What Makes a Drizzt Clone?

>just make them green elves with tusks.
TES did that

That gives me an idea actually, how about only half-drow can be not fucked up?, makes sense to me.

>This phenomenon didn’t seem to exist in AD&D 2e

It very much did, practically from the publication of the Crystal Shard in 1989. I actually met Salvatore once (at a book signing for his Star Wars Episode II novelization when it came out) and asked about this, and he told me that he's been getting letters from DMs telling him that they love his books but hate him for the legions of Drizzt clones ever since he first came up with him.

>I'm surprised they just haven't just elminated their evil aspect like Eberron

Drow aren't Neutral in Eberron. They're still generally Evil, it's just that Eberron is a place where alignment is...complicated. Don't forget that in Eberron you can have a Lawful Good cleric of the Mockery or a Chaotic Evil cleric of Dol Arrah.

That's the stereotype. Pic related, and one I've run into with my character who, to make things even worse, is even Chaotic Good - even though I'd never even heard of Drizzt when I made her (as impossible as that sounds given that this was back around 1998), and once I DID learn of Drizzt I purposefully made her backstory as unlike Drizzt's as possible.

They're pretty ugly in everything except for skyrim, and even then.

That’s kind of cutting it close to what the Mormon Church does though with Native Americans

>TES did that
I'm sick of this example. All races descend from elves in TES. And even in Tolkien's stuff the idea was floated that they were corrupted elves. The point is that they are ugly savages and that they don't look sexy.

That lady orc in your pic looks kinda' sexy.

And just because Tolkien did it doesn't mean we all should. We're not all trying to ape Tolkien.

If you aren't going to use orcs in your setting why call them orcs? Just use amazons or whatever.

>I purposefully made her backstory as unlike Drizzt's as possible.
It's almost sad to me that you had to do that. Hopefully it led you to explore the character instead of making forced choices.

Just like everything else about drow!

at least 40k made orks fungi. that was somewhat original.

>We're not all trying to ape Tolkien.
It's ok, you're on Veeky Forums. There's no need to lie.

Because they're still green skinned aggressive retards, which generally fits into orc.

I am using orcs. I'm just not using Tolkien's orcs. He may be the guy who invented them (more or less), but they've become differentiated over time. Orcs now cover everything from Warhammer to Bright to WarCraft to D&D to Magic: the Gathering, and more.

>It's almost sad to me that you had to do that

Well, it helped that I started in a very different place - I came into D&D "sideways". Quick summery: Magic: the Gathering > MtG books > Fantasy book section at Borders > Baldur's Gate II novelization (first encounter with drow) > Baldur's Gate game (rolled up a "drow" character) > more D&D books (including Drizzt) > 3rd Edition D&D (transported "drow" character to pen and paper, made her an actual drow) > learned about what people think of Drizzt

Since I figured most DM's wouldn't be on-board with me running a Bhaalspawn I already was working on divorcing her backstory from Baldur's Gate (the only aspect I kept was being born on the surface and raised by a human man after her mother died in childbirth), but when I read the Drizzt books, and then learned about the reaction, I made a deliberate choice to give her a happy childhood, sans a singular event (that in her childish mind was blown out of proportion) that made her (stupidly) run away from home and to the big city, where she became a thief.

Even then she led about as happy a life as a street urchin could. I was deliberately trying to make a plucky, snarky thief with a heart of gold.

But I'm really not. I'm trying to ape Alexandre Dumas, Miguel de Cervantes, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Robert Howard more than anything, just with a high fantasy veneer.

>retard
>builds a morkanaut. In a cave. With a box of scraps!
Orks are just tony stark on a hearty bender, with none of the distractions of being a playboy. They're certainly not retarded, just simple and straight forward. All they want is a good fight, big guns, and big engines. They can have everything they want within a month, even in a completely barren planet, and live a life of orky paradise.
T. Morker, cunnin...but brutal.

Fapbait aren't orcs. Show me a single RPG that isn't fetish wankery that has sexy orcs.

>Show me a single RPG that isn't fetish wankery

Clarify this statement, please: do you mean that the RPG isn't intended as fetish wanking; or that the art isn't intended as fetish wanking?

Because I'm not sure how I can provide art of a sexy orc if you mean the latter, since anything sexy is by definition fapbait.

Like this, but I just wanted a sneakboy with a smokebomb power to use a dagger and hand crossbow together.

Thank-you, Plane Shift: Ixalan.

...

Being able to oneshot Demogorgon with the power of friendship. No. not even once.

>2018
>Drizzt thread
I'm not really sure it's a thing anymore. At least not in a way you think it is. Instead, Not!Drizzt became a standard node of how drows are played. Which is something OotS made a strip about too

>The point is that they are ugly savages and that they don't look sexy.
>posts a pretty female orc complete with blush makeup and a square jawed, ruggedly handsome male orc
Savage is sexy now. Just accept it, you'll be happier.

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Shadowrun

>all races descend from elves in TES
>implying the races of men aren't the creations of Lorkhan
>implying Bosmer, Khajiit, and argonians weren't discovered by the Aldmer and Ayleid explorers
>implying Bosmer aren't more closely related to khajiit than Altmer
do you even TES lore?

Bosmer are more closely related to khajit because their branches are closer than the altmer one. They're all still mer.

No. Mer are descendants of the et'Ada who did not flee Mundus (as Magnus and his did) or become Worldbones. You would call these et'Ada the Aedra. Humans and beastfolk are the creations of Lorkhan/Lorkhaj. Kynareth/Khenarthi and Lorkhan/Lorkhaj are the creation deities of at the very least the Khajiit, While there is information to suggest that Man and Mer are both either physical descendants or creations of the Ehlnofey, there is just as great a likelihood that Humans(nords specifically) are the creations of Lorkhan, just like the beastfolk races and Bos''mer'."

P.S. int the Annotated Annuad, the Ehlnofey/Wanderer stated to have been the progenitor of the humans is Lorkhan.

The problem isn't literal clones of Drizzt. The problem is what Drizzt represents.

Drow were intended to be pretty much pure evil. Their society is built to nurture this evil and weed out any and all traces of goodness. They are antagonists, they live and breath to antagonize others.

Drizzt is the quintessential special snowflake edgy mary-sue character. There is no trace of the pervasive Drow evil in him, for no reason. He grows up amidst a society of pure evil and ends up not just a good boy, but near saint-like levels of Good. And he escapes because he's actually the best swordsman everrrr, and then spends a lot of his time catching flak for how evil his race is and how sad and isolationist he feels but weathering the storm because he's just so Good.

R.A. Salvatore created a legion of players who think it is cool to take a pure evil race and play an inexplicably good member of said pure evil race and then be all dramatic about it.

It feels stilted and wrong. It's cool to joke about them but if someone comes to your game saying "I want to play a good Demon!" and you say "you mean a Demon who is trying to be good despite the pressure of his nature?" and they respond "nope he's just totally good in every way!" It's just not good characterization.

Isn't that why even in the references to the good drow of Eilistraee they're depicted as good and kind folks, unless you happen to be evil or an enemy of the church in which case they go full bloodlust?

Hell the high priestess of the temple in skullport I recall having a profile that says she spends her evenings looking for creatures she can have an excuse to kill.

Including the kinky sex? Somehow...I doubt it.

Ooooouuuuuuuuuch. Is there a good quickstart guide that won't actually give me a headache?

Yes, most other Good drow characters are characterized much better than Drizzt himself by R.A. Salvatore. Drizzt is sort of an aberration.

If I recall correctly, the Elistraee folks are explicitly noted to retain the "females rule / males are worthless" dogma of the Drow society they left in their new society, and often have individual character flaws that remind you that these are people who left a horrible place where morality-defying acts were the norm.

>"you mean a Demon who is trying to be good despite the pressure of his nature?"

this sounds pretty interesting and a fair enough way to roleplay a evil race.
It also sounds hard to do good since you need to play a unstable schizophrenic person in a convincing way.

>Playing a Drizzt clone
>Not an Obould Many-Arrows clone
Gross

Fixed it for you

>for no reason

You're ignoring that until he was ten he was raised by Vierna, who was softer than is typical for drow (even if she's still evil, she's nevertheless called out on it in Homeland and Drizzt references it again in The Legacy when he tries to save her from Lolth, though he fails), and then from ten to twenty he was raised by Zaknafein, who was basically a good man who just didn't know how to escape drow culture.

Now, we don't know why Zaknafein was similarly soft (with Vierna it's pretty much outright stated due to Vierna and Drizzt both having Zaknafein as their father), but given that he was explicitly a commoner drow elevated to his position due to his sword skills it's possible that commoner drow just generally lead lives that aren't as pervasively, relentlessly evil. More to the point, it isn't important why Zaknafein is soft since he's a secondary character. You don't explain every detail of everyone who shows up in your story.

Given his time under Vierna and Zaknafein, then (particularly the latter), it's not unreasonable for his time in Melee-Magthere to have hardened his resolve to be more like Zaknafein than to give in to drow basic nature.

Then following that and the whole surface elf debacle (a problem of the honor code taught him by Zaknafein more than a question of good/evil), Drizzt lived in the Underdark for ten years and nearly went insane if not for the kindness of Belwar Dissengulp and the svirfneblin, who showed him that a Good society can actually work and where he lived in peace with the svirfnebli for at least several months.

My point being, stop talking about shit you clearly don't know; there are reasons shown for why Drizzt ended up good instead of evil, while his saint-like dedication is easily enough explained as due to an explicit rejection of the culture he came from - think Ayn Rand's utter rejection of Russian and Communist culture (even if in her case it led her down a frankly insane lifestyle).

user, you and I both know that can't be true, if for no other reason than the fact that a mono-classed Rogue (thief) isn't going to be able to survive as a frontline melee fighter for any significant length of time, unlike a Ranger (Hunter).

Also my animal companion (a gift from another PC via casting the Find Familiar ritual on my behalf, which he did for the rest of the party [DM allowed it]) was a faerie fruit bat. She was useless in combat.

Plus her typical downtime activity was going to the local tavern and getting sloshed. To be honest a fellow player (same one who gave me the bat), who is a filthy weeaboo, has said that in terms of personality she most closely resembled pic related.

Critical mass of the following traits

>Be of traditionally evil or disliked/discriminated against race
>I'm not like the other [evil race]
>Angst
>Contrarianism
>TWO. SWORDS.
>CURVED. SWORDS.
>Big cat or big dog animal companion, bonus points if it's black
>Chaotic alignment
>Traveling the world to get away from his race/past
>Being mysterious/broody

Look, Drizzt isn't a very complex character, and no longer very popular, so copies are kind of a thing of the past now that it's no longer part of the zeitgeist.
It's like GUTS you know? The edgy dude from berserk with the huge fuckoff sword? Every fucking fighter I've played with for the last ~4 years has been a very thinly veiled Xerox of Guts.
Something about Berserk has kept it more relevant and popular (because it's a power fantasy for teens and manchildren who need masculine role models and guidance in their lives and look up to a man who exemplifies those virtues, such as strength both of mind and of muscle, endurance and grit and fucking tons of ladies).

1d4chan.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls#Creation_of_the_world
kind of? when theskyrimblog was still a functioning forum (after Emer bought it i have no clue what happened) a user named Vix used to run a Lore section. Not sure if any archives exist but he was recognized on the TES official Facebook page for pretty much hitting everything on the nail. if you can find anything written by him it's all pretty good and concise

there's always the wayback machine, thanks, user.

>strength of mind
>fucking tons of ladies
Have you ever even read Berserk?

Wow, it's like you've never read Berserk at all.

Guts has is 23 years old and has only had sex with two people, once was when he was raped by a black man. He lost his virginity(non anal virginity that is) when he was 21. He hasn't had sex sense because he got cucked a week or so later.

Actually read berserk before you shit talk it's characters or plot.

To be far in chapter one he's having sex with the demon girl, so I wouldn't say ever.

But he's certainly not pulling in the ladies.

I figured it was implied that he killed her before he got it in with that apostle, but I may be wrong. I haven't read chapter in years.

They're mid act when she transforms.

The early chapters are odd and don't entirely match up with the rest of the manga

I don't really think it's that odd, to be honest. What little we know of the demon established that this was how she hunts, and it's sort of an ironic fate for her to die the way she killed others.

I doubt Guts just randomly decided to have sex with her and then murder her when she turned out to be evil, I think it was more him deciding to kill her in a way that let her guard down.

Plus, it was meant as an intro to the character.

And as an intro to the sexually molested character violently opposed to others touching him in any way shape or form, it's kind of odd. He slapped fairy away just for trying to heal him. It seems really strange he'd be willing to bang a thing that repulses him to his core just for the sake of irony.

I said the death was ironic, but I don't think he did it for that.

I think he did it that way so he could just shoot her in the face and avoid the whole battle piece.

And Guts is more than willing to do shit he otherwise hates if he thinks it'll give him an advantage.

It actually would make sense if Zaknafein's alignment stems from his commoner origins; in the original Vault of the Drow adventure, only the drow NOBLES are Evil, whilst the commoners are all Neutral - the lore in that module establishes that it's the aristocrats who wholeheartedly worship Lolth and go around being backstabbing powerhungry douches, but the commoners just try to survive in a culture where their own leaders are batshit insane.

For what it's worth, Dragon #367 has an article called "Children of Darkness", which is all about Drow PCs, and it specifically talks about ways in which the idea makes sense.

There's even a segment called "Escaping the Past" which builds upon the facts established in "Drow Customs & Behavior" that drow are MADE evil, not BORN that way by presenting ways in which a drow PC could believably come to be an adventurer.

Four distinct archetypes are presented: the Anomalous Drow (a Drizzt-like character who simply never "took" to the teachings of their people and yet survived long enough to escape), the Haunted Drow (one plagued by guilt over what they did in their old life), the Unapologetic Drow (a drow who simply accepts what they did - this doesn't explicitly prohibit you from being Good, but it does mesh more easily with the Unaligned and Evil alignments), and the Unhinged Drow (like the Haunted Drow, except the weight of your sins broke you).

All of these are well handled, and even the Unhinged Drow isn't presented as a case to be chaotic stupid - it actually talks about legitimate, non-annoying behaviors you may exhibit as a result of your scarred mind.

I went with the Raised By Another Culture route; in my PC's case, humans. But Sandwich Stoutaxe is another good example that Veeky Forums itself produced.

Sandwich is shit

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This is true though.

interesting

This makes sense, we're constantly shown that drow culture is more or less engineered to produce amoral chaotic assholes

They were canonized.

>Being able to oneshot Demogorgon with the power of friendship.
I haven't been keeping up with the novels, but did Drizzt actually do that?

>Which is something OotS made a strip about too
Did you not see the OP image?

In the very first module introducing the Drow and their society, there are stated exceptions to the society, specifically more neutral than chaotic elves.

Even Mormons need something to fap to. Who's to say it isn't depraved stories about Native Americans?

I disagree that we shouldn't wonder about Zaknafein, but I think the fact that he is a commoner, and commoners are not so embroiled in the constant Lolth-pleasing rat-race, is an interesting theory.
Also, aren't Svirfneblin supposed to be neutral? I guess anything is good in comparison to most underdark societies.

That's interesting. I should really look up that module.
That doesn't perfectly square with Salvatore's portrayal of drow society in his novels, but then again, Salvatore is a bit of a hack. I'm willing to substitute some officially-inspired headcanon into my reading of his works.

It's not that we shouldn't care about Zaknafein, it's that Zaknafein's own basic tendencies as a decent person is enough to justify Drizzt.

>Also, aren't Svirfneblin supposed to be neutral?

Maybe usually, but Drizzt certainly considers them a Good (capital G) race when he meets them. Mind, he doesn't have much to compare them to; mostly he's drawing this conclusion from the fact that svirfneblin families love each other, children can play on city streets, they actually taken in a drow before Drizzt ages ago (never named, though), and the kids like Gwenwhyvar.

>Baldur's Gate II novelization
You poor unfortunate soul.

Keep in mind that the Vault of the Drow modules came out in 1978; Salvatore was writing The Crystal Shard in 1988, ten years later. The perception of the drow among the player base was already changing by that point.

Plus Drizzt was a character he came up with spontaneously when his original sidekick for Wulfgar was a no-go given that he'd been misinformed on what the Forgotten Realms was like (he was under the impression that the Moonshae Isles region was the ENTIRE Realms, since that was really all that existed at the time, and that the authors would be sharing some characters between them, as was the case in Dragonlance. He needed a new character RIGHT THEN since his agent was selling his book synopsis to TSR and needed something to pitch.

In hindsight, it was awful. But it does mean I'm maybe the last person on Earth to learn about drow before learning about Drizzt.

Rage of the Demons. Got a powerboost from helpful Illithid voiced eerily similar to PS1 Spiderman's Mysterio and oneshotted Monkey Trouble back to the Abyss via a Psionic attack and the power of freindship.

In Neverwinter Online he literally just get's swatted into the fucking abyss like a chump after making a stock speech, and it's as just and hilarious as you think it to be as YOU deal with Demogorgon in the same manner has BG2 offered, In a fucking cave, which is technically the only way to beat him because he cannot drown you in DemonSpam and his ability to control all lesser Demons next to wish abuse and his Rottentacles and Death Knights. Then after victory, the smug cunt shows up again to take credit.

To be honest, Zaknafein was hardly Good, he simply hated his own society, but took pleasure whenever he had a chance to kill a priestess of Lloth, for no righteous reason, just for the pleasure of killing the bitches.

Also, apparently the time when he and Jarlaxle were best bros was the time of greatest chaos in Menzoberranzan.

Issue for me is the hows. How is drizzit the shining example of Good from his very earliest days?

He's not? I can't think of any hugely heroic things Drizzt did while in the Underdark. I guess he didn't kill an elf child during a raid, but "don't kill children" isn't exactly a huge act of heroism, it's a fucking entry requirement.

Nah, don't worry, my first encounter with D&D in general was via Baldur's Gate 2 game, and Viconia was one of my favourite characters, and I never did the part of romance that made her True Neutral.
Not mentioning that while I was aware of Drizzt's existence, it took me years before reading any of his books.

That being said, I was more interested in the drow city in the Underdark that was ruled by males worshipping Vhaeraun.
>Vhaeraun’s goal was to put the Ilythiiri, or drow, back into the position of power they once held. He detested to see his people wither because of the pointless infighting and division that Lolth promoted. His plan towards his goal was thus, undoing the Spider Queen, her idea of "society", replacing it with one where the drow would be united, and both genders treated with equality. He saw that as the only way to lead the drow to reclaim their power and place on the surface, called the Night Above, to rule over all the others. Elves represented an exception, as it was Vhaeraun's belief that all the Tel'Quessir needed to work together for common progress.
I think that the Drow faction I think about is Jaezred Chaulssin