Valeskan Drow: Origins, Culture, Biology, Q&A

Disclaimer: The vast majority of this is not mandatory to know; there are hundreds of drow settlements with major differences. What is described here is "Mainstream" drow culture and society for the Valeskan world.
Drow

Origin and Abilities: Drow are a species of elf with heavy cave adaptations. Thousands of years of genetic drift have left them incapable of producing hybrid offspring with the general elven population. They are descendants of an elven population driven underground in their homeland, "Udast Nguslu" ("The Forest of Terror," when translated into the common tongue from that of the Goblins that dominate the surface).

The magical activity of the homeland - the very same magic that made the predators above the surface so voracious and that keeps them growing throughout their lives, so long as they have prey - gave them swift adaptations to the realm they named the Underdark. The females were more sensitive, and become the cultural, military, and spiritual leaders. As the adaptation progressed, the Drow became unable to tolerate sunlight, and so chose to reject it entirely; nonetheless, several thousand years ago, the species underwent the Drow Diaspora as their home Underdark reached the point of exponential population growth. Since then, new Underdarks have been formed with samples of plant and animal life to give birth to copycat ecosystems beneath lands across the world. Many drow leave Underdarks due to rampant crowding, exile (voluntary from fear for their lives, or involuntary as mandated by enemies/the justice system), or in search of enemies they seek to settle accounts with.

Drow are not particularly frail, nor especially robust. They have a natural aptitude for Shadows and Magic from their connection to the depths. They have a life expectancy of roughly 1000 years and are capable of Darkvision, a supernatural ability that allows them to perceive normally in conditions completely lacking in light (particularly caves). Their vision also extends slightly into the infrared spectrum, though they are not capable of detecting creatures by heat alone.

Appearance: Drow have pale hair and eyes that can be red, white, purple, green, or other tints (though rarely brown or blue). They are, being an elven species, slight in build, and their cave adaptation has made them often quite short; within a single generation born aboveground, however, a drow will be roughly the height of an average human. Like elves, their ears are pointed. A very small number of them have sharp teeth, most often those so touched by the mana of the Underdark that they have acquired a Thirst for Blood.

Culture & Religion: Drow have a strongly individualistic ethic born of their difficult origin as a species. However, they also have a strong distrust of other races, to the point that they could be described as isolationist, xenophobic, or even at times genocidal. They have a particular enmity with other elves, believing themselves the superior species. Avariel, most of all, stand for what they hate the most (elves, the surface, and large open spaces). Besides elves, the fae, garou, orcs, goblins, and trolls of the world are particularly seen as ancestral enemies. They will work reluctantly with humans or mer, but the other races are all seen as having "personally" offended or harmed the Drow race as a whole.

The most honored individuals (usually grudgingly) are those who are seen as making contributions beyond their own skills. Those groups are, particularly, females (especially the fertile and/or pregnant) who are seen as those who shepherded the Drow through their formative years, metalsmiths of all types, and the masons (often mages) who make the grand architecture of the Underdarks. Poisonmaking, hunting for valuable sport/trophy kills (particularly of large animals and monsters as well as sentient enemies), and the rejection of the surface and sun are also proud traditions.

In short, Drow value personal strength, power, and achievement second only to advancement of the Drow as a race above the other races of the world. The greatest honors are mastering a craft, taking trophies from kills, and having many children. Even after the Drow Diaspora, these have remained a near-constant and universal cultural fact of the entire race.

Lloth is back, bitches
The best and worst thing to happen to the drow, Lloth is the QUEEN SPIDER BITCH GODDESS of the drow. She delights in seeing them fight for her favor. Houses rise and fall by her approval and her enforcement of the matriarchy is absolute wherever she is venerated. Only females may speak in her name, and the sacrifice of sentients is pleasing to her. Spiders are sacred to her. The world of the Isle of Valesk has drow who are a touch more cynical than devout. While all but the most brave or rogue serve her and worship her, many of them are fully aware that Lloth endangers or kills them on whims quite often. There are entire rogue Underdarks that refuse her authority, and Valesk is a welcome reprieve to many from her predations.

Society and Military: Drow society is traditionally organized into three social categories. Some Underdarks reject some aspects of the system or another, but Udast Nguslu's Underdark is seen as the 'true' system all others should seek to follow. The military is generally divided into commissioned officers drawn from the Great Houses, NCOs and career soldiers drawn from the Undercitizens who have completed their mandatory service and remained in the military, "draftees" who are serving their ten-year mandatory term and "reservists" called to serve during a time of war, and slaves drawn from outside of the Citizenship to act as support units, arrow pincushions, or other irregular soldiers. The common branches, copying the Drow homeland's military, are the Surface Legion, the Underdark Legion, the Priestesshood Guard, and the Irregular Warfare Division. The former three consist of a core unit of melee combatants and crossbow soldiers with mage support, while the IWD recruits from the other three divisions and works as a special operations division that carries out special missions that the other branches are not equipped for.

The Great Houses, a system of hereditary nobility who seek to increase the prestige of their House, is the top stratum of Drow society. Seeking glory by the holding of high offices in the local Underdark's administration (despite nominally giving up their House ties to do so) by the elimination of enemies and claiming of trophies from them (surfacer or Underdark, nonsentient or sentient) and the training of skilled Smiths or Masons (other crafts being seen as lesser and unworthy of nobles). They conduct both assassinations and open duels, and are considered to be the cultural leaders of drow society in peacetime and the military leaders in wartime. However, all acts of governance are outside of their hands with the exception of military courts-martial.

The Undercitizens, the second tier, are the common masses. All those formally recognized as citizens of an Underdark but not members of a Great House. They are required to serve at least one ten-year tour of duty in a branch of the Underdark's standing military before the age of 300, and remain an active reservist for the remainder of their citizenship.

The Clientele, who are not citizens, are not officially recognized as part of the Drow state; they are hangers-on, parasites, slaves, foreign merchants, or Drow who have been stripped of citizenship for crimes or for spending too much time above the ground. They have few rights or freedoms and the punishment for a Great House member acting against them is much lower than it would be if they acted against an Undercitizen. They can petition for citizenship if they are not slaves, but few, if any, will ever receive it. They may be drafted in times of war.

The Priestesshood (and, to some degree, The Servitors, who execute their will as a bureaucratic body) is the final class, but not the lowest, as formally the Priestesses and the Servitors are not part of the Drow society - they are, officially, above it. governing from outside via divine wisdom. The Priestesshood is in charge of maintaining the Underdark's magical horticulture, setting laws and punishments, holding non-military tribunals, negotiating with foreign entities, setting taxes, and ordering new expansions to the Underdark for Priestess/Servitor use. Religiously, they train new priestesses, torture themselves and others, and sacrifice sentient beings to gain prosperity and wisdom from their goddess(es). The Servitors collect taxes, execute the law, perform punishment, detain criminals, and act as the "secret police" arm of the Priestesshood. They are not subject to Drow laws and as such can take any action they deem necessary for the betterment of Drow society, save for harming a Priestess without the orders of another Priestess. Servitors are drawn almost exclusively from the Great Houses, though on rare occasion Undercitizens (and at least a handful of the Clientele, though only Drow members of that caste) have been allowed to join the Servitors. Unlike the rest of Drow society, acting for self-benefit or attempting to advance their former House, which they must give up when they join the Servitors, is punishable by death or even purging of their former Great House, as it is seen as the ultimate disgrace in Drow society to betray their Servitor oaths and risk the wrath of the gods.

The Servitors and the Irregular Warfare Division are known to have a thriving rivalry in many Underdarks. On the other hand, veterans of certain military branches will often consider each other siblings-in-arms outside of the normal bounds of social class and even Underdark-of-Origin should they meet.

“Udast Nguslu” (“The Forest of Terror”) -- Origin of the Drow

An equatorial tropical rainforest and a location of great magical activity, the hot, wet, and thoroughly hostile environs of Udast Nguslu are an untamed wilderness so hostile that no permanent settlement has ever been established aboveground. The megafauna aboveground, most of which is simply normal wildlife that has undergone the process known as “wyvernization” from overexposure to ambient mana levels grows to massive sizes as long as the forest has food to sustain them, which usually means that they simply continue to grow until they die of disease or wounds taken from choosing the wrong prey. A thick canopy of greedy trees consumes almost all of the light, and while some filters through in most spots, there are places so choked by the canopy that it’s pitch black even in the light of day. The elves of the region took to two directions - some went up, to the trees, living in the canopy and building without ever going to the forest floor. The so-called “high elves,” over the years, have almost all migrated away, driven off by the destruction of their villages or the hunting of their kind by the massive drakes, wyverns, wild cats, oozes, fungi, hostile elementals, or worse. All that is left of their proud traditions of archery and craftsmanship are long-overgrown graveyards, ruins of rotting wood, and rudimentary metalworking sustained by the long-defunct lifts they used to reach the forest floor. Some say, though it is mere speculation, that the high elves interbred with the wild fae (if such a thing is even possible) until the elves had lost their own identity; either way, the wild fae thrive in the magic-rich forest and are one of the many terrors, though even they are not safe from the wildlife. Drakes and wyverns dominate the canopy level as the unchallenged apex predators, and knowing where one’s territory ends and another begins can be the key to survival, as they are notoriously jealous creatures.

Beneath the forest floor, the low or dark elves took another path, tunneling beneath the earth and sheltering in their mines, fleeing deeper and deeper into the ground and forming a near-lightless city. Supporting their growing city with arcane hydroponics, massive earthen fortifications, and the occasional sacrifice of sentients for the favor of gods, the dark elves created their subterranean sanctuary, the Underdark, and expanded it beneath the entirety of the forest, a massive realm of twisting caves and passages where the dark elves created a true civilization, even as the mana-rich environment changed them, allowing them to see in the infrared spectrum. All dark elves from the world of Valesk can trace their ancestry to Udast Ngulsu, though many emigrants have formed enclaves and new underdarks (it is technically incorrect to refer to any single underdark; many islands have their own and most continents have at least two or three that are unconnected). Dark elves are widely renowned for their kind’s mastery of masonry and metalworking, a rich tradition that has stayed with them since their culture’s earliest days. The Ngulsu Underdark trades almost exclusively through underground tunnels that join them to other regions’ underdarks, as they rarely brave the surface except on runs of slaving or hunting - though even hunting is more for sport than sustenance, as escaped animals have long-since mutated and created a rich underground ecosystem, the twin bases of which are that the heavy rainfall of Udast Ngulsu brings carrion, dead growths, and more down into the tunnels, while deep vents feed manavores, plants, fungi, animals, or other types of being that can subsist purely on magic but which are hunted by less overtly magical beings.

On the level of the forest floor are the most wild and arguably the most dangerous of the sentients - orcs, goblins, trolls, garou, and others are engaged in constant tribal warfare. Packs of garou and goblinoids alike form warbands that raid the Forest’s neighbors, then collapse into infighting. If anywhere in the known world can be called a “barbarian” land, it is Udast Ngulsu. The orcs, goblinoids, and garou do not form permanent settlements; they have long-since learned not to. While they simply say it is not their way, the truth is that anywhere they settle in for long becomes the hunting ground for one massive predator or another - and they, the prey. The goblins and garou can manage, from historical ties, the barest amount of trade with the Underdark, but the dark elves distrust them (quite rightfully) and they almost uniformly prefer raiding outsiders over trading with them. The orcs cannot even manage that - they have a long-standing historical enmity with the local dark elves across all tribes and their long history of crimes against each other has left both sides less than eager to negotiate in any way that does not involve the point of a spear.