Drow

>Skyrim with all the retarded anime mods installed.
Forgotten Realms summed up.

Because they're actually Neutral Evil.

What, you want a real-world explanation for an explicitly supernatural race? Well, you won't get one. The official answer is "a spider god did it".

Not just "did it" but "keeps doing it"

2e drow were chaotic evil. 3e onwards they became neutral evil.

I don't see the issue though, a shitload of real-world societies are chaotic evil and they don't collapse. All you need is a constant external enemy, which drow have in plenty.

Welcome to DnD as a whole.

Yeah, I agree it's unrealistic. But it's a consequence of magic and gods being real that some societies are gonna be forced into unnatural forms. And this specific one kinda makes sense. Lolth is the "good is DUMB, everyone's secretly a jerk on the inside, I figured this out at 14 because I'm smarter than everyone!" goddess. She has her ideas about how life "really" works, and punishes anyone who deviates from that.

>My society will be honest! No one gets ahead without backstabbing and cruelty, and my elves will be the only ones wise enough to admit it!
>"Hey guys, let's work together! We'll get a lot more done if we help each other!"
>NO NO NO YOU'RE A SPIDER NOW!

So Lolth is basically the kind of person who read Machiavelli and didn't realise it was satire?

Also don't Duergar and mind flayers have their own gods? Why do they just stand by and watch as Lolth rekts their supplicants. It makes no sense especially as god are specifically stated to obtain their powers through worship. Just letting Lolth kerb stomp their followers weakens them and really makes no sense.

I don't think so, almost all societies have an underlying order that the organise themselves by. I can't think of a single human society that lasted that abides by the Chaotic Evil as described in the source.

Everything about drow has always been magical. Why are they matriarchal? Because Lolth favors the female drow. There's no physical, psychological, cultural or evolutionary reason for it, it's literally just "Lolth wants it". Even their skin color has nothing to do with pigment, it's a magical curse from Selune or some shit.

Go read Vault of the Drow

>and didn't realise it was satire?
What. Have you read that book?

Obviously not, user. Why even ask?

Yes. It's a satire written with intention of exposing the moral deficiencies and logical disconnects of authoritarian and dictatorial leadership in my opinion.

We should probably go to Veeky Forums to discuss this though. I don't wanna derail the thread.

Wait which book? I assume we're talking about The Prince.

> It's a satire written with intention of exposing the moral deficiencies and logical disconnects of authoritarian and dictatorial leadership in my opinion.
New to the thread, but you're being ridiculous. Most of the recommendations in The Prince are echoes of ones in his Discourses on Livy, which is very, very serious scholarship.

Machiavelli outright states that cruel and disingenuous methods should be someones last resorts. He praises good rulers that don't need such methods.

>Also don't Duergar and mind flayers have their own gods?

Yeah, but they're dicks too. It's not like the Drow are taking over the Underdark, it's more of an eternal, violent stalemate situation. Lots of Drow dying in Lolth's name on one side, lots of Duergar dying for Ladugar on the other. Permanent siege mentality and crisis-level fervent worship. The gods hate each other and fuck with each other and each other's followers constantly, but that just adds to the stalemate.

Illithids have an unconventional relationship to their gods, and many complex problems of their own.

We're not in the 19th anymore, you can drop the act

Guys:

"Is The Prince satire" is a question that has been debated in every freshman lit course in the last two centuries. The answer, arrived at time and time again, is "sort of." Parts of it are definitely tongue-in-cheek. Parts of it seem honest in a "this is how the world seems to work, ain't that fucked up?" way. We're not gonna cover any new ground here today.

Drow are the least controversial thing about D&D. With the abundance of entirely consequence-free magic that allows free resource production, massive energy production and near-instant long-range communication there would be a world-spanning industrial civilization within centuries if not decades of mastering magic.

The mind flayers are kind of another race that makes sense. Their biggest problem is their lack of numbers. But their numbers are kept artificially low by the elder brains eating 99% of the illithid tadpoles.
But the elder brains have supernormal, nearly godlike intelligence.
But they can't work out that if they eat less tadpoles, they'll have more mindflayers, WHO CAN BRING THEM MORE BRAINS FROM OTHER SPECIES TO EAT!

This is the kind of shit that makes me rage.

>*makes sense
Makes no sense I mean.

Yeah, every time that happens civilization tends to magi-nuke itself flat or summon too many demons or something. Turns out "consequence-free" is always a bit of a stretch, and early-renaissance societies really aren't responsible enough to handle godlike powers.

On the upside, you get a world with loads of forgotten empires, ancient ruins, and powerful lost artifacts!

I always thought that they were like the Goa'uld and eat the young out of arrogance and hubris

The skin is due to demonic taint, actually.

If you eat less, you'll get more money to do other, more interesting things.
Have you tried reducing you calory intake?

The elder brains aren't trying to help mind flayer society grow and prosper. They're just looking out for numero cerebro. Higher illithid populations are harder to control. Gotta balance the risk of being slain by invaders against the risk of being slain in a coup.

Also, alien thinking and priorities, time shenanigans, etc.

If a superintelligent monster seems to be doing something stupid, you've got two options. You can say "that's stupid, this sucks!" Or you can assume they're working toward a different goal, do some worldbuilding.

I'm not saying the original writers didn't fuck up. I'm saying the material is ours now.

>That one guy in every D&D related that spergs out about D&D

You know, just find a group that plays something other than D&D-.. oh wait, thats why you are here being a little bitch.

you guys forgot about drowtales! (woohoo)

> They're just looking out for numero cerebro.
A larger mindflayer population would give them more stuff, particularly more brains to eat.
>Higher illithid populations are harder to control
I don't think there's anything in the source that says this. I'm pretty sure it was more the illithids are 100% under control of the elder brain, until some outside force slays the elder brain.

>Also, alien thinking and priorities
That's a fair point. But again unsatifying I find.

>do some worldbuilding.
That's the thing though, I can't make this stuff work in my head without tossing out huge amounts of the source material. At which point if I make the drow how I think they should work are they still drow or are they an entirely new race of elves with dark skin? Who are immediately eaten by the rampaging armies of elder brains and live as ragged huddled outcasts in the forgotten corners and depths of the underdark. And they all despise Lolth for putting them in this unwinnable situation.

this has a very bad aura
this just screams at me

is it the art? the expressions?

what is it...

It's a smidgeon above that. The Drow's logistical advantage is that their whole retarded civilisation is structured in supreme sacrifice and reverence to their god, making their god super disproportionately powerful for a civilisation of their own shitty size and integrity, which in turn means said god has divine power to spare for the purposes of preventing said ill conceived civilisation falling apart.

You could theoretically see a similar society arise elsewhere where I dunno, the god of fucking hats or something marks a race who decide status and jobs based on what hats people have at the time as his chosen people, summoning hat elementals and creating powerful and devastating sentient magic hats to defend and assist them, which deepens their devotion for hats to the point that their society starts revolving around hats at a level that an outsider would see as fucking stupid and bound to fall apart.

But then the god of hats gets even stronger as the institutional inefficiencies of his chosen people are accepted as just a part of the sacrifices they make in their reverence for him, the price of his love. Which then results in even more magic hats. Neighbouring city states seeking to put an end to this ridiculous farcical hat-state on their doorstep find the skulls of their armies crushed as their helms come alive to devour their wearers. A legend is born.

>You could theoretically see a similar society arise elsewhere where I dunno, the god of fucking hats or something marks a race who decide status and jobs based on what hats people have at the time as his chosen people, summoning hat elementals and creating powerful and devastating sentient magic hats to defend and assist them, which deepens their devotion for hats to the point that their society starts revolving around hats at a level that an outsider would see as fucking stupid and bound to fall apart.

The land of TF2?

Everybody already knows about this shit.

The main story sucks, but it consistently had good artwork on a regular release schedule

The porn is pretty good

What a beautiful example.

And it suggests a way of explaining the underdark power balance. You're playing a game of civilization, with three civs. The Drow have neglected everything but religion and espionage, giving them some crazy bonuses, but making their civ a hilariously awful place to live. The Duergar have gone all-in on industrial production, and the Illithid have gone all-in on research. Each civ is completely insane and unbalanced, and none has their shit together enough to take out the others.

Having a deeply localized and involved god is cool and good. What's not cool and good are goblins and orcs in ye standard D&D setting. You have fully intelligent, tool-using, language-speaking races sharing the same area with humans yet they somehow don't end up trading or having some form of diplomatic relations with each other beyond raiding caravans and burning down villages. They don't even have to be all that peaceful or nice, it's just convenient for all involved.

>Assuming it's just one person who's tired of the burning garbage fire called DnD being the default TTRPG of the hobby.

Was wondering how long it's take the DnDrone Defense Force to show up.

Is there a big gallery of just the porn

...

I had to pick an example that could put some fucking talons in people and what better than HATS

Yeah, that was what I was trying to get at. The Drow have so thoroughly gone in on their religion that they are able to use it to prop up their civilisation, something not really possible outside of a setting where worship is literally providing an energy source. It may be an energy source for something else, but you can potentially get the work back.

By the same token, you might well be able to get an industrial revolution going by finding a god who has the power of spinning wheels and is worshipped by burning coal sacraments.

Divine power is a valid power source for a civilisation in this setting if you can get the right god mono-maniacally focused on YOUR guys enough. Everyone else up on the surface is playing the chump game of allowing freedom of religion and trying to be kinda sorta friends with all the gods at once, which means that none of them care enough to seriously intervene if REAL bad shit is about to go down.

>Higher illithid populations are harder to control
>I don't think there's anything in the source that says this.

Just checked the sources a bit. These seem to be the limitations on colony size:

Range: elder brains can control their illithids within a 5-mile range, which may be shortened by intervening ores and underdark weirdness. Illithids who go outside the range may go rogue.

Concealment: being discovered by a Gith war party can easily get a colony wiped out. Larger colonies are easier to telepathically detect.

Number: while we don't have actual numbers for control limits, any mind flayer colony in the literature with more than 4,000 flayers has had multiple Elders (and Elder in-fighting.) Colonies of one Elder and a few hundred Flayers are much more common, suggesting that Elder Brains find those numbers more comfortable.

>Everyone else up on the surface is playing the chump game of allowing freedom of religion and trying to be kinda sorta friends with all the gods at once, which means that none of them care enough to seriously intervene if REAL bad shit is about to go down.

OP here, ok wow that's a good explanation.

It's kind of like a race of literal autists, totally focused in their autism on their autistic god, who is in turn totally focused in her autism on her autistic race.
It's a completed loop of autism feeding off autism, kind of like the necropotence decks of M:TG.

No, fuck you. You said they were changed from what they originally were, it's your responsibility to explain

>Tired
You are not tired, you are so autistically mad that you keep shitting up completely unrelated threads for it.

I can also easily picture why a tardlet like you doesnt have a group to play with. Instead of being forever rectally-ravaged about DND put some time and effort into getting a game running that isnt DnD.

This question has been answered hundreds of times here. If you want to make a drow thread, you don't need to start with a question you already know the answer to.

Lolth was right

The skin was like that before they went underground actually.

It's fantasy fiction. If you're looking for sound reasons based on a consistent set of principles, you're a fool.

If memory serves the tl;dr of why mind flayers do stupid shit is A)They know they're stuck in a timeloop involving the creation of their species, long term consequences aren't a major concern if they fuck up, on the other hand if they do too well they're looking at a time paradox, B) the rank and file illithids don't actually know the elder brain eats mind flayers, thinking it's more of an assimilation thing C)They NEED to cull the numbers of their young lest they metamorphosis into a graboid who hungers for mind flayers

It's not an antagonistic formal debate, you fucking sperg

>There's no physical, psychological, cultural or evolutionary reason for it
Actually, female drow are repeatedly described as stronger and taller than male drow on average. Of course, that might be because of a blessing from Lolth, so HEY.

Basically, the drow are a NE society forced to be LE by a CE deity for shits and giggles.

Think that's bad? Try the freaking Dark Elves from War Hammer. They're a slowly reproducing races that is low on population. Yet, somehow they're constantly going to war and hold an annual celebration where a cult kills a large amount of their cities population, namely children.

Lolth doesn't so much bless it as encourage it in breeding patterns (which I suppose ends up the same thing), because she sees male drow as representative of Corellon Larethian.

She's literally turned an entire race on its head solely on the grounds that she's that crazy ex-girlfriend the rest of the elven pantheon wants nothing to do with because at the merest hint of Corellon wanting to do his own thing and not be under her thumb, she threw a raging bitchfit, fucked Gruumsh for revenge against the imagined slight, and plotted an assassination.

And when it failed, she dragged her son into her punishment with her and started fucking a spider-demon lord because why the fuck not. And the reason she hates her daughter Eilistraee so much? Corellon realised that her daughter was being manipulated and forgave his child, so Eilistraee is still allowed to be in Arvandor.

Nothing rules that fantasy fiction must be inconsistent slop.

Thats inconsistent between sources, and usually, no, they aren't. All elves, including drow, are usually described as having no differences in height and physical abilities between genders in D&D.

Because gods exist in D&D and have physical incarnations that can literally walk among their followers and give them direct orders. Basically think of all the greek/roman myths, like Helen of Troy being impregnated by Zeus while in the form of a swan. Or Zeus smiting people with lightning bolts. That kind of shit legit happens in D&D every damn day.

Drow society exists the way it does because it pleases Lolth, she is a goddess of pure chaos. And all the other races in the Underdark don't fuck with that shit. Nobody wants Spider Demon Goddess on the rag wrecking their sweet virgin asses.

>LMAO dude like why are you trying to think about things lol what are you some kind of nerd ohmigod everyone throw rocks at this guy trying to make sense of source material what a dork lmao

>Helen of Troy being conceived by Zeus

Derp, my bad.

It's a logical consequence of drow society, however. Drow females are more valued than drow males, and the Underdark is resource-poor and food-poor. So females will get more and better food than males when growing up, and a significant part of what determines how tall you grow up to be is the food you eat as you grow up.

The height difference between North Koreans and South Koreans stationed at the DMZ provides a good example of this.

In fact I'mma just post my "Drow are North Korea" thing.

Drow males rank below Drow females, but above slaves. It's the slaves who go hungry when there's a food shortage.

Like medieval noblewomen, the males have limited power and are often treated as the property of the other sex. But they still get fed and clothed, because it would be an embarrassment to the house if they weren't, and they may still be of some use.

So, no, the males aren't short because of juvenile food deprivation. Unless you want them to be in your setting, of course.

>It's the slaves who go hungry when there's a food shortage.

You don't understand. There is ALWAYS a food shortage. 20,000 drow and thousands more slaves could not be supported to a healthy degree by the food that Donigarten supplies. It's not just slaves that starve, it's every drow who isn't noble (and probably a few of the lowest-ranked nobles, too)

>because it would be an embarrassment to the house if they weren't

Sure, but most drow aren't nobles. House Do'Urden was 9th House in the novel Homeland, for example, and was considered exceptional for having 4 fully trained clerics of Lolth (Malice, Briza, Vierna, and Maya). Add in Dinin, Drizzt, and Nalfein, and you've got 7 nobles in the 9th most powerful House (and one of those, Nalfein, died on the same day that Drizzt was born).

If we very generously assume that Menzoberranzan has 100 noble Houses, and further generously assume that each noble House has 10 members (more than the 9th House ever had at one time), then that's just 1,000 noble drow in Menzoberranzan, or 5% of the population. Which makes sense - nobles aren't very noble if they're as common as lice.

Drow are matriarchal elf Romans.

They have a militant, religious society in which being smarter, stronger, and more popular than others is seen as evidence of your divinely ordained fitness to rule. Noble families at the top will constantly feud with each other, but always with the ultimate goal of maintaining the status quo. Lolth priestesses are just "gospel of wealth" clergy who think that being poor means you can be ritually sacrificed.

They rule on top of a teeming (by elf standards) underclass population, which in turn manages the large populace of non-drow slaves, mercenaries, and peasants who know that living in a drow slum is still better than going it alone in the underdark.

Because the greatest unifying force is what's outside their cities. All manner of nightmarish creatures from whom being devoured alive would be a mercy. To be a drow is to live in a hellscape that would send the tree-humping surface elves howling into their own beautifully-wrought graves. And they hold their own. The boss lady got to the top over the dead bodies of all her almost-as-capable sisters. The best warriors and mages get invited to the high-class fuckfests. Kill bitches, get paid, have a great time doing it.

For the record, here's a closer map of Menzoberranzan. The area enclosed in red is Donigarten, where 100% of Menzoberranzan's food comes from.

Let's call it about 70,000 square yards of farmland plus a lake 20,000 square yards wide, plus an island upon which all the rothé in the city reside - an island that is significantly less than 500 square yards in size.

That's not enough to support 20,000 people and thousands more slaves. And even if it produced enough food in terms of raw calories, numerous vital nutrients would still be lacking.

Dammit I forgot the map.

>The area enclosed in red is Donigarten, where 100% of Menzoberranzan's food comes from
Who thought this was a good idea? I mean landscapes and farmland that is the main source for entire realms have always been a thing, but I hope you are exaggerating.

To be fair, who fucking knows how much magical underground mushroom farms can produce. The books say that much land fed that many people, and that's really all we have to go on. Did the books say everyone was starving all the time? Did the books, conversely, say that drow are definitely mean enough to kill and eat slaves until the population and food supply were closer to equal?

But hey, maybe you're right. What that map says to me, though, is that no one actually thought this through and you should do whatever you like when you DM.

The three dimensional nature of the underdark doesn't translate well into two dimensional maps. There could be many caverns and levels in that region that effectively increase the total amount of space for farming by a fractal amount.

5e's Volo's Guide to Monsters has a section on the Illithids and their society. I'm unsure if the 3e books, particularly the ones that dealt with Illithids, have such information in them; it's been a long time since I read them, and don't have the files on hand anymore.

Volo's mentions that there is a rare chance for the ceremorphosis process to yield an Ulitharid - which are hyper intelligent, wholly independent Mind Flayers.They seize control over a portion of the population. Eventually, if the colony gets large enough, they strike out on their own. Elder Brains are not fond of Ulitharids, because they endanger the colony (by being more aggressive and conspicuous), and they will divide the colony, creating two weaker colonies that have higher rates of activity than usual. This makes them highly vulnerable, despite being one way that Elder Brains can reproduce.

High rates of repopulation and population growth will increase the chance of a Ulitharid being created. This can endanger both colonies to wary Gith. I'd be smart, then, to only populate the colony to levels that have a low marginal rate of Ulitharids, and never past that. In addition, Elder Brains consuming a tadpole could be based entirely on their calculation of Ulitharid possibility. They could consume the ones who look too strong or too weak.

Ulitharid occurrence would be due to their miscalculations or a desire to have another colony potentially arise.

Reminder that Heroes of Might and Magic V commissioned a huge load of concept are from Olivier Ledroit (The art from quoted post), but decided to go with stupid fucking general WoW-esque graphics for the whole game.

You can still see some influence in hero portraits

>matriarchal
>hedonistic
>prone to gang warfare, stealing, and raiding
>dark skin

>most iconic one has a black panther familiar and fucked a ginger
What EXACTLY did DnD mean by this?

The way drow males are treated isn't remotely comparable to medival Europe.
The worst you could do to your wife back then before someone intervened was give her a shiner. Drow males are tortured with these fucked up snake whips and turned into mindless drider if they piss a priestess off badly enough (or if it suits her purposes).

You're not taking into account magic. The cult of lolth, especially, is very active and influential, and lolth herself is very demanding.

The main reason their society doesn't make sense to me is because they kill each other frequently, yet it takes a long time for an elf to grow up.

No, user. The slaves don't go hungry. The slaves get eaten.

Don't they use magic and stuff? Like, you take one mushroom, cast a spell on it, and it duplicates into a dozen mushrooms? I'm pretty certain they've got gates open to planes of fresh air and shit all over the place. Otherwise they would all suffocate from the lack of oxygen just from the constant cook fires everybody has in their homes.

no its not his responsibility

its your responsibility to educate yourself before you come to a board and proclaim that an entire race is nonsense.

Fuck off back to your containment board.

Once again, /pol/ is always right.

Would a /pol/tard know that much about Drizzt?

I just think it's hilarious. Salvatore wrote a scathing criticism of black American culture (and of the way an "oreo" is treated by society), and no one batted a fucking lash.

Yes
t. /pol/tard crossboarder.

*laugh track intensifies*

>Drow males rank below Drow females, but above slaves.

One thing I think people overlook or ignore is that "all the leaders are female" is not the same thing as "all the females are leaders." Of course you have those who go straight for blah blah femdom whip-cracking fetish society. But I have more fun with the idea that there's more subleties in the social strata than that. Like favored males--either because they have valuable skills or just because they're good looking--could have more influence and autonomy than a low-status female. Males likely could get away with using mistresses, whores, etc, as long as they're sufficiently deferential to females at the top.

If you want to go by shit in Faerun books Orcs/goblinkind are just naturally inclined to cruelty and their gods tend to exacerbate the problem by rewarding warlike raiders/violent little shits and fucking up any attempts at civilization or diplomatic relations with all but a few races by moderates.

Occasionally you get counter-examples of stabilizing forces like like Obould Many-Arrows attempt at kingdom building but Gruumsh and Maglubiyet are overall dicks in a way similar to Llolth.

Pretty much yeah, if I remember correctly there are basically 3 or 4 castes in drow society,
Slaves < male and female peasants (< maybe high class males/male wizards) < High class females/priestess
The leaders are female, but there ARE lower/middle class drow of both genders of equal standing

So, anons, if Drow society is kept functioning by the direct intervention of Lolth, what would happen if another god decided to change things for the better?

A god, like, say, Vehk-and-Vehk? youtube.com/watch?v=-MnhhBoioCI

>yet it takes a long time for an elf to grow up.
Y'know I've never been sure whether that refers solely to mentality or physical as well and the texts I've read are ambiguous.

Mostly from what I've read they grow up at the same rate as humans, elves just have, because of their higher lifespan, a different opinion on when someone is an adult. Though on drow, I think in the Driztt novels they actually need longer to grow up, so different writers will make up their own shit.

That tadpole eating thing has a purpose. It weeds out the less intelligent, less survival oriented tadpoles.

Why do you think an elder brain needs the tadpoles for sustenance at all? They DON'T. You're making an assumption based on normal psychology and normal biology. Illithids have neither.