Space Drow

>They are strongly matriarchial
I don't think you need to look at physical traits here
Remember that drows are highly religious. Having a female priest class works in a sci-fi setting as well

>They are slavers
Again, it can be a cultural thing. Nobles get servants as a mark of status, it helps keep the proles in line,... Works especially well with a militaristic and/or expantionist society.
We still have slaves currently, you know.

>They live underground
They are accustomed to living in spaceships and don't fare well on the surface? Ground sickness, blindness when it's sunny, issues with gravity?

>They are slavers
Note that despite our own increasing technology, there are more slaves today than at any other point in history (in part because of increasing populations, obviously). Dubai in particular is infamous for luring in workers from poor countries with lucrative contracts, then forcing them to work for nothing once they're in the country with no way to leave.

For combat slaves, I imagine they'd just outfit most of them with bomb collars and laser cutters and throw them at the enemy in waves. Those that prove particularly skilled and resourceful are either given authority over lesser slaves, or are drafted for their supersoldier program, where a mixture of gene modification and cybernetic implants enhance both their abilities and their loyalty. However, the most extreme modifications are reserved as a punishment for disgraced drow, which is how we get driders.

Having a slave broken in enough to follow orders without collar or modifications is considered on par with having a pedigree dog. Particularly wealthy nobles occationally hold competitions to see whose slaves are best trained, usually involving painful or humiliating tasks.

>They live underground
Chalk this one up to their natural dislike of sunlight. Sure, it doesn't really harm them, but they'd really rather not have to put up with it. Most spacedrow prefer living on sheltered stations and ships, and only colonize planets with extensive cave networks that don't require much excavation to make habitable. This is also why they almost always perform their raids during a planet's night cycle.

A drider cyborg would be terryfing in space combat

Building on this, since spacedrow only live on ships, stations and select planets, their industrial base is not as strong as other races. Sure, they make some of the strongest, fastest ships in the galaxy, but they don't have proper mass production. For this reason it is considered a major crime to destroy another drow's ship or station, with the minimum punishment being driderization of the perpetrator, and in severe cases resulting in the complete annihilation of a noble house in order to make an example (or because of lobbying and politics within the ruling houses).

Therefore, rivalry between houses always comes down to boarding action to take the vessel intact, usually aided by chemical and digital warfare to cripple the enemy's defenses.

Their spaceship weapons focus on knocking out systems rather then destroying hull.

This actually works well with them being slavers and the fapbait part.

They take down crews nonlethally as they can, take their ship to salvage and supplies, fuck the men for more babies, sell the rest to slavery

I just thought EMP/disruption weaponry would be a good proxy for sleep poison.

Into a playable setting without HFY or Mary Sue elves? Easy. Just go (kinda) magical realm.

The space-drow aren't mary sue, but they are just straight up a race of dommes. The matriarchal society means that many biological/tech improvements are only available to women (strength enhancing nanotech or whatever your settings tech level is at), and as such all males in drow controlled space must have a "matron" in order to qualify for any benefits. Women get ID's, men can only get them with the approval of a woman etc.

A male (of any species) getting a license to trade in drow space requires offering subservience to a matron in the government, which can be revoked by the drow at any given time and there's no guarantee that you could get a license no matter your history or capabilities. It depends on who you go to see first, because while they wouldn't be serial backstabbers like their fantasy iterations, they would have the ego that if one caught wind that they were your second choice to try and get a traders license, then you probably aren't getting it, or it's getting revoked.

Women of course, can simply go through the normal politics of getting a trader's license, and if requested, they can apply to be a "business matron", such that they can have a strictly limited amount of males with the qualifications to act on her behalf.

Tech-wise, I would say their benefit is that they keep it secret. Maybe they are a little bit behind tech-wise, but they're better at portability. While a human exoskeleton is this bulky hunk of metal, maybe the Drow have gotten skintight suits that are weaker then the human exoskeletons, but stronger than someone without an exoskeleton. Also explains why they can wear those "noblewoman's" dress style, it's to hide whether or not any given female drow is packing heat. Their propensity to hide it might lead to rumours of the drow just being insanely strong too if that's what you're into.

>Cthulhutech
/thread

TES shares little in common with most standard fantasy

About nonlethal weapons.
In Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, pirates use nonlethal weapons, while the merchants use regular nuclear missiles because fuck them.
As the opponents are very far away, everyone fire their weapons, then the merchants are hit and sleep for a couple hours, if everything goes well they wake up with a destroyed pirate ship, and if the missile missed they wake up chained in a cargo hold.
I was a neat bit, I think.

The dwemer are surprisingly close to traditional dwarves though.

>Fondness for beards
>Peerless craftsmen
>Disdain for (other) elves
>Not terribly religious
>Live in underground strongholds
>Fond of gold(en alloys)
>Highly geometric designs with few organic shapes
>Highly structured society

All they need is a fondness for booze and axes.

Slavery is totally possible in a space faring setting.

>"Either do what I say or its the airlock"
>"K-kay"

They might have been created by another species (ANCIENT HUMANS) a long ass time ago as their deep space station/weird planet colonists. You know, there might be lots of nice stuff on a tidally locked planet, or under Europan ice sheets, so they made a bunch of weirdos to go get it.

Kind of a cliche though, sorry.

>Depending on the setting, women might outright be stronger and bigger than males, either comparatively or to humans. I would suggest having it be relative to even humans for the sake of adding differences from humanity, avoiding random people saying "lol -4 STR can't fight men", and subverting the idea of 'willowy, delicate elves'
Physical strength is a lot less important in an industrial society and a society where warfare is won through ship battles, gun fights, and occasionally power armor. Having matriarchal clans isn't too far-fetched for a bunch of exiled fucks with an eye towards treachery and tightly limited populations. After all, you can be pretty sure that a child came from a mother, but no so much the father. Start tracking family and inheritance down that side, and you've got the framework for Matriarchs.
>A bit trickier with, you know, a space-faring setting where nothing should necessarily restrict them, but perhaps we can spin this as part of their origins: a planetary disaster struck their planet long ago, forcing the society underground. They had hoped to wait things out but it soon became clear their planet was gone for the foreseeable future, and thus space faring was pushed.
You QUINTUPLE NIGGER, these are Sci-Fi Drow we're talking here! Use your head for a second. Space Drow don't live beneath the surface of a normal-ass planet, they live in hollowed-out asteroids and shit. O'Neill on a budget. Banished (or having fled from vengeful neighbors, I suppose) from the Space-Elf homeworld after some war or other, they just fucked off to the darker crevices of space.

>Created by ancient humans
>Some faggot scientist on another planet created a race of submissive waifu's. Well there' goes the neighbourhood. Let's all move to the next planet.
>"But what if... we created a race of dominant waifu's?" one remaining scientist asks.
>The scientists all thought for a moment, and then left him on the second planet and moved on to the third.
>And then the Drow took their dominance to politics, and nobody cared because everybody left was submissive.
>Then the Drow outbred the humans
And now Drow control a solar system or two, but they are have been biologically created to appeal to and be able to detect submissives in their proximity. The Drow have an innate sense that submissives would be happier under Drow rule, and don't like seeing people suffer, so if they meet a politician with a submissive streak, be careful or else you may need to re-hold elections as they quit their job to live under the Drow.

It's like the reverse/domme-version of that one screencap about elves.

Oh, and since spacedrow hate the sun so much, they spent an absolute fortune to erect an atmospheric shield around their homeworld that covers the entire planet in a dark purple shade. Occationally there are flashes of other colours, as debris and meteors are incinerated, or ships phase through the field.

>how do we not go Mary Sue or HFY
By balancing things and having it be reasonable and realistic insofar as a sci fi setting can be.

If they're worried about the sun so bad, why don't they just live further orbits, so that the rays are less blinding.

They're not worried about it, they just don't like it. Shielding their homeworld was an act of absolute hedonism, not necessity, which is why they don't do it on their colonies.

Post more picture Fantasy races IIIN SPAAACE!

This I like, though in keeping with the D&D drow I can see them, or least a handful of major houses, having one or two major advances in chemical/material science above everyone else, to keep with their "good at poisons" thing and cause a couple of dragon articles would mention how every now and then a drow house would puzzle out how to make things like latex or other synthetic materials

How about we don't? What's even to be gained from doing this?

Which screen cap is this

That's pretty good

I think spaceship wise, humans should have a very nautical appearance like this or UC Gundam in contrast with the slender, almost crystaline shapes of drow ships. Where the space drow have shields, humans put up walls of flak

>first off
Don't

>second off
Well if you are really doing this...
a) you can't just have them have long lifespans, any race worth their salt would have long lifespans. We are living in the hardest sci-fi possible, and we have almost solved it. Make them psionic or something of that ilk.
b) don't make them Mary Sues, their culture causes them problems, and they get their crap pushed in by other races just as much as they push crap in.
c) have more races then just elves, elves alone can't carry a setting the way humans can
d) make sure to point out that by using slaves, they are actually reducing inefficiency. Have a minor race or group that only uses robots be extremely puzzled that someone would go and steal slaves.
e) know their specialty, slaving. They would have a culture built on this. Use other races for other specialties

Forgot pic

at some point you just gotta draw porn

Pretty sure space drowtales are from the soft porn spinoff

>surrender to us, foolish lesser races
>ok, I surrender
>send over 50 of your crew and we will spare you
>I'm the only crew member
>what?
>we use robots, im the only crew member, sorry

>can I just go?
>...fine

>soft

Did it have any penetration? Can't remember

Far orbits and, as says, not living on planets much, is probably the way to go - instead of the UNDERdark, they live in the OUTERdark: far, cold orbits and non-system space.

>the drow ambassador has asked us to make slave personality chips for the bots, in case they were captured.
>in exchange, they will return their human prisoners
>...
>that's a deal, I guess

>but, uh, as a mostly automated ship, I don't have the food and water to take 50 people home

>drow meet their ultimate nemesis
>the science confederacy of planets
>only use robots
>all ships are crewed by one dude
>armies are robots
>ships are robots
>diplomats are robots

Don't drow use constructs all the time? I know Menzoberranzan is guarded by a pair of gigantic spider golems.

>the only human looks like this due to being constantly pampered by robots
>"are you gonna enslave and rape me? that's okay, you know"
>"ugh, just take the emergency shuttle and leave, human"
>"thanks for the offer, but I'm the one doing all the maintenance on the bots, so you'll probably want to keep me around anyways"
>"by Lolth..."

What about High Crusade humans versus Space Drow

>such insolence, I will beat you with my stiletto

Seems like you’re winding up with a Batarrian situation here.

Corporations and crazy nutters who insist on working the unsettled, unclaimed, highly dangerous areas. They might get well paid, but any trouble is their own.

Basically, Wall-e humans?

>fat-humans
>not chad gene-explorers

The fat ones are on the planets.

Wouldn't the sole human look more like some strongfat clean-shaven dockworker with glasses than a fat nerd?
Consider the following: the human is intended as a backup for when the usual repair droids malfunction, and the whole ship was probably built around a crew manifest of so and so many bots and one human.
The maintenance droids are in different scales, with the smallest beetlebots working out structure damage and the largest behemoths handling heavy part replacement and maintenance on the ship itself, and the roughly humansize ones work the middling tasks like behemoth/beetle repairs and internal maintenance.
The human handles maintenance where the other bots either are unable to do so (more important shit to repair, metal frame not flexible enough, out of material and restocking) or unwilling to do so because lawset fuckery.
This probably means heaving fuck-off big behemoth servos from the maintenance storage to the behemoth bay and into place, pulling hard on loose cables to connect the ends, rebuilding armor plates from scrap, hell even the humansize bot components can be heavy enough to pass for pumping iron.
And if the ship's suitably big and suffered a catastrophic electrical failure where both primary and auxiliary generators fail simultaneously and the bots don't have enough reserve power to fix them in time, the human would have to heave full-sized bots out of the service hatches, lug potentially heavy components to replace burnt-out ones and manually restart the generator before lugging each bot and any heavy electricity-powered equipment to the nearest charging station one by one.

But i will concede, the thought of space drow matriarchs having to deal with having a fat, unattractive porky nerd to keep their new robotic adoni in working order is a funny mental image. Wonder if there's a series on the subject already?

Nah, the robots run on different systems, so if one set malfunctions there are still backups to fix it. If things screw up so bad that the sole human is the only functional thing on a massive ship, it's FUBAR anyway.

Whatever you want, baby.

I did say backup.
Let's say there's a meteor shower and the meteor shields are down.
The beetlebots are hard at work resetting the meteor shields, but it's not fast enough.
Entire swathes of the ships' internals are closed off because the meteors got through the hull plating and are wreaking havoc in the rooms and hallways.
The manbots are all tied up trying to fix the internals before important equipment is compromised.
There's just enough behemoths that they could work together to keep the hull plating fixed until the meteor shield go up again.
But, shock and horror, two entire behemoths get their legs clipped by wayward meteors.
This means the remaining ones aren't enough to keep the hull intact for long enough, and the two damaged behemoths, unable to move, are needed out there yesterday.
The beetles are ineffectual, and the manbots can't spare anyone without losing the entirety of the medbay for the foreseeable future, so the only one who can do anything is the human.

Or my other example above about the generators failing. They may be on separate systems, but if all the generators fail in an otherwise safe position, each set would just fail one after another in this schedule:
The manbots try to analyze the issue and burn their reserve power to fix it, getting left in the service hatches.
The behemoths run out of juice lifting the manbots out of the service hatches.
The manbots of the next set run out of reserve power analyzing the issue and trying to fix it because the main computer is down and the first set manbots couldn't transmit their work history before running dry.
The behemoths of the next set run out of juice getting their manbot brethren out of the service hatches again.
The beetles are too small to be of use, and probably drained their reserves just wriggling to a position to be picked up for recharging.
Ad nauseum until no sets are left and the human gets a ping on his pager from the generator room.

Forgot to add...if there's enough sets for each set to monitor and repair another in a big cycle, why have the human at all?

Well the whole thing would be solved by nanomachines but that would require the science confederation be TL 10. And nanomachines aren’t really crew members.

But I digress.

Veeky Forums We managed to cause a random post about an all robot crew into a semi-interesting group of people all based on a drowtales fappost.

Laws

Oversight obviously

Pretty sure it does.

They are scientists.

They want to put the ubermensh that they used billions of credits of grant money making to work at something.

Robotics laws or space travel legislation?
If it's the former, the bots are probably running on an all-races-included variant of asimov and monitoring both their designated set and everyone in their own.
J0-HN starting to act odd? Shut down inter-bot communications and take him in for controlled reprogramming.
But why do it in parson?
Regarding oversight, chances are the bots are tough enough that a rogue one could easily go toe to toe with a trained spec-ops officer simply via battle of attrition. And if repairs are handled by the robots yet oversight is needed, we go back to the human being backup for when the bots break down in such a manner they can't fix each other.
As for science, wouldn't it be more reasonable for a scientist to be planetside monitoring and taking notes for the next batch of ubermensch based on what hiccups this one has? Adding himself to the experiment as a factor not only messes with the test data but also puts him at risk of being dead in the starwater if the bots go rogue or otherwise fail miserably.

The thing I can see causing a human to be on a ship like that is having non-sentient robots like nanomachines.

In that case the robots simply exist for maintenance and would require a human for oversight.

This isn’t a case of a robot-crew, it’s a case of a one person crew.

>But why do it in parson?
Relativity

I see. But, depending on how it's handled, one human might not be enough to monitor every nanobot, and monitoring nanobot sets gives way to rogue nanobots to develop when the human isn't looking.
And, besides, who says robots have to be sentient to run maintenance on each other?
Program in a specific list of standard behavior to individual robots and watch as the bots fix each other to match the standard behavior.

One reason a human might be needed is the afforementioned maintenance backup.
The bots, not being sentient, run on predetermined priority lists.
Humans run on instinct and usually handle whatever is immediately required rather than what the bots deem more important.
Elaborate, please.
Even with relativity as i recall it, it's safer for all humans involved to stay away from the bots.
We'll get news of their going rogue when the feed gets to that point.

>scientist builds nanobots
>installs nanobot factory
>tells nanobots to follow computer
>install ubermensh on ship with computer and engineering knowledge
>a winner is you

Probably works as long as the ubermensch has enough reserve power to fix the generator in case of generator failure.

This would make for an interesting first encounter between posthuman ubermensch and space thots

You could have backups and space checkins stations full of proper engineers to repair hard core stuff.

>fapbait space drow vs humans
>without going full HFY or Mary Sue elves?
by not having the humans be magically better because plotpowers or having the elves be tolkien supermen

a high tech society which looks like drow, is female only (reproduces via tech or whatever- Asari ) and employs technology and slave races rather than fighting themselves versus your generic space humans in a long and brutal war sounds doable

Reasonable. But, let's assume the worst:
The backups discharge their reserves in response to the failing generator's surge, and the engines are powered by the same generator.
How does the ship get to the checking station if the ubermensch is neither programmed to activate auxiliary thrusters nor has enough power to fix the generator himself?
Space is serious business, you gotta plan for everything or the investors are going to use your hide as a stress toy.

Theoretically the ubermensh could think reasonably because he’s a living being.

Maybe you could have a backup engine in the storage place and nanopaste repair tubes.

...but he's a robot? I thought that was apparent.
When did we go from robotics to live human beings?

Ubermensh are genetically superior humans?

And, by the same token, not having either of them be arbitrarily incompetent. Like the bit about drow being baffled by human robots above, why wouldn't the drow have their own roboticists that can operate them, or at least cannibalize them for their own tech? They're decadent and depraved, not luddites.

Earlier, ubermensch was used as a term for an advanced robot. Unless i completely knackered translating that.
I thought he was advocating for a full robot crew.

>Like the bit about drow being baffled by human robots above
that sounds retarded and whoever though of that should be ashamed

>Theyre decadent and depraved
which would suggest that they can afford to be so, which implies powerful tech/army

Sorry m8, ya knackered ya translation

>turns out the fat is actually a mass of nanomachines, son

>drow raid a ship
>meet a fat dude that could’ve gone pro if he hadn’t joined the army.

Eh, c'est la vie.

Do you guys thing he would be ale to defeat those elves form op's image?

They would all surrender to his masculine might

Nanomachines aren't the only thing that hardens

You can make things pretty HFY and Mary Sue, just go crazy over the top and don’t let any one faction dominate.

I got to thinking about drow ship essentially being flying mountains, mountain ranges even. Go smalller than an Imperial and the crew will start freaking.

So you get mercenaries, Jannisaries and slaves to run smaller vessels, shuttles, fighters et c. The typical drow ship might be in the 10-100km range and have ports and naval bases. The design isn’t nice and optimal like a GSV, priority one is pandering to drow agoraphobia.

There will be a lot of infighting, but over centuries or millenia it’s become more disciplined. Maybe Lolth got fed up with cities imploding and tinkered with the rules.

The drow might be the end result of a lolbertarian/HFY human splinter group who wanted to be the little girl. Or the seven foot fetish domme in this case.

I don't have a copy of it myself, but it was a written as a letter of someone warning somebody new away from the planet, because the elves now outnumber the humans. Except, since they were designed to be a slave-race, they spend the whole time trying to make the humans happy.
Something about how it's exceedingly tiring having a race of people who spend every moment of their day desiring your approval. Especially when they're "competing" for praise and thanks from humans.

It's not about wether it's possible, it's about wether it's practical.

Why would you use slaves to harvest your crops if you can have a machine do it. The machine does it faster, better and it doesn't need "food" if it's not working, whereas with organic slaves you'd need to find something for them to do in the winter months when you can't grow crops.

>Physical strength is a lot less important in an industrial society and a society where warfare is won through ship battles, gun fights, and occasionally power armor.

If your soldiers are stronger you'll still have an advantage regardless of most technologies. A stronger soldier can carry more supplies or a bigger gun. Even if we assume the use of strength enhancing power armour, a stronger soldier can be augmented further.

Fuck, I know I have this screenshot saved but I don't know on what harddrive

Then why not just use robots, orbital bombing, or nanomachines to do your dirty work?

wtf is this?

Drowtales.

Take chakats or those things from avatar, and replace them with drow porn.

As the other user said, you probably make your repair bots so that there's heavy redundancy. Almost anything that can make a bot fail can also kill a human, so you probably don't want your standard answer to a failure to be "send the meatbag".
Also, the guy could be a programmer with only notions in actual repairs. All he does when there's a problem is type lines of code so the bots know what to do.

Yeah, and having a strong sense of taste can help you detect NBC attacks, so it's definitely an advantage. Yet this isn't the most important factor to determines who wins a war.
Same thing with physical strength.

>chakats
why

...

Buzzwords. Chakats get easy responses, despite no one on Veeky Forums ever having encountered them in a game ever.

I actually did in a Star Trek game.

They weren’t outright called it but “lion headed centaurs with no sexual dimorphisms that make your feel happy” is rather unsubtle.

Thankfully I was able to get past it without metagaming due to my characters paranoia of empaths setting off all the warning bells in my head.

Got in my hardsuit and ran tests on the hull until they had left. Never found out what happened with them.

RIP head engineer Mallard

The na’vi showed up too, but most of the stuff was run of the mill Star Trek episode stuff so I didn’t leave.

the sole human on board probably wouldn't be that out of shape, but yeah he probably wouldn't look like an adonis either