Drow of the Underdark
What do you get when you combine the Player's Guide to the Sabbat with The Master Race's Handbook? Well, you either get a classic black-cover Forgotten Realms accessory or a shelfbreaker shovelware reject from the depths of the d20 era.
The Drow have a long and somewhat troubled history in D&D of being EVIL elves because...they...have dark skin. That sounds terrible and racist when you write it out like that, but it also helps that they live under ground and worship a demon spider, I guess?
The nominal idea behind the different editions of an RPG is that they are in fact different editions. So it's not actually weird that the different editions have books that have the same name. There's a Player's Handbook of every edition, and there's no particular reason that other editions can't duplicate popular titles like Deities and Demigods or Manual of the Places.
That is also a thing that happened.
There is always and forever a tug of war between the people who want to reuse names from previous editions and people who want books to have different names. The advantages and disadvantages are obvious: if you give your book for the new edition the same name as a book from the old edition, you let people familiar with the old edition know what your new book is about; and if you give it a new name you ensure that people understand that it's a different book. At any given moment, the upper hand will be with one group or the other, and I don't think that there's any hard evidence to show who is right and who is wrong. Heck, sometimes the upper hand will be had by both groups at the same time in arguments about different parts of the game line. So in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons the new Manual of the Planes and new Deities and Demigods had the same name as the AD&D version, but the 3rd edition version of The Complete Priest's Handbook was called Defenders of the Faith.
Other games have similarly struggled with this exact problem for as long as there were new editions. The 2nd edition version of Shadow's Grimoire is simply called “The Grimoire 2.0,” while the 3rd edition version is called “Magic in the Shadows.” In Vampire, the clanbook for Ventrue has been done four times in different editions, as “Clanbook Ventrue,” as “Clanbook: Ventrue,” as “Dark Ages Ventrue,” and as “Ventrue: Lords Over the Damned.” In all cases the name of the book is simply “Ventrue,” but the superscript and/or postscript changes with the edition. Whitewolf being Whitewolf, they also made two other books called “Ventrue” which were not the Ventrue clanbook of any edition, with the novel “Clan Novel: Ventrue” and there's like a comic book from 2002 that is called “Vampire: The Masquerade: Ventrue.” Because of course there is.
But that underscores the underlying problems of repeating names. A new edition's books will presumably be different to at least some significant degree than books of the older editions. Picking up the 4th edition Player's Handbook won't give you the exact options that the 2nd or 3rd edition of that book did. And that causes real butthurt because in general even parts of your older edition that are relatively unpopular still have a significant number of fans in the fanbase. This was eventually codified as the “Gnome Problem” whereby it turns out that because RPG groups are 4 to 6 people that things which are liked by only 5% of the players are liked by somebody at about a quarter of the tables. Which makes major shakeups between editions into serious minefield territory.
This is from the video explaining why 4th edition added the Tiefling and subtracted the Gnome – it did not go over well.
Which is all kind of a long walk to explain that the 3.5 D&D book “Drow of the Undersark” is not a new edition of the 2nd edition AD&D Forgotten Realms Accessory Book “Drow of the Underdark.” It is an entirely new book that carries the same name for essentially no reason. It wouldn't surprise me if none of the writers of the 3.5 book had picked up a copy of the 2nd edition book in the ten years prior to having been tapped to write the new book with the same name. The are no people who overlap in the credits of the two books and there's no attempt at continuity between the two products. The books came out 16 years apart, and there is very little to connect the two other than name.
You also forget the important thing that having the two books with the same name greatly confuses people that attempt to torrent the new book, since presumably scans of the old book will already be choking up their networks. Which is about as far as RPGs ever got when it came to digital copy protection that worked, since DRM is ass and if anybody actually seeded a bunch of lesbian pornography under the title "3.5 Player's Handbook" I never saw it.
The original Drow of the Underdark is book 2 of the Forgotten Realms Accessory series. In 2nd edition, they tried to have a set of distinct book lines that had different colored covers and had different themes. Other book lines included the Historical Reference series, the Campaign Reference series, and of course the far more notable series the Players Handbook Rules Supplement series. In any case, as far as I'm aware the Forgotten Realms Accessory series had ten books in it: Draconomicon, Drow of the Underdark, Pirates of the Fallen Stars, The Code of the Harpers, Elves of Evermeet, The Seven Sisters, Giantcraft, Pages From the Mages, Wizards and Rogues of the Realms, and Warriors and Priests of the Realms. Many of those books are super obscure, but chances are good that you've at least heard of a few of these.
Even a casual inspection of the contents will show you that the Forgotten Realms Accessory books are not meaningfully connected as a book line. It isn't like the PBRS books where there was mostly an agreed upon format and mostly a core mission statement for each book (even if it was just “talk about a class or race from the PHB until you run out of things to say and then babble on about whatever you're doing in your home campaign until you finish the required wordcount.”). The Forgotten Realms Accessories are just whatever the fuck the Forgotten Realms team felt like writing on any given month. And some of that stuff has a lot more traction and staying power than others.
The 3.5 version of Drow of the Underdark, by contrast, is not formally part of any book line, but is essentially formatted exactly like it was one of the “Races of [foo]” books that Andy Collins had masterminded back in 2004. It's even developed by Andy Collins. Now, by the time Drow of the Underdark came out, the Races of [foo] line had been officially discontinued for a year (somehow the powers that be didn't feel the book series needed to be continued after Races of the Dragon, which seems like a reasonable position to have). But it wouldn't surprise me a bit if this book had started its life as “Races of Darkness” and just got some shovelware text dumped into the Drow section and the vestigial Kuo-Toa text dumped in order to make it be technically different from the closed book line.
We've ranted about some of the books in the Races of Whatever series before, and Drow of the Underdark 3.5 is exactly like what would happen if you started writing one of those books with your first writing assignment to be about the Drow, and then you gibbered on for so fucking long that you overspent your wordcount for the entire book on just that part and ended up not only having too many pages overall, but no room at all for the other sections on the other races the book was supposed to include. So we're in for 216 pages of shovelware about Drow. That contrasts very sharply from Ed Greenwood's contribution, which was a 126 page rant by Ed Greenwood, pompous hallucinogenic tirades and all.
Ed Greenwood incorporated pretty much everything from AD&D into the Forgotten Realms, and that very much included the Drow. But it's important to remember that he started making the Forgotten Realms in 1967 and the first insane D&D booklets didn't come out until 1974. So there was a bit of work being done to harmonize the two projects. By the time Drow of the Underdark came out in 1991, there hadn't been any Forgotten Realms writings done outside the context of AD&D for more than a decade, but it's important to understand that Ed Greenwood's personal mind caulk about how the Drow from Descent to the Depths of the Earth fit into the Forgotten Realms was something that he came by honestly.
On the flip side of course, the authors of the 3.5 version were mercenary hacks who didn't give two shits and hadn't even written anything until WotC had taken over D&D. Since the first named author on this book was fucking born in 1974, the chances that any of them remember a time that there weren't any Drow in the Underdark is approximately zero.
Drow as a concept are one thing you can't really lay on Tolkien. He had different types of elves, but none of them were actually evil, even if many of them were assholes. It's not even something that you can lay at the foot of Poul Anderson, since elves in The Broken Sword are basically amoral fae that don't mind raping trolls, stealing babies, or sleeping with their sisters. Gygax claimed:
Which is important as far as the evolution of concepts go, but also because most of the actual material for the Drow wasn't written for D&D general, but for specific campaign settings - R. A. Salvatore has had an outsized influence on the perception of Drow in D&D even outside of the Forgotten Realms just because he's written a crap ton more about them than Gygax ever did.Drow are mentioned in Keightley's The Fairy Mythology, as I recall (it might have been The Secret Commonwealth--neither book is before me, and it is not all that important anyway), and as Dark Elves of evil nature, they served as an ideal basis for the creation of a unique new mythos designed especially for the AD&D game.
A major question about the Drow in general is how extremely racist and sexist is the whole setup? Well, kinda a lot. But things are slightly more complicated than you'd think.
So yes, the Drow are like normal Elves except that instead of being light skinned and good, they are dark skinned and evil. And that's honestly pretty fucked up when you say it like that. The original Drow are actually based on Nordic fairy tales. The word “Drow” or “Trow” means pretty much the same thing as “Goblin” or “Troll” or “Elf” with the expectation that such creatures are evil or at the very least dangerous.
Source material is only sometimes sexy.
But with the Gygaxification of fairies, we had Dwarves and Elves being different things, but we also had distinct creature entries for Pixies, Sprites, Sylphs, Brownies, Goblins, Trolls, and all the rest. So bringing in a new dark skinned fairy creature of evil and then having that be “like the Elf we already have but dark skinned and evil” was a perfectly natural extension of the normal ways D&D had to expand the monster roster. It's just that of course if you do that, the thing you're going to make is going to sound racially insensitive. Because it genuinely is racially insensitive.
Gary Gygax wasn't like your Trump voting racist uncle, but he was a lot like your casually racist grandpa.
The Drow don't have skin the color of black people, they have actually night-black skin. Which isn't racially aggressive, it's just racially insensitive. With some thought, some empathy, and some work, you could potentially present them in a way that didn't make African Americans uncomfortable, and to my understanding no one at TSR or WotC ever thought they had to do that. Gygax and Greenwood have the excuse that they were relics from America's casually racist past, and the excuse of the 3.5 version is just nowhere near as good. All of the authors are white, and while I don't think they meant anything particularly racist by the portrayal of the Drow, they also don't take any action at all to distance themselves or their work from the obviously racially problematic imagery. And in 2007, that's just problematic all around.
The Sexism thing is a different story altogether. The Drow are an evil matriarchy led by sexy evil priestesses who have a black widow theme. The Drow are sexist. They were embarrassingly sexist in the eighties and they are embarrassingly sexist now. And in 2007 everyone knew they were embarrassingly sexist and WotC probably should have done something about that, but they didn't. Ed Greenwood didn't do anything to stop the sexism parade in 1991 because he was and is kindof a perv and has always endeavored to make sure that there was an ample supply of sexy bondage nuns available in every faction. I mean, not as much as Terry Goodkind loves his bondage nuns, but close. The opening fiction of the 1991 Drow of the Underdark involves Elminster (Ed Greenwood's self insert character) chilling with a naked Drow lady taking a bath. It doesn't get any more sensitive to gender issues later on.
Spider Cooch!
Anyway, it's difficult for me to imagine a real edition of D&D getting written today and have a book about Drow that didn't spend a lot of wordcount trying to reach out to blacks and women, because the original source material is pretty insulting to both groups in the sort of passively dickish way that fantasy often was in the 1970s. But while “times were like that” is a vaguely acceptable excuse for the material from 1977, when it comes to the material in 2007 I got nothing.
I, on the other hand, have far less faith in humanity and have no doubt that not only would a contemporary RPG sourcebook double down on the issues, but they would probably call anyone that didn't like it an SJW cuck at the same time.
Frank and I harp on fantasy racism a lot because it is generally terribad in a sort of utterly lazy, contemptible way that a lot of bad fantasy is. They're the elves that dress in black and do freaky BDSM sex stuff with demons because it's edgy and cool. They are the Sabbat of D&D, and they serve the general narrative purpose of being stereotypes for your bad-guy needs at several different character levels. That means, to keep competitive, they need more material to work with - people were interested in the Drow. They wanted more. And TSR/WOTC would sell that to you.
A major question to be answered certainly is: who are these books intended to be for? They go into a lot of information that probably won't matter to the players if they are running around the city in full conquistador mode, and while there are minor attempts to write in things that might be useful for players who intended to play as Drow, these are not very compelling or complete. My impression is that these books represent the full rabbit hole: books whose intended audience was people who wanted to read about and imagine Dungeons & Dragons scenarios but weren't actually involved in a game as DM or player. There have been times in my life that I've simply read Dungeon Magazine adventures and imagined characters going through them, and that seems to be the rough wavelength of both the 1991 and the 2007 version.
As such, I'm really not sure how much I'm supposed to rag on these books for having terrible game mechanics. I mean, they totally do have extremely terrible game mechanics even by the admittedly lax standards of 2nd Edition AD&D or late-period 3.5 D&D shovelware, but I'm not convinced it matters. The Prestige Classes chapter spends 27 pages to tell you about 8 prestige classes that no player of 3.5 D&D has ever or will ever take. Is that a waste of space? Probably? But again, I'm not sure, because the purpose here obviously isn't that you actually play an Arachnomancer, it's that you read an entry and then think about a hypothetical Arachnomancer. It's extremely meta.
I have actually played an Arachnomancer.
One of the issues with the Drow was fitting them in to your campaign: D&D has a lot of monster bloat, and while they were pretty bitchin' enemies in the first series for D&D, the playspace has expanded a lot since then and Drow have kind of taken a back seat - they aren't an evil empire set to conquer, in most campaign settings. They have their own cities, and trade in the Underdark, and have a feud with the surface elves, but there really isn't an ongoing racial war for the most part. That's partially because big events are hard to play out at the local game level. Most Drow and their equipment don't like sunlight, so these are the guys that come out for a nighttime ambush, maybe enslave a few people, and disappear. The fact that they can have class levels helps a lot in keeping individual Drow characters relevant as the PCs level up, but they still don't have some overriding need to attack the PCs like, say, Illithids do.
That's not necessarily a criticism unique to the Drow, but it's something to keep in mind: what are the dynamics at play in these books? What are the hooks for the characters, how do the Drow fit into a campaign?
The 2007 version is split into 7 chapters: All About the Drow, Drow Options, Prestige Classes, Drow Equipment, Monsters of the Underdark, Campaigns and Adventures, and finally “Erelhei-Cinlu,” which I assure you is the actual name of the chapter and not just me fucking with you. The 1991 version by contrast does not have chapters, and is just a series of short essays written by Ed Greenwood about Drow offered up in no particular order. There's some rough cognates in the first part of the book with the “All About the Drow” chapter, so at first there can be some serious apples to apples comparisons. But that's going to break down almost immediately and there just isn't anything we can do about that.
Another thing to keep in mind...this was all for fun. This was writing a book aimed at people that presumably already liked Drow enough to write an entire book about Drow. It is still kind of amazing that people were actually paid to sit down and type out a book on Drow, and others got to illustrate it, and the whole thing went to press and then shipped to stores and people bought it. There are definitely sillier RPG books out there, and worse ones, but it's always amazing to me that there were enough people on more or less the same wavelength at the same time for there to be a book all about Dark Elves. Twice.
Next up: All About the Drow.