Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General I just made Male Drow Cleric of Lolth?! huh?!

We need at least a warning at the stage of character creation, when we choose Drow Lolth, about what awaits us.
And the ability to abandon Lolth during the game, if you do not want to pass one of the tests.

How many difficulties, plus the tests are cruel even for me (I like to pass for evil, not chaotic, but law)
This is the reason I am the Drow of the Seldariin

This is a complete misconception in terms of Forgotten Realms lore. You could always play a drow male priest of Lolth in all editions of D&D. The problem is, most Lolthite societies would have you killed for it, since gender roles are very rigidly defined. However Lolth herself is a goddess of chaos, and who thrives on chaos, and if it serves her purpose, she might allow a drow priest to gain spells from her, provided the priest is in some way following her designs.

You are an abomination either way.

OnT: Your PC is always a Baldurian/surface dweller (right? I'm actually not sure...), but yeah, it still doesn't make sense if he becomes a cleric of Lolth. Maybe he used to be female? Maybe he's just very confused and only his parents accept him for the cleric of Lolth that he belives himself to be?

On my first playthru I played a female Drow Cleric and I was not a Baldurian AFAIK but from the Underdark.

Oh dear... you're right indeed.

A surface dwelling Lolth worshipping Drow living among the humans and elves in Baldur's Gate...... hmm....

More choice for players so can't be too bad, I guess.

Althogh im from the thinking that the PC can be whatever, because everyone is different, i look into the wiki and books about it, from what i can see Lolth dont have a distinct rule that she will ONLY have female drows as clerics, but the drow society impose this as a rule, even tho they have this, male clerics drows are still there, not as much, and very few, but still there.

EVERYTHING IM SAYING IS 5E

Uh, no they aren't. Even if they were the good-faith assumption would be that the Baldurian tag being on Drow or Githyanki is simply a mistake. However those tags are not on either Githyanki or Drow.

Kind of wild how quickly this turned into an insane political thing. I think it's much more likely that it's an oversight. Lloth sworn drow can't pick a deity other than Lloth, right? So there's already a restriction there, so gender locking cleric for Lloth sworn drow isn't entirely impossible given that. I mean it's early access and there's not a ton of talk about but this level of projection is better left on twitter, in my opinion.

Any such Drow would be attacked on sight by literally everyone he met for either being a Drow or an apostate. Don't see a reason why you "cannot be" but the life expectancy would be laughable...... If he said to mommy in the underdark at age 5 "i wanna be a cleric" he would be chucked in a spider pit 10 seconds later.

I suppose you could stretch it by saying Lolth is amusing herself. Still a bit weird though but it is a single player game.


It seems that WotC wants to pretend Underdark Drow do not exist any more. I am just glad the people I play DnD with accept that Drow didn't all wake up one day and decide to become good.

Ok guys, here's what I found on Lolth's page on the FR wikia:





So while I agree that a male cleric of Lolth seems bizzarre, apparently it is not against established lore - just very rare.

(Though I think male clerics of Lolth should get appropriate reactions. It IS weird in most places that have even rudimentary understanding of drow society/religion - including most drow cities, I presume.)

Yep, Rai-guy Bondelek and he is a top lieutenant in Bregan D'aerthe (Jarlaxle's mercenary band.) I don't remember which book it is in but in one of them he actually heals Regis by praying to Lloth and later in the same book he save Drizzt from dying and Jarlaxle remarks about how he will have to do penance for months for using his prayers to Lady Lloth to heal Drizzt (or something to that effect anyway.)

Not entirely true. I haven't played PnP since 2nd edition but I know for a fact that you could not play a drow anything in 2nd edition.

I think that there's a difference between people being inherently evil as in genetically evil and culturally evil.
The Drow are clearly culturally evil even in the game, that doesn't mean that every single Drow is.

Just like how just because America has a culture that glorifies violence and is full of religious fundamentalists doesn't mean that every American fantasise about being Charles Bronson in Death Wish and hates gay people.

No, just 99.99999999% of them are evil, at least in Salvatore's Legend of Drizzt books. There's a reason Drizzt, Zaknafein and Jarlaxle stand out in those books. It's because for each of them, there are a thousand or more drow that are evil to their core. I mean Lloth dwells in the Abyss and she is the deity that most drow worship. Enough said I think. Drow are also extremely racist. All of that is ok in a fantasy world and in fact, it makes drow great antagonists. I really, really hated the Do'Urden girls in those books for example.

I don't see the problem with having the option to play the 1% of the Drow that aren't like that.
Our characters in RPG's to begin with are always the exception and special.

@Svalr: I didn't say there was a problem with wanting to play a non-evil drow. I was just pointing out that non-evil drow are extremely rare and that there is no problem with the race being almost entirely evil in this fantasy world. I say that because this is not the first time that I have heard crap about Wizards softening the drow to be less evil because, ALLEGEDLY, they don't want the dark skinned race to be the bad guys. I don't know if that is true but I certainly hope it is not. I really grow tired of attempts to make fantasy worlds reflect the modern real world.

Lolth allows male clerics everyone... just so you know. It's just pretty rare.

Eh, I don't feel anyway about it tbh. Like, Wizards being "having a dark skinned race inherently evil kinda cringe now that we think about it...given, you know..." is kind of understandable enough to not bother me too much. Things change.

Yeah I don't think that's what wotc are doing either tbh.
I do think that there is a problem in America in particular with the overall political climate being really crazy and there's a lot of overreactions and reading really extreme interpretations into everything etc.
Like the whole '' everything is political '' thing is often incredibly toxic and quite shallow, people act as if just because you can read politics into something deliberately then it actually makes it super political and needs to be judged as such 110%.

But I think that in this case and in regards to the alignment issue it's more about just giving people more power to RP the character that they want.
I think that most people who play a certain race is still going to play it pretty traditionally and most of the characters in games will still be quite typical.
If you play an Orc for example then I think that in 9 out of 10 cases you're going to play it fairly stereotypiocally, but there's also people who want to play a more atypical Orc and the alignment system for example often got in the way of that.
My first character in Baldur's Gate 3 for example was a good Drow.

I have a lot of problems with wotc, I am not a fan of them as a company and a lot of what they're doing at all.
But I don't think that this was about some agenda or anything but more about just creative freedom for the players.

Yeah, I also find it to be a bizarre thing to be upset about.