To the Stars

Work has reared its ugly head. Content to come. Hang tight!

Blame It on Customs

Has it really been over a month since I last posted? I blame the U.S. Customs.

After all, Pathfinder #14—featuring Mike McArtor’s Second Darkness adventure “Children of the Void”—got delayed en route from China by Customs for at least three weeks. So surely I can also blame them for the theft of my time, energy, and focus. Right?

Or not.

Anyway, posts on the way. Hopefully.

Irish Inspiration: Good Craic

The Irish are known for their fellowship and friendliness. Maybe it’s a stereotype, but as stereotypes go that’s not a bad one to have. And that friendliness and sense of fun is infectious—last week I spent my nights hanging out with Aussies, Israelis, Germans, and French until the wee hours of the morning (something that did not always occur in other places I’ve hosteled). And let’s not forget the music—live performances in almost every bar with no cover every single night of the week. I was in heaven.

In D&D, the habit of pumping strangers for information in taverns and inns is so ingrained we rarely think about why most people go to bars—for fellowship, friendship, and distraction. And while many social interactions might be glossed over in the interest of pacing—“After two days of searching, you hear a rumor that the Winter Blade entered the city only yesterday”—it’s worth occasionally slowing down to actually spend some time in the characters’ favorite inn, tavern, or festhall.

Here are some tips on keeping the ale pouring freely:

Make bards the stars. Unless your bard has tragically misspent his skill points, he’s likely to have the most ranks in Performance in the joint, along with a pretty darn good Charisma. People are going to beg him to play and sing. Patrons are going to want his attention, respect, and affection (and will compete to get it). He is going to be the life of the party. So let him be.

For even more fun, you can play this for a running gag. Imagine your party’s three-foot-tall halfling being able to get a drink in any establishment, while the fighter twice her size is habitually refused service, or perhaps can’t even make it to the counter!

Similarly, some DMs like to set up rival adventuring groups as foils for the PCs. If so, make sure they have a bard—particularly if the party doesn’t have one. Watching their rivals scoop them on rumor after rumor will drive your players absolutely nuts.

Encourage—and reward—players for good performances. Whether it’s a use of the Performance skill or simply good role-playing, players who put resources into social encounters (whether skill points or time spent role-playing) will both have more fun and should benefit accordingly. If the party’s gnome evoker took the time to learn the fiddle, make that expenditure of cross-class skill points worth it.

If it’s an encounter, it can have an Encounter Level. Anyone who has survived middle school knows that social encounters can be more chill-inducing than any wight. If your party bests a foe in a conversation, a negotiation, or even a flirtation, it may be worth an experience award.

Have a night in a bar where nothing happens. It’s perfectly okay to role-play a night out at the bar and have nothing of significance happen. In fact, this is something you should do. Not too often, of course—there are orcs that need slaying—but every once in a while. This forces your players to really act in character for long periods of time rather than relying on dice rolls, and gives you insights into the characters that can be useful later on. Plus, when players and characters come to truly like and loathe certain NPCs, you know you’ve really developed a living, breathing world and not just roughly sketched a setting.

Irish Inspiration: Giants in the Earth

As I mentioned, I just got back from a trip to Ireland, and while for the most part my attention was devoted to sightseeing and fine stouts, I did keep my eyes peeled for role-playing inspiration.

One sight in particular caught my eye: Inishtooskert, the Sleeping Giant. Just off the coast of the Dingle Peninsula, this island truly earns its name, looking for all the world like a giant in deep repose.

Set amid waters that are hazardous even in the best of weather, this island is difficult to visit up close, but captures the mythic imagination when seen from afar. Battered by wind so hard that our guide warned us to keep hold of the car doors so they didn’t bend off their hinges, it was easy for me to look out over the coast and put myself in the mindset of people from an earlier age. To them, giants wouldn’t be creatures of legend. They would be fact—or at least a likely probability (perhaps recently extinct, like the South American flightless carnivorous birds who may have coexisted with early humans and lived on in local tales). The evidence would have been there, right in front of them. Or it would have at least made for a good story to tell around the turf fire. Looking out through the mist, I wanted to believe.

What if it were a real giant or titan? This could be the central mystery of a campaign, an intriguing side trek, or an enigma purposefully left unexplained. How would it have gotten there? Would it be asleep, dead, ensorcelled, or cursed? What impact would its presence have on the people who lived near it? How would they interact with or avoid it? And what would the consequences be if it woke up?

Here are some more thoughts for making the most of giants in your campaign:

Giants live where people give way. Mountaintops, islands, canyons, icebergs, deserts…all are the provinces of giants.

Pick your period. Most campaigns take place in a late medieval/early Renaissance (or even steampunk, thanks to magic) period. Giants in these eras will be on the run, or consigned to far distant lands (think Xen’drik on Eberron). But if your campaign is set in a period reminiscent of the early Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, or before, giants will be uncomfortably close neighbors. They may even be more sophisticated or magically adept than humans.

Introduce them early. Characters should hear about giants while they’re still 1st or 2nd level. Bards and innkeepers should tell tales about them that make the blood run cold. They should leave tracks in the snow deep enough for livestock to flounder in. Most importantly…

Characters should run into their first giant well before they’re ready. And they should lose.

Note that this does not mean a fight to the death. Perhaps the giant loses interest in them, is scared off, or otherwise heads on its way. Perhaps the characters are captured and sold, thus springboarding them into another adventure. The point is, the giant should win handily—because that scares the bejeezus out of characters like nothing else. From then on, whenever you mention giants, they will quiver in their comparatively tiny boots. And when they finally do beat their first giant, many levels later, the party’s early defeat will make their final victory taste all the sweeter.

Ignore all of the above if it makes for good fantasy. One of the fascinating successes of Athas, the world of the Dark Sun setting, was its cosmopolitan half-giants, who lived among humans and changed alignments and philosophies as freely as clothes.

A Tardy Return

Well, I’m back from vacation! …And already posting a day late. *Sigh* Mexico and Ireland were great (as was the long weekend in Baltimore and Philadelphia in between) and I even managed to mine my travels for some D&D world-building ideas. But a fever has made my reëntry into the daily grind a bit rocky.

But never fear, I am indeed back. Rather than posting every weekday, I’m going to try to keep to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, both for my own sanity and to keep the quality of the posts high. So look for a new post tomorrow as I dive back into realms of myth, magic, and mayhem.

Summer Vacation

Back in July, I started this blog as an outlet for D&D ideas that I’d too long neglected and which now felt orphaned in the wake of 4th Edition. (I pause for a moment to mourn my poor barghest ecology, which received positive feedback from Dragon years ago, and which I never got around to revising…because I am an idiot.) It was a way to get myself writing again and carve out a little bit of fantasy pleasure during the workday. Never did I realize that I would actually be able to keep it up, essentially without interruption, every single weekday for seven straight weeks.

But I’m off for vacation to Mexico and then Ireland, so On Beyond Drow will be on vacation, too. In between the two trips, I’ll try to catch up on tweaking and revising the entries I haven’t had a chance to upload yet. And, having run across some interesting D&D blogs in the past few days, when I come back I’ll consider engaging some of those folks in conversation and perhaps promoting this blog in general a little more.

So I’ll see you soon—possibly in a few days; definitely in three weeks once my travels are over. If you’ve found this blog and are enjoying it, look for more come September 15th.

It’s been a fun seven weeks and I can’t wait to come back. Thanks for reading, and keep thinking of ways to imagine on beyond drow…

Rethinking Wererats Continued

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Rethinking Wererats

In D&D, wererats don’t get a lot of respect. Perhaps this is appropriate—after all, neither do normal rats.

Still, it seems like they fall far too easily into clichéd tropes. When most werecreatures show up in adventures (at least published ones), it’s either as the main antagonist for low- to mid-level parties, or as the interesting secret identity of some NPC (often a minor noble the characters may or may not interact with).

But not wererats. They’re consigned to the sewer.

It’s such a typical setup that an editorial in Dungeon, talking about what made a successful submission, once went out of its way to discourage adventures with wererats in sewers. And yet even they (in the form of their offspring Pathfinder) can’t seem to get away from the habit: Greg A. Vaughan’s otherwise excellent “Shadow in the Sky” has a group of Riddleport beggars…who are also a criminal gang…who are also wererats…who live in a dump. It’s a lycanthropic cliché quadfecta!

I shouldn’t pick on Vaughan—he's a good author, and one man’s cliché is another’s useful shorthand. Sewers and dumps make sense as wererat habitats, and Ziphras and his gang are just side treks, so there's no reason to push them beyond price-of-entry.

But as we’re busy thinking of ways to reapproach iconic D&D races and subraces, wererats deserve our attention. Because a) it’s fun, and b) certainly no one else will give it to them.

The late, lamented “basic” D&D had one interesting twist. All kinds of oddities crept into the Known World/Mystara—after all, this was a setting that had Arabian-inspired countries bordering Scandinavian-inspired ones, and a monster (the thoul) that was inspired by a typo. Wererats are yet another example. For some odd reason, in the Known World most wererats weren’t people who turned into rats, but rather rats who turned into people(!).

I’ve always wondered at what point that decision was made, and by which designer, as well as what it might suggest about the exceptional nature of wererats versus other lycanthropes. And pity the poor rat who, having been bitten by his werecousin and infected, finds himself in an alleyway for the first time as a shivering, naked human man….

Spoilers…of Genius!

As I mentioned yesterday, Pathfinder’s Second Darkness Adventure Path has arrived, with Greg A. Vaughan’s “Shadow in the Sky” kicking things off.

Since this blog tends to deal in issues of subraces and cultures, here’s what’s of interest to us. But if you’re a player, hold off reading, because this post has some spoilers.

The Good
The major elven subraces split as a result of a coming cataclysm. Some left the world of Golarian to escape it, some stayed sheltered from it in remote jungles and the polar regions, and some were caught up in it. Some of these latter would become drow after exposure to radiations from Rovagug, god of wrath and destruction.

I like this a lot, because it recalls the elves of Tolkien, who sundered into subraces because of their varying degrees of love for and engagement in the world, and whether or not they answered the call of the Valar. Hooray for giving a nod to the classics!

Drow have tapped aboleth magic capable of pulling asteroids out of orbit. Now that’s just cool.

Elves who turn to great evil spontaneously become drow. I guess great minds think alike, because last month I suggested a similar transformation. But my suggestion was to have it happen in a directed manner—as the result of a curse or as a punishment inflicted by elven society on outcasts as they were to be exiled.

But to have it just happen spontaneously? That’s simply awesome, and it takes my idea a step further than I'd been brave enough to take. (That’s why I’m a fan and the Pathfinder guys are professionals.) Imagine cornering an elven antagonist and have him suddenly morph into a drow right in front of you! Now that’s good adventuring.

Note that not all evil elves necessarily become drow, which adds a further layer of mystery and suspense—where is the line? What foul acts or vileness in spirit tip an elf over the edge into darkness? I'm eager to see how this plays out.

The Bad
Drow are purple. Yep. Dark purple. Dark blue or gray, too.

Yikes. But I guess I can’t blame Paizo. Truly black skin must be hard to paint—every artist who’s tackled the drow has had to wrestle with this one. (Downer was definitely gray. Jeff Easley made Drizzt so light in some pictures he was practically cream!)

Oh well. Dark purple it is. Bring on the evil eggplants!

Second Darkness

The Second Darkness Adventure Path has come to Paizo’s Pathfinder. And as the series name portends, drow are the main antagonists.

You might assume I’d be down on this prospect—I do call my little blog here On Beyond Drow, after all—but you’d be wrong. I’m thrilled.

In the foreword to “Shadow in the Sky,” Editor-in-Chief James Jacobs does some talking about the history of drow in D&D and fantasy—from Hall of the Fire Giant King to The Crystal Shard and beyond—and their growing popularity over time. What he then goes on to write is revealing and heartening. I quote him here (without permission, but with much respect and interest):

Of course, with such sudden popularity came the to-be-expected backlash, and today you can hardly mention drow in the presence of gamers without sparking an argument. Some players love playing drow characters, while other players won’t play in a game that allows drow PCs. Some GMs love the concept of “renegade” drow who have turned against their sinful ways to become champions of good, while others gag and gnash teeth over the very concept. Even the name riles up gamers—there are at least two good ways to pronounce the word, and I wouldn’t put it past someone to come up with a third and a fourth. No matter how vocal people get about drow, the fact remains that everyone knows about them and everyone talks about them.

Sound familiar? It reads an awful lot like my long-winded editorial in the Comments section of my first OBD post. He goes on:

So they seem like a perfect choice for the villains of Pathfinder’s third Adventure Path. For those of you worried that the next several volumes are going to descend into angst-ridden, misunderstood dark-elf heroes, let me repeat myself.

The drow are villains.

During the course of Second Darkness, you’ll meet more drow NPCs than any other race, and I can pretty much guarantee you that they’re all going to be bad guys. The drow of Golarion are not to be trusted. They worship demons. They’re slavers and sadists. They perform hideous experiments on innocent victims. The drow are back to being evil, in other words.

As a result, you should encourage your players NOT to play drow characters in this campaign. I fully understand the attraction of playing a drow. Hell, two of my own favorite characters that I’ve played are drow (one of them even ended up in the Shackled City Adventure Path!). Playing a misunderstood hero who’s forced to live with the fact that her heritage brands her a villain can be quite fun and rewarding—but Second Darkness isn’t the place for drow PCs. If a player wants to play a misunderstood hero here, try to talk them into playing a half-orc. Or a goblin. Or a half-fiend. Or even one of the other Darklands-dwelling races, like a duergar or a troglodyte.

Drow can be PCs in all the Adventure Paths after this one. For now, though, give them a chance to be the bad guys again.

The folks at Pathfinder and Paizo get it. They managed to avoid using drow as main antagonists throughout five full Adventure Paths in Dungeon and Pathfinder. And when they did decide to use drow, Jacobs’s foreword indicates that they’ve done their best to rethink them, reapproach them, and most importantly, make them evil—not dark, not Gothic or Romantic (note the capitals), and not cool—truly evil. Drow are a mystery in Golarion—even most sages don't even know they exist—and by nixing drow PCs, the writers are returning mystery to the race. If well executed, the revelation of drow in Golarion could be almost as shocking a moment as it was when Gygax created them decades ago.

All in all, it’s a great start, and I’m excited to see what comes of it.

The Dark Seldarine: Aerdrie Faenya

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Sourcebook Mashup: Ghostwalk & Waterdeep Continued

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The Dark Seldarine: Labelas Enoreth

Work has reared its ugly head. Content to come. Hang tight!

Sourcebook Mashup: Ghostwalk & Waterdeep

Over at Amazon, prices on used 3.0/3.5 supplements have dropped to fire-sale levels, so I’ve been snapping up a couple of books I missed the first time around. This past week was spent thumbing through City of Splendors: Waterdeep.

I have a confession to make: Waterdeep has never made a lot of sense to me.

To my mind, Waterdeep shouldn’t be such an important city, if one considers pure geography. As the entrance to the Heartlands, Baldur’s Gate should be the vastly more important site. Waterdeep simply sits too far from the rest of the action in the Realms to be the hub that it supposedly is. (The Silver Marches are a new confederacy, and I can’t believe there’s all that much trade pouring in from Icewind Dale and the Moonshaes.) And subsequent reasons we’ve been given for Waterdeep’s importance—proximity to the High Forest and several ruined elf kingdoms; ease of entry to Skullport, Undermountain and the Underdark; trade with Evermeet (um, do idyllic island paradises hidden from the world need to export...?)—have all felt like over-fantastic and too-late justifications.

Of course, I could be wrong. After all, Waterdeep is analogous in many ways to London, who certainly didn’t let being stuck on a cold, rainy island stop it from becoming a world power. Also, maybe Waterdeep’s isolation worked for it. When you’re the only city in the area worth talking about—take that, Luskan!—perhaps it’s a bit easier to become a world power.

That said, what if we supplement Waterdeep with one of my favorite books (as I’ve mentioned before): Ghostwalk?

Ghostwalk is centered around the city of Manifest, where the dead walk as ectoplasmic ghosts. Manifest sits on an interesting (and disappointingly unmapped) peninsula developed by Monte Cook and Sean K Reynolds, but can by adapted to other settings. Cook and Reynolds suggests placing Manifest in the Realms in Lantan, the Moonshaes, Tashalar, or Maztica. But there’s no reason Manifest couldn’t be Waterdeep—and a lot of reasons why it should be.

Ghostwalk also solves the problem of Undermountain. There’s always been this sense that, if you missed the original the original The Ruins of Undermountain box set, you missed out big. (I was in middle school and still playing “basic” D&D at the time.) In 3rd Edition, Wizards of the Coast’s website barely scratched the surface and Expedition to Undermountain has been lambasted as being mere CliffsNotes. If you’re trying to create Undermountain for devoted Realms fans, you have a lot of work and a lot of catching up to do.

At the same time, Undermountain is also kind of silly. “Mad wizard creates super-dungeon? Could you be any more 1st Edition?”

Ghostwalk alternately frees DMs from the psychic burden of Undermountain—“Sorry, the Deathwarden dwarves have the place locked down”—or gives it a proper reason to exist. A path to the Land of the Dead is totally worth a super-dungeon…worth dozens of factions fighting….and worth countless adventures.

More on Thursday about specific ways to turn Waterdeep into Manifest (and vice versa).

The Dark Seldarine: Erevan Ilesere

Every royal court needs a jester, and Erevan Ilesere is the Dark Seldarine’s. Perched from a tree branch, lounging in a grassy glade, or peering down from a nearby balcony, Erevan fires volleys of jokes, puns, and pointed observations to keep the elven deities alternately rolling with laughter or seething with anger. Which is just the way Erevan likes it.

No wise power turns his back on Erevan, however; nor should any mortal. He is a thief to his core and a backstabber by nature. Elven thieves worship him and elf assassins consign their blades to his care.

Erevan is also a gambler. He has a devil’s eye for knowing just what a mortal wants and what that mortal will wager to get it. But at least the Hells’ own are lawful. Chaotic Erevan, on the other hand, will cheat, lie, and invoke all the godly power he can muster to win, even against the most naïve child. Only with the other Dark Seldarine does the Dark Jester play fair (after one too many stern—and scarring—reprimands from Corellon Larethian).

Erevan loves evil pixies for their sharp wits, sharp blades, and natural invisibility. (The fact that they are handy with poison never hurts either.) His friendship with dragons—and their deities—is more complicated. He will partner with one from time to time when there is a mighty hoard or priceless artifact to gain, and more than one demon lord or stuffy deva has found herself the poorer after such a collaboration. These elf/dragon pairings are epic capers involving much wordplay, side bets, and very, very careful negotiation ahead of time of how the take will be split.

Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Cleric Alignment: CE, CN, NE
Domains: Chaos, Elf, Evil, Luck, Trickery
Favored Weapon: Short sword

The Dark Seldarine: Hanali Celanil

Of all the Dark Seldarine, Hanali Celanil is perhaps the most beautiful, the most radiant…and the most terrifying. Her passion knows no restraints and her vengeance knows no limits. Hanali is the lover who lures servants into her bed and then calls for their master, the sadist who flays the skin of a bound slave, and the cat who toys with her prey before discarding their broken bodies.

At the dawn of time Hanali was a simple fertility goddess. But she watched avidly as the elves civilized themselves, trading their tree-bole shelters for canopy palisades, illusion-wrapped hill forts, and crystalline cities. Entranced, she abandoned the portfolio of fertility to become a deity of love, romance, beauty, and art. But like a spoiled child, she quickly became bored of each new discovery. Her quest for novelty took her down darker and darker roads, till even the fleshpots of the Abyss drew a multiverse-weary yawn. Now she hungers after new sensations, however vile.

Hanali’s worshippers are the pampered, the spoiled, the cruel lovers, the sadists. She inflames elven passions and delights in instigating trouble so she can watch the resulting ruination play out.

While rarely fruitful, careless Hanali’s liaisons do occasionally result in divine-touched elves, fey’ri (Monsters of Faerûn), and succubi. She bears all these beings with alarming speed and in total secrecy. It is whispered that more than one atropal (Epic Level Handbook or Libris Mortis) is her responsibility as well.

Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Cleric Alignment: CE, CN, NE
Domains: Chaos, Charm, Elf, Evil, Magic
Favored Weapon: Dagger

Bonemortar Dwarves Continued

Bonemortar dwarves have well-kept black hair and beards streaked with silver. Their skin tends to be quite pale—sometimes to the point of white—but will vary; dark tan and jaundice-yellow coloring is sometimes seen. Given their cultural history, a tendency toward dark clothing with silver, white, or yellow accents and bone or skull motifs is unsurprising. They exhibit a reticence beyond even the “dour and taciturn” dwarven stereotype. Seeing themselves as a nation under siege, too much laughing and joking is consider unseemly and occurs only in the privacy of their own apartments.

Bonemortar dwarves do not shy from horses. The height and speed horseback allows is invaluable for keeping order over their human thralls. Breeding warhorses with draft horses (similar to Clydesdales), they have created a steed with both a martial temper and the strength to carry even the most over-plated rider. Often these horses’ feathery-haired legs are incongruously augmented with steel shoes, vicious spikes, and other wicked innovations in barding. Bonemortar dwarves’ favored weapons—halberds, urgroshes, Lucerne hammers, horseman’s picks, and Lochaber axes—are all ideal for combining dwarven weapon familiarity with the realities of mounted combat.

Bonemortar Dwarf Characters
[Stats TBD]
Favored Classes: Fighter or wizard (specialists only, in the schools of abjuration or necromancy)

Dwarven defenders are highly valued by the Bonemortar clan. They also often take levels in the runecaster (Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting), true necromancer (Libris Mortis), and geometer (Complete Arcane) prestige classes.

In the later two cases, it should be noted that though the Bonemortar clerics still invoke the names of the dwarven deities, their people’s turn to dark magic has divorced them from Moradin and the Morndinsamman. Any divine favors they receive thus come from other sources—in some cases, human gods of death and undeath, but mostly from a dedication to clan and a determination to survive that transcends all wordly concerns.

The Dark Seldarine: Solonor Thelandira

If Corellon Larethian is the noble who loves a merry (or baleful) hunt, Solonor Thelandira is his master hunter, tracker, and game warden. Eschewing the life of the trouping court, Solonor hunts alone if it all possible, stalking prey with divine patience and cunning. That his quarry occasionally includes creatures that most folk would never consider game—including men, unicorns, blink dogs, metallic dragons, and the odd insufferable archon—is of no consequence to this solitary hunter.

Solonor is a good steward of the land; he never kills pregnant females or the young. But he has little patience for those who see hunting as a proxy for honor or a statement about the nature of elfhood. He brings home meat and hides, not trophies, and in a pinch he is as happy to kill with a snare, a knife, or his own bloody jaws as he is with his beloved bow.

A remote deity, Solonor does little more than provide spells to his clerics. Worshipping rangers model their behavior after him (always choosing the bow over double weapons) but rarely ask his assistance, calling on him only for the most impossible shots. Aside from Corellon, Solonor avoids communicating with other beings. The lone exception is Rillifane Rallathil, whose woods he frequents. By exterminating those who have angered the Green Regent, Solonor ensures unrestricted access to his favorite hunting grounds.

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Cleric Alignment: CE, CG, CN
Domains: Animal, Chaos, Elf, Plant, War
Favored Weapon: Longbow

Bonemortar Dwarves

So my original plan was to post new subraces, tribes, cities, gods, etc. Monday/Wednesday/Friday, with the occasional commentary on Tuesdays or Thursdays when inspiration struck. Miraculously, I’ve managed to post every weekday for over four weeks. I’m going to try to keep that streak going, but in the process I may play a little bit with which content shows up on which days.

Since presenting the Dark Seldarine pantheon for your evil and neutral elves to worship is monopolizing the MWF posts, we’ll take today to look at a new clan of dwarves…

Some nations, when confronted with an undead menace at their borders, become beacons of light for the world. In these proud bastions, embattled paladins and clerics stand against all that is blasphemous and vile. The very threat that hangs over them throws their nobility into sharp relief.

Other nations do not. Lacking the fire of faith or reason or charity, these nations decide—consciously or not—that the only way to survive great evil is to become it. They stare into the face of their nemesis until they become its mirror.

The Bonemortar dwarves are a terrifying clan who make their homes on the slopes of the Kartacian Mountains. For centuries, the Bonemortar dwarves toiled under the pallid thumbs of a line of necromancers, who were themselves locked in a never-ending struggle against a triumvirate of lich-kings who claimed the Kartacians as their own.

Naturally, these necromancers relied on their dwarven serfs for the skill of their stonework. But the Bonemortar dwarves were powerful in magic as well. Like most dwarves, they were masters of the ancient art of runes. But they lacked their race’s usual prejudice against arcane casting, lacing their glyphs with abjurations to create fortifications of unearthly strength.

Even so, the lich armies hammered at the dwarves and their overseers. Skeletal hordes, bone wyverns, and siege engines of nightmarish proportions broke through their walls and tore down their gates. And so the Bonemortar dwarves tapped the might of their masters and learned the necromantic arts as well. To their rune-carved stones they added mortar made from the bones of countless creatures, including their own dead. In doing so, they earned a new name.

And the walls held.

The tide turned, and soon one of the lich-kings was crushed into powder by the combined might of the dwarves and the spell-slinging of their human liege, Velshard II. The dwarves then turned on the weakened wizard and reclaimed their freedom. Now they exercise dominion over all his lands and beyond, while still weathering the onslaughts of the remaining two undead armies.

Obsessed with protecting their borders, the Bonemortar dwarves are driven to find more bones with which to anchor their magicks. And so they enact a terrible tithe on all those who dwell in the windward side of the Kartacians. When the clattering of their iron-shod horses is heard on the cobbles, townsfolk know the dwarves have come to collect the old, the infirm, the weak, the lame, and the barren.

The dwarves ride into the lands of men and harvest them for their skeletons.

More to come in two days…

The Dark Seldarine: Deep Sashelas

The pounding surf that brings down a cliffside. The coming storm that turns sails to tatters. The raging whale sperm maddened by the harpoons of seamen. All these things are the province of Deep Sashelas, the Wave Lord.

The patron of the sea elves sits at a remove from the rest of the Dark Seldarine. He keeps an ambassador in Corellon Larethian’s court in the form of a male nixie called Rivertooth (who is actually an aspect of Sashelas, and into whom he has poured the entirety of what little humor he possesses). But he is a king in his own right of the world’s oceans. Any elf crossing a great body of water pays homage to him, as does the entire race of sea elves.

Like the oceans, Sashelas is ever-changing and often contradictory. He is the patron of rangers who go out to hunt alone with just a trident. He revels in the destruction of crushing waves, casually erasing coastal villages. But he also calls sea elves to create huge undersea empires, and he blesses their coral cities with strength so that they defy even his own destructive urges.

Sea elf clerics thus have to be careful readers of signs and portents, divining Sashelas’s mood and adjusting their rites accordingly. One spring they might call for all seal pups to be protected; the next they might order the blood sacrifice of a halfling every night of the full moon. Often sea elf communities become theocracies, as that is the simplest way to ensure their lord's demands are met.

Deep Sashelas’s great secret may be that these whims are actually part of a careful balancing act. Despite the harsh rituals he calls for, he is not naturally as chaotic nor as prone to evil as his kin in the Dark Seldarine. He finds grace in the inherent order of the coral spires constructed by his worshippers. And he recognizes that it takes discipline and teamwork to survive in the ocean depths—and even moreso to build an empire.

The plain truth is that he cannot afford the selfishness and self-indulgence of the Chaotic Evil mindset. Besides his ancient enemy Sekolah, the sahaugin deity, the Wave Lord and the sea elves share the watery depths with beings the likes of Yeathan, the deity of death by drowning (Book of Vile Darkness), and the alien intelligences of the aboleth powers (Lords of Madness). By alternating bloodletting and beneficence, he keeps his followers close, protecting them from the other sea deities—both their predations and their proselytizing. He knows full well that there is madness in the depths, waiting to drag him under like an unwary swimmer should he let down his guard.

Alignment: Neutral (Evil tendencies)
Cleric Alignment: CN, LN, N, NE
Domains: Elf, Knowledge, Ocean, Water, Watery Death (Underdark)
Favored Weapon: Trident

The Dark Seldarine: Rillifane Rallathil

If Corellon Larethian is both king and prince of the Dark Seldarine, Rillifane Rallathil is the Green Regent. After Corellon, he is the most venerated of the elven deities, both lord of and at one with the ancient forests and his special charges, the wood elves.

Like an oak that has had a spike driven into it, Dark Rillifane is an old, gnarled, and bitter deity. At his best, he was Nature—cold, remote, and wild. But the assaults on his forests by men and humanoids have quite literally poisoned him, and his character has become actively malicious and evil in turn. Even wood elves are not immune from his hatred, should they grow careless. Rillifane is the natural world turned xenophobic and reactive: the root that bores through your walls, the wolf that terrorizes your penned sheep, the deadfall that crushes the unwary lumberjack. If you have ever stared into a thorny thicket with the uneasy certainty that some…thing…was staring back...you were right.

While Rillifane is enthusiastically worshipped by wood elves (and elves in general), their prayers resemble that of unwanted guests asking their host for yet another favor; they know Rillifane too well to expect more than grudging guidance and protection. The Green Regent prefers instead the company of treants, plant creatures, and the most ancient animals.

Alignment: Chaotic Evil (formerly Chaotic Neutral)
Cleric Alignment: CE, CN, NE
Domains: Chaos, Elf, Evil, Plant, Protection
Favored Weapon: Quarterstaff

Other Dark Elves We Like: The Shadow Elves

Sit down, my children, and I’ll tell you a tale from the days when D&D was Advanced D&D and “plain” D&D had a life and a setting of its own.

The Known World’s shadow elves were pale, but they were essentially drow, especially in early incarnations (such as in The Elves of Alfheim and The Orcs of Thar Gazetteers)—right down to Clyde Caldwell cover art picturing them with gray skin. In The Shadow Elves Gazetteer, we discovered that they were more misunderstood than anything else, and that their main deity, Rafiel, was not the ogre we had assumed. (Most of the shadow elves that surface dwellers encountered were devoted to the bloodthirsty Atzanteotl, which explains the shadow elves’ poor public relations.)

Still it was a fascinating culture—purple-marked shamans, pterodactyl riders, a capital city reverse gravity-ed to a cavern ceiling, and a high temple that was actually—SPOILER ALERT—a nuclear reactor. Bizarre and wonderfully cool.

(The schattenalfen, the shadow elves’ cousins in the Hollow World, were more reliably evil—totally committed to Atzanteotel and basically downright wicked. But we learned little about their culture beyond that, sadly. And in terms of cool sidekicks, stunted, dumb red dragons totally lose to cave pterodactyls. Just sayin’.)

The Dark Seldarine: Corellon Larethian

In the Dark Seldarine pantheon, Corellon Larethian is the undisputed leader of an otherwise fiercely independent and chaotic bunch. He is simultaneously a deity of nature and courtly intrigue, of bloody struggle and magical accomplishment. He is everything elves are and more: beautiful, fearsome, striking, magical, wild, fey, and unpredictable. Where he goes, his court—and even the realm of Arvandor itself—usually travels with him. When travelers awake to find themselves surrounded in lush woodlands with a mighty troupe of elves on stags, fine stallions, and suspiciously savage-looking unicorns passing by, they know Corellon is near.

Dark Corellon often goes by the monikers “The Laughing Prince” and “The Verdant Prince,” and his love of a good jest and a good hunt is indeed well known. (For the mortals who cross his path, the difference between the two entertainments may seem moot, particularly when Corellon is being spurred on by bets from divine thief Erevan Ilesere.) He styles himself as a youthful prince untouched by the troubles and responsibility of rulership. This casual pose helps him maintain order among his fractious brood.

Make no mistake, though. Corellon is the head of the elven pantheon, and his ire is great. Should his followers and sacred woodlands be threatened, his leadership challenged or insulted, or when the urge to sow fear arises, he dons the antler-crowned mantle of the Erlking. As the largely nocturnal Erlking, he is attended by storms, baying hounds, and a wreath of erlkings (naked and wingless—though they can still fly—Chaotic Evil pixies that travel in tittering swarms). Wielding a spear that turns those it kills into greenbound creatures (Lost Empires of Faerûn, or use shambling mounds) he is the personification of the dark and inhospitable wilderness.

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral (as the Prince) or Chaotic Evil (as the Erlking)
Cleric Alignment: CE, CG, CN, NE
Domains: Chaos, Elf, Magic, Trickery, War (as well as Darkness, Evil, and Storm as the Erlking)
Favored Weapon: Longsword (as the Prince) or shortspear (as the Erlking)

Other Dark Elves We Like: Dier Drendal

In our efforts to move on beyond drow, we’ve been sure to praise reinventions of the drow archetype, such as Keith Baker’s take on Eberron’s drow. Now let’s look at some other dark elves that we think hit the mark.

The inhabitants of Dier Drendal, from Sword & Sorcery's Scarred Land setting, are not drow per se. But subterranean elves forced to serve an evil, lead golem-bound god on a slowly trundling city beneath the earth?—wow, that rethinks the drow concept in some great ways. (Does anyone know if there was ever a sourcebook? Was it any good?)

While we’re at it, we should note that the Scarred Lands setting did a pretty good job with elves of all kinds, and anyone looking to cast elves in a new light in their campaign should try to dig up these books. Some of Scarn’s elves were the noble forest-dwellers of Tolkien, while the forsaken elves were the chaotic child-stealers of European folklore, and still others were truly decadent and debauched hedonists.

In fact, we should take this time for giving props to Sword & Sorcery in general. They were among the first out of the box to really tap the potential of the Open Gaming License. Their Creature Collections combined the stats of 3rd Edition with the well-rounded monster ecologies of 2nd. And the basic concept behind Scarred Lands—which one could easily and too hastily write off as blatant rip-off of Greek mythology (gods vs. titans)—blossomed into a truly interesting setting. Almost every monster had a reason for being, good’s victory was by no means certain, and many often overlooked building blocks of the D&D system (especially druids) got new vitality and breadth. A fine world that, while I never played it in it, I could never get enough reading about.

(Though explain to me again why gnomes in Scarn only appeared as psionic-addled pygmies? Oh right, because no one knows what else to do with them. Say what you like about the silliness of tinker gnomes in Dragonlance, Spelljammer, and the Known World/Mystara, but at least machinery gave them a defined character. Eberron’s elementalists and information-brokering bards was an interesting take…but I guess it didn’t (take, that is), since gnomes didn’t make the leap to 4th Edition as a playable race.)

The Dark Seldarine

Gods shape their adherents, and adherents shape their gods. If you change who a race of people worships, you inevitably change the race.

In most incarnations of D&D, elves are a force for good, and their gods are as well. The elven pantheon, the Seldarine, is an important bulwark against the depredations of the wicked orc and goblin deities, and they make their home of Arvandor on the Chaotic Good plane of Arborea.

Anyone seeking to trade the idyllic creations of Tolkien for the more dangerous sprites of folklore need only start with the Seldarine themselves. In your world, the elven gods might be Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, or even Chaotic Evil. Their children would accordingly be far more wild and fey, even feral, in nature. And the deep woods might become a place even hardy adventurers fear to tread.

So what might a Dark Seldarine pantheon look like? Let’s start at the top in two days, with Corellon Larethian.

In the meantime, clerics and other divine casters can, of course, worship the whole pantheon, rather than just one particularly deity.

The Dark Seldarine Pantheon
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Cleric Alignment: CE, CG, CN,
Domains: Chaos, Elf, Magic, Plant, Trickery
Favored Weapon: Longbow, longsword, or shortspear

Cloud Elves

I must confess that I doubt I’ll ever run an Oriental Adventures or a Rokugan campaign (I don’t even have time for a European one!). But that’s no reason to let an excellent book with some evocative classes go to waste…

The Lyrithen, or cloud elves, are a reclusive clan of elves that live in the cloud forests of the Stoneheart mountain range. They are known for green, white, and silver garb, and some occasionally sport silver hair as well.

Cloud elves are contemplative and solitary by nature. They spend much of their time hunting for mushrooms and mosses in the misty terrain or tending small flocks of goats or vicuñas. Many are accomplished musicians, particularly with simple wind instruments like flutes, double flutes, and panpipes.

Though they are as drawn to magic as most elves, Lyrithen spellcasters tend to be druids or windspeakers. A windspeaker has the same abilities as a shugenja, with air as her favored element. A few individuals occasionally favor water or earth instead; though they are properly termed river- or stonespeakers, they are usually referred to as windspeakers anyway. Although they may learn fire spells, no Lyrithen ever favors the element.

Advanced windspeakers are known for their skill at divination and for the whirlwinds they conjure in self-defense. Truly exceptional individuals also befriend sky wyrms (Dragon’s “Voyage of the Princess Ark”)—great beasts with lion forefronts, feathered wings, and dragon tails from the Elemental Plane of Air.

Rehabbing the Drow: Eliminating the Spider Queen

As we mentioned in our previous installment of “Rehabbing the Drow,” drow identity is very bound up in the worship of Lolth. Remove her and the picture changes dramatically. Perhaps they all become good...or perhaps they simply become a different shade of evil.

Such was the promise when Eberron was released. Finally, we were told, drow who don’t worship the Spider Queen! What a notion! What possibilities! So who do they worship?

…A scorpion god.

*Sigh*

Actually I'm kidding. I like the drow of Eberron and Vulkoor a lot. Ordinarily, yes, I’d savage the concept as unoriginal—we've just switched genders and arthropods. But it’s actually perfect for the Eberron mission—make the familiar different, but close enough to the original so it’s still D&D. Drow are still into bugs, just not spiders; they’re still mostly evil, but not single-mindedly so; they’re still tough, but as fierce barbarians and sorcerers instead of as assassins and wizards.

(Yes, it’s a wee bit problematic to a have a dark-skinned subrace living in savagery south of paler cousins, but it works for the setting, so once again—see the essay tucked away in the Comments section of my first post—we’ll overlook any unintended and unfortunate real-world correlations.)

Plus, not every drow in Eberron is a scorpion-worshipper. The Umbragen dabble in the powers of Shadow (Dragon #330), and the Sulatar play with fire magic (Secrets of Xendrik). And having them regularly fighting giants make for outstanding imagery. All in all, the drow of Eberron are a nice tweak on the familiar…especially in a setting where most of the “regular” elves range from a touch too jingoistic to downright creepy.

(Props also to Keith Baker for giving giants their own continent and historical context—it revitalizes them like nothing else has since a few articles in Dragon #141 and the power boost they got in 2nd Edition. Well done!)

Plague Dwarves

The plague dwarves carry loss of the Everdelve in their very bones. The Ironbond, Steelguard, and Kazzar clans were among the last to forsake their ancient holdings, and whole family lines were lost to mind flayer experimentation. As the Brain Nations fell in turn to fiends from the Lower Planes, the descendants of these abused lines escaped. Haggard, thin, and tottery, with pale skin and patchy, jet-black beards, these dwarves are sallow remnants of a fallen age. Cursed with a mysterious wasting disease, they are feared and rejected by all who come in contact with them.

The Healed are plague dwarves who have overcome their families’ dark affliction. They are as stout and bold as other dwarves, but they love the depths of the earth less. Most refuse to handle a hammer or pick, instead preferring axes or even short swords. They keep their hair cropped close to the skull and some even shave their beards. When asked why, they answer only, “To remember.” When pressed further, their hands go to the hilts of their weapons.

Mirror Elf Cities

To most visitors, the Plane of Mirrors reveals itself as little more than a mysterious set of hallways—each hallway linking a series of mirrors that have some relation to each other in a grouping known as a constellation (Manual of the Planes). The mirror elves have forcibly constructed cities in the largest of these constellations, turning the Mirror Plane’s hallways into gigantic, otherwordly apartment complexes (for lack of a better term).

Currently there are three major mirror elf cities. The centuries of experience that forged the Murrowfey into one people also divided them into castes based on the professional affiliation of their leaders. Each of the three most important castes—roughly translated from the Elven as the Illusionists, the Loremasters, and the Assassins—controls their own city, notably shaping the character.

Still, travel among the three cities occurs frequently, and several minor castes exist as well. Lightfarmers, for instance, for instance, are vital to every mirror elf city. The Plane of Mirrors is barren, so they capture the light of the real world in greenhouses, growing the crops upon which the Murrowfey rely.

Other castes of interest to adventurers include the Artisans, who are known for their stained glass golems (Monster Manual II) and the Mirrorward, who protect Murrowfey cities from the plane’s native inhabitants, the nerra (Fiend Folio).

Mirror Elves

In humanity’s infancy, its rapid population explosion was watched by the elves with a mixture of fascination, resignation, and alarm. When mankind reached the borders of their domains, elven civilizations great and small were divided on how to respond. Some opened their doors. Many nocked arrow to bowstring. Other fled: to the sea, to the sky, to north and south, underground, or deeper into the forests.

In those times there was a group of several far-flung settlements that were linked—geographically through a series of portals, and academically through a respected order of illusionists and loremasters. Acting upon the order's advice, the elves in these cities and villages chose to hide. First they cloaked themselves and their dwellings in illusions. Still the humans came, eventually bearing down on the elven cities until that they could not be diverted or misdirected away. The elves turned to invisibility and magical architecture, living in and among the humans in secret. With heartbreak, they watched as their groves were cut down for housing and their sacred springs were turned into watering holes and cesspits.

Finally they sought simply to escape. But disastrous forays into the Plane of Shadow and the Ethereal Plane nearly wiped them out. Broken and embittered, they returned to their homelands, now smothered by full-fledged human cities.

In the end, the elves turned to the only place left to them. They disappeared into the mirrors of their occupiers.

In the Plane of Mirrors, the disparate clans merged into one people. Together they bear the name a dwarven antiquarian, the first to conclusively document their existence, gave them: Murrowfey—mirror elves.

Other elves hate orcs, goblins, and all manner of monstrous humanoids. But to the Murrowfey, these are nuisances easily foiled. Murrowfey save their ire for cities and those who live in them: dwarves, gnomes, halflings, and especially humans. Civilization, in the urban, trash-strewn, hive-like manner practiced by man, is an anathema to mirror elves, who remember their carefully constructed groves and living crystal towers of old. They watch through the windows of their despoilers’ own mirrors and quake with rage at the devastation of their homes.

Sometimes they work in secret to subtly influence lords and politicians through illusions and carefully worded compulsion spells. But when they can bear it no longer, they burst back through the mirrors with slaughter as their only aim. When a king does in a locked and warded room with no sign of entry, you can be sure the Murrowfey are to blame.

Were travel to and from the Plane of Mirrors easy, mirror elves might be humankind’s greatest scourge. But most mirror elves lack the magic to do so—and those who do are busy contending with the Mirror Plane’s other inhabitants—so such assassination attempts must be carefully parceled out.

And Murrowfey are not immune to the dangers of their adopted home. As experienced planar travelers know, the Plane of Mirrors responds to interlopers by spawning duplicates who attempt to kill them. Mirror elves who are not careful returning home from a mission can find themselves assaulted by their mirror twins when they can least afford it.

Thus, they plan their journeys into man’s world very carefully. So for the most part murrowfey watch…and wait…and seethe.

The Murrowfey’s expatriation to the Demiplane of Mirrors came at a high cost. Mirror elves no longer have the typical elven affinity for the natural world. They may not become druids or learn druidic magic of any kind, nor cast spells in the Plant domain. As avowed hunters of men, many mirror elves become rangers, but they cast spells as sorcerers rather than as divine casters, and they may not cast any ranger spell that is also on the aforementioned forbidden lists. They may, however, substitute spells of equal level from the assassin class list.

Interzone & The Yuan-Ti

Yesterday I hinted at Burroughs/Cronenberg's version of Tangiers as a perfect backdrop for a yuan-ti-based campaign. So what might a D&D version of Interzone look like?...

Everything about the city of Antaeziers confounds. This coastal city is a vital port of call along the Southern trade route, yet it is controlled by no one nation. Inexplicable gaps in treaties among the interested colonizing powers left it an independent city. While it is theoretically partitioned into four territories under the control of consulates, in reality the city looks after itself.

Navigating the city is difficult. Its streets and causeways are a warren of stairs, ramps, balconies, balustrades, and arches. A thoroughfare might dead-end for no reason, while an alley might open into an elaborately tiled courtyard. Minarets in the distance seem to grow and recede independently of the viewer’s location. Bells chime at random, irrespective of the hour.

Even the very geography and climate of Antaeziers seems to work against the visitor. Hilly terrain and jungle scrub surround and encroach upon the city. The heat and humidity inspire lethargy. And underground vents in the surrounding volcanic soul, popularly said to be gateways to the Land of the Dead, release strange plumes into the air at regular intervals. These gases settle over the city in a fog that tinges the sky in sepia and seems to stretch dawn and dusk impossibly long. They also have a numbing effect on the spirit (-1 Wis for 1d6 hours, DC 10 Fortitude negates, checked every 12 hours; three checks failed consecutively leave the recipient dazed). Occasionally, these gases trigger mass hallucinations as well.

Visitors to the city may be forgiving for not noticing the difference, because the city itself seems like one giant fever dream. Nomads, beggars, and merchant princes all mingle over hookahs. Wizards’ spellbooks also serve as familiars, morphing into bad-tempered awakened beetles and clockwork abacuses without warning. Specially bred troglodytes extrude straw-like crests of ambrosia-filled flesh for addicts to suckle from. And pushcarts filled with hot coals serve giant centipedes, which are wrapped and smoked for pleasure or roasted and eaten as a delicacy. (Such carts offer poor families a risky mainstay, as those who hunt the vermin in the city’s underworld are often consumed in return.)

Perhaps the yuan-ti created this phantasmagoric city. Perhaps they did not. But they have certainly profited from it. Tainted ones manage the supply chains for the most sought-after and illicit drugs and other pleasures. A brothel madam’s robes hide the snake limbs of a half-breed. Well after midnight, in dark chapels filled with incense and pillows the size of camels, abominations lead their cultists in unholy rites. And no one leaves Antaeziers if the yuan-ti do not wish it so.

At least, not alive.

The Essential Yuan-Ti Reader

As subterranean creatures with access to powerful magic and poison, drow make excellent behind-the-scenes schemers and manipulators. As combatants, drow are easy for you to scale to match PCs’ abilities—just add class levels. Their hidden cities make for exotic destinations, and their worship of the loathsome Spider Queen encourages heroic intervention by adventurers.

If you’re looking to move on beyond drow (and hopefully you are—it is the title of the blog, after all), the campaign villain you choose should ideally reach the high bar already set by the drow. Flipping through the Monster Manual, one race immediately leaps out: the yuan-ti.

Simple to level, consisting of several subspecies, and coldly reptilian in nature, yuan-ti are easily a match for drow in both ability and sheer malice. Their affinity for poisons, disguises, and enchantments make them hard to pin down, and their ability to recruit and even transform humanity to their cause makes them truly despicable and insidious. The drow will enslave and murder you. But you’ll serve the yuan-ti without even realizing you’re doing so…until the day they enslave and murder you. You might even wind up as one of them. Or you might wind up as lunch.

It’s no accident that two of the best (or at least most readable and thought-provoking) supplements for 3rd Edition put yuan-ti front and center. In Ghostwalk, yuan-ti are heartless, otherworldly monsters, spilling forth from the Demiplane of Coil to assault the City of the Dead (and nearly driving that setting’s elves to extinction for good measure). In Serpent Kingdoms, yuan-ti are the ultimate plotters, secret agents, and saboteurs, bringing down or subverting human civilization from the inside. Both of these books—along with an article about yuan-ti sociology, “Venom and Coil” by Robin Laws, in Dragon #305—are required reading for DMs wanting to run yuan-ti in any D&D edition. (Races of Faerûn also gets a nod for pureblood and tainted one stats, but Serpent Kingdoms is the vastly more essential work.)

DMs wanting to dig deeper should check out the Settites from Vampire: The Masquerade. These vampiric and herpetological troublemakers are great analogs for the yuan-ti, and the various supplements describe any number of inspiring ways that snake cultists and snake monsters could embed themselves in a city, enmesh themselves in its politics, tempt, seduce, and intoxicate its citizens, and help bring it to ruin (or make it flourish) as fits their nefarious ends.

The yuan-ti also give DMs a reason to explore outside D&D’s traditional European backdrop. If characters take the battle to the yuan-ti, they can easily find themselves in locales more reminiscent of the Mediterranean, North Africa, India, or Brazil. Inspiration might come from 2nd Edition AD&D’s Al-Qadim campaign setting, Will Eisner’s The Spirit comics, or One Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights).

For a truly trippy backdrop to a yuan-ti campaign, rent David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Forget about its tenuous connection to Williams Burroughs’s novel—or plot entirely—and just let the sense of it (and the truly creepy creatures) inspire you…

Silkworm Drow (Moth Elves)

Yesterday we discussed revamping drow in your campaign by making them all good. Here's what one such tribe might look like...

While “silkworm drow” is a useful term for differentiating these elves from their wicked cousins, they themselves would not recognize the term. Hailing from a land that has never known Lolth’s touch, these elves never fell from grace or earned Corellon’s curse. They therefore never turned to evil, nor bear the mantle of “drow.” Instead, they refer to themselves as The People of the Evening Wing’s Embrace. The rare outsiders who have contact with them refer to them simply as “moth elves.”

The reason for this name is clear. The lives of silkworm drow are centered almost exclusively around their silkworms (and the silkmoths these caterpillars eventually become). Silkworm drow live atop mountain ranges and hillsides with heavy woods, ample precipitation, and numerous caves—the ideal habitats of their moth charges. Just as normal drow take inspiration from spiders, silkworm drow incorporate wings, fan-shaped antennae, and geometric patterns (representing woven threads) into their art, architecture, and craft goods. Wormsilk produces moth elf clothing, bedding, and fabric of all kinds. Tough wormsilk rope and hammocks are bartered with other forest races, while delicate wormsilk gowns (sold through many layers of intermediaries) are in demand at royal courts the world over.

The origin of the moth elves themselves is lost in time. Though essentially good-hearted, they are reserved in the extreme, rarely associating even with the most reclusive wood elves. Their nocturnal habits and dark skins (ranging from dusky gray to jet black) speak to long separation from others of their race, as does they archaic dialect of Elven they employ. They also exhibit enhanced magical abilities (as per the drow)—though whether these abilities were once possessed by all elves or developed over time specifically by the silkworm drow is a mystery.

Even their creation myths set them apart from other elves, hinting at a marriage between the moon and a moth figure. Or the two might be one and the same, as silkworm drow swears (“By the Moon Mother” and “By the Moth Mother”) seem to suggest.

One thing is certain: silkworm drow are capable fighters. Though they prefer to sit at their looms, the woods are full of threats. Ettercaps, goblins, and bugbears are common enemies, and aranea are dealt with with extreme caution. Moth elves also often find their skies assaulted by chimeras. A platoon of silkworm drow lancers urging their giant moths into dogfights with such aerial predators is a sight to behold.

Rehabbing the Drow: It's All Good

If you want drow in your cosmology but are searching for a way to freshen them up, one option is to simply make them all good (or at least neutral). It’s amazing what that this one simple change can mean for their entire entry in the Monster Manual.

First of all, good drow naturally would not worship Lolth. They might worship the Seldarine, Eilistraee, deities from other pantheons, or entirely new patrons. Out from under a thumb of a bloodthirsty, chaotic deity, their society would be able to develop in ways vastly different from the Darwinian cities of Erelhei-Cinlu or Menzoberranzen.

Without Lolth, the drow affinity for spiders likely also disappears. If they retain that fondness, exploring why could be a fun challenge. Perhaps drow are renowned weavers, and years of harvesting spidersilk have built a bond between them and their eight-legged pets. Perhaps they live on cliffsides and canyons where spiders are the only reliable steeds. Or perhaps they have a strong druidic culture and prestige classes that focus on nature’s often forgotten or reviled children.

Meanwhile, drow skin color and light-blindness have been considered marks of their cursed status. If there never were any curse, is there a natural, environmental, or magical reason for these traits? Is it an adaptation to their cave habitats? And from whence do their magic resistance and spell-like abilities come? Or perhaps no explanation for black-skinned elves is necessary. Drow might even be the only(!) elves in your world.

Finally, we discussed previously, any change to drow as a race inevitably raises another question: what are the implications for driders?

It’s okay, of course, to simply get rid of them—if drow are good and not in thrall to the Spider Queen, driders are unnecessary. Alternately, drider status may be a curse (or a reward from Lolth or a similar entity) for the rare drow who do turn to evil. Disney’s The Little Mermaid actually provides this model—one only needs to look at Ursula’s octopus lower half to know that she’s the film’s villain. A good drow who falls from grace or accepts an evil power’s boon might become a drider in the process.

Tomorrow we’ll put these notions to work and create a good drow subrace—the silkworm drow.

Noble Elves

In most campaigns, elves leave the trappings of aristocracy to humans, their kingdoms having long since fallen, dwindled, or relocated far away. While a select few families (typically cosmopolitan high elves) may participate in politics, most simply quietly go about their business.

In a campaign where elves take a more active interest in ruling, many clans would inevitably rise to the top of the social order. Those of a domineering bent would have centuries to shape the political and social landscapes to their liking. PCs could take the role of would-be Robin Hoods and Swamp Foxes against hard-hearted elven lords and landholders.

Arvitesh is a southerly, practically subtropical domain whose treetop manor houses are legendary. Over the years, the elven culture there has evolved into an aristocracy of noble families whose balls, fashions, and occasional duels are a constant game of oneupmanship. Corsets, hoopskirts, scarves, fans, and sashes are common sights here, as are rapiers and chessboards.

This frivolity is supported by the backbreaking labor of human, dwarven, and halfling serfs. Both in the canopy lanes and on the ground below, indentured servants and bondmen toil in the orchards, fields, parlors, and workshops to please their demanding masters. (Gnomes, at least those with mechanical or bardic faculties, are spared due to the nobles’ demand for clockwork toys and musical divertissements; they are considered skilled artisans.)

The rarely acknowledged shame of Arvitesh is the aristocrats’ rapacity for human bedmates. Half-elves are born at well above average frequency in the servants’ quarters, and in more than a few plush beds as well. In the latter case, the offspring are almost always given away as foundlings. Arviteshans never refer to half-elves as such (or as half-human). Instead they use only “kith-le’vesh,” an elven dog breeder term that roughly translates as “the Bastards.”

Canker Gnomes

“Canker gnomes” is the derisive name given to gnome clans who scavenge in the slums and on the outskirts of human cities. Most citizens regard canker gnomes as nuisances, thieves, and worse—and many of them are. Still, they are valued for taking on vital jobs that others often won’t: collecting garbage, maintaining sewers, carting away corpses, and the like. In the process, canker gnome enclaves become clearinghouses for what the city throws away, with members of the clan serving as particularly resourceful fences, pawnbrokers, and information brokers. Local wags whisper that this is the unspoken reason why municipal rulers tolerate the noxious demihumans—they’re good people to know…and they know too much to move against.

The rumormongers are somewhat off the mark, however. The truth is in the name “canker”—many canker gnomes are actually cancer mages (Book of Vile Darkness). Their ability to cure disease—and more importantly, their ability to spread plague in their thirst for vengeance—is the real reason human rulers don’t summarily evict them.

Most canker gnomes roam the city in pairs, often directing simple carts or barrows with solid wheels taller than the gnomes themselves. Terriers, dire rats, and giant beetles occasionally serve as animal companions or mounts. Canker gnomes exhibit little of the usual gnomish fondness for contraptions and machinery. Instead they devote their ingenuity and alchemy to thwarting any otyughs, gibbering mothers, and shambling mounds their work may bring them into contact with.

Canker gnomes and wererats share similar territory. They also positively loathe one another, doing whatever is necessary to drive the other out of the middens and trash heaps they share. A canker gnome who contracts lycanthropy can expect the death sentence from his clan.

Rehabbing the Drow: The Dalamar Paradigm

The plan here at On Beyond Drow is to present new subraces, tribes, and so forth on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule. As the mood strikes me, I’ll also drop in commentary on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and/or over the weekend.

Having spent a vast tract of real estate in the Comments section of my first post dissing the drow—not for themselves, mind you, but for their unfortunate and inevitable overexposure—it is only fair that I suggest some ways to rebuild and refresh them.

One way is to focus on the literal curse of their heritage. In the Dragonlance setting, there were no drow. There were, however, dark elves such as Dalamar, cast out by their people for grave crimes.

Dalamar’s shame was a social and psychological one, but imagine if such an exile came with a physical transformation as well. Exiled elves in your campaign might have a grievous curse laid on them, their skin darkening and hair bleaching, so that their infamy would be visible for all to see. Their eyes would become weak, forcing them to hide from the live-giving sun. However, these elves would likely not have the typical drow’s affinity for spiders or innate magical powers of the drow (unless some evil power intervened to mock and reward them for their fall).

Because their existence would be the result of a curse rather than race, these drow might vary wildly different in temperament. Some might embrace the dark, consorting with demons and monsters (such liaisons may have been what earned them their exile in the first place). Others might quest for atonement. A drow paladin would make a particularly compelling PC in such a setting, and an entire campaign arc might revolve around his attempts to wash away the sin from his ebony skin.

This scenario also demands that the genesis of driders be reconsidered. In this cosmology, driders might not exist, or they might be a example of a further degradation—the ultimate price for drow who fail to redeem themselves.

Hag Elves

So apparently my definition of "tomorrow" really doesn't square with the dictionary's. Only three entries in and I'm already behind. Sigh.

Possessing lifespans that can easily span 500 years or more, some elves can't help but pity the younger races as poor cousins. But the Shevereth don't even recognize other humanoids as sentient beings, regarding them the way a human might view a chimpanzee. Thus, they don't consider the possession of other humanoids as slavery…nor the consumption of them as cannibalism.

It is for these dark appetites that the Shevereth (male and female alike) are known as hag elves. To the Shevereth, other humanoids serve primarily as a source of slaves, meat and goods. Humans are especially prized for the clothing their supple leather provides. No hag elf is ever without his childskin bag of knives and flaying implements.

Thankfully, Shevereth are usually rare and solitary creatures, making their homes in secluded grottoes and swamps. (These dwellings—and the furnishings within—are noteworthy for exhibiting exemplary elven standards of craftsmanship strangely tainted with the stains and smells of habitual butchery.) But some more ambitious individuals ride elegantly styled carriages from town to town, purchasing or abducting children as they go. And rumors persist of canyon cities where hag elves gather in vile communities debauched even by drow standards.

The hag elves' relationship with actual hags varies widely. In some Shevereth communities hags are considered upstanding citizens and role models, and it is not unknown for hag/elf pairings to produce strikingly thin and voracious hagspawn (The Unapproachable East). But in most cases jealous rivalry and outright violence is the norm, as it is with most relationships involving the Shevereth.

Exigence—Why Now?—And a Note on 4th Edition

I’ve been kicking the germ of On Beyond Drow around for a while. So what has finally spurred me to put some ideas down? Well, Paizo’s work revisiting classic monsters shows there’s an appetite. And with 4th Edition D&D now out, I'm supposing that there are two natural audiences—4th Ed fans looking to build brand new worlds and 3.0 and 3.5 fans hungry for fresh content for their favorite system.

By the way, I have not made the switch to 4th Edition. Whether I do so in the future is up in the air. But I’ll try to make the ideas fresh enough that they can crossover among editions, even if particular crunchy nuggets don’t.

I promised evil elves. I’ll deliver tomorrow: the hag elves.

Introduction

Most great D&D campaigns are defined by their villains. A heroine's legacy is shaped by the monsters she chooses—or is forced—to face. A land in the clutches of an undead tyrant breeds one kind of champion; a land living under the shadow of a dragon breeds another.

The drow are, in some ways, the ultimate villainous race. But their very power and popularity with DMs and designers alike have made them ubiquitous to the point of cliché.

In this space we will—to borrow a notion from Dr. Seuss—move on beyond drow. We'll create other evil elves for characters to fight. We'll come up with new subraces to stymie (and aid) your PCs. And we'll try to create cultures that feel alive, fresh, and fantastic.

By "we," of course I mean "me." This is a place for me to jot down and share ideas. If you're intrigued by what you read here, feel free to comment, contribute, and/or riff. Just be sure that if you borrow an idea, it's for your personal use and not something to be published or posted somewhere else. That's how intellectual property works. Cool? Cool.