CYBER-PULP FANTASY CORE-Drow

CYBER-PULP FANTASY CORE

© Jerry Harris 2013

Published here as Open Game Content.

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Overview Index

Background Index

DROW

This offshoot of the Elvish race has been created by two different means of fairly recent discovery.  Elves can be cloned, but the product is not an Elf, but a Drow.  The Drow have pitch-dark skin and only a slight magical nature.  They can accept artificial implants.  Their offspring are also Drow and they breed more quickly than Elves.  (Drow can’t breed with Humans, or anyone else.)  Consequently, Elves no longer allow themselves to be cloned.

However, there is a magical procedure that can also produce a Drow.  Some Elves for various reasons have rejected virtual immortality and their magical nature to become mortal.  There has long been a political and social movement by some away from traditional Elvish ways, but it has not been until fairly recently that a means of formally breaking with it has been invented.  Some Elves have done this procedure for political reasons, even to identify themselves with Humanoid causes, or for religious reasons as a mark of shame for past Elvish sins.  Some just do it as an act of rebellion against their parents, or they think this is their best chance of having Elvish grandchildren.  (Half-Elves only produce Human children.)      

The process is called Soul-Jarring.  An Elf loses their magical nature (and their longevity) and acquires the pitch-dark skin of a Drow clone.  It is like a forbidden magic ceremony where a human becomes an immortal undead, though in reverse in this case.  There is some sort of technology involved, perhaps like cloning.  How exactly this is performed, the nature and frequency of it, and, more importantly, what happens to the drained magic is left up to you.  (This so you can create a campaign to discover the mystery without those pesky players knowing anything about it up front.)  

As you can imagine, the very rigid, tradition bound Elvish society has been horrified by these developments.  They can barely tolerate Half-Elves.  It is seemingly a corruption their very being.  Worse, the Drow have already overtaken them in population.  Drow, for their part, still have the Elvish arrogance gene, and think they are the superior of their kind (and perhaps all races), physically and perhaps even morally.  They are the enviable future, or so they think.  Drow and Elves can’t even breed with one another.  They are separate species. 

As snobbish as the Elves are, they may have a point about the Drow.  There does seem to be something inherently sinister about them in general.  Their gravitation towards the Humanoid Movement seems to support that.  There does seem to be a coordinated effort by the Drow to undermine Human and Demi-human civilization.