A D&D Mirror Universe (Thread Rehash)

[Dusk Raven]

Once upon a time, I posted a thread suggesting a "mirror universe" of sorts, wherein all of the classic "evil races" were good, and vice-versa for the "good races" (Hereafter, I'll be referring to the evil-turned-good races as "Dark" races and the good-turned evil races as "Light"). It's been years since that thread was active, but I've got the mirror universe on my mind again, and rather than reviving the old thread (again) I decided I'd start a new one.

So, imagine a world turned on its head, where the familiar Player's Handbook races are evil, and the barbarian hordes of orcs as well as the underground drow, amongst other races, are actually good. What does this actually look like, when you get down to the particulars? My preferred method was to keep as much of the race's lore intact as possible, only flipping them from one side of the morality axis to the other. This was a challenging task in some cases - how does one turn backstabbing drow slavers good, for instance? Towards the end of that thread we'd started coming up with a theme to work off of for the Light and Dark races, but that was a long time ago, and perhaps it's time to start fresh.

I'm curious to see other Playgrounders' takes on this concept. I'm thinking of running (or at least requesting) a game set in such a setting, and I haven't yet finalized my concept for the setting. Sometime later I'll post what I've managed to come up with, but for now I just want to get this thread up and get the conversation started, again.

[EdokTheTwitch]

Well, let's see if I can somehow contribute:

Flipping the alignment creates a drastically different world compared to the basic fantasy setting, in a way that it becomes a kind of "What if Sauron won", but the Orcs were pretty. I imagine a civilization built on tyranny, Lawful Evil to the core, with people striving to advance through sabotage and espionage where the basic would advance through skill. Elves would still be nature-aligned, but more as predators than shepherds, living and hunting in packs. Dwarves are craftsmen focusing primarily on weaponry over any other craft, and Halflings are thieves and essentially any other stereotype. The world itself would hold itself together not through peace in diplomacy, but the threat of losing power and mutually assured destruction.

On the other hand, I see Orcs being roaming tribes of shamans who focus on restoring nature in an ever-losing battle, Drow kidnapping children and raising them to be better in a hope of overtaking the dominant races when those children grow and become spies/infiltrators, Kobolds being scholars of dragons and creating monasteries around dragon lairs, and let's say Mind Flayers feeding solely off of evil humanoids, sharing their acquired knowledge to keep up technologically.

This is probably difficult to understand, but hopefully at least somewhat helpful!

[Jervis]

One of my settings has a take on Drow that has some flavors of this. I’ll give a quick rundown of elf politics so this makes sense. Basically elves in that setting are bound by a law of Corellon, not so much magically bound as it is a religious and legal code. Elves are kinda divided up by subrace where the subraces that are part of the Sylvainus council, that being most of the common elf flavors, get a seat at the table discussing all things elf and two gods to be part of the proper elf pantheon where Corellon himself is the head god and one of the high elf representatives. Some subraces just aren’t represented for one reason or another but Drow aren’t one of those. Elves are expected to follow the Law of Corellon which is his law of what makes a ideal chaotic good society. Elves are run primarily as a theocratic monarchy with clerics being the main law of the land.

His laws are a bit too long to go into here but the main thing is that it forbids killing outside of self defense or war and a consequence of this is vegetarianism. Breaking any given law resulted in being imprisoned one of the underdark caverns near elven until a cleric determined you were sufficiently sorry, the logic being that elves were naturally like Corellon made thing and thus would see the error of their ways if left along for long enough. Well Lolth in this setting never agreed with Corellon even in the early days, for a lot of reasons unrelated to this. At some point a food shortage caused by a blight brought everything to a head. A lot of elves who weren’t in settlements with clerics capable of casting spells to fix the food shortage ended up getting locked up for hunting. This was a straw that broke the camel’s back sort of scenario that resulted in a cleric of Lolth leading all the elves that got locked down there for one reason or another into the underdark. A few generations later and we have the Drow.

Drow culture there is admittedly a bit of a Australia joke playing on the terminology of “living down under”, complete with its under common being common with a thick Austrian accent spoken/written backwards. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s not full on “elves bad Drow good” as it is “everything is complicated”. Drow actually trade with dwarves a lot to the point that the elves and dwarves hate each other trope gets inverted when Drow are involved. A lot of them are big game hunters. On the terms of societal complications though elven society is very free and idealistic on paper especially since the whole underdark punishment thing is gone, but elves that don’t adhere to Corellons view of what a elf should be are kinda forced to follow or leave one way or another. It’s sort of meant to be a juxtaposition between his alignment and morals fitting into CG on paper but in practice everyone kinda gets forced to comply with Corellons sense of morality, which is very random, subjective, and hypocritical. That’s not to say Drow are all good either; Lolth is very Drow first to the point that just about anything is justifiable as long as Drow benefit. Drow society is a strict theocracy with Lolth’s priestesses at the top. That said they aren’t comically evil like they are in most settings. They might have spies on every kingdom but they’re still diplomatic. And Lolth herself is a lot kinder to Drow in the setting. And Drow cities are a lot less depressing with the men not being treated like trash.

Orcs have a different take in the setting as well. Basically Grumsh is dead and now orcs are sort of like Warforged. They were all made to be soldiers in war that’s already over. Some orcs are trying to revive him while others are trying to live in peace with others. Going much more into would take a much bigger setting lore dump though.

[Quizatzhaderac]

Elves believe the forest is theirs; if some other people have lived there for a hundred years, there are merly persistent squatters. Yes, they won't be able to survive once driven away, but they were only able to overbreed so due to their stolen land.

The other races are children that don't know what's best for themselves. Foreign Kings left to their own judgement will bring ruin and require subtle manipulation.

Dwarfs love their gold and their honor; people, not so much. Anything that isn't their responsibility doesn't bother them. People suffering because it is their place or because they made a bad agreement is natural and inevitable.

Dwarven lord partake grand enterprises. Some details go unnoticed and the lives of small people get swept aside.

Humans stick together, right or wrong. They'll always come to help other humans against monsters, no questions asked. Questions like why are the Orcs mad at you? where did you get all those coins with portraits of goblins of them? Is trolls blood just a name, right?

Halfings don't like to get involved. Find you bleeding on the side of the road? I'll stay away from that business, thank-you-very-much.

Likewise, they don't like it when outsiders get involved. They're no much for fighting, but they can spread bad rumors faster than can eagle's flight.

[Yakk]

Colonialism makes this relatively easy.

The "Light" races have invaded this world through portals.

Dwarves have occupied the mountains, Elves have occupied the great forests, Humans have occupied the plains, and Halflings are a mixture of home bases and traveling merchants who trade between the various empires. Gnomes are everywhere, treated as idiot-savants who do low-reward magic-tek maintenance (in Dwarven lands) or forest maintenance (in Elven lands) or both (in Human lands). They are as respected as a night soil worker might be in the 1700s; necessary, but no status. "Real creativity" is reserved for the upper classes (and gnomes are not upper class). Due to the dangers of "wild" tinkering, gnomes are all magically branded with their "keeper", which can be used to locate a wayward gnome and hold the keeper responsible for any damage their charge deals.

The Drow are a plantation society. The Elves discovered this world had a species that could interbreed. They replaced and coopted the ruling caste and rule them by proxy in as brutal slave overlords. Quite possibly the rulers of the Drow are actually Elves magic-jar'd into "noble" drow lines. These possessed Drow choose elven parents for their heirs, resulting in the upper class of Drow society slowly moving to looking more and more elvish. (Not all of the upper class is soul-replaced -- who wants to actually do all of the work to run a society? -- but the top is heavily replaced. The more-elven look of the upper classes has ensured that the "free" Drow tend to view the under classes as lesser as well, and by extension the elves as superior. And so it goes...)

Elves engage in this kind of body swapping/soul swapping regularly. It is part of how they grow up. Individual elven bodies don't live for 1000 years -- that is ridicuous -- but their souls do. A template (an elf without citizenship rights) has their soul replaced by an elder elf. So doing this with the Drow is nothing special -- the difference is that all of the Drow are viewed as sub-elven.

We can place this during the Westward genocide of the USA: the Plains orcs are being pushed back by Humans. Some tried to be peaceful or the like, but that just delays the Genocide a generation or two.

Deep gnomes are part of the resistance against the oppression, fled into the dark. Their nondetection ability is how they free the oppressed gnomes.

Humans are remarkably bio compatible with other species. A number of lines have been developed for specialist purposes -- half-elves are diplomats and domestic servants, half-orcs are used as legionaries, muls do heavy industrial work, goliaths (half-giants) are both used as heavy industrial workers and shock troops. Tieflings (fiend cross humans) are more likely to have magical talents, and are often a member of the upper-middle class for that reason.

Dwarves lack this ability to generate slave castes like the Humans. Their solution has been to build them -- the secret of warforged come out of Dwarven lands.

Elves meanwhile train magical beasts for military and industrial use. When you can move their souls around, it becomes surprisingly easy to breed trainable terror drake (trex) to obey certain commands.

As each of the species is very leery of each other, Halflings are the go-between at the small scales. An ancient compact lets them travel freely between each land, even during war. Talking about the details of the compact is taboo, but people who violate it do not have pleasant or long lives.

Goblins are considered similar to feral cats. They keep your cities free of rats, mostly, breed fast, and aren't dangerous. Having a neutered goblin for such purposes isn't rare, or even a small breeding colony on a farm. They came with the invaders from the Light world.

...

Is that dark enough for ya?

[Starlit Dragon]

Elves believe the forest is theirs; if some other people have lived there for a hundred years, there are merly persistent squatters. Yes, they won't be able to survive once driven away, but they were only able to overbreed so due to their stolen land.

The other races are children that don't know what's best for themselves. Foreign Kings left to their own judgement will bring ruin and require subtle manipulation.

Dwarfs love their gold and their honor; people, not so much. Anything that isn't their responsibility doesn't bother them. People suffering because it is their place or because they made a bad agreement is natural and inevitable.

Dwarven lord partake grand enterprises. Some details go unnoticed and the lives of small people get swept aside.

Humans stick together, right or wrong. They'll always come to help other humans against monsters, no questions asked. Questions like why are the Orcs mad at you? where did you get all those coins with portraits of goblins of them? Is trolls blood just a name, right?

Halfings don't like to get involved. Find you bleeding on the side of the road? I'll stay away from that business, thank-you-very-much.

Likewise, they don't like it when outsiders get involved. They're no much for fighting, but they can spread bad rumors faster than can eagle's flight.

I like this very much.

Drow are traitors. They made compromises that no true elf would make, trading with lesser races and letting them make their homes in what was rightfully elven land. For this they were banished, and Auranshee, too soft-hearted to abandon her children, went with them. They were expected to die, forced from their homelands, but they did not. They settled into the wastes underground, tamed vermin to use as beasts of burden, and sank deeper and deeper into depravity and filth.

That's the elven story, at least. The Drow tell it differently. They showed kindness to a race that would have died anywise, a once-ally of the elves that was nevertheless considered lesser. Lolth, then called Auranshee, spoke in their defense when Corellon came down to punish them. She was therefore shared their punishment.
To survive underground, they had to abandon the traditions of the elves. They accepted shelter from other races, who remained close allies when the Drow began to built their own cities. They farmed mushrooms and tamed lizards and spiders, because there was nothing else in the Underdark. Drow are survivors above all, and they survived by the kindness of others. They haven't forgotten that.

[Metastachydium]

That reminds me: here's a thing I actually intend to have in pretty much any and every setting I use: the drow are not a thing; at best, they are a fairytale meant to scare children, but they aren't real which is for the better because they don't make a lick of sense.

That doesn't, however, mean, that dark/deep elves do not exist. They indeed do, and they are called goblins. Goblins are an offshoot of elves adapted to living under the ground. They have a much smaller stature (resulting in lower STR), larger eyes (that see better in the dark) and thick body hair (that helps keep them warm and acts as padding to make them move more silently). Living where they live made them more resilient (no penalty to CON), but other people find it difficult to take these largely harmless furry little critters seriously (hence the hit to their CHA) and it's hard to blame these other people, given that goblins do actually look like this:

Goblins are shy scavangers. They often lurk at the fringes of dwarven settlements, rifling through the dwarves' refuse for tools, food and the like. Dwarves (to lean more into this mirror universe thing than I normally do), therefore, consider them pests and are known to actively hunt them so as to cull their numbers. Goblin fur is also popular among lower class dwarves as a substitute for imported wool. High elves, in the meantime, are well aware that they are distant relatives of the goblins, so in order to showcase their "magnanimity" and "benevolence", they will sometimes pay dwarves to capture goblins alive and sell these captives off to them. Elves find goblins amusing little things and often keep specimens so bought as glorified pets.