Drow (4e Racial Trait Variant)

Drow

Cruel, wicked slavemasters, lords of the Underdark

Racial Traits

Average Height: 5'4"-5'9"

Average Weight: 120-165 lb.

Ability Scores: +2 Dexterity, +2 Charisma or +2 Wisdom

Size: Medium

Speed: 6 squares

Vision: Darkvision, Light Blindness: Abrupt exposure to bright light (such as sunlight or a daylight spell) blinds drow for 1 round. In subsequent rounds, the drow are dazzled as long as they remain in the affected area.

Languages: Common, Elven (drow dialect), Drow Sign Language, and Undercommon

Skill Bonuses: +2 Religion, +2 Intimidate

Drow Weapon Proficiency: Hand crossbow / Short Sword / Dagger / Mace

Drow Education: You gain training in one additional skill of your choice.

Drow Reflex: You gain a +1 racial bonus to your Reflex defense.

Contemptuous Courage: You gain a +5 racial bonus to saving throws against fear effects.

Fey Origin: Your ancestors were native to the Feywild, so you count as a fey creature for the purposes of effects that relate to creature origin.

Drow Cunning: You may use drow cunning as an encounter power.

Drow Cunning	Drow Racial Power
Apparently from nowhere, you are struck by a fiendishly brilliant stratagem that will see you conquer the obstacle before you, whatever it may be.
Encounter
Free Action	Personal
Trigger: Add a bonus equal to the higher of your Dexterity and Intelligence modifier to your next roll.

Play a Drow if you want...

• to be sadistic, scheming, and paranoid
• to engage in all manner of depravity and licentiousness
• To be a member of a race that favours the rogue, ranger, and warlock classes.

Physical Qualities

Drow are of human height, though usually slightly shorter, and have black skin and red eyes, in a fairly limited range of shades. Their ears are larger than their elf and eladrin cousins, and still retain some limited independent movement. They are wiry and supple, and do not run to fat easily. A drow who is visibly in disrepair has fallen at least twice as far as his human counterpart. Their hair is thin, wispy, and almost universally white, shading to bone at one end of the spectrum and ice on the other. Drow do not usually grow facial or bodily hair, but suitably evil-looking goatees can be cultivated with persistent effort, usually by the small fraternity of drow wizards.

Playing a Drow

Long ago, there was a great rift among the elves. Seven noble houses were driven from the face of the world. They made their way through crack and crevice and deep worming tunnel to the Underdark, where they at last found refuge from their pursuers. It was not much of a refuge, as the Underdark was in nearly every way far more dangerous than the world above. In the centuries that followed, the ancestors of those cruel, savage elven kingdoms became a new race altogether, the drow. Within mere centuries, they established themselves as the undisputed masters of the upper reaches of the Underdark, with the middle reaches belonging to the Duergar and other such races, and the deeps belonging to their own hideous aboriginal races.
Drow are city-dwellers by nature. Despite their constant infighting and viciousness towards one another, they share a deep contempt for all the other races, and a subconscious need for companionship. In any city of the drow, all other races are guests (rare), merchants (despised), or slaves (ignored unless they are being actively oppressed). Their cities are monuments to the art of architecture, great spiderwebbing nightmares of gargantuan size and labyrinthine design, reflecting the unique aspects of drow psychology, a characteristic that renders them difficult for other races to navigate. Eventually, simply by virtue of the environment, any being that spends a long period of time in a drow city will begin to either think like a drow or go insane (sometimes both).

The drow are, nearly to a one, scheming, manipulative, and often surprisingly vicious. This is in part due to their nature, and in part due to the cutthroat society into which they are indoctrinated from the day of their first word. They generally do not care for any companions they may deign to take, or care for them only as possessions. In combat, they are savage and merciless. In the social arena, it is much the same. Drow usually do not leave their lands without purpose. Some are exiled, some flee the tyrannical reign of the clergy of the spider-goddess Lolth, some flee scandal or accusations of treason, or some powerful figure they have offended. A very rare few leave out of wanderlust or the desire to expand the drow empire.

Drow Characteristics: Cunning, paranoid, vicious, decadent, arrogant, brilliant, forceful, vindictive, pious, skilled

Male Names: Hrada, Kurze, Jacint, Isidoros, Yosa, Larquen, Kain'an, Da'ak, Sahaal, M'shaw, Agram, Togar, Zet

Female Names: Shirilael, Asuma, Harror, Lillit, Na'ama, Ysar, Kessida, Saerith, Llo'sael, Erzebet, Sanjin, Warada, Xassa

Drow Adventurers

Hrada is a drow ranger. His knowledge of the mostly unexplored network of caves around his city is unparalleled. As such, he would be much sought after as a caravan guide except for the fact that he is very much in disgrace due to a scandalous and agonizingly publicized incestuous affair with his sister. As such, he has retreated to the caves below the city, living in the dark, like a sage or mad hermit. Many say he is mad, but he is not. He has found a very, very lost group of adventurers from the surface world, and spends his days watching them as they journey through the caves, blissfully unaware of the nightmare city not twenty yards above their heads. He has appeared to them on several occasions to warn them of danger, or to rescue them from it. He schemes for ways to use them to enact revenge on the city above and reclaim his sister from the convent of Lolth in which she has been immured.

Kurze is a drow warlord. He is not cruel, in that he takes no pleasure from the nighmarish horrors he inflicts on his enemies and disobedient subordinates. It is simply business. His aim is the expansion of the realm of his House, and to that end he has embarked on a scorched-earth campaign through a neighboring principality, committing dispassionate atrocities as his armies advance at lightning pace. He is a great believer in the power of fear, and if he truly has a god, Fear is it.

Erzebet is a drow cleric of Lolth. Like all daughters of respectable noble families, she attended seminary immediately after primary school, and has recently completed her education as a priestess of Lolth. She has been sent to a rural (or at least remote) drow city suspected to be considering the ultimate crime of abandoning the worship of Lolth. As yet, she has not investigate this, being too busy with attempting to ruin one of the city's more influential slave traders, who refused to accept her offer for a particularly savory human she had been eying for the sacrificial altar (and perhaps some other things). Her connection to the Spider Queen is strong, as is her faith, but she is too wrapped up in pettiness and spite to truly make the most of her goddess' favor.

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