Drow are actually from Greyhawk. And Orkney, of course.
I feel I should point out that they are black-skinned, evil, and generally superior mentally and physically to surface elves.
What else? They obviously don’t have it together enough to make guacamole.
I’m not sure I mind Salvatore’s deliberately stylized prose. It’s intentionally over-the-top and not trying to be “good” in the conventional sense. It’s like criticizing Tim Burton for having unrealistic set design.
They’re still writing those? I still have my original copies of Chronicles and Legends series from the 80s.
Ditto! I think My Chronicles are out on loan, though.
The original Trilogy and the Legends followups were literally the books that got me interested in Fantasy. All others came from that set.
I hold the authors in high regard and am saddened if new modern versions will be curtailed by this decision. D&D needs modern heroes and stories to kindle the same fire in today’s youth that the original books did in me.
“Center jawbreaker never any smaller! Bland taste!”
I don’t read BOOKS as much as I should, but I did read the first six. I legit cried when Sturm died.
I was completely enamored with the dark, angsty Raistlin.
polygon has more details.
card number 1488? wtf?
Wait a sec, let’s back up here… How can this be racist? They’re all entirely different species. Speciesism is generally well accepted and tolerated…though as a vegan I’d be supportive of opposition to it! But I don’t think that’s what they’re getting at here…
Yeah, but that looks like an incredible coincidence. I remember that set. I remember going to like 8 different shops in one day and buying the allowed limit. They didn’t assign page IDs back in 1994.
Looking at the site now, the order of the cards shows it was in alphabetical order based on card color. So it would be the next card in the list, but instead it goes to an error page and they changed it to 485302.
But that artwork needs to be changed. I agree with that.
Never played that, but I LOOOOOVEEEEE that artwork. Skeletons are my bag, baby.
I had a copy of Dragon Wars and it is a similar type of RPG and I loved it.
Oh shit - you can get it on Steam?
I never played it originally: back when the Gold Box games came out my budget for software was very low…and also they were hard to find in small southern towns. It’s definitely not as good as the original series (Pool of Radiance, etc.), but it’s maddening that in damn near 40 years no-one has come up with a better combat engine for a D&D game.
I haven’t read them in at least 25 years so I have no idea how race in the series might look to modern eyes. I do however remember that the plight of Tanis for being a half-elf was my first emotional connection to how racism was bad.
My favorite moment as a reader kicked in probably a decade after I’d read them. Was studying in Japan and hanging out with my karate group after a practice. My Japanese was terrible and they were a great bunch just for putting up with me. Then one day we realized we’d all read Dragonlance ( I had no idea it’d been translated and was over there, but yup! ) and started reminiscing about scenes and characters. Rastlin was generally agreed to be everyone’s the favorite character. This would’ve been my first ( but far from last ) realization that the Venn Diagram between martial artists and nerds is very nearly a circle. 
Haven’t dared to go back and re-read them. I’m ok with that being my highlight of my experience as a reader.
Oh wow. I remember reading these as a c. 10 year old; Dragons of Spring Dawning I took with me on a school skiing trip. This has me super-nostalgic for them; I loved these books and read them over and over - Raistlin, Tanis, Silvara and others - wow. I think I’ll leave them as memories and not try to relive them…
To be clear, what I’m reading is that the attorneys for Weis and Hickman are dumping out a laundry list of accusations of racism against Wizards of the Coast, with very tenuous association to their particular case; presumably kicking them while they’re down to encourage a quick settlement.
They were always dark skinned, but were cursed to live underground and over time developed black skin as an adaptation to lightless conditions (against all biological sense) and magic warping them. Although maybe if they had been white they’re sunlight sensitivity would’ve been even worse? I don’t think it was ever really explored. IIRC it was one (very large) family line that got turned from dark-skinned surface elves into drow, then the rest of the elves ganged up on the whole race and drove them all underground, where the cursed/evil ones killed the rest?
In any case, the Drizz’t stories and the War of the Spider Queen books are very much about why the other elves’ racism is wrong. Plus there’s the book where the Blackstaff works with the rest of Mystra’s Chosen, the Sharn, the Pentad, and a whole huge group of elven high mages to undo the destruction of the original dark elf kingdom of Myeritar and resurrect many of its citizens.
@Ratel: I am totally willing to believe that, but even looking back now I have a hard time seeing gully dwarves that way.
Personally I stopped reading Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels after the nth time WotC decided they had to blow up the world and end in-progress story lines to make room for a new game edition rules change and set up characters and monsters and adventures based on the updated campaign setting rulebooks.
Also: I’d probably know a lot less of the lore if my friends had actually been the type to want to play D&D with me, but alas, they were not.
transparency and milky whiteness are common adaptions amongst cave dwelling species. Why waste energy making pigments? Why waste energy making eyes?
Agreed. But at the end of the day, because the writers aren’t biologists, and it’s a fantasy novel. The ecology doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at any level, you just add enough gods and magic to make up the difference. Some stories are more up front about this than others; serial web novel The Gods Are Bastards, for example, makes very clear that you can’t possibly maintain a society as evil as the drow are said to be without some force imposing and sustaining it from the outside.
