Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Elves are not Elven - Tel-quessir feed back ;)

Are they tho? O_o
I mean evil "by nature"?

In current lore, they are not. But they used to be.

That's the kind of oversimplification that's liable to get the thread locked :s

Oversimplification of what? It is well known what inspired Drows from American pop culture. And it aint pretty. Pointy Hat a dnd youtuber made a good video bout Elves, he shortly alludes to drows. Check it out, he is quite good.

Interesting

Pointy Hat - Elves

The Drow discussion begins approx 8:50 mark

It sure is nice to not be american, grow up on fantasy novels/games, and think that fantasy actually borrows from, you know, mythology most of the time - with an added layer of exaggeration / fanservice on top for what was back in the day considered to be the core audience (the stereotypical male geek type).

Might be a step towards the thread getting fridged, but I've seen somebody say that Larian's portrayal of elves in D:OS2 is apparently a pinnacle of bigotry. I have long given up on trying to figure humanity out at this point, I am afraid. Yes, the typical fantasy races are definitely not mostly borrowed from Tolkien who mostly borrowed / expanded them from Celtic/Nordic mythologies. Gnomes obviously are a racial stereotype and not earth-aligned fey-kin rooted in alchemical lore. So are the dwarves, who certainly aren't an established species within the Norse mythos and are technically elves (alvar) and their typical traits come from that particular source...

I should probably stop before this gets out of hand.

The dwarves suck as well, the selection for beards its absurd. Not sure if anyone at larian has even opened a players hand book.

Yeah, I'm going to be honest, that is ....rather poorly researched and argued....statements with not great evidence to back them up etc. Sticks to the narrative of 'drow were bad but getting better in 5e' even when namedropping Eilistraee....a goddess from 2e. I'm generally just not super impressed when 'drow are racist because they are evil and dark skinned' is an argument that's seriously thrust forward and presented as is, as if it's inherently an undeniably obvious fact. Drow and racial issues are a way more complex topic than that sort of reductionist hyperbole applies to.

Well, I talked about it to an extent in my post. You eh, just didn't address it. In regards to Forgotten Realms, the setting was very much not a 'drow were evil by nature' setting. Certainly Drizzt is very famous(infamous) as being a renegade good drow. Eilistraee and the development the Drow got in 2e was a direct result IIRC of a player asking the creator of the setting, Ed Greenwood to facilitate playing good drow. And Facilitate he (and the other writers) did.

Certainly it's a bit of a stretch to say that drow were intrinsically evil in 2e when faced with stuff like Elminster having a drow apprentice, one of the Seven Sisters being a drow & the existence of Eilistraee...hard to label them a monoculture when the sourcebooks of the time were full of alternatives to Menzoberranzan. 2e the writers went full out trying to flesh out the drow, writing new cultures, locations and deities for them. Also, It's....kinda impossible to play through the Original Saga and come to the conclusion that Drow were all evil by nature. Again, 2e.

But 3rd rolls around and WoTC decides that 'good monsters' is stupid, and that all the previous stuff written about alternate drow cultures and good drow subtract from the specialness of the Drizzt cash cow. They kill off the other drow gods, raze most of the non-menzoberranzan cities to the ground, and come up with the goofball idea that Drow are black-skinned because their blood is *literally tainted* by evil, essentially the Curse of Ham, despite multiple previous authors writing other explanations that weren't copy-paste RL white supremacist excuses for racism.

So yeah, I'd say there was a huge dip in quality in regards to how they were portrayed starting somewhere in 3rd edition through fourth and into fifth. WoTC just kinda decided that there was too much drow lore-that it needed to be simplified to be more accessible, and that pure evil drow were more marketable. The current situation in regards to drow portrayal is very much one of WoTC's own making.

I agree. Dwarves definitely could benefit from a wider selection. At the very least though, they physically seem to align more with D&D's fairly consistent portrayal of Dwarves. Larian even listened and went back and made the Duergar less hirsute, which as something of a FR lore junkie, I appreciated. Gives me a sliver of hope the elves get a pass as well, and get some more angular faces, larger, angled eyes etc so they don't look interchangeable with half-elves.

It's the human faces that bother me.

Yes. To be perfectly fair. They are lovely human faces. And I think they'd be perfectly fine for the humans and half-elves, but the only distinguishing feature between half-elves and elves is ear size right now, and that just feels wrong. Larian's DOS elves were already radically different-incl with faces that looked significantly more like D&D elves (and the rest of their bodies were even more radical) So it seems odd to me that their BG elves are just humans with pointy ears.

Rly? O_o

Just to be clear i come out of that deffinition we were provided here by Niara (i think? Not sure tho) that creature who is evil "by nature" ... dont have any other choice but to be evil ... and if they somehow manage to "not being evil" they transforn into their oposite ...
Fiend into celestial ... and vice versa.
Metalic dragon into chromatic ... and vice versa.

Thats why i have problems imagining any creature with completely free will would be evil (or good) "by nature" ...
I can easily imagine they tend to one side like half-orcs who have this inherent predisposition for being evil and they either embrace it or fight it.
Drow following the same rules are certainly evil bcs they are culturally raised that way, just as Githyanki, but they should be physicaly able to resist it ... and therefore are not evil "by nature".

Feel free to corect me, this is just how i understand it.

Regarding Pathfinder elves:

The only thing I do not like about them is them being needlessly tall. :< The black eyes remind me of Waywatchers from Warhammer so I really liked that bit. c: As for the DoS elves - I kinda like them too! It was a unique take and while I did not find them very attractive, I did find them interesting and pretty awesome. c:

However, I agree that just adding a bit sharper features and tilted eyes is more than enough for the 5e (or in this case, BG3) eleves. No need to make them look completely alien to humans. :]


Hmm, your post is not entirely correct as far as I've read/been taught (I am a huge enthusiast for fantasy and literature, as well as a student of archaeology on university level).

Gnomes do exist in norse mytholgy but the original "gnome" was not a very nice creature. They were tiny, grumpy forest folk that took care of cattle and other farm animals - as long as you treated them well by leaving them some cooked meals and blankets. Failing to treat the gnome well or even disrespecting them in any way would result in sick animals and bad harvests.

Dwarves existed as well. They were said to live underground and from most of what I've read they were supposed to be dark skinned in grey tones (like darker Duergar basically). They were excellent smiths and craftsmen in general. In fact, in norse mythology, Mjollnir (the hammer of Thor) was crafted by a dwarf in Valhalla - and so was Gungnir (the spear of Oden) along with a bunch of other legendary items. While dwarves do share some common traits with the norse mythology elves (like being called "svartalfer" which roughly translates to "black elves"), elves as described in norse mythology was more about supernatural magic and being demi-gods, while dwarves were associated with craftsmanship. As far as I can remember, dwarves generally had a better relationship with humans as elves were often indifferent or more likely to make humans ill than befriend them.

Unfortunately, the pre-Christian era of Scandinavia is very ill documented as its people did not pass down their teachings through literature and texts, but rather "mouth-to-mouth". Most of the existing documentation of norse mythology comes from the Christian people's observations/notes, and they were not very interested in the nordic culture (and I mean, they didn't really have any reason to actively attempt to document it correctly at the time). Hence, there are huge gaps in our knowledge regarding norse mythology. A lot of it is just assumptions that might be proven incorrect by tomorrow once new evidence is found.

But alas! A lot of creative people have taken a look at the "evidence" that we have access to and let their own ideas do the rest. c: Many of the results came to fit very well into the concept that we know as "fantasy" and story telling! That in itself is awesome, imo! :]

On point regarding the gnomes - I tend to resort to the Paracelsus description of them from where their alchemical/magical talent and curiosity as traits are often borrowed. I guess Pathfinder makes them more like the Norse prototype, then. Thank you for an enlightening post.

Elves, gnomes and dwarves are all mixed up mythologically. The Noldar (elves) of LotR were at one point going to be gnomes (the name is a bit of a hint) The Drow of D&D had their dark skin inspired from norse 'svartalf' where of course the concepts of dwarf and elf are kinda overlapping....and of course in D&D there are Xvarts, inspired by the same source, which are gnomes.

You and I are in agreement: they come across as too alien simply for the sake of being alien.


"elves" with heavy quotation marks .

Removing flavor from the Realms = dumb, dumb and more dumb.

Drow as a race arent evil. But their society that worships Lloth sure as hell is. A statblock in a DMG stating them as evil is also not proof that theyre evil. 99 out of 100 drow you will run into however will belong to the earlier mentioned drow society. Which.... yeah, makes them evil. A society that thrives on slavery, killing and offering sentient beeings to gods beeing evil sounds about right to me. Specially considering how much of their own society also suffers from this same treatment.

Same story for the 'orcs are evil' debate tbh. The race itself isent evil. Their society and their actions make them evil.

So no I think you got it right. Some exceptions to this are creatures like devils, fiends, celestials, fae etc etc which are basicly a physical embodiment of their alignment. Those are 'born' into their alignment and its basicly almost impossible for them to change. Because their entire fibre and beeing IS that alignment.

Quite exactly my point ...
I was not arguing about Drows being evil (most often to be precise) ... the problem i had was the words "by nature".

I understand you. Sometimes alignment can be nuanced. More often then not though its pretty clear cut.

Abominations liking to eat sentient humanoids (often times preferring humans) is pretty clear cut for why theyre evil. Same goes for Drow and Orcs honestly when you look in the lore how their societies work.

Some things have changed over the years though like how things sometimes were evil by nature but now beeing changed to not always be by nature but by nurture. Given that dnd has been around for a few decades its bound to happen that some things change over time.

This is a fantasy game...escapism; it truly is as simple as saying "X is evil." and then moving on with one's life. Anyhow, can we please discontinue the tangent that has been done to death? Feel free to fire up a new thread or continue the discussion in similar threads.