Meta:Drow

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Retcon

Until the publication of Heavy is the Crown, drow were the predominant people in Sekamina and serpentfolk (sekmin) were far less common. Heavy established that the primary in-universe source of information about the drow, Pathfinder Chronicles Volume 44, was unreliable and had intentionally understated the scale and scope of sekmin dominance in the Darklands.

Heavy was the first work to contain Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster Project changes relevant to the Darklands. The Remaster Project retroactively removed the drow from Golarion's history due to intellectual property conflicts with other games. With the combination of this framing of the in-universe Chronicles in Heavy as unreliable and this real-world retconning of the drow, previous canon details about the drow are presumed to be in-universe fiction or intentional disinformation.

See also official clarifications by James Jacobs (1, 2) and Luis Loza (1, 2) confirming that the drow were retroactively removed from Golarion's history in the Remaster. -Oznogon (talk) 03:55, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

For the article's content prior to the changes implementing this retcon, see revision 393181. -Oznogon (talk) 18:59, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
The role of Pathfinder Chronicles Volume 44 as in-universe justification for the retcon continues to generate confusion. For further clarification from Jacobs confirming that this framing in Heavy is the Crown is the in-universe justification for the legally required retroactive removal of the drow, see the archived video of the PaizoCon 2023 panel "Into the Darklands" (20'00" to 21'45") or transcribed below. -Oznogon (talk) 20:15, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
The article itself is pretty short. The framing device is basically, Koriah Azmeren, who is a Pathfinder, in the very early days of Pathfinder we had her set up as the first one to explore the Darklands. She reported back in the form of a Pathfinder Chronicle—I believe it was 40 (ed: 44)—which is all about like, here's what I found down deep underground. And (she) was the first person from the surface world to really explore that.
In ("Into the Darklands" in Heavy is the Crown) it's revealed that she kind of did a few... she fiddled with the truth a little bit. There was this big threat in the underground world that she wanted to protect people on the surface from, because if they knew about it she feared it would cause panic. So she kind of, there's more fiction I guess in the in-world Pathfinder volume 44 than fact. And that's sort of our in-world mechanic for why there's going to be some pretty significant changes to how the Darklands work.
And I guess I'll get right to it. The biggest one of those is we are not going to be doing much with drow going forward, and the reason for that is drow elves are pretty popular. They're really really identified with Dungeons and Dragons, and a lot of great work making them super popular. But it's something that is an entire element of the game environment that is so deeply in mentioned in the OGL, but it's easier to move in a different direction than to try to figure out how to recast and recontextualize that. And so part of what this article does is it updates the Darklands into the Second Edition with new content. We took advantage of that to also make a few adjustments and changes to some other OGL content and also to add in some new brand new stuff.

Unincorporated sources

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