The Drow War
Un article de ErnstWiki.
D20: The Darkest Hour - The Drow War Saga is Complete We have a very special release this week from Mongoose Publishing - the epic Drow War saga, a campaign that takes your characters from 1st to 30th level, is finally complete with the release of The Darkest Hour.
Designed for 21st level characters, this 256 page hardback will take them all the way to 30th level in a titanic struggle of true
Epic gaming. Without wanting to spoil the plot (if you have been playing through the saga up to this point, that is the last thing you will want!), I'll pass you over to the Drow War's author, Adrian Bott;
Players love to have choices, because it means that they can make a difference in the game world, bringing life to their characters and forging meaning from their gaming experiences.
Games Masters also love players to have choices, because whenever players are faced with them they bicker amongst themselves for hours on end about what to do next, which saves a Games Master from having to do any work.
If you are going to make a villain, then it really is worth your while to make them interesting, even if it takes twice the work. Even in a system that allows Evil with a capital E to be a person's motivation, people are still more complex than mere black hats with statistics. There is a certain terror that the Non-Player Character that you invested two hours in creating will be slaughtered in two minutes. Do not yield to it. The more you know about the character, the better you can respond.
Playtesters are wonderful, brilliant, dedicated people and they do not get enough appreciation in the gaming world. They hold themselves to standards more draconian than some writers do and have a tiring and often thankless job, and yet they are responsible for critically important quality testing.
They are also some of the best friends you will ever have as a designer, particularly if they can tell you diplomatically and clearly what is lacking in your work as well as what is good. It does not matter how creative you think your work is or how good it looks on paper; the proof of the pudding is in the playtesting. Mongoose is lucky enough to have some of the best playtesters in the business. So cheers to Mark, Sam and their crews. You guys are the unsung heroes of gaming.
Demiliches are cool. I admit, I like Bodiless Ao best of all the characters I've dreamed up. He's a nasty piece of work.
Speaking of likes and dislikes, I ought to say a few words about drow. Yes, I was well aware when I took this project on that they had been done to death. How could I not be aware of that? I'm a gamer! I go out of my house occasionally! Give me some credit!
There was no way around it. Ever since TSR gave us that first foray into the Vault all those years ago, drow had been served up cold, boiled, reheated, with mustard, with cranberry sauce, in pie crust, with dumplings, on toast for months and years. Furthermore, I had seen the live roleplayers covered in black paint and wearing Tina Turner wigs, with plastic spiders glued to their heads with spirit gum, striding around on sunny days as if they owned the field. Every time I saw a 'meh, drow are teh sux' response to the Drow War announcements online, I wanted to answer 'You really have no idea.'
And that's a shame, because it means that to some gamers, all the flavour has been chewed out of the drow. I had to get around that, but I also had to produce a campaign that wouldn't tell the drow lovers (and there are plenty of them!) that what they liked was somehow wrong.
So I went back to basics, and did a little revision into the bargain.
The most important step was to make them predominantly lawful. Rules, hierarchy, order. Recast the drow as a lawful evil race, and immediately the decadence becomes more like that of a Berlin cabaret in 1938 than that of a thrash party in 1988. Their arrogance and brutality becomes that of a species fanatical about its own superiority. It becomes institutional and not just cultural.
Drow in this series are not misunderstood, angst-laden Goths (apart from the Threnody in Velvet, of course, who constitute a nod to today's more enlightened drow!). They are evil, callous, treacherous, irredeemably vile creatures who have a conviction that they are the master race. This is why it is so satisfying to smash them down. They just cannot understand defeat, much less accept it.
The evil that chaotic creatures perpetrate is at least arbitrary and often incoherent. Lawful evil is, to me, more terrifying because it is systematic. Law encourages you to follow the routine instead of asking the questions that might keep evil from becoming entrenched. The bleat from the lowest ranks of a lawful evil society is 'I was only following orders'.
'Yes,' I thought, 'this has legs. I can play with this'.
Thus the temptation to turn the drow into regimented, fanatical agents of darkness instead of the usual hedonistic dalliers with demons proved irresistible. If nothing else, it is a slightly different spin on an old enemy. It seems to have worked, too: The Drow War, Book One has been in the shops for a couple of months now, and I was very happy to see the reaction from one reader online that it had 'made the drow evil again'. Good, that's what I was gunning for.
