Why no drow?

Drow came up as a suggestion for monsters I should include in my DF game.

I said: "No drow. Period."

Why?

On my ride home from work I thought I'd probably need to address that, if only because at least of my players likes the drow. Here is that attempt to address it.

Basically, because the drow come with a lot of baggage.

First, you have the AD&D baggage of the Eiservs clan, the Against the Giants series, and the Vault of the Drow. Good stuff, but it has a definite shaping of what drow are and what people expect from them.

Second, you have the baggage of later editions's versions of what drow are like, or do.

Third, you have those novels by Salvatore. I haven't read them, but they carry a lot of weight in terms of what people expect drow to be like.

Finally, I have the baggage of how drow were in my own Forgotten Realms-based GURPS game.

They are a pretty interesting race. But there is now way to use them without bringing in expectations that would fundamentally change how people react to them and deal with them.

Contrast that to, say, the six-fingered masters of Felltower. Who are they? What are they like? It's all built in play. There are no expectations of what they are like. There are no novels about them, no memories of how someone's half-drow elf was run, no thoughts about how "good" or "evil" or whatever they should be. They simply are, and what they are is defined by what happens in play.

Simply put, putting in drow would stamp out some of the uniqueness of Felltower and replace it with canon and preconceptions. And that's not a positive.