Drow should be Lawful Evil, among other things

I have been thinking about the Drow of late.  We are going through some of the classic modules and I really am looking forward to doing the GDQ series again.  Now I have every faith in DM to make it interesting and new to me while keeping the same thrill I originally had for me and the kids.

But I have a problem with Drow.  Actually, I have had a lot of problems with drow for a long time.  Let's work backward.  In the GDQ series, Drow are the "secret enemy" the big reveal is they are elves! who are evil!  It was like when we first saw Romulans in "The Balance of Terror".  Elves, especially to those who lived on a steady diet of Tolkien, were light and good.  The drow were evil and dark.  And that is the other problem.
Why are drow dark skinned?  Really shouldn't they be albino?  And let's not even go with the dark = evil meme.  I am not suggesting any sort of racism on the part of the creators here; this is something that has appeared in fantasy and fairy tales for thousands of years, but that still doesn't mean it has to be that way in my games. I prefer the "Shadow Elves" from Mystara in many respects over the Drow.  They are described as smaller and pale.

You can see a visual evolution of the Drow through the eyes of fellow bloggers, James Maliszewski and Eiglophian Press.

The next problem is frankly Drizzt.  He is a symbol of everything I felt was wrong with 2nd Edition and uber-munchkin playing in general.  Since his advent, the drow went from hidden secret evil to S&M fetish elves.  Now I am not against S&M or fetish of any sort, but what makes for an interesting diversion does not make for an interesting enemy.

Finally Drow are nearly universally described as an oppressive, hierarchal society ruled by the Priestess of Lolth in an iron-fisted dictatorship with harsh laws of behavior.  That sounds positively Lawful Evil to me.   This is not a new idea, it was mentioned in Mongoose's "Drow War" books (which I do not have). They are described here as being like Nazis. That works for me.  Plus if elves are freedom loving do-gooders (Chaotic Good) then the ultimate expression of evil to them must be an evil, rigid society of absolute laws.  Lolth then needs to be closer to a devil than a demon;  she was a Goddess then was "cast down" by her fellow gods.  That sounds more devil like to me.  Plus unlike demons, which are manifestations of anger, destruction and hate, devils have agendas.  So does Lolth.

So combining features of my "The Church of Lolth Ascendant" and "Going (Up) to Hell?" I think I have a way to work the Drow into my world.

Drow and Lolth in Mystoerth
The story of the fall of Lolth has been detailed by many.  Regardless of the reasons for her fall one thing is known for sure, she and her children the Night Elves were cursed.
The Night Elves were regarded by many to be the most beautiful of the elven races.  They were as Lolth herself was before the fall; described by Corellon as a "piece of pure midnight and her hair reflected the light of the stars above".  When Lolth fell her sons and daughters were cast out as well (Well there was that business with the Elven Civil War, but that is another lesson).  They resided in a place they called "The Abyss" and it eventually became known as the Demon-Web as Lolth's new form attracted spiders and arachnids of all sorts.
While the Church of Lolth Ascendant maintains that their Goddess awaits only the chance to reunite with the other Elven Gods, the Drow, as the Night Elves became to be known, decided that the only means of reunification was by violent take over to the point of killing all the other elven races.  For this they train. Their society is everything elven society is not.  Elves are free with equality to all; all drow are slaves to the hierarchy or cast above them, with the priestesshood of Lolth at the top.  Drow males are second class citizens, a concept most elves can't understand.  But like their cousins above Drow excel at magic.  Maybe they are even a little better.

Lolth does not reside in the Abyss.  That was an error from a mistranslated document.   Lolth resides on the first layer of Hell.  Here lair is still called the Demon Web and she does have some demons in her employ, but Lolth herself is not a demon but a fallen Goddess.  This makes her closer in nature to the Devils whose prison she shares.  In Dante's Inferno Lolth occupies the area of Pagans.  As can be expected she has great enmity  with Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.  She is on well enough terms with Glassya, having supported her rise to power, but Lolth maintains her neutrality and her own agendas.

The Drow
The Drow of the underdark live close, not just in word but in relative proximity, to their Goddess.  With the Underdark as the Antechamber to Hell, the Drow are as cast out as race as one could hope to find.  Due to their prolonged sojourn in the darkest places of the world their one dark skin is now pale.  Some Drow are nearly white and others maintain a pale blue coloration.. Oddly enough it is Drow that make regular trips to the surface world that find their natural coloration returning.    These are the Drow that most surface dwellers are most common with.  It is no coincidence then that surface dwellers and Drow have prejudices regarding Drow skin color.  Surface dwellers see a dark skinned Drow and automatically think "evil elf".  While a Drow associate the darker color with a Drow that has become more "surface" or "elf" like and thus "good".
All Drow are born darker in color, but still no where near what their Night Elf ancestors looked like.  As they age their skill becomes more and more pale.  Since like elves they tend to alway look young the one true way to guess a Drow's age is to look at her skin.  The lighter the skin the older and usually the more evil the Drow.
Generally speaking Drow are smaller than elves or humans.  Shorter, smaller build.

Drow and Evil
Drow are completely lawful evil.  But they do not see themselves as being evil.  They are harsh because the survival of their race demands it.  There are rules and hierarchies because they live in a harsh, deadly environment.  The pogroms and breeding programs are in place for the good of the Drow species.  They are doing what they must do to survive.  They survive because they demand revenge on the wrongs committed on them by the elves. Killing a non-Drow is not a crime.  Killing a lower caste Drow is not a crime IF there is reason for it, but even the lowest Drow is more worthy of life than any elf.  Drow do not ally themselves with orcs under any circumstance.  They will work with like minded evil dwarf races, devils, demons or giants but Drow do not have allies, they have servants and minions.
Their ultimate goal is to retake the surface world from the elves killing them all (they are no longer satisfied with mere reunification). This way the gods would have to take them back as the only elven race.
Though there is something standing in their way and they are not quite sure how to deal with it. Humans.

So that's a start on my little pointy eared, underdark Nazis.

Read an RPG in Public week

Today is the start of "Read an RPG Book in Public Week".  A worthy gesture I think.  If our hobby is going to survive then we need more new players.  Now I am done having kids, so I have affected all the people I can locally (ie at home), so I figure I might drum up some more support.

Since it is sitting here next to me, I am going to take my new Pathfinder Bestiary.  It's a great looking book so that should get some attention.

Links
http://www.theescapist.com/readrpgsinpublic/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Read-an-RPG-Book-in-Public-Week/316050748718?ref=ts

Pathfinder, Keep on the Borderlands and witches

So Saturday we started what we call "the kids game", this is our D&D game that includes me, my two sons (6 and 11), my regular DM and his sons (10, 10 and 5).
We started out as a 4e game and it went rather well.  This weekend though we switched over to Pathfinder.

And it was awesome.

It is not really saying much, but Pathfinder is closer to old school D&D than D&D 4 is.  We entered the goblin cave and had four encounters with goblins and "the big guy", an ogre helping them out.  It was a blast.  Our group consisted of a human witch (me), a human dragon-blooded sorcerer, a dwarf cleric, a half-elf ranger, a human ranger, and a human thief.   We figure that we need to make some tweaks, the sorcerer needs some different spells and I think my witch needs a cure light wounds spell to help out the cleric some.

So Greg (my DM) and I figured that under 4th Ed the characters would have been killed with these encounters.

We are going to keep going with 4th Ed in our "Big Kids" group.  So I am going to get a chance to do both games.

I like 4e, I do.  It is fun and the material for it is top notch.  But Pathfinder is a lot of fun too and those books are really nice.  Picked up the monster book for it.  If Pathfinder had something like DDI I would be all over that too.

So where do I stand with my "D&D" games?

I am running a 3.x (mostly 3.0) game with my two boys.  I am playing in a Pathfinder game and a D&D 4 game.  And it looks like I might be running another 4e game here soon.

For doing all my old school stuff, well it looks like we are going to be doing that as part of Pathfinder and doing something different for 4e.

All in all it sounds like a win all around for me and everyone else.

Now on to my witch.
She has a cantrip, Daze, that she kept using in combat.  Worked out nice really.  Was able to keep a goblin distracted (and the Ogre once) pretty much every round.  Not getting hit goes a long way to help keep the party alive.  Found a scroll of "cure light wounds", since I have that spell on my list I could read it and use it.  So game-wise a nice mix of witchy offensive power with some good defensive buffs of a divine nature.  I totally under-used my familiar however, but that is the same as my last 4e game, so those are even.
Comparing her to her 4e counterpart, Daze was my "bread and butter" spell where "Arcane Blast" is in 4e.  Arcane Blast has the advantage of causing some damage.  And my 4e warlock has those teleports which are very nice.  Both characters had the about the same feel in terms of hitpoints for the foes they were up against and I compensated the same way; I hid behind tougher characters and fired off spells from a distance.

The Pathfinder witch uses Intelligence though as her main stat.  I am not buying that.
Warlocks use Charisma and I can see that and see it for the witch.  In the end though I still think that it would be best for the witch to use Wisdom as her main stat for spell casting.  In this respect the Pathfinder does come up short.

So in my judging for combat playability, Pathfinder Witch vs. 4e Warlock, it's a draw.
In terms of spell casting mechanics, the Pathfinder has more "witchy" spells, but the warlock spells do fit that concept well and work well in the game.  So in the end I am giving the nod to 4e.

Looking forward to the new Pathfinder book that has the witch in it.  Is there still time to have switch the spellcasting stat to Wisdom?  Anyone know if we are going to see some witch prestige classes?

Pathfinder

Played Pathfinder today.

Loved it.

WE now have a new family game for are larger group.  Love my witch.

More later.

Mirror, Mirror

So tomorrow I play my first Pathfinder game.
I am playing it with the kids, so it is not the same group as my 4e game.

But I am going to play the same character.

This of course will raise a cry from my GM saying "but you always play the same character".  This is true, to a degree.  Most often I am "playtesting" the same character and I hold it as my constant amid a sea of variables.  In this case I am not playtesting, but I am testing something, or somethings.

First I want to know exactly how this two versions of D&D differ from each other.  There are factions on both sides claiming that "Game X" is "Teh one true way!!"  I feel rather that they are two different interpretations of the same thing (that will get me comments).  But the only way I am going to get that is to play the same (or very similar) characters.  But which character to choose.

IF I were paying attention and planned this out I might have chosen a Paladin or Cleric.  Both have had rather large changes to them over the years and it would be a nice bit a symmetry to my first D&D character, who was a cleric and then I played his son, a paladin, as my first AD&D character.  
But in truth I wanted to play my witch.

I have written a lot about witches over the years and with me through all of that has been one character.  I use her in all my playtest and I have been using her a lot lately.  Plus both games offer, for the first time, a witchy-like character as a published choice and not something I have had to make up on my own.

In Pathfinder she is a witch, using the new witch class from their playtest.  Now I have a 3.x witch class and it is different than what Pathfinder has.    But I think it will work out well enough.

In D&D 4 she is a Fey-Pact Warlock.  Not a perfect fit mind you, but it is working out well enough too, for different reasons.

I am working making their skills similar to each other, taking similar spells, powers and feats.  Since these are all being driven from a central character concept this is really not that big of deal.  See, I can do high-level "role-playing" and the rules are only a manifestation of how my concept appears.

So if I am judging these games on how well they fit a concept I guess I could start now.
I am not ready to get into a lot of detail yet (no time today), but here are the basics.
- Pathfinder witch:  Has the mystery and background concept to fit the character well.
- D&D 4 warlock: Fey pact is a bit of a stretch really, but none of the other pacts are any better.  The powers though of the warlock are a better fit in some cases.  Maybe I need a new pact to make this work, but that violates the "rules" and making up for this (create nothing new).

So concept-wise the initial round goes to Pathfinder with only a slight lead, but D&D4 is rather close.
If I add some of the stuff from the newer books such as backgrounds then it is very, very close.  The biggest flaw in D&D4 is the Fey Pact is not what I wanted exactly.

Tomorrow is the true test.

Returning to the Keep

Playing a Pathfinder game this weekend and I am pretty psyched about it.

Even more psyched now that I know we are going to the Keep on the Borderlands!
I guess it has filled up with monsters again.

"Bree-Yark" is goblin for "I surrender" right?

Should be a blast.

Gods, Demigods and Heroes

I have been thinking about Gods and the like in my games for some time now.  Now that I am going to be playing Pathfinder as well as 4e I thought I would look into some gods for my Mystoerth world.

Now Mystara didn't have gods, but Greyhawk does and so do all the other worlds I am using here.
A few I know I am going to use and where they all fit.

Gods
Ancient beings of great power.  The next generation after the Titans and Primordials.  Gods differ from humans and the others in many respects.  Gods can have Aspects and Avatars, which are semi-independent versions of themselves that can interact in the world.  Demons and Devils can have Aspects too, but generally only one at a time and for them it is more like Astral Projection.
Gods also have the power of creation.  They created their specific races, or the lands, or even the world.

Bahmut and Tiamat -Bahmut (and his Dragonlance cousin Paladine) has become the god of Lawful Good paladins since the 3.0 days.  This is only reinforced in 4.0.  Plus he is a very D&;D god, with ties back to the first Monster Manual and featured in the Dragonlance sagas.

Tiamat is a given for the same reasons, but she was also a god in myth in her own right.  Though given that in Babylonian myth she was the god of Chaos, I would change her alignment from LE to CE and put her in the Abyss.  In fact the Abyss is there there because she was tossed into it.


 Sehanine / Selûne / Shar - Three aspects of the same moon goddess. Represent the Maiden, Mother and Crone aspects of the Triple Goddess. Neutral.

Wee Jas - Goddess of Magic and Death. The Witch Queen.  Worshiped by the Suel. Mix in bits of Hecate, Cardea, Isis and Mystra to her.  Her student was Ioun.  LN.

Others
Bast Egyptian - Goddess of Cats and the hunt. CG
Blibdoolpoolp (Greyhawk) - Goddess of the Kuo-toa and other deep see nasties. Maybe a daughter of Dagon and consort of Demogorgon (ick). CE
Camazotz (Aztec) - the Bat God, I like having him as the god Vampires too, great rivalry exists between him and Orcus. Camazorz doesn't control vampires, but some vampires and vampire cult pay him homage. CE
Celestian (Greyhawk)-  God of the stars.  Have to include him. Neutral
Corellon - God of Elves.
Gruumsh - God of Orcs. Neutral Evil.
Istus (Greyhawk) - Goddess of Fate. Neutral
Lovitar (Realms/Finnish) - Everyone needs a crazy S&M chick.
Set - God of Evil.
Surtur - Fire Giants and Thrym - Frost Giants, both from Norse myth, but folded into the D&D myths.
Vaprak, the Destroyer - God of Trolls and Ogres. Though I have considered having this just be an aspect of Demogorgon.

I plan to use Earth myths when I can.  For example my Desert Elves worship elven versions of the Egyptian Pantheon.  Isis is an elf, but Set is human since according to these elves humans are the greatest evils in the world.

Devils
The new editions of D&D (3.x, Pathfinder and 4) have Asmodeus listed as a god.  Now I have no issues with that per se.  I even think the back story of Asmodeus rising to power that started with the Dragon Mag article "Politics of Hell", on through the Blood War stuff and finally his triumph at becoming a Dark God is an interesting one.  But it does't work for me.   See I would rather set Devils up as the alternatives to Gods.  The devils temp mortals away from the "proper" religions to worship them.  Why would a mortal worship a lesser beign like a Devil?  Simple, the devils provide a quick avenue to power.  Gods, even evil ones, require faith and worship and service, the rewards then are given based on that faith.  Devils tell the mortals "hey, why do all that work when you can work with us and get all those benefits now."  Devils also side with mortals against the Gods.  They will remind mortals that the Gods have it easy while they work and toil.  They even try to promote kinship, "hey the Gods cast us out, so we are on your side."  Of course these are all lies, but situated in enough truth that mortals keep falling for them.   Asmodeus then is not a Dark God, but the most power Arch Duke there is and his power is equal to that of a god or goddess.  The Devils will even point out that one of their own rose to such power that is should be possible for everyone to do it.
The devils now have moved beyond the "Blood War" of 2nd ed and are now going to engage in a "Gods War" with the battlefield the mortal realms.  I think a good story for the PCs would be to become part of this "Gods War".  I alluded to it a little in my Buffy adventure, The Dragon and the Phoenix.
Afterall what would be more climatic than all the heroes, each representing their God, on the field of battle against the greatest foe in humanity.    I might drop my "Vs. Orcus" idea for this instead.

Demons
The Abyss is the sewer of the multi-cosm.  Everything that gets flushed, thrown out, discarded and forgotten ends up here.  Of courses there were plenty of things here to start with.  Demons are legion.  There are thousands of types, races, and varieties.  Some, like Orcus, are "dead" Gods.  Others, like Demogorogn, used to be Titans.   Others still are cast out gods (not sent to Hell), forgotten powers or even monsters that have become very, very powerful.  There are even ones that were spawned by the Abyss itself.  If the ultimate purpose of the Devils is the destruction of all the Gods, then for Demons it is just destruction.
The Blood War, the war between the Demons and the Devils, was a minor skirmish in the long range plans of the Devils.  In fact prior to the Blood Wars, demons and devils had been on working terms.  The devils would often use demons as grunts in their battles.  This went on for so long that some species of demon were once considered to be devils and visa-versa.   Graz'zt, the Demon lord, had been an Duke of Hell, till he went native.  Succubi are constantly switching allegiances between demons and devils that they are difficult to properly classify.

Demogorgon - Older than the gods.  A Titan that has become more demonlike.  Hates Orcus.  Only worshiped by non-humans and insane cultists.  Just wants to destroy everything. CE.

Jubilex - Demon lord of slimes.  Created from the Abyss itself.  It is as if all the waste and runoff of the Abyss collected into a conscious form.  Deeply, deeply insane.  Wants the entire multcosm covered in acidic slime.

Orcus - Was a god, then demonized, killed, came back as undead, became a demon again.  GEnerally just an angry dude.  Hates undead, but hates them less than he hates everything else.  Wants to become the God of the Dead.  CE.

Primordials and Titans
Like in Greek myths, the Titans were the "parents" of the Gods.   Some gods from other games might end up here.  I prefer to figure these out as I need them.  The Scarred Lands books from Sword and Sorcery Studios were good for this concept as well.  They had a lot of interesting titans.  Theirs though were outright evil, I prefer to have my titans more uncaring about humans.  The world was theirs, now it isn't anymore and they are not happy about it.  Most of the titans are dead, others are imprisoned or converted to demons.

Primordials came even before the Titans and represent raw nature or natural aspects of the world.  Earth, Sky, Night, Death.  These things are hard to personify into human terms so Primordials are not really like the gods or titans at all.  Primordials do not care about worship or humans although some are aware of such actions.  In some cases my "Titans" are what other games "Primordials" are and my Primordials are something different.

Mad Gods
Have to include these. Things like Leviathan, Cthulhu and the rest certainly will have a place in my game.

For me Gods need to be complicated.  The characters live in a world where they can travel to the planes, commune or other wise get "evidence" for their faith.  I think I might make this a bit tougher is some cases and even out right prohibit in others.