Drow culture

>dark skin
>revere spiders (Lolth/Anansi)
>slave trade central part of culture
>manipulative scheming bastards

Are drow the fantasy counterpart of West African empires (those that sold other Africans to slavery) and, thus, modern-day Nigeria?

>inb4 KANGS

>inb4 /pol/

can any type of matriarchy be found in real history?

>inb4 that one scooby doo picture with reddit and

It's not necessarily impossible.
But I don't think there is.

Drow aren't humans though.

I have nothing better to do so let's play your game.
>Are drow the fantasy counterpart of West African empires and, thus, modern-day Nigeria?
Yes, maybe.
And your point is...?

>You will never be a drow wizard that successfully conspires to overthrow the matrons and install a magocracy

>another Are Drows just Niggers? thread

They have no analogue to any real-world culture because they're a matriarchal race of sex perverts who live in caves and talk to spiders.

Wise Sage Barry Johnson

10/10

>double triple double

Even Drizzt only every dual wielded bait posts, this guy is /triple-wielding/ his bait!

>another Are Drows just Niggers? thread

After the Lady Penitent series, which is after War of the Spider Queen, a spell was cast that turned non-evil aligned elves into "black" elves.

At main character considered that many nonevil elves in the underdark would suddenly be at a huge advantage, not being able to see and all, shrugged, and moved on with his life.

>They have no analogue to any real-world culture

If you left it there, I would have agreed with you. At least in Faerun they're originally a tribe of black elves that turned to "demons" in a time of trouble. Otherwise, the culture has become completely abstracted from any worldy things.

Requesting Eastern European Drow stories pasta

Are Drow women typically more powerful at magic than males? So wouldn't 'the magocracy' just be a slightly different form of matriarchy?

No, because in a magocracy, you would have both men and women in positions of power, such as head of finance, secretary of state, that kind of thing. In the drow culture, it's pretty hard to find a high ranking man anywhere, and even when you do, he is STILL subservient to pretty much every single woman.

Women are clerics, men are wizards.

They're pretty much equal in arcane magic, but since being a cleric is much more prestigious, most of the powerful mages end up being males.

I prefer hyper capitalist matriarchy where the women run the business and finance and the men handle the war fighting and making sure no takes the money.

Drow females are also canonically taller than the males

/thread
And thanks for the Barry.

Acknowledged. Pasta inbound.
Out.

...

Came here just to post that.

>Are drow the fantasy counterpart of West African empires (those that sold other Africans to slavery) and, thus, modern-day Nigeria?

Obviously not, retard.

That was an amazing read.

Minoans.

So the Minoans.

No
>Minoans
>King Minos

wew lad

No. Drow culture is based off the perception that early adventure fiction writers had of primitive matriarchies they thought once ruled everything.

A female ruled, religiously violent culture involving blood sucking insects and constant greed and backstabbing is a really old trope. Like She or La of Opar.

This later became a stock culture in fantasy settings because it gives the hero a chance to meet terrifying amazon women.

One word friends: chad-zak

Hawaii, I think.

Drow women are typically taller, stronger, and more magically inclined than the men.
However most drow women eschew the arcane in favor of the divine, which is why most of the merchant houses are run by male wizards.

This was one of the main complaints about the 3e changes to the Drow, given that AD&D's Drow of the Underdark describes the matron houses (headed by powerful noble drow and the clergy of Lolth) are just one of the main pillars of the society, while the merchant houses (usually educated/charismatic males and females, but typically headed by male archmages) are the other major pillar.

The merchant towers don't have the strength nor the alliances among other drow to muster defenses against the other underdark creatures or even maintain order in the cities. However the ruthlessness of the priestesses and the matron houses makes for poor communications and many issues when dealing with outside races in non-violent manners.

3e kind of pushed the merchant houses aside to focus more on hurr durr matriarchy everyone blindly follows women always forever.

Only in individual families. There are no known societies that have been unambiguously matriarchal.

Yes, but not successful ones.

Patriarchy is the answer evolution settled on.

Social behavior drives evolution, not the other way around.

user, they drive each other. Are you so naive to think that interactions only work one way?

The only thing that matters in evolution is whose sperm fertilized whose egg first. Evolution has nothing to do with social norms.

Genes and social behavior are both subject to selective pressure.

Systems of organization that can't compete on their own merits - matriarchy, or communism - die out; while capitalism and patriarchy pass the test of time.

Shouldn't that mean all Drow Women are giga-amazons with Drow Male Fuckbois?

Yes

From a drow perspective, yes.
Drow are also the shortest of the Elves though, so their women are about the height of your typical gold elf man.

But societal norms influence whose sperm fertilizes whose egg first. Why do you think European nobility is so inbred?

Correct. That is a factor that that drives evolution. Social behavior drives evolution.

Communism, capitalism and feminism are just ideas. They will all die out but the way evolution works will not, as long as there is organic life. Evolution doesn't create ideas.

Wait, really?

4'6" - 5'6"

From Drow of the Underdark
>Drow females tend to be bigger and stronger than males. Both sexes tend to be lithe, slim, and graceful in build, features, and movements, much as other elves appear to human eyes.

From the Monstrous Compendium
>Drow have black skin and pale, usually white hair. They are shorter and more slender than humans, seldom reaching more than 5 feet in height. Male drow weigh between 80 and 110 pounds, and females between 95 and 120 pounds. Drow have finely chiseled features, and their fingers and toes are long and delicate

And for completeness sake
Also from Drow of the Underdark (AD&D)
>Drow vary in shape, features, and hair color as greatly as humans do. The only exception to this rule is their uniformly jet-black skin (the few exceptions tend to be bone-white albinos).
>The majority of drow have snow-white hair from birth, yellowing (if female) or graying (if male) and thinning with great age. Rare drow have naturally silver or copper-hued hair, although there are those who deliberately dye their hair silver (see the chapter on Drow Religion, under Eilistraee).
>Most drow have red eyes. Others have green, brown, or black. Various shades of gray, even amber and rose-hued eyes are not unknown. All drow eyes tend to grow redder when they are angry or upset. Yellow eyes usually denote illness, disease, poisoning, or the presence of certain detrimental magics. Blue and purple (and all the tints thereof) are the most unusual eye colors, and usually denote human or surface elven blood somewhere in the drows ancestry.
>Drow teeth may be black, white, or purple, and their gums, tongues, and throats pink, red, or purple.

M A N L E T S
A
N
L
E
T
S

King Minos is a myth. The Minoans predate both the Ancient Greeks and the Mycenaeans.

Even many animals know not to shit where they eat and habitually keep themselves clean. I hate this meme that medieval-tech people drank out of cesspools and didn't know what caused infections. Sure, they didn't understand its mechanism of action, but "keeping a wound clean makes it less likely to kill you" is stone age caveman wisdom, as is "don't shit where you eat" and "corpses spread disease." Fuck, that's why burial and pyre rituals came about, as a means of disposal of corpses.

...That will not stop me from having 6ft drow amazons and 4'6" drow fuckbois in my setting

Will they have magical adamantine prosthetics that have rules for stripping the armor off of people mid-combat?

>magical adamantine prosthetics
Yes
>that have rules for stripping the armor off of people mid-combat?

Wasn't planning on it, was that a thing?

You're quite right about all that, but that screenshot isn't about medieval-tech people, it's about drow.

Tumblr

And yet for the longest damn time, people thought if your infected wound was squirting puss, it was being cleansed, nobody understood hygiene well enough that you could have cut down the dead toll from the black plague from like 2/3rds of Europe's population to maybe a tenth if people washed more, there were actual sewer systems fed by aqueducts and there was less garbage and filth around that created the insane breeding grounds for rats and lice.

Shit like Burials came about because of religion.

It took man well after the renaissance to actually form fucking medicine beyond fucking bloodletting, leaches and fucking drilling a hole into your brain to relieve a fucking headache.

Perhaps the most common drow advanced craftwork are the replacement limbs worn by injured drow. These wonders are almost all fashioned of adamantine alloy: assemblies of precise, intricate parts that are as agile and dexterous as living limbs, with many ball-swivel joints and tendon-like cables for control. The adamantine construction makes them both very hard and flexiblethey are not prone to shatter or snap off under stress, but can punch or rake through most armor.

Such limbs may have specialized, removable hands a drow lady whose everyday limb-end is a delicate metal hand may substitute an armor-rending claw, or even a sword, axe, or long-spiked mace end, when expecting battle.

If a drow claw attack roll succeeds, drow and target both roll 1d8, adding this to their Strength scores. If the drow has the higher total, an area of armor is torn away. A claw does 1d4 + 2 for a punch (crushing blow saving throws for struck target items apply), and 1d4 + 4 per rake (an attack that rends armor does only 1d4 to the victim beneath).

Able-bodied, whole drow may have similar weapon or specialized extensions that strap onto limbs or fit over a hand (e.g. a one-piece sword-gauntlet) or foot (e.g. toe-claws or spikes, used for climbing stone and to kick-stab an extra dagger damage-attack in battle).

>Shit like Burials came about because of religion.
You're confusing cause and effect. No, burials took a religious significance because they were practical and widely practiced, as did funeral pyres.

You might not know what germs are, but you might notice people who hang around people who died of disease tend to get sick, and that leads to a lot of religious ideas about how to dispose of corpses.

Huh, but armor isn't normally sunderable for a reason so no

>It took man well after the renaissance to actually form fucking medicine beyond fucking bloodletting, leaches and fucking drilling a hole into your brain to relieve a fucking headache.

That's really an exaggeration. While modern medicine may not have existed in the ways we understand it people were not completely ignorant of medicine.

I would say funerals were probably a side effect of mixing corpse disposal and ancestor worship

You are now imagining a 4'6" drow woman trying to bully you and failing miserably because she's so short, and getting more and more adorably, impotently frustrated.

>slap enhancements

Guessing the extra 10-15lb is dem titties.

Except leaches and drilling holes in skulls are both useful in the right circumstances.

You're completely wrong and very ignorant about medical history.

Just look at history of Ignaz Semmelweis. In middle of 19th century he advised doctors to wash their hands, especially after working with corpses, he found this reduces maternal mortality up to 10 times. Most doctors rejected his proposals, laughed at him, and he was put in mental asylum, where he died. 19th century, "educated" doctors.

Before germ theory of disease, hand washing, antiseptics, anesthetics and vaccination - mostly middle and late 19th century things - medicine was unscientific garbage and full of completely incorrect theories (like "four humours" theory) and useless or even harmful treatments. Doctors knew some things - like eye surgery or that quinine-containing plant from South America was used against malaria - but these were exception, not the rule.

>Minoans
>As matriarchy

>implying that she can't, with her superior skills, steal your precios from your backpack, ambush you at every dark corner, trip you on your ass. Not even mentioning her heirloom trinkets and magic. All the while you ll never able to catch her.

>tries to do this
>im psionic
>oh wait
>"i send you to the shadow realm"
>Muh-muh-muh-Mind Crush.jpg
No one resists psychic in the underdark thats why aboleths and mindflayers live down there.

>steal your precios from your backpack
What's a precios?

Not same user but probably meant precious

Type of bread, supper nutrient laden, as palatable as a rock.

interestingly, evolutionary determinists like yourself have also been crushed by people saying "no, that's goddamned stupid, and just a modern update of kings saying 'hey guys turns out god says everything I hate is evil' to boot." Seriously, y'all tried your luck and by the end were reduced to begging liberal democracy to save you from the Communists before they could demonstrate their counterargument.

Which one? I collect Scooby Doo pictures. Give it to me.

btw as an actual biologist, any time someone says that a cultural artifact has evolutionary significance, consider two things.
one, how many hours in your life you have devoted to masturbating in front of a shiny plastic box.
two, how remarkable a coincidence it is that there has never been an evolutionary determinist who thinks someone else's politics are more evolutionarily justified than his own.

Shit's divine right of kings with god scratched out and genetics poorly scratched in on top of it.

Mosuo

You didn't really play the game, did you?

Underrated post of the century

...

...

...

>Just look at history of Ignaz Semmelweis. In middle of 19th century he advised doctors to wash their hands, especially after working with corpses, he found this reduces maternal mortality up to 10 times. Most doctors rejected his proposals, laughed at him, and he was put in mental asylum, where he died. 19th century, "educated" doctors.

Sometimes I wonder why we have not become extinct.

Not the other guy, but while what he said might be bullshit you can't actually deny a biological component to social/cultural structures and behavior.
Back in the 70s the equality crowd was raving mad when anyone dared to imply that behavior was in any way rooted in genetics, even if modified by the enviroment, but now it's pretty much a well known fact.

It's not like it means humans are stuck to doing one thing, it just means there is a biological component that makes us predisposed to doing some things over others. It doesn't even mean said behaviors are better or worse. They just are.

t. Lolbertarian

>You are now imagining a 4'6" drow woman trying to bully you and failing miserably because she's so short, and getting more and more adorably, impotently frustrated.
>Then she knocks you out with poison, brings out the chains and slave collar, and keeps you bound and naked in her bedroom where she can bully you at her leisure

>No one resists psychic in the underdark thats why aboleths and mindflayers live down there.
>Drow also live in the underdark
>Drow probably have something to fuck over psychics specifically

yeah, team eugenics has gone full creationist in their rear-guard action. "you can't be 100% sure that any given action isn't genetically induced! therefore our totally unscientific wet-dream has to be true."

is there a biological component to some behaviors? probably. form dictates function, and all that.

the million dollar question is and remains if you have any way to separate out evolutionarily incentivized behaviors from artifacts of random cultural drift, beyond "i'd really like to believe I was the ubermensch."

Actual Science shrugs and says 'not yet, at least.'

evopsych adherents mumble awkwardly for a second or two and then pretend very, very hard that they didn't hear the question.

Truer words were never posted.

> it just means there is a biological component that makes us predisposed to doing some things over others
Human behavior is an insanely complex and nonlinear system.The same genetic determinants can lead to one kind of a behavior in one social context, and to a completely different one in another context. And there are quite a many different social contexts due to family influence, difference in cultures, economic standing etc that it's absolutely impossible at this point to make any assumptions based on statistics.

Tuareg nomads and some region of Tibet.

There are some pacific islander cultures and there were a few native American tribes that were matriarchies, but those are very much exceptions.

>sex orginizations are ideas instead of expressions of natural law

get out of here retard, stirner is a dumb faggot and so in continental philosophy

Shit man, you called me a faggot retard and posted a gif. I guess biology really does work how you want it

It wasn't originally a matriarchy. It was originally just an expression of the old 'lost underground decadent civilization' trope.
Original appearance of the drow has a gendered caste divide, yes, but nothing that indicates that temples are more important or in charge of society (people claim that it's implied, but no, that's them reading in future decisions.)
R.A. Salvatore, the genius also responsible for Scottish Dwarves, is one of the main reasons we're saddled with the idiotic Murderhobo Mafioso Matriarchy, which has devolved into being dumber and dumber over the years.
(Though, I think we hit peak dumb-drow with the Chad-Zak thing back in 3e. Thanks, Paizo.)

for almost all of human history, economic power came from the ability to do physical labor. m political power came from the ability to employ violence in armies or feudal oaths. women spend most of their lives pregnant because they dont have birth control, and pregnant women have damn near zero ability to employ violence or do real work. therefore, women naturally have less economic and political power than men, which is why there are zero matriarchies in history.

tell that to your continental philosophy professors, faggot. also, enjoy your life of unemployment for having a faggot major

When I was dicking around in liberal arts, there was a guy in my sociology class who believed the amazons where a real group. When the teacher corrected him on this, he was confused that Herodotus had written about something that wasn't real.

>a cultural artifact has evolutionary significance
have you seriously never even heard of sexual selection? how many dudes do you think got laid becasue they play the guitar good or can paint good? i dont believe you are a biologist.

It's funny because you think your opinion is valid.

>opinion
no, user, it is a fact.
would you like to offer an argument as to why it is not valid? or is your continental brain incapable of a response?

Not really. I really couldn't care less if you understand how biology works. Feel free to declare yourself the victor of the conversation.

i will. next time you should show up with actual arguments before hemorrhaging your bullshit.

>i will

Oh.