- #DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER RACES MANUAL#
- #DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER RACES PLUS#
- #DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER RACES FREE#
And that makes them the evil ones? Please.Ĭontinuing the disrespectful way duergar are treated in D&D, they have not once been a character option for any video game or featured as good characters in any work of fiction. Yet, the duergar were tortured, enslaved, and manipulated and returned looking for sympathy but were given none. Looking at the details of the oath, it is not classified as an act of evil.īecause Moradin was angry his followers left, he cast them out and wouldn’t accept them back into society again. But if we look at another aspect of Dungeons and Dragons, this is a classic example of the oath of vengeance for paladins. It is this one act that results with the duergar and Laduguar being labeled as evil beings. Thus, with no other apparent choice, the lost clan fled back to the Underdark. “Laduguer, in response, tried to explain that his people had been lured into a trap by the mind flayers, but his assertions fell on deaf ears. As Laduguer quickly learned, the priests of Moradin had long ago labeled the lost clan as heretics, spoken of now only as an object lesson concerning the fate of dwarves who stray from Moradin’s teachings.” “When Laduguer and his people returned to the dwarves of the upper world, they were shocked by the hostility they faced. After freeing those captured, Laduguer and the duergar returned to the surface seeking solace and guidance from the dwarves and their god Moradin. The pact granted Laduguer godhood but also weakened the minds of the duergar making them even more emotionless and greedy.
#DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER RACES FREE#
In order to free his people from the illithids, Laduguer went to the Nine Hells and made a deal with Asmodeus. It wasn’t until a lone duergar named Laduguer came along that the duergar people were freed from the clutches of the illithids. Another side effect gave the deep dwarves psionic abilities to turn invisible and grow larger for a time. Their time spent under the dominion of the mind flayers warped their minds taking away their emotions. The duergar were tortured, experimented on, and enslaved for decades. But before then, the illithid are alien creatures who live in the Underdark and enslave other races, with one of the most prominent being the duergar. You’ll see them as the antagonist in Baldur’s Gate 3when it releases in early access in August, maybe. Having wound up in the Underdark they were met with the tyrannical and alien mind flayers. (Cue Lord of the Rings Mines of Moria music). One of their gods, Laduguer, was given a short snippet as well but it wasn’t enough to reason why the duergar are evil.ĭelving deeper into their backstory we learn that they were once dwarves who left their mountain homes and dug too deep. They’re generically classified as evil but are never given a reason why. “Sometimes called gray dwarves, these evil beings dwell in the underground.”
#DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER RACES MANUAL#
The only information we get is about their alignment.Īn excerpt from the Monster Manual says this about duergar. Actually, they didn’t receive any lore here at all. However, they didn’t get much of a backstory. (Don’t get me started on how making a race evil is stupid, because it is, it’s stupid.) It’s not until the third edition of the Monster Manual, released in 2000, that duergar became a fully fledged race complete with their own stats. However, they were considered evil creatures which characters could fight and weren’t officially classified as a character race until much later. Duergar made their first appearance in the AD&D Monster Manual way back in 1983 and were created by Gary Gygax. To understand why duergar, or gray dwarves, need to be more inclusive and represented better, we need to look at their history in Dungeons and Dragons. It’s about time the deep dwarves, like drow and orc, are represented as more than thralls, evil creatures, lesser and become a playable race in future video games. The grey dwarves are one of a number of races that have been mistreated and mislabeled over the years and have never been featured as custom characters or companions in any video game or work of fiction. That will make a total of 15 playable races in the sequel.
#DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS PLAYER RACES PLUS#
Two decades later, Baldur’s Gate 3 will be adding more races to the Dungeons and Dragons series with Larian Studios including tiefling, githyanki, drow, and half-drow, plus four unnamed races. The Baldur’s Gate series released in 1998 with seven playable races: human, elf, half-elf, gnome, halfling, dwarf, and half-orc.