Pathfinder Remastered Will Drop Drow

As Paizo continues to work on updated (“Remastered”) editions of the Pathfinder 2e books, they’ve announced that they’re going to do away with Drow entirely from the Pathfinder game and setting. Also known as dark elves, Drow are evil elven-kind that live underground. They were first mentioned in the Advanced Dungeons And Dragons 1st edition Monster Manual, published in 1977.

This seems to have to do with Paizo’s goal of cutting ties entirely with the Open Gaming License (OGL), after Wizard Of The Coast recently (and controversially) released revised drafts that threatened the future of third party works based in the OGL. In a recent livestream, narrative creative director James Jacobs said that Drow are “really identified with Dungeons and Dragons.”

Other races/species from the Darklands area of Golarion (Pathfinder’s setting), however, are sticking around, for example the Duergar. They’ve been revised to remove the slavery element and a little bit rebooted conceptually.

But Jacobs says that the Drow are so iconically D&D that it just doesn’t seem possible to revise them in a similar and have them feel genuine, saying, “There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the Drow.”