The drow are often cited as an example of sexism in gaming, so I decided to give Vault of the Drow a reread. The results were surprising. I have the blue book edition of the module.
The Erol Otus cover has a woman in impractical armour, but she’s not particularly sexualized past that token genre wear. She’s attacking a PC stand-in and looks angry.
On the way to the drow city, the party encounters a succubus and her vampire boyfriend. The succubus and vampire are pictured on the back cover. She is not in a submissive pose; she’s kind of menacing somebody on the left and her hands are strategically placed, since she’s wearing a diaphanous gown. The vampire is *also* wearing a see-through garb: a kilt. He’s barechested. They’re side by side in a fairly egalitarian pose. There’s an interior cartoonish nude, but she’s actually standing tall, with imperiled party members scattering before her, with the implication that it’s scary when she reveals she’s actually a succubus.
When you meet the succubus in the encounter, she’s nude, but is actually pretending to be a statue plucking a flower. The notes talk about using magical suggestion but emphasize that she’s going to soften PCs up for when the boyfriend attacks.
The drow are evil. In terms of an aesthetic, that evil is often associated with lots of porn — “lewd” images. That’s about as much sexuality as the module ever suggests.
Drow society is not really described as any kind of male-gaze matriarchy. It’s a theocracy where the women have more power because they’re better clerics and they worship a demon goddess. Outside of that, there are male *and* female fighting societies (compare this to Salvatore’s portrayal). The women act ad peacekeepers among the drow noble houses, while the men do the same for the merchant houses.
Lolth is described as having an attractive drow form, but all the pictures portray her as a big spider-monster.
The drow monster description doesn’t say much about gender except to note class, level limit and equipment differences. This is par for the course for the module. One thing to note is that the description specifically describes the drow as *not* resembling any real world ethnicity.
To conclude: It looks like the original modules were better for this sort of thing than subsequent portrayals. The cover of GDQ (where drow were African-looking and wearing see through swimsuits) was retrograde and didn’t even portray anybody depicted in the module. Salvatore’s Menzoberranzan is also worse, as in the original modules there was a pretty even split in gendered labour divisions.
It’s not without flaws, of course. There are plenty of annoying implications, but the whole thing is less annoying than future iterations of the drow.