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’.)