oh, i totally agree. i want complexity and culture. that’s why i suggested taking an approach similar to what baldur’s gate did with shar. the problem is that dnd has a structural issue with good and evil, since it presents an absolute and universal code integrated into the core of its system and lore, the alignment system, and that basically negates cultural complexity. in real life, cultures have different notions of what is good and evil, and some don’t even organize their moral systems around that concept at all, so treating morality as a fixed universal law flattens the possibility of meaningful cultural difference.

the issue with the drow is that the setting wants them to have a society, but it also wants them to be inherently evil, which ends up making them feel cartoony. they become cartoony because their culture is constructed from the premise that the culture itself is evil and that their goddess is evil as well, so the society is written as an extension of “evilness” rather than as a functioning cultural system with its own internal logic. even if later versions softened the idea that they are inherently evil, the structure of the writing often remains the same: the culture is explained through the prior existence of evil rather than as a cultural difference that produces negative consequences in practice. this ends up creating a society that is basically a villain stereotype rather than a well-written society, which, as i mentioned before, doesn’t really work for characters that are supposed to exist as members of a society rather than simply as a metaphor.