pathfinder-appropriate and less Tolkien/D&D flavored. In particular, this would mean making the elves more welcoming and friendly to the PCs and MUCH less xenophobic and isolationist. The big change here would be to the first half of book 5 (all the stuff that happens outside of Tanglebriar), which probably WOULD be completely rewritten with new story beats and encounters and the like.
3) Replace the drow with serpentfolk. This would be the most expensive change, since it'd require a lot of new art, but the storyline would remain the same—the serpentfolk would be trying to bring about a Second Darkness. The "elves turn into drow" plot would be removed entirely, and replaced with a conspiracy-based element of "serpentfolk can assume humanoid form, so they've got some of their number infiltrated Kyonin and have compromised the Winter Council and now control it from within, and Allevrah is one of the Coils of Ydersius who is an elf who reincarnated from a serpentfolk but retains her serpentfolk memories and personalities and then, beyond that, becomes an Abraxus worshiper, who is seen by most serpentfolk as a heretical god, so there'd be some built-in conflict there between her and the rest of her serpentfolk family. Book 4 would still be about the PCs infiltrating a serpentfolk city—whether or not that'd be the same city as currently exists in book 4 or would be a different one... dunno. I could see that going in different ways, but I kinda like the idea of setting it in a different city entirely and leaving Zirnakaynin as an entirely different mystery to explore in a different Adventure Path. But the element of the PCs infiltrating this city would be EASIER to do, since the serpentfolk have an established ability to shift form and do have non-serpentfolk people in their society, so we wouldn't need a kludge like "recorporeal incarnation" to enable that plot (something we built in pretty much SPECIFICALLY to give players the rush of playing drow PCs, which at the time this adventure was released, was a popular choice AND one that, as a 3.5 adventure without access to D&D's Savage Species or to our own rules which wouldn't be out for another year, had no mechanics available to support drow PCs).
So, yeah, the big "completely rewritten" elements would be a new adventure between books 2 and 3, a lot of rewriting to book 4, and a new first half of book 5. For sure more than most (all?) other potential Adventure Path updates, but hardly a "complete rewrite." Especially since converting from 3.5 to Remastered 2nd edition would require us to expand things by several levels, since 3.5 adventures give out XP faster AND that one never got to 20th level anyway.
Hopefully the spoilered text above will help GMs who want to update Second Darkness in their own games, and might provide some insight into how we might tackle the tonal shift to the Darklands in future products. Currently, there are no Darklands-themed products coming out anytime soon, and a remaster of Second Darkness is VERY VERY low on the list of potential Adventure Path compilation products, just to manage expectations.
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Yeah. I would have simply preferred something that didn't completely delete them. The example you pointed out is more or less just a renaming.Changing a race to avoid legal entanglements seems spot on to me for both cases.
Plus the whole D&D2E removal of demons. That's even more spot on.
If it helps, Starfinder 2E is keeping Drow around. They'll have a new bespoke name, but are also largely referred to as Void Elves. Some more retooling of their lore will be done (separating from the matriarchal Houses and more focus on their association with corporations), but they'll be there to stay. And with Starfinder 2E being 100% rules compatible with Pathfinder 2E, it'll be simple to port them over.
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Well, we elves aren’t native to Golarion anyway, and stories of evil underground elves were an invention of a pathfinder trying to scare folks away from the darklands. The very real evil underground snake and lizard folk that are plotting all of our destruction used this false myth to hide their evil agendas.
But out in the broader universe there are all kind of elves and ones who treat corporations as cults turned family isn’t really going to ruffle any feathers anyone needs to worry about. They don’t have to have anything to do with demonic corruption of underground civilizations that could ruffle a lot of mean feathers to ruffle.
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I think that leaves me with more questions. They went the extra mile with one but not the other. Gosh, to be a fly on the wall during these internal discussions lol.If it helps, Starfinder 2E is keeping Drow around. They'll have a new bespoke name, but are also largely referred to as Void Elves. Some more retooling of their lore will be done (separating from the matriarchal Houses and more focus on their association with corporations), but they'll be there to stay. And with Starfinder 2E being 100% rules compatible with Pathfinder 2E, it'll be simple to port them over.Yeah. I would have simply preferred something that didn't completely delete them. The example you pointed out is more or less just a renaming.Changing a race to avoid legal entanglements seems spot on to me for both cases.
Plus the whole D&D2E removal of demons. That's even more spot on.
I don't play Starfinder, but I imagine it is because the far future version of drow society looked a lot less like D&D drow than the Pathfinder time period's drow society did. Intellectual property is about more than just names. If you "made" a cartoon character named Homer Sampson who is yellow, bald, overweight, works at the Springfield power plant, and so on... You still be violating intellectual property law because your character is clearly just Homer Simpson with a name change.
Pathfinder drow were like that. They weren't something super generic like dragons that couldn't be copyrighted. They were dark skin underground elves with a specific set of magical abilities. They are slavers with a matriarchal society and penchants for spiders and flesh warping. This is a specific formula which undeniably originated with D&D and is strongly tied to their brand. If they were going to use drow, they wouldn't just need to change the name. They'd have to change enough about drow culture to where it wouldn't be an obvious copy, and then would they really still feel like the drow you know and love?
Meanwhile, Starfinder drow were already from a different planet and had arms dealing as the basis of their economy instead of slavery. They ran around with laser rifles and power armor. They weren't all born with magic. They had more separating them from D&D and are going to have even more in SF2e. Probably helps that SF2e isn't released already with several years of content, so they can find tune Void Elves more.
"Going forward, the team has had some talks about drow and how we might handle them in a post-ORC published Starfinder world. I want to share some insight into this, in hopes of not adding fuel to the fire, but instead let you know how seriously we're taking this, and because I firmly believe we should be open about as much as we can be.
The biggest element that we've agreed on for this whole situation, is that we don't just be "disappearing" drow and having Apostae suddenly become a barren world or have it entirely populated by xulgaths. What we are leaning towards is likely a change to Apostae's primary residents that keeps the spirit of what they currently are in-line with what we have, but make them less directly pulled from OGL-isms. This means a redesign that would remove their existing name, and a lot of the old associations with certain elements that, quite honestly, we've barely had time to delve into with Starfinder beyond stuff like the write-ups in Pact Worlds and some appearances by drow in APs.
A good example of this, would be that instead of households, we might just shift Apostae's residents to being corporation-based, which works WAY better anyways for telling futuristic dystopian stories. Similarly, we'd already been planning on removing some of the matriarchal elements from this, and I suspect we'll just clear those out going forward.
TLDR: Yes, the team is actively aware of the likely need to change. We have plans and discussions have already happened. We're not at a point to lock anything in place, and really don't need to, because we have at least a year of OGL-content that we're still releasing for Starfinder. Also, yes, change is scary... but we've got really creative people coming up with really creative solutions to some of these issues. And again, we're not going to suddenly make Apostae a barren world or just remove the core concepts (Dystopian sci-fantasy stories about oppressive scheming corporate overlords all above a mysterious megadungeon)."
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Yeah, the big issue is that the Duergar got respiffed and we got the Hrynggar because Paizo was working on several extremely Dwarfy books at the time and had the time and attention needed to make their take on "mean subterranean dwarves" unique and more importantly legally distinct. There was an impetus to do so anyway because "slavery" was a big part of Duergar culture and that's something Pathfinder doesn't really put on screen anymore anyway.
There wasn't a similar place to address the Drow in Pathfinder, and most of what was true about the Pathfinder Drow was completely lifted from D&D (via the OGL.) So you'd need to change everything about them and didn't have the time and space to do it.
However Starfinder (with a 2nd edition coming, which will be ORC) does have the time and space to address the people living on Apostae and what they're about. Once they get rules in SF2, you can just play one that came from space in your PF2 game since the two games will be largely compatible. There are still Elves in the Darklands (the Ayindilar, who aren't mean) and there are Drow-looking elves in Tian Xia with their own unique culture, but if you want the mean purple matriarchal elves who are into cruelty you have to go to space, which admittedly is where Pathfinder elves come from to begin with.
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There is an in game explanation though: the Drow were never real. The below ground threat is the sekmin. It’s always been the sekmin. A pathfinder misled the surface, and the sekmin have used illusion magic to exploit that lie. That is the official, in Golarion answer. Any deviation from that in your own campaigns is totally fine…and on you to explain more.
There is plenty off PF2 material there if you want to tell a different story, but moving forward this will be the official story.
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I mean, I personally will ignore the removal of drow in my games. If the removal of drow is troublesome to you then you can ignore their removal too. Drow never were a big part of the setting to begin with, so its not like them removing Avistan from the setting or something similar to that.
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Im not too far off from exequiel759.
I have one player that joined my campaign that is playing a dark elf.
Im dropping the drow verbiage. Dropping the entire lore of drow. I am just using cavern elf and dark elf terms interchangeably.
There will still be dark elves in the darklands in my games. They wont be evil by nature and will serve whatever plot devices I need them to when they come up. Also with the presence of sekmin as a underground antagonist dark elves can more easily fill more ally and protagonist roles.
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Not to nitpick, but it took me a moment to realize that we even were talking about the drow. The description mentioned the elimination of a 'core' species, but in either terms of mechanically core or a major player in the setting, drow simply do not fit this description.
I mean, I get that people love them, which is why I call this a nitpick. Something of value was certainly lost, but what was eliminated was not a core species, and it wasn't without cause, no matter how upset we might get with Paizo's lawyers for preferring they stay in business, or for the creatives for deciding that, even if we could have some barely recognizable variation of drow, D&D may as well keep credit for something they actually made.
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I can understand why some groups are hesitant to stray from the published lore. It's the same reason I have stopped using house rules and stick to published lore as well.
The overhead of maintaining and communicating the changes can be a real hassle without some sort of content system for it, like HeroLab for character rules or a campaign management program like World Anvil or the like for campaign lore.
Part of the use for published material is to take that load off of the GM to make up and for the players to keep track of. Homebrew campaigns come with the expectation of a lot of lore tracking, but doing it with homebrew changes to published material takes away from the benefit of using the books in the first place.
It's a choice every group has to make, but it doesn't make it any easier when publishers have to make lore changes for important reasons, like Paizo has had to do to get away from the OGL.
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That being said, the new lore drop that Zirnakaynin is abandoned and even the Snakefolk (the new main Darklands antagonists) are afraid to go there is a very juicy plot hook.
If you want to make it so that the Drow left or got wiped out instead of the Paizo baseline of "they were never there, we're not going to talk about them", you tell that story by exploring "what happened at Zirnakaynin." Where it's time travel shenanigans, something involving Dark Gods, or whatever this is a really juicy mystery that Paizo isn't going to touch.
I think that leaves me with more questions. They went the extra mile with one but not the other. Gosh, to be a fly on the wall during these internal discussions lol.If it helps, Starfinder 2E is keeping Drow around. They'll have a new bespoke name, but are also largely referred to as Void Elves. Some more retooling of their lore will be done (separating from the matriarchal Houses and more focus on their association with corporations), but they'll be there to stay. And with Starfinder 2E being 100% rules compatible with Pathfinder 2E, it'll be simple to port them over.Yeah. I would have simply preferred something that didn't completely delete them. The example you pointed out is more or less just a renaming.Changing a race to avoid legal entanglements seems spot on to me for both cases.
Plus the whole D&D2E removal of demons. That's even more spot on.
Void Elves? So they want to get sued by Blizzard/World of Warcraft?
Not to mention any campaign we start can simply be set in official Golarion any time we want to go back to it.
Void Elves? So they want to get sued by Blizzard/World of Warcraft?I think that leaves me with more questions. They went the extra mile with one but not the other. Gosh, to be a fly on the wall during these internal discussions lol.If it helps, Starfinder 2E is keeping Drow around. They'll have a new bespoke name, but are also largely referred to as Void Elves. Some more retooling of their lore will be done (separating from the matriarchal Houses and more focus on their association with corporations), but they'll be there to stay. And with Starfinder 2E being 100% rules compatible with Pathfinder 2E, it'll be simple to port them over.Yeah. I would have simply preferred something that didn't completely delete them. The example you pointed out is more or less just a renaming.Changing a race to avoid legal entanglements seems spot on to me for both cases.
Plus the whole D&D2E removal of demons. That's even more spot on.
I am not aware how the void elves are in WoW, but the name itself can't be copyrighted. Those are simply two english words next to each other. It's the idea behind the name. The Starfinder void elves are only in risk of breaching copyright if their lore is very similar to the WoW ones.
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A pathfinder misled the surface
.. This is probably the most interesting fallout from the change. It recontexualizes her from being a hero who unmasked the Drow to the creator of a baseless anti-elf conspiracy theory.
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I think the surface iruxi would kindly remind inquiring apefolk that not every reptile is a lizard, and that once upon a time in the world there were many reptilian civilizations and very few mammalian civilizations so an underground reptile empire seems just as plausible as an underground mammal empireWell, what do surface iruxi think?I said it was underground lizard people all along and everyone just laughed at me.They have and they haven't, and where they have, it's pretty scattered about in various official blogs, Twitch streams, book publications, and other sources.
Drow have been retconned to have never existed. They were either subterranean lizard people, false reports made by surface dwellers, or evil cabals of cavern elves.
Dragons and many other creatures don't need such changes; as they're still very much a part of the setting. Even though you won't see them printed anymore owlbears still populate the forests of the Inner Sea.
You just reminded me that I have a Xulgath tribe led by a disguised Skelm lurking around in my campaign that clearly needs something to do.