Why is it whenever I try to find any info out about this game I find posts full of edgy "haha I killed that, are U mad?" assholes and borderline "race realists"?
Ffs I just wanted to find a post that would help me avoid killing Kobolds and the one posts I find asking the question is full of edgelords bragging about how they love to kill "vermin" races and gays.
This is what you get when you make a fantasy world were certain races are born evil, it attracts all the racist freaks that want to live out their genocide fantasies.
It's killing my fun for this game.
yes, it's fucked up. I was at a convention shortly after Gary gygax died and they held a hastily-assembled panel and someone pointed out that in fact it's really messed up that someone at some point has to have said "let's make a race of elves who are evil, they can have black skin", like WHAT. The biologist in me wants to point out that most things that live underground are pale so they even had to defy reality to make them black.
It's one of the reasons I think it's good that newer editions of d&d are moving away from calling them "races" in favour of "species". Plenty of the d&d "races" are way more distinct than you'd expect human groups to be anyway.
Gary Gygax was....um.....more than a bit questionable himself.
In an online forum post he commented that killing goblin babies is normal (if not inherently good) and compared it with......well.....so apparently there was a military general responsible for the mass killing of indigenous people who said of the killing of children 'nits make lice', and Gary used this quote to explain why killing goblin babies was fine. He used an example of a person saying this about human beings for why he supported killing fictional infants. There are many awful excuses he could have used, but I genuinely don't think he could have used a worse one than this.
Well, yeah. Gygax fucking sucked ass. I certainly wasn't trying to say he was GOOD, he ok'd the dark elf bullshit.
To be fair, he didn't invent the concept, drow are based on the Norse Dökkálfar, including the "dwelling within the earth" and behaving opposite to the """good""" elves who dwelled in Alfheimr in the heavens.
Still, choosing to adapt it verbatim was all him, as well as all the additional traits like being pro slavery (which was not in the Norse dark elf lore) and infanticide.
smh woke took away our evil elves. but of course anti-illithid sentiment is alive and well.