Drow of the Underdark (1991) follows the Draconomicon in the Forgotten Realms sourcebook series. Shockingly, considering my general ambivalence to FR, I mostly like this series, probably because they are mostly by Ed Greenwood. I like FR best when Greenwood is writing about it.

This book is about drow, in case you hadn’t noticed. It appeared in the fourth year of the drow-mania ushered in by Drizzt’s appearance in The Crystal Shard and subsequent books by R. A. Salvatore. Drow had, since the first hints of their existence in Monster Manual, captured a certain sort of player’s imagination, but Drizzt pushed that interest to a fever pitch. Good, bad, it didn’t matter: as long as it involved drow, people would buy it. At the same time, drow were no longer playable and D&D was firmly in the “don’t make moms angry” phase of its existence. That makes this book…odd.

Greenwood is pretty emphatic that drow are bad. Very bad. They have bad super powers and bad magic items and are the products of a society that is unforgivably bad. Setting aside the 21st century re-evaluation of drow and absolute alignments (which I tackle in my book, which you should go buy!), there seems to be some confusion here between bad and cool. Because for as unredeemable as this book wants drow to be, it really doesn’t impact their cool factor. Not even a little bit. I was never under the ‘90s spell of the drow and reading through this, they still come off as pretty cool. Except that portrait of Drizzt on the cover. I never thought that guy looked cool, with his poofy hair and the metal plate in his head. Isn’t he a good guy, anyway?

This is maybe the pinnacle of self-contradictory early-‘90s D&D products, a real head-scratcher that remains rather compelling in spite of itself.