A Sundered World: Drow Draft

I have already elaborated at length as to why I do not like drow-as-written, and since I do not expect WotC
to give this iconic Underdark race any depth, Josh and I came up with a different origin and flavor to back them up. As always, let me know what you think.

During the Sundering, the elves opened up gates that allowed them to evacuate to the moon. Other things made it there as well, or later—which we will cover in a blogpost specifically about the Feywild/Faerie/Wyld/whatever we end up calling it—but not everyone did.

Like the drow.

The drow were in a bad place at a bad time. When the barriers between words was shattered, each plane, with their own rules, layout, and denizens tried to fill in the gaps. The severity and end result of which plane, if any, would come out on top in any given place was…unpredictable to say the least; not only were the drow unable to maintain their own gate, but their home was flung into the far reaches of the Astral, and it was assumed that they were lost or destroyed.

They were not.

Drow dwell within the dark regions of the Astral, venturing forth to ambush astral vessels or hunt, though some houses are willing to trade or hire themselves out. Their homes are large motes of stone that vary in size and shape—though generally the more powerful the colony, the larger the mote—and riddled with numerous passages (think floating termite columns). Though gravity on the Astral is usually subjective, these tunnel networks are still useful in disorienting intruders, making it easy to separate and dispatch them.

Physiology
For the most part drow are similar to other elves, except that their skin is very pale, and in some cases semi-translucent. Hair color is generally black or white, but other colors can manifest as a result of one or more transmutations.

Drow undergo ritualistic transmutations as reward for their accomplishments. These can range from additional eyes or limbs, venomous fangs, chitinous skin, and so on. As a rule of thumb the more spider-like a drow appears, the more powerful it is. For D&D, this would be reflected as optional powers that you can add to drow (boosting their XP value), while for Dungeon World this would just add moves.

Society
We are sticking with the matriarchal society, but alignment-wise they would range from Lawful Evil to Neutral Evil, or either Neutral or Evil in Dungeon World parlance. Definitely toning down the random betrayals and murder, as there is really no way that any kind of meaningful society could flourish if almost everyone was Chaotic Evil. Plus, I want there to be other reasons for drow adventurers beyond “inexplicably good renegade”.

We are also kicking around the idea of giving them something like a “hive mind”, making them like Borg, only with spider-bits instead of machines. I think this would be more appropriate if their insect theme was ants or wasps, but as with the alignment shift above I want to make sure that there is a fairly easy way to play a drow.

Hierarchy
At the top of the food chain is the Spider Queen. She appears as a drider, but her entire body is covered in a hardened carapace, and there is little to indicate that she was once an elf. I imagine her face being a largely expressionless mask—kind of like that scene in Mimic where they realize that the bugs are mimicking them—behind which is a grotesque conglomeration of eyes, mandibles, and hair.

The drow worship and offer sacrifices to her, making her the source of their divine magic and considerably powerful, comparable to Asmodeus (Next), an apocalypse dragon (Dungeon World), or a level 30+ solo controller (4th Edition D&D).

The matrons look similar to the Spider-Queen, but the humanoid half of their bodies are still mostly recognizable as elf. Each drow house is lead by a single matron. They are very capable in combat and able to channel powerful divine magic, but tend to keep a handful of heavily mutated warriors (aka, royal guard) on hand just in case.

Priests are drow that have yet received the same “gift” that their matrons have, but are still trained in martial combat—wielding daggers or swords instead of snake-whips—and have access to divine magic.

Warriors who prove themselves enough are elevated to royal guard, ranked just beneath the priests that they are assigned to protect. It is because of this that they are the subject of numerous transmutations, oftentimes retaining only a vaguely humanoid shape.

Weavers are arcanists that specialize in thematic “spider” magic: they can summon spiders—including spider-like demons and devils—conjure sheets of webs, bind creatures, poison, and such.

The typical rank-and-file warrior retains most of its elven appearance. They wield swords (often times two), poisoned javelins, and wear a kind of carapace armor that is mechanically identical to studded leather.

As for spell-like abilities, I am shying away from faerie fire and levitate. Darkness is fine, but I think giving them something like web, the ability to envenom one of their weapons, or even something more mundane like advantage on climb checks makes more sense.

Spidership
Spiderships are, as their name implies, vessels built in the shape of a spider, complete with articulated limbs. I am thinking something like the Necron tomb spiders. Raiders attack by initially launching a salvo of ballista bolts at a vessel. Cables attached to the bolts allow their warriors to board while preventing escape.

Puppeteers specialize in telekinetic magic. This allows them to manipulate the legs, which they use to grasp onto ships, either to prevent them from escaping or to just crush them. The “strands” are visible to anyone able to detect magic, and can be severed with either abjuration magic or a cold iron weapon.

Wandering Monsters: Scum of the Underearth

I was waiting for this.

I have never really been a fan of drow. To me they have always seemed like evil-elf caricatures: they dress in black, have black skin (sometimes also red eyes), live underground, worship spiders, are adversely affected by the sun (to the point where even their gear gets destroyed when exposed to it), and are pretty much always Chaotic Evil, the most evil-est of alignments.

Really, all they are missing are monocles and mustaches.

Seriously, I could let everything slide except for their alignment. How does any kind of society exist when virtually everyone is Chaotic and Evil? Though it might sound worse, Chaotic Evil is no more evil than the rest of the lot, just the method or limits. Lawful Evil or even Neutral Evil would work just as well.

I am also not a fan of their seemingly random spell-like abilities. Darkness is a no-brainer, and faerie fire and dancing lights I can kind of get behind as they can use them to lure creatures into traps (or scare the ones that know better), but levitate? Know alignment? Where do these come from? Why do all drow know how to do these things? Is it genetics, or are they all forced to learn the exact same magical regiment as they grow up? Why can they only do these things once per day? Do they have multiple internal reservoirs of magic-juice specially partitioned for each power?

I would just make them more like “normal” elves, but with darkvision and better suited for stealth. If they had to have inherent spells, I would take a page from the high elf and let them pick one, perhaps even from a limited list of thematic spells. I guess if you absolutely had to, you could give them spell-like abilities as an optional power.

Even driders do not make sense. If you screw up, Lloth “curses” you by making you tougher, stronger, and–in 3rd Edition, at least–giving you more spell-like abilities? It made so much more sense in 4th Edition when it became a reward, not to mention that it allowed you to include driders with parties of other drow.

If you want driders to be a punishment, then make it suck. Like, you are not some graceful, spider-like creature, but a hideous, barely recognizable mass of elf and spider. Their bodies should be constantly wracked with pain due to their twisted anatomy, and they can recall only flashes of their former lives (in particular the failure that resulted in their new shape). Outcasts from even drow society, they wander the Underdark seeking to inflict torment on others.

Why not give us both?

Like drow, I am not a fan of duergar, for pretty much the same reasons: they are evil dwarves with seemingly random spell-like abilities (though to be fair, I felt that 4th Edition’s beard-chucking treatment was about as silly). Boring. Give them a reason to be evil, and if they must have inherent magical powers, they should make sense given the flavor behind them.

I have never used grimlocks outside of the second Age of Worms adventure (spoilers, I guess). As blind humanoids go, while they are not particularly interesting, but aside from that I guess there is not much wrong with them. They are in need of some solid flavor to back them up, because as they are I really cannot see much appeal.

Saying Yes, Or How I Winged It

On Tuesday I ran Songs of Erui after about a month of down time. The party had traveled to the mostly-dwarf city, Cindervault, looking for the second fragment of a song that’s been the primary focus of the campaign since the ass-end of the first adventure. When they arrived they found that it was mostly abandoned, but figured out later that night that it was now under the occupation of a shit-ton of drow. Not wanting to end up as spider-chow, they made a beeline for Cindervault’s fortress under the assumption that something really expensive would be locked up there.

En route they ran into various drow entries cribbed from the Monster Manual (de-leveled of course to account for the fact that they were only level 9), in addition to a web golem, blade spiders, and some summoned mezzodemons (a drow demonologist needs him some demons). Now, after a few encounters they got to choose which way to take trying to get into the castle: the main gate or the access ramp for wagons and cripples, and deciding to tackle the main gate. Unfortunately, the gate was guarded by a purple dragon that I had to change to a black dragon after I realized that purple dragons go as’plode in the sun (WHOOPS), but in the end a summoned unicorn took it down and they got a level for their troubles. The session ended with the party on top of the ramparts observing 20+ drow and a drider communicating to a formorian king through a visual- and audio-only window.

That was all just pointless recap. The actual point to this post is that the following session they decided to stick to the wall and attempt to loop around the side of the walls where they hoped drow wouldn’t be skulking about as they so often do. Now, my plans were to have them more or less make a direct assault, using the various siege engines on the walls to give them an edge. I did not think that they would just side-step all the encounters I’d had planned. So…time to wing it.

There was a lot of wall to cover, and several towers, so I used towers as indicators for where encounters could still rationally occur. It was just a matter of rapidly populating them in the span of a few seconds. Blade spiders were level 10, so in the first tower I just had one using it as a lair. Inside they found that there was one lurking on the ceiling amidst the suspended, putrefied corpses of dwarves. One of the characters opened the doors, and they had the druid go in under the guise of a Medium-sized spider. Discovering the spider, she tried to communicate with it, and trick it into thinking that there was a threat just outside. A few Bluff and Nature checks later, the druid was able to distract it long enough for the ranger and cleric to take a few pot-shots at it.

The highlight of the combat was when the druid used pounce to latch onto its face and pull it off of the ceiling, and then the ranger made a very nice grab and bull rush checks to slam in onto a ballista, which the cleric used to launch it off of the ramparts, taking a total of, “enough damage to say it died without bothering to roll.”

That was the first instance of the session where I had to make up rules on the fly. How much damage does a ballista do? I dunno, 3d8 plus Intelligence modifier? How do I resolve the attack?  Make a level plus Intelligence modifier attack. I didnt want to make it just deal a shitload of damage, for fear the party would try and lug them around and potentially backstab shit with them. So, going off of damage that ogres can dole out with boulders, I think it was a nice benchmark that made it worthwhile. Anyway, it wasn’t the bolt that killed the spider, but the push effect that knocked it over the edge. A fairly easy kill, but all those nice rolls (including the use of memory of a thousand lifetimes)…fuck it. It was awesome.

The second moment came when the party decided to look for hidden passages into Cindervault so that they could avoid taking the door. I thought, sure, fuck it, give me a roll. After a Perception of 33 I was like, okay, you find a narrow crevasse that a halfling or gnome could safely get through. I figured that they could squeeze into it and that I could throw in some insect or vermin swarms to mix things up. Nope, not gonna happen: the druid used some level 10 daily that let her turn everyone into ferrets. Or rather, spider-ferrets (its D&D, animal combinations happen) and rapidly scurry through the opening.

And that was last night’s session. The players easily steamrolled my encounters through liberal use of bull rush, push-effects, and clever thinking. Easy XP, awesome session.