Sunday, May 28, 2017

Anti-Elves

Drow as "elves but evil" has been done. Let's take a cue from Otus's ink-blot, living shadow rendition, and say that they are the arcane Evil Twins of evils. Maybe not quite Bizarro World duplicates, but close. They look like photographic negatives of some elf, somewhere, sometime. (It is quite possible that if a specific elf and anti-elf come into contact there will be an explosion, Or, they will untie into a single, transcendent being and leave this plane. In an explosion.)

Anti-elves live underground in ultra-controlled, industrial, technolgical environments because they hate nature. They want replace it all with a machinery hellscape like Apokolips. The only reason they haven't yet is because they hate the sun, too, and are forced to live underground. They're working on that one.


Anti-elves are profoundly unmagical. All those magical abilities listed in a drow stat block have a technological basis. No surface creature can steal a anti-elf device and make it work because their bio-energy polarity will just disrupt it and make it nonfunctional after a use or two.


Ant-elves don't believe in gods, meaning they accept the existence of tiresome things other races call gods, but they think them ridiculous impediments to their own purposes and would never worship them. All sacrifices you might see them make are strictly translactional. Any temples are really just fanclubs--an anti-elves are the sort of crazy, obsessive fans that are very likely to progress to stalking and murder.

4 comments:

Lee B said...

Interesting twist! I'd also say that their spider pets are actually liquid crystal golems. Outsiders can't tell the difference, and the artificial arachnids dissolve when slain.

Anonymous said...

Well, that makes more sense than FR drow.

Certainly playable and any excuse to break out Errol Otus' art is a good one.

Christian said...

In the final picture, she looks to pouring the black goo that turns people into mutants from the recent Alien films. That guy on the slab is about to have a really bad day.

jbeltman said...

That reminds me of the movie The Dark Crystal, where each of the vulture people had a duplicate among the elephant/yak looking guys. When one gets injured the other does too, when one dies the other dies, etc.