The Derro - The Unlikely Origin of D&D's Most Underrated Villains

You have been wandering through the Underdark for days now. At least, you’re pretty sure it’s been days: It’s hard to tell, given the lack of sunlight and the ever-present glow of these damned mushrooms. The smell of subterranean gasses float up from deeper, darker levels of this cursed labyrinth, snagging in your throat and clinging to your nostrils. Every now and then, a lizard the size of a horse lumbers by, fixing you in its lazy purple gaze. Sometimes, you think you hear voices. 

You pray that they are friendly. 

They never are. 

From the darkness they emerge; short, shabby creatures with wild white eyes and thick moustaches shaped into sinister points. They snarl through sharpened teeth, and in their calloused hands they carry whips, flails, rusted hooks, and filth-laden chains. They are out for blood. 

Creepy right? It gets creepier. 

Derro are a pretty weird addition to the classic D&D monster menagerie. Appearing all the way back in 1e, these scrawny little buggers resemble a cross between a dwarf and a heavy metal bassist, with pale blue skin and shaggy moustaches. Their defining feature - aside from their legendary cruelty - is their enormous white eyes, which bug out of their oversized heads like those of a cave cricket. They are astonishingly sadistic, even by the standards of the underdark, and are infamous for their paranoia and seemingly omnipresent madness. 

There are plenty of creatures in the Monster Manual that seem to have sprung whole-cloth from the minds of D&D’s original writers, and on first glance the Derro seem no exception. They seem like a dark mirror to the dwarves and duergar: Every bit as diminutive and hairy as their industrious cousins, but altogether more chaotic and spiteful. In-universe they act like boogeymen, coming to the surface primarily to snatch up naughty kiddies and torment the unsuspecting. So far, so D&D. 

The thing is, the Derro weren’t invented by Gygax and his cohort. Their origins go back further, and are much darker. 

A Warning to Future Man 

In 1943, a man by the name of Richard Sharpe Shaver wrote into Amazing Stories magazine with details of a revelation: He had deciphered the ancient language of Atlantis, and with it had uncovered the true history of mankind. In this - and subsequent - letters to Amazing Stories editor and notorious huckster Ray Palmer, Shaver told a fantastical tale of the primordial god-beings that once ruled the earth from their subterranean cities. These “Elder Races” possessed incredible technologies and mind-bending powers, but they were no match for earth’s sun, whose radiation was slowly killing them and driving them to madness. They fled the planet, leaving behind their stunted offspring. Their descendants split into two camps: The terrestrial “Teros”, who would go on to evolve into modern day humans, and a race of vile, “degenerate” cousins who dwell beneath the earth and use their vast psionic powers to spread pain and misery. 

These creatures, Shaver tells us, are called Deros. 

Despite being named for robots, the Deros of Shaver’s tale are biological entities that thrive on suffering. These creatures would harness the “god mech” technology of their distant ancestors to direct events on the surface world, causing everything from minor injuries and ailments to natural disasters, plane crashes, and other terrible events. The Deros also possessed access to flying saucers and rocket ships, which they used to explore the surface world and abduct prisoners for tortuous experiments and acts of mindless violence.

Once Shaver’s stories - which he insisted were 100% true and accurate events that he had witnessed firsthand - entered the public consciousness, others began to write of their own experiences with the Deros. One woman wrote into Amazing Stories telling of a secret elevator that leads to Dero caverns beneath Paris, where she was kidnapped and assaulted for months. Fred Crisman, the infamous conspiracy theorist, ufologist, and hoaxer¹ who would go on to be tangentially related to the assassination of JFK, claimed that he battled “mysterious and evil” Deros in northern Pakistan during the second world war. Shaver’s story was a hit. 

But Who Was Richard Sharpe Shaver?

Richard Sharpe Shaver was born as Dick Shaver in 1907 in Berwick, PA. He lived a fairly unremarkable life, working as a meat packer, landscape gardener, welder, and the like. He was an intensely creative man, and in the early 1930s got himself a job as a part-time art model where he would meet his future wife Sophie Gurvitch. 

The next few years, however, were difficult. The art school that Sophie taught at permanently closed just a few weeks before Dick and Sophie got married. In 1934, his brother died unexpectedly of pneumonia, resulting in a deep and lasting depression that Shaver self-medicated with alcohol. He soon began harbouring paranoid delusions that his brother had been killed by the mob, and that during his time as a welder he developed telepathic powers that gave insight into the “malign entities in caverns deep within the earth.” Shaver was eventually institutionalised - first at Ypsilanti State Hospital, then Grafton State Hospital, then finally Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. During his first stint in hospital, his wife died, and their daughter Evelyn was signed over to Shaver’s parents. 

Shaver was eventually discharged in 1943, the same year he wrote to Amazing Stories magazine. His first story - which was eventually repackaged by aforementioned editor and huckster Ray Palmer as I Remember Lemuria! - was a long-winded and rambling recitation of Dick’s life as he remembered it: Lowly factory worker Dick Shaver gains telepathic powers due to “some freak of [his welding gun’s] field atunements [sic]”, and overhears a torture session psychically recorded by the evil Deros that live in the centre of the earth. Dick quits his job and flees, becoming a drifter and hobo before eventually writing his story down for publication in Amazing Stories. This version of events is notable in that it leaves out Sophie, Evelyn, and Dick’s years of hospitalisation. 

With Palmer’s heavy editing, Dick’s stories became somewhat readable. Palmer wove classic elements of esoterica - Atlantis and Lemuria, “racial memory” and the “Akashic Records”, etc. - into Shaver’s recounting and changed the author’s name from humble Dick Shaver into the respectable Richard Sharpe Shaver. Dick’s rambling prose - which alone could take up hundreds of pages - was added as a series of footnotes to the published story to give it a sort of scientific edge². With Palmer’s coaching, Dick would go on to write countless more short sci-fi horror stories, each with the same basic themes: Subterranean monsters that psychically torture surface-dwellers, primordial god-beings that created incredible technology, sado-masochistic violence (usually directed towards women). 

The reception, it is fair to say, was mixed. The kids that read Amazing Stories ate it up, doubling the magazine’s sales overnight. More established sci-fi authors - including none other than cantankerous super-genius Harlan Ellison, of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream fame - detested the stories, which he decried as “publicity grabber[s]”. Palmer’s insistence on replicating the stories - which obviously have their roots in Shaver’s psychotic delusions - as if “fact” has also drawn ire over the years. Indeed, author Michael Barkun even makes a case that the conspiracy hoax QAnon, with its horde of subterranean monsters that indulge in sadistic torture for their own gain, could well trace its origins back to Shaver’s stories. 

Conclusion 

Dick Shaver’s career of fantasies didn’t end with Amazing Stories. In the 70s, Shaver was living a life of relative obscurity when he claimed to have discovered his infamous “rock books”, which he claimed provided physical evidence of alien life. He wrote extensively about these rock books, eventually creating a mail-in lending library where borrowers would receive a slice of polished agate and a detailed itinerary of the “book’s” purported contents. Dick died on November 5, 1975, and in the years since his death his work has become a focal point for conspiracy theorists and aficionados of outsider art alike. 

Dick Shaver was clearly a brilliant man. His writing was bizarre and otherworldly, and gave shape to a new generation of weird fiction. He was also a deeply troubled man, plagued by psychosis and traumatised by the death of his brother and wife and the loss of his daughter. His desire to understand the world through conspiracy - to put a face and an identity to the random acts of tragedy that tormented him - is one that in our modern world is all too familiar. 

With all this in mind, the Derro make for a fascinating - albeit slightly tragic - monster for Dungeons and Dragons. While there are few surviving links between the Derro of D&D and the Deros of Shaver’s Amazing Stories, there is enough of an overlap - their subterranean nature, their cruelty, their psychic potential - to see a clear link that extends beyond their name. 

I think that the Derro are due for a reevaluation. Their sadism - born of a desperate and damaged man seeking answers for the trauma he had experienced - makes them compelling antagonists, perfect for an Underdark horror campaign. Their oft-forgotten sci-fit roots seem fertile ground for inspiration: Rather than just being mindless, spiteful brutes that vaguely resemble Lemmy from Motörhead, they could be powerful psionic scientists with an effortless command over UFOs and the “God Mech” of bygone days. 

Just remember, when incorporating these creatures into your campaign, to think back to Dick Shaver, and the brilliant, turmoil-stricken mind that first created them. 

---

¹ Oh, but I repeat myself.

² Footnotes, as we all agree, are the foremost tool of the talentless hack.