Editing Drow (section)

==History==
Drow were first mentioned in the second, 1978 hardback of the [[Monster Manual]] for [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]] 1st edition, under "Elf". Here: "The 'Black Elves,' or drow, are only legend. They purportedly dwell deep beneath the surface in a strange subterranean realm. The drow are said to be as dark as faeries are bright and as evil as the latter are good. Tales picture them as weak fighters but strong magic-users." Contemporaneously they are fleshed out in ''[[Against the Giants|G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King]]''.

They truly sprang onto the world in the followup [[Drow Trilogy]] [[Adventure Path]] which, with its sequel [[Queen of the Demonweb Pits]], fleshed out the [[Underdark]], drow culture, and [[Lolth]]. They subsequently entered the [[Fiend Folio]], and Gygax himself gave them PC stats in ''Unearthed Arcana''.  (More on that in a minute.)

The already-popular villains exploded in popularity as a PC race following the release of the Drizzt novels to the point of parody, oversaturation, and backlash, though all three have died down with time and distance. 

I guess we can't go any further without talking about the controversy, can we? Alright, so a lot of the things in drow culture are supposed to be opposites of what other races see as normal: drow are matriarchal, consider clothing (besides underwear) to be a sign of weakness, adore spiders and hate puppies, and have their skin and hair colors inverted from humans. Oh, and they're also Evil! Yeah, put all these facts together at once and you don't even need to ask the [[SJW]]s what the accidental implications are. Things aren't helped by the internet's eternal love affair with simplifying things down into jokes, so it didn't take long before drow picked up the stereotype "darker-skinned elves are ruled by evil feminazis and have a savage, half-civilized culture of betrayal."

To tell you what you already know, there's some grains of truth to the unfortunate implications, but there's also more than a little bad-faith trolling at play, until people who didn't know anything about them but the memes took it seriously. First and foremost regarding their skin tone: drow are almost never described as having ''any'' human skin tones in any sources (originally their black skin was ''literal'' onyx in color, and in modern depictions they tend towards blatantly fantastical hues of grey, purple, or blue), and their facial features are usually drawn to resemble either Caucasian or Asiatic appearance rather than an African. With dark skin, light hair, and (sometimes) red eyes, the effect the artists were going for was ''photonegative'' rather than "person of color." Sadly this was lost on a lot of people, such as whoever drew the porny ''Queen of the Spiders'' cover (where their skin was an ashen dark tan ''a la'' South India), pretty much every Japanese artist (where they tend towards the coffee with latte end of the skin spectrum), and one particular writer who described drow hair as "curly."

Even the "evil" thing wasn't supposed to dominate drow culture. Drizzt was rocking the Good alignment as far back as 1988, then in 1991 [[Eilistraee]] was written in to show drow weren't inherently evil, the evil gods were just on top right now and the good ones were still clawing back territory.

As of the [[5e|present]], the drow have seemingly moved past the backlash to hit the most popular spot they've ever been in. They were introduced as a ''core'' PC race for the first time in 5e (albeit the only one at launch to have a built-in penalty), the second major adventure line for the edition took place in the Underdark and gave them a ton of focus (and was retconned to be a massive plot by their patron goddess to boot), and they tend to cameo in most other adventure lines or collections and get new monster versions added with each new Monster Manual equivalent.

In-universe, the drow backstory mostly boils down to them being victims of the bitter breakup between [[Corellon]] and [[Lolth]]. Basically, when the two gods started fighting, this led to a great [[elf]] civil war as elves chose to follow either one god or the other. When Lolth's side lost, she and her followers were all kicked out of the realms controlled by the [[Seldarine]], and that extended to her elf followers, who fled into the [[Underdark]] to avoid further retribution. There, they stewed over their defeat and fully turned to the dark powers in hopes of rebuilding and one day launching a massive counterattack to destroy those who had driven them from the surface - old-school drow were implied to worship all manner of unsavory deities and [[Demon Prince]]s, but due to the [[Forgotten Realms]], and in particular the [[Drizzt]] novels, Lolth eventually became the defacto henotheistic patron goddess of all drow.