Focus on a D&D 5E mini: drow

Why bother with a drow miniature?

Drow are one of the most popular Humanoid creatures in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, as well as being a playable race. They’ve been around since the early days of D&D and are not going away any time soon. Lots of people want to play drow, and they are an Underdark staple, so you may as well accept that and grab a miniature or two.

What about this mini?

This unpainted mini pack consists of two drow miniatures: this male and a female. The fact that the drow mini is medium sized like it ought to be makes me happy. This mini is made by WizKids as part of their Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures line: Drow #73189. It’s a nice sculpt and I have no complaints.

How useful is this mini, really?

Drow are included in 17 published Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition books:

That’s 40% of the published books. In addition to them being a playable race. If you run the published campaigns, you will want a drow mini. Even if you don’t, your players will likely want to play a drow at some point. Go ahead and get one of these miniatures early on, since you will end up using it.

Racism and the drow

OK, so let’s talk about the elephant in the room whenever drow come up: Are the drow a result of racism. I’m going to have to say that it’s not clear whether or not the original creators ever said, “Hey, these drow folk are going to be super-evil, so let’s make them black and call them dark elves, because black people are evil.” However, whether or not they said that, or even thought that, the reality is that making a connection between being black equals being evil for a person, whether deliberately or not, is a pretty racist thing. Evil people can be any colour, even orange. In fact, there is a FAR higher proportion of orange people who are evil than black people. Astronomically higher. Conversely, there are not more evil people that are black than any other colour. There is absolutely no connection between being black and being evil. As a biologist, however, drow being black has always also really annoyed the hell out of me because it is the opposite of biological reality. The more sun a species or population is exposed to, the darker their skin is, and the less sun that a species or population is exposed to, the paler their skin gets. We can see this with human populations; compare ancestral Scandinavian or Scottish skin tones to people living on the equator. This is pretty obvious to everyone. As for caves, where the drow supposedly have been living for countless generations, the situation gets even more extreme. Think about the creatures found deep in caves which have lost all of their skin melanin entirely, and have become a ghostly white. There are reasons for that, and I will chat about them a bit, but I will preface the entire conversation by stating that my drow are an extremely pale white, not black. Whether or not black drow was unplanned racism or planned racism, it is racism, and it also is the opposite of what biology demonstrates. I oppose racism and embrace biology with my pasty white drow.

Darkvision in D&D 5E

Let’s begin by talking about normal vision in the real world, and darkvision in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. In the real world (and presumably in D&D), our eyes see colours when the light of the sun is reflected off of something, and the reflected wavelengths of light hit receptors in our eyes. These receptors are each only picking up certain wavelengths. As humans we have, at most, three types of colour receptors (cones) and rods (which are sensitive to a wider range at lower amounts but are not ‘in colour’). When you look at a rainbow, that represents the colour options that our eyes can see. Other species see wider or narrower sections of the electromagnetic spectrum, usually because they have more or less cones, and can often see colours that we can’t as a result. That is how you see colours. After the sun’s radiance (or whatever other light source) hits an object, certain frequencies are absorbed, others are absorbed and then transmitted at a lower-energy frequency, and others are reflected. The reflected and transmitted frequencies hitting your eye trigger the cones and/or rods in your eyes. That is how you get the colours that you see.
About half of the creatures in 5E have darkvision, but the physics of it is not explained well, which is very likely deliberate; they almost certainly haven’t come up with a good explanation for the physics of it. In some past editions, infravision sensed heat coming off of objects to see in the dark, but darkvision apparently does not use heat to see (Dungeons & Dragons Conversion Manual, 2000, p.6). In addition, it appears that darkvision sees only in shades of grey, and can see in a total lack of light. It doesn’t see invisible creatures, so it can only see things which could be seen with visible light, if there were any visible light, which there isn’t. It’s fairly confusing, really, to try to understand the physics of it, since all we have for this edition is hand waving, especially when you add in things like the abilities of Gloom Stalker Rangers, but let’s do our best here with what little we do have:
1) We know it does not allow colour to be seen, only shades of grey, although it’s not clear what each shade of grey corresponds with. We know it’s not heat and we know it’s not colour. What options are left? It could be something about the object’s visible spectrum shade (this would explain a species being stone-coloured, but that seems infinitely unlikely, since it’s not seeing the visible spectrum), their distance, their texture, or something else (this is clearly not magic though, since darkvision still works in antimagic zones). Possibly the minerals in the soil and rocks (and creature bodies) emit a frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum (or emit something else mysterious) either above or below the visible spectrum, and the ‘darkvision receptors’ in eyes with darkvision are picking that up. It also is possible that the creature with darkvision is emitting those frequencies itself, but if it did it would stand out like a beacon to other species which could see those frequencies, ruining stealth, so that’s clearly not the case. We just don’t know, but the mineral emission option seems like a reasonable best guess to me.
2) Darkvision drops off over very short distances. This supports the minerals emitting a frequency, if that frequency does not travel far.
3) Creatures become neither more nor less stealthy when viewed with darkvision. Since darkvision does not include one important element of vision which creatures use to detect other creatures (colour), this implies that darkvision is better at picking up another element of vision for spotting hidden creatures. Sadly, we are given no more clues regarding what that element may be. It seems obvious that it is not texture, or else anything not made of stone would stand out like a beacon in caves, and stealth would never work. Realistically however, I am assuming that bringing too much science into this is not going to be very helpful, since I am assuming that the lack of explanation of the physics behind it is because there was no scientific mechanism behind it beyond handwaving, so it could in fact easily be either distance or texture. I have chosen to assume in my game that it is distance, since that seems to fit better with the remaining facts. In caves, distance from an object would be far more important than any other aspect of sight, for purposes of navigation as well as prey detection and predator avoidance. One of the only things which we know about darkvision is that it drops off quickly over distance, so presumably something being emitted from the surroundings is being picked up in the eye, but since this mysterious emission drops off over relatively short distances, it would make nearer things appear brighter and further things appear darker since fewer ‘darkvision photons’ would be reaching the eye from further objects. In addition, creatures with darkvision that reaches farther could be easily explained by them simply having more efficient collection organs in their eyes. In the real world, colour shades can only be observed by a creature if visible light is reflecting off of it and entering the eye of the observer, and this is obviously not happening in total darkness, since by definition there is no light. Distance measurement, however, can be done in any number of ways in total darkness, including the way that bats manage it in the real world, without them being detected doing so without the use of complex electronic equipment. As such, I choose to appropriately treat the colour or shade of creatures which live in the deep places of the world, where light is not used ever, as being the same as in our world. In those situations, pigments on creatures are no longer important for use in either camouflage or communication. Pigments instead are more of an accidental secondary consideration; possibly the result of ancestral pigmentation which has not entirely disappeared as a result of the slow changes due to natural selection. “But why would pigments be lost due to natural selection,” you might ask? Let’s now move into a short overview of just one pigment, albeit the most important pigment relating to shading as well as to human skin colour: melanin.

Melanin is a force for both good and evil

Melanin has both positive and negative effects for the creatures which utilise it in their bodies. There are two main groupings of melanins which provide a range of colours; eumelanins produce blacks, greys, and browns, while phaeomelanins produce light browns, tans, brick reds, and dull yellows. Other types of melanins exist in bodies of creatures, but those melanins are used less in skin colouration and are more useful internally for physiological reasons- we won’t focus on them as they aren’t relevant to this conversation. While melanins are obviously helpful for organisms regarding camouflage and communication (e.g. males showing off their ‘good genes’ to females through bright colouration), there are also less easily seen beneficial physiological effects. Melanins help to protect an organism’s tissues and DNA from harmful ultraviolet radiation (which obviously is not an issue in subterranean environments, but can be seen when we are exposed to higher amounts of ultraviolet radiation and our melanin levels respond by increasing in density in the form of tanning), helps to regulate some metals in the body (such as calcium, iron, copper, zinc, magnesium, & lead), has some antioxidant functions, strengthens tissues (for example, parts of bird feathers without melanin would need to be ~40% thicker to be as strong as the parts with melanin, hence the black tips to the flight feathers on most birds), and ties to immune function, among other functions. On the downside however, producing and storing melanins can be toxic to both living tissues and to DNA. This is why much of the melanin which our bodies use is stored in the dead and/or less accessible tissues on our bodies; places like feathers, fur, and the outer layers of skin, where it can be of the most help and do the least harm.
OK, so now that we’ve seen a bit of what melanin does, let’s look at how organisms which live exclusively in deep caves, which are never exposed to light, evolve in regards to melanin, from an evolutionary perspective. Is melanin worth it? It turns out that many of melanin’s good effects are negated when there is no exposure to light. Camouflage and communication benefits of melanin don’t work in the dark, and there is no damaging ultraviolet radiation to protect against. These are arguably the most important uses of melanin for most creatures. Given how common it is for organisms to lose their external melanin pigmentation after becoming permanent deep cave dwellers, it appears that melanin’s adverse effects in these situations outweigh their remaining advantages (although some albino cave organisms retain the ability to produce large amounts of melanin around wound sites to benefit from the immune functions). Populations of planarians (flatworms), annelids (worms), molluscs, arthropods, and vertebrates commonly lose their external melanin and/or their eyes when maintained in cave environments for long spans of time.

Melanin in Dungeons & Dragons

So now we know what happens to organisms which live in caves for generation after generation. How does this affect us in Dungeons & Dragons? Well, according to the Monster Manual (page 126), the drow have lived undergrounds for tens of thousands of years, long enough to have evolved to their surroundings. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes adds more information about their background and history but adds nothing more that really contradicts that information. Given that the Monster Manual makes it clear that they have lived underground for long enough to evolve to their surroundings, there is no reason why they should be “dark” elves. As we have already seen, populations lose pigment the longer they stay underground, not gain more of it. The only real reason for making drow black is because:

as the Monster Manual states, they are the “wickedest of elves”
some European cultures associate black with evil, and
Dungeons and Dragons was written largely by people with European ancestry and who were raised in similar Euro-centric cultures.

The main problems with making drow black-skinned, as I see it, are twofold. First, the biology doesn’t match. Drow should be albino or close to it, as they have lived so long underground that they have adapted to their environment. Second, and this is significantly more obvious to most people with even a modicum of intelligence, people with black skin are not evil. So the drow in my games are not black-skinned; they are essentially albino. This is not because albino people are evil (spoiler: they’re not evil, despite what some morons claim). It’s because no colours are evil, and because skin colour has nothing to do with whether you are good or evil. It’s entirely because cave dwelling populations tend to become albino, because melanin becomes a costly burden for cave dwellers, instead of the helpful resource that surface dwellers find it to be. In addition, I have made their eyes completely black. This is also not because black is evil, but because I thought about what colour the eyes of something might be if it has been subterranean for so long that they can’t see properly in normal light but use darkvision, and I had no idea. So I chose black as a counter to the pale white. It could have been any colour, but for a creature which doesn’t see colour, there didn’t seem to be much point to making a fancy coloured pigment, and white eyes seemed wrong because it makes the face difficult to differentiate in miniatures. I’m flying blind here. My drow also have faintly brown hair as a result of the shampoo which they use, based off of a mushroom recipe, and their clothes are brown or purple, as they are largely also made from mushrooms. You use what’s available, and if mushrooms are the most common ‘plants’ (yes, I know they’re not plants; please tell WotC that), then they will be used commonly for whatever is possible. That’s not canon, except in my games, but it seemed to make the most sense to me.

What about duergar or deep gnomes? Should they be albino as well?

According to Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, duergar raiding parties regularly go to the surface. This is exactly the sort of thing which you would need to do to keep your population from evolving in the same way as populations which are entirely cave-dwelling. A stark white dwarf wandering moonlit fields at night would stand out like a sore thumb and would not be returning with the rest of the raiding party to pass on its genes to the next generation.
There is much less history for deep gnomes, or svirfneblin, but there are tales of deep gnomes coming to the surface for a while for various reasons, as well as tales of entire cities of svirfneblin fleeing overrun cities and making new homes on the surface. Again, this sort of behaviour is not conducive to evolving your typical deep cave-dwelling traits.

But why are you doing this?

As usual for these videos, my aim is to provide you with good views of all angles of the miniatures featured, along with accurate sizing information for them. As I already pointed out, the drow miniature is on a medium sized base as it is meant to be. In addition I would like to thank wildlife artist Sherrie York, the incredibly skilled reduction linocut artist, for graciously allowing me to use one of her reduction linocuts, Shivano Sunset, as the backdrop for my miniatures in the video. Check out her other reduction linocuts; she is, in my opinion, the best linocut artist of our generation.