Ancestral Origin: Ancient surface elves
Primary Environment: Underdark
Game Rules: Use standard Drow ancestry rules
The Drow are an elven people descended from populations that migrated from the surface into the Underdark in antiquity. No single migration accounts for every Drow community, and the surviving histories of individual cities preserve different explanations for why their ancestors went below. Warfare, exile, refuge, colonization, religious disputes, access to deep resources, and the opening of new routes may all have contributed at different times and places.
Long separation below the Spatial Break eventually made the Drow distinct from their surface elven relatives. Their dark-adapted senses and other traits developed within environments shaped by deep geology, isolation, and strong Fundamental influences rather than through a single divine curse or universally remembered transformation. Drow remain recognizably related to other elves, but thousands of years of independent history have produced peoples whose identities are rooted primarily in their own cities and communities.
Cities and Cultures
Drow communities are commonly organized around independent city-states and local political systems separated by dangerous distances. Terl’Narquel and Olath Belanore, two known examples, developed distinct institutions despite both being predominantly Drow.
Olath Belanore historically organized its aristocracy through matriarchal noble houses, including House Glannath. Other Drow settlements have developed councils, hereditary offices, military governments, mercantile institutions, religious authorities, and other systems suited to their own histories.
Terl’Narquel developed a female-dominated political and religious establishment closely associated with a local tradition of Kalabold worship. In the 8750s SE, the revolutionary organization Venorik Killianen drew support from Drow men who believed that system denied them meaningful access to authority. The same city also maintained relationships far beyond its cavern through trade, military activity, and resource expeditions; members of Venorik Killianen harvested Shriekstone from tunnels connected to the abandoned dwarven city of Gorneduhr.
Life in the Underdark
The danger of the deep world has strongly influenced many Drow societies. Travel between settlements can mean crossing regions occupied by powerful predators, hostile communities, unstable caverns, flooded passages, or routes that may become unusable without warning. The Spatial Break also makes easy magical contact with the surface more difficult, reinforcing the practical importance of defensible routes and reliable local relationships.
The geography of the Underdark has encouraged strong isolationism in many Drow city-states. Borders, entrances, trade routes, and knowledge of safe passages can carry exceptional political importance, and strangers may be treated cautiously until their intentions and connections are understood. Some cities nevertheless pursue active trade, mercenary work, diplomacy, or expansion, while others avoid contact almost entirely.
The same conditions have encouraged harsh institutions in parts of the Underdark, including slavery, raiding, authoritarian rule, and violent rivalry. Other Drow cities have built their influence through trade, scholarship, mercenary service, diplomacy, and mutual defense.
Religion
Drow worship the gods of Kor Sirok through local traditions shaped by their city-states and neighboring societies. A god influential in one city may be marginal in another, and Drow living among other peoples often adopt the religious traditions of those communities.
The pressures of subterranean life often give particular prominence to gods associated with protection, construction, knowledge, water, fire, death, secrecy, and other concerns important to a settlement’s survival.
Drow Beyond the Deep World
Drow travel beyond the Underdark as mercenaries, merchants, emissaries, scholars, exiles, adventurers, and migrants. Surface reputations therefore vary sharply by region and by which Drow city-states, trading companies, military expeditions, or individual travelers have established contact there.