#races: elves (drow)

[goodolreliablejake]

Fantasy races are an uncomfortable concept, because they present a world that literally works the way racists think that it works. The attempts to mitigate this problem often fail to address the core concern, merely making the idea more palatable.

A big example is trying to correct by changing the language from "races" to "species." This attempt fails for two reasons:

1) Exactly! Racists think that people of other races are a different species. That's the foundation of "race science," phrenology, all of it.

2) Are demihumans different species, though? Like, the interactions between elves and dwarves don't resemble the interactions between different species in our world. They don't act like snakes and lemurs, or whales and krill, or even cats and dogs. More often we've got different groups of people, who may speak different languages and have different cultural practices, engaging in diplomacy or war and struggling to coexist. In practice, they are treated as nations: ethnicities. Except they're ethnicities who are biologically distinct enough to have objective differences in ability.

This is something that puts me on edge in Mass Effect, otherwise one of my favorite games. True, the game ultimately lands on condemning the genophage, and it's not subtle about that. I mean just look at the name... But it's still considered debatable, morally grey, and Mordin Solus remains one of the most charming and enduring heroes of the series. The setting has bent over backwards to make every racist stereotype and talking point as legitimate as possible. In this setting, it is objectively true, scientifically proven that it is in the DNA of Krogans to naturally be violent, warmongering killing machines whose explosively rapid breeding poses an existential threat to the galaxy. That in turn is meant to make us think that maybe forced sterilization is something worth considering. It's hard to ignore the parallels to real life racist propaganda. I don't think it's malicious, just ungrounded and thoughtless; the result of creators to whom these ideals are abstract thought experiments, rather than reflections of real history.

Another big example is Dark Elves. They try to make it okay, to mitigate the message by fleshing them out as characters, by scapegoating an abusive deity rather than an ingrained nature, by erasing the monster manual description that reads "Always Chaotic Evil," by trending skin tone away from black and towards purple, or gray, even pale white. But none of it really changes the core issue, does it? The idea of drow is to equate dark skin with evil, to fetishize that idea, and to tell a story about a subsect of people cast into darkness as a result of sin in a direct parallel to racist Christian beliefs about dark skin being a curse or punishment from God.

So, do I think we need to cancel Mass Effect and stop playing D&D or telling stories about drow? No, not really. I mean... I do all these things. Truth is, I don't have an actionable solution, for myself or anyone. But the dynamic is clearly present and worth describing. And the attempts to challenge it are often insufficient, more about making ourselves feel better about what we're already doing than enacting real change.

[living-dead-guyy]

Elves (Speculative Biology)

If elves were real, what do you think they’d descend from? Personally I find them being a subspecies to be a little bit boring. Please lmk!! I’m considering for my fantasy world

[jag-rat]

Let's analyse the drow!

Quick history on the drow: The drow have been historically characterised as ‘evil’, especially in earlier editions their alignment was always on the evil spectrum. Even Drizzt Do’urden for example was a story that essentially circles around one ‘good’ drow who managed to rise above the rest of his kin and become ‘one of the good ones’. I think we also need to acknowledge that in the earlier editions drow definitely had racist implications around them intentionally or not. With the drow initially being described as ‘completely opal black aside from their white hair’ and essentially just existed as the ‘evil’ elf counterparts to their perfect blonde cousins. Now in recent years wizards of the coast have started to rectify this. As of right now Drow have been described as being more purplish grey in colour and are steering towards being implied not to be 'completely evil'. There's no doubt about it that the drow have had a rocky history and being overtly over-sexualisalised by the early writers definitely didn't help much either. But I still think there's something very interesting wedged into this unique race of elves. 

Lolth's role: Their main goddess is of course Lolth who even in modern renditions is always depicted as a chaotic evil spider demon. You could argue she’s currently the main reason why the surface folk still don’t like these dark elves. Even in Baldur's gate three which came out last year the writers make a point of emphasising that the ‘good drow’ are the ones choosing to rebel against this goddess. Now obviously this ‘good’ and ‘evil’ thing has always been a core part of DND, which makes sense given it was inspired by Tolkien who consistently made a point about there being two sides, good and evil. And it's still a very common theme in modern fantasy but I think when we look at Lolth and her connection to the drow from a more contextual standpoint this insistence of ‘evil’ isn’t nearly as interesting as exploring the greyer implications of how this Goddess came to be. Being viewed as ‘evil’ in the dnd universe is natural as Lolth is written as a chaotic evil being, encouraging violence, the sacrifice of first born sons, and general betrayal among your fellow drow isn’t very appealing. It's enough for anyone to wonder why the drow worship her in the first place if they aren’t evil. However I think it's also important to remember in real life when we create gods they almost always reflect our world, the good and the bad. Let's take Zeus for example, he was a pretty shitty guy, cheating on his wife, kidnapping women and punishing people for petty reasons. But he was still worshipped, he just reflected power and kinghood. And kings aren't perfect or benevolent, they can abuse their power and take what they want. People are complex and imperfect and so are their Gods. So a similar sort of argument could be made for Lolth. 

How the environment shapes a culture: The underdark is almost always described as a harsh environment, with creatures like hook horrors casually wandering around, mushrooms that explode when touched and let's be honest probably not a lot of food in a place with little sunlight or stability. Earthquakes happen often here killing many and flattening villages. The underdark is without a doubt an unpredictable chaotic and cruel hellscape where death is a guarantee and often occurs for little to no reason. It's not hard to imagine how competition could become everything here. That means that every creature living in the underdark, even every other drow clan is just another competitor for those sparse food and resources in an already barren and harsh climate. In an environment so unforgiving and competitive you can imagine how a Goddess such as Lolth would be worshipped. Because Lolth, like most Gods, reflects the environment her worshippers live in, she is characterised as being as cruel, violent and chaotic as the underdark is. And the teachings of violence, sacrifice and betrayal that she encourages of her followers might not actually be such a bad thing but rather the key to the drows continued long term survival in such an impossible climate. Traditions and culture almost always stem from a purpose, in this case how you survive. The cutthroat nature of drow culture mirrors the underdark in such a way that it ensures that the strongest survive (although it's important to note when I say ‘strongest’ I don't mean it in a literal sense but rather those who possess the qualities best suited for survival in that environment.) The strict hierarchical structure also ensures this, with female drow being favoured as they are naturally larger, stronger and more robust than their male counterparts. Which in itself is most likely because larger stronger women generally lead to a higher rate of survival in offspring especially in harsher conditions where a single misstep can be certain death. This physical and social difference lends itself to the spider metaphor of their goddess both literally and figuratively where spiders eat their males. But as unfair as this rigid hierarchy based on sex seems, it can be argued like many cultural phenomena to be a curated survival method in itself. After all you need fewer males than females to maintain a stable population which is an important detail when living somewhere with a natural lack of food. Even sacrificing your first newborn son as gruesome of a tradition as it is, in a way makes sense. It selectively ensures that the male population is lower meaning less overall resource demand in an already scarce environment will be lower while still being able to maintain some semblance of genetic diversity.

Solutions to these dilemmas?: Now of course it goes without saying all these things are horrible, sex selection, strict hierarchies and encouraged violence to decrease competition are all bad. However in an extreme dystopian sounding scenario such as this one it does at the very least make sense. And I think what we can gather from this is that despite all the terrible things, at least terrible to us living in the world we are, drow aren’t really evil. Not even their society despite its depiction is ‘evil’. Calling them evil is kind of like if lions from a zoo who get fed everyday started calling wild lions evil for eating zebras. We may not like it of course but it's not fair to call it evil, it’s survival. In the same way Lolth isn’t even an ‘evil’ Goddess, she's just a cruel and unfair one, made to reflect the natural violence of the underdark and the lived experiences of those worshipping her. When debating the drows morality it's just about context. It brings some questions to mind. Like if the ‘good drow’ drow who are against Lolth did manage to rebel and forcefully shift the culture of the drow to be more like the surface elves for example what would really happen? Would the drow stop all their violent habits and competitiveness to live happily ever after in a more equal world? Or when all of this ‘evil’ behaviour was ‘corrected’ would it lead to a ripple effect causing famine and death anyway? Who are the surface dwellers to determine what’s wrong and right when they’ve never had to survive in such an environment? Perhaps instead the culture of the drow would just naturally change over time anyways if the need for those more violent and extreme traditions subsided because there were more ways of accessing resources and building a stabler environment. Either way I don’t know the future of drow society, but what I do know is that it’s far more complex and grey than we give it credit for.

[princehendir]

Crazy how the obvious (partial) fix for a big chunk of dnd's issues is just to replace the concept of "sub races" with class/cultural/geographic differences, and several other series have in fact already done this, and really its not even so much as a change as it is a slightly different way of phrasing things, And Yet.

[andrewknightley]

what i will never understand why bg3 in all its glory doesnt have a thing to modify your character's face like dragon age origins, a game from 2009

[low-rez-moth]

Did a little sketch of my boy

I'll make it digitally someday

Or not

Anyway this is Drixitel :)

He's got a lot going on. He's actually part of a lost peoples called the umbara rather than a drow but literally no one can tell the difference so he gave up on trying to correct people. They are culturally similar but not under the iron fist of Loth. They were rejected for being "impure" by her standards and formed their own colony and have since evolved to have a few things that set them apart from the drow.

Umbara elves are very few in number to the point where they are thought of mostly as a myth even by the drow. They follow a matriarch like the drow but in a much less extreme way. Rights are relatively equal and not so divided into male and female. They recognize three sexs; female, male, and dya (dyatic) or rather, intersex. They see those born as dya as sacred.

Umbara also tend to have very soft, quiet, voices since they don't use a spoken language too often. They don't have the benefit of hiding from the horrors of the underdark in a larger group like their drow brethren so they speak very softly so the sound of their voice won't attract unwanted beasts. They also get around this by using a LOT of sign language and to speak at further distances they use their natural bioluminescence. They have otherwise invisible freckles all over their body that they can light up in various sequences to relay messages. This can sometimes catch the unwanted attention of passing beasts but it can also be used in a strobe like fashion which does frighten most would-be predators away because it's confusing and disorienting.

Since the umbara are separated from other societies they are very basic in their ways. More tribal than not. And it's not for a lack of intelligence or anything but more of a lack of resources. They also move from one cavern to another regularly so they aren't as easy to track down. The umbara are masters of traveling in shadow, some even say they become shadow and that's how they slip away so easily and you can never be sure if you saw one.

Drixitel himself got separated from his people at a fairly young age and was found by some traveling drow. They took him back to their home and assumed he was one of them. I mean, regardless, free kid and slave labor so whatever. There's a whole lot of trauma that results from living with the drow, as one might expect, especially when he's found out to be a dya. That does NOT go well for him. Poor guy. He eventually escapes to the surface where he decides to strictly identify as male to draw as little attention to himself as possible. Drix ends up with a small traveling party of mercenaries and slowly learns to open up and how to smile again.

[jarinnards]

Hot take but the race selection in bg3 is actually so ass and I genuinely wish we could've had more unique races like tabaxi and yuan-ti pure blood instead of the seventy morbillion flavors of the exact same thing that we got

[vancruejovi]

They have soooo many R.A. Salvatore books on Spotify, I am eating GOOD tonight with my drow son

[plutoniumpuddle]

I'll eventually do all of them but this just to give me direction.

The lore drop will include art and whatever fun lore I've come up with for that race as well as the basic info. The changes I've made aren't meant to be for players, the changes I've made are for my dnd inspired story

[bg3screenshotdump]

I kind of want to port all the elf/human/tiefling/halfelf heads to the short races but the work it's going to take is already making my head spin

[rubyisms]

i love combining my knowledge of d&d lore with elder scrolls lore and being able to determine what had a clear influence on the elder scrolls’s lore from the works of d&d

[chargenmorphed]

Drow are short. Don’t come to me saying they tall, they’re short af

“They’re elves” fuck you

[hoping-for-novelty]

I think orcs also tend to incorporate a lot of stuff from other racial groups. I can't think of proper examples rn but iirc there was also stuff that seemed like it came from (stereotypes of) vikings and Sub-Saharan parts of Africa. but yeah. Yeah it's uh

It's bad

idk. maybe it's obvious if you're looking for it, but when you show me an orc i just see a buff green guy. i don't consider that it might be racist until something sticks out to me

[darlingdesiredelicious]

((Now for Sebastian AFTER being turned...

He's very bitter and jaded but he never actually got over Astarion oops. I mean kind of hard to when he's the reason a lot of people ended up in that cage. He doesn't hate him, though, and it really bothers him.

He's totally lost being led through the underdark, because how do you even deal with 100+ years of being in a cage with no food? And then being released. I think there is a small chance some of his family and friends are still around because Elf Things but who really knows if they still live in Baldur's Gate, anyway, and who knows what these spawn are even going to do in the underdark and how long they'll stay

He can handle his hunger... kind of? He would probably get carried away faced with an abundance of 'food', but he's so used to being hungry that he has some endurance. I would imagine some of the vampires in there went so crazy you couldn't even talk to them, so all things considered, at least he can still think.))

[meanbossart]

Sorry if you've gone over this before, but you've said a few times that DU Drow and Astarion both sleep. I know BG3 can be a little fast and loose with the original D&D rules to fit video game logic (some stuff I think they do better for it), and there's no wrong answer here but I was just curious. There's dialogue referring to the player sleeping no matter what race they are, so I figured maybe it was something to do with the tadpoles: Astarion lost a few vampire quirks while infected, maybe elves would lose the ability to trance/meditate and would HAVE to sleep. Or maybe they do still trance and they just say sleep because it's basically the same to non-elves. And on that note, would DU have the ability to trance at all, since he's kind of just... A bhaalspawn wearing a drow-ish skin? Again no wrong answers here cause you're the one running the show, I was just curious if there was any lore going on behind the scenes.

I could go into how most sources I found (at the time and right now) state that elves can sleep if they so wish, and honestly I can also come up with reasons why both Shadowheart and Astarion would choose to avoid reverie... But I'll be honest with you anon, I just don't find the concept very interesting!

The idea of being able to rest without ever actually letting your guard down, plus having the time required to replenish your energy being cut in half, is... Very boring to me, so I ignore it, it's as simple as that 😅 you are free to come up with your own reasons or just pretend I'm saying "meditate" instead of sleeping whenever I mention it.

Regardless of headcanon though, DU drow isn't capable of it and lacks most other perks of being a drow.

[anim-ttrpgs]

Silk & Dagger & Disability

So, obviously, the main thing Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is about is capitalism and slavery through indirect means, but people really resonate with the disability readings of my work, so here’s this.

So, unlike Eureka, Silk & Dagger is technically a class-based RPG, but it only has two classes, Mistress and Servant, which is the joke. (It’s literally their socio-economic classes.)

It also has two races, elf and man, A.K.A. humans.

“Race” is not normally something I default to when writing RPGs, but in this case it’s a matter of the inspiration and source material that Silk & Dagger is parodying. The thing is, though, that still isn’t really what Silk & Dagger is about. It’s about class and forced labor, and the way that these two “races” map onto that is not really applicable to how that works in the real world. That’s one of the reasons that Silk & Dagger doesn’t have a whole roster of “races,” it would make people even more likely to try and read it as a racism allegory when it’s not.

So, there’s the dark elves that live in the underground caves. Dark elves can see in the dark, have sensitive ears that move and that ear movement is part of their language, and they don’t sleep, among other things.

You, reading this, are probably a human so you know that humans can’t see in the dark, can’t really move their ears, and do need to sleep regularly.

While dark elves are actually still not particularly well-suited for life in these caves, nor the society they live in, their innate abilities make them much more suited to it than humans.

The people in charge of division of labor in this society pretty much all happen to be dark elves, who have obviously never been humans and never will be, and have an interest in their underlings working as much and as hard as possible. So when they get servants who can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t communicate as well as a normal person, and these servants try to say they also need to take more time off than a normal person, you can probably see where I’m going here. The response is that humans are dumb, lazy, ungrateful, parasitic, worthless, etc.. Many Drow don’t even think “sleep” is real, they think it’s something humans are making up to get out of work.

These humans are people who would be able to thrive somewhere else, in some other situation, but they’re not in that situation, they’re in another situation that the Drow forced them to be in. They have no choice but to do a job their body is not good at, do it worse than everybody else because of this, and be considered dumb, lazy, and a liar the whole time.

I’m sure many of you reading this will find this situation familiar.

Oh and also the little candles that humans need to see in pitch black caves are constantly blamed for the buildup of carbon dioxide in the enclosed cave systems by Drow who burn coal to heat their bathtubs.