GLOGtober Day 2: Heck Drow

 

If your first response to “what kind of sentient race lives in the deepest, darkest place in the world” is “i’unno, dark elves?”, you’re a hack. (sry gygax)

There are two (and ONLY two) ways to make Drow interesting:

1. Make them the ONLY elves in your campaign.
2. Make them not elves. Make them mega-weird. Don’t call them drow, they’re blinklings now and they have 2 rows of teeth and no eyes and smell with their hands and and

Roll a d20 until your drow are finally interesting:

1. Colloquially known as “snickers,” for the sound you hear as they approach, unseen, thru the caverns. They don’t actually laugh; that’s just what it sounds like
2. Extremely spindly with pinprick extremities. Can slip through the cracks under doors with minimal effort
3. Tall, so tall they would need to crouch if they walked through the caves. Thankfully they never need to
4. “Cannibals? you slander us topworlder; we would never eat our own. strangers, however…”
5. Darting, mandible-d tongue.
6. Lay eggs in underground reservoirs. larval form is parasitic, which leads adults to seek out “pastures” for their young to mature upon (it’s absolutely catastrophic if there’s drow in your well)
7. Blind, have a telepathic/symbiotic relationship with troglograss. They tend to their lawns, and the lawn lets nearby drow know when prey is stumbling by.
8. Most joints (including the spine) can rotate 180 degrees like broken puppets.
9. Literally just spiders (and not just spider-themed dominatrixes). Big, sentient spiders, who talk like humans and emote like humans and have absolutely no conception of the boundary between friend and food
10. Kidnap surface animals to turn them into drow. The process involves a lot of starving and light deprivation. it often works; you can encounter drow cats and drow elephants. They have all the other rolled drow traits.
11. Indistinguishable from corpses while metabolizing. Can lie perfectly still, all night, watching, waiting. Drow encampments always look like ghost towns, and you’ll wonder what monster wiped all these people out, and then when you sleep they’ll getcha
12. See-through skin. They wear bat-leather everywhere except their stomachs, where you can see through their intestines and observe whatever they ate recently (it’s a sign of friendliness to wear an open-belly tunic, so whoever you’re talking to can see that you are not currently hungry, and therefore not an immediate threat)
13. Wear the molted exoskeletons of their elders. When the eldest molts, the rest trade up like a hermit crab parade. very fleshy and moist underneath it all.
14. 8 FOOT VERTICAL LEAP they don’t even need to bend their legs to do it. All their joints sound like cave crickets
15. Due to lack of traditional eyes, noses, etc. on the face, Drow paint “self-portraits” on their skin to augment their appearances. Snarling hounds for warpaint, delicate masks for parties. The paints are mild irritants which serve to modify the thermal patterns of the visage; sighted creatures may struggle to comprehend the patterns being displayed.
16. What you see is little more than the roving gametes of the Linddrow - a great wurm beneath the earth, constantly tunneling around the world, releasing plumes of drow into the caverns. They seek to unite with the great egg, whatever that is (a crystal in the elven kingdom, the moon, a flying city?)
17. They walk on the ceiling and are absolutely surprised to see you. They claim to be on a mission to chart the depths of the earth. If you let them past, they’ll walk up to the surface, absolutely boggled by the sheer drop into the sky.
18. Cling to walls and sheer surfaces with ease. Often hide in plain site on paintings and murals
19. Normal elves infected with some sort of parasite/being puppetted from the shadows/housing an undead spirit (take your pick)
20. All things the same, except based on a different animal. They aren’t sexy underground elves, they’re sexy underground ELEPHANTS. You can keep the spider-worshipping and poisonings and shit