Place
Zaran Mor
The last great drow city, rebuilt after the Jax occupation
Zaran Mor is the last great drow city. It fills a single immense cavern with family domains, archives, temples, markets, and fighting schools. Before the Jax war it was the greatest of many such cities. The others were destroyed.
The city is common ground, not a state. Each family answers to its own matriarch and no ruler can command the whole. Drows share roads, schools, worship, and trade inside Zaran Mor while remaining politically separate. The city gives them a place to meet, not a government they must obey.
The Jax occupied Zaran Mor during their invasion of Janashia. Archon liberated it in M1010, drove the invaders back to Salk, and sealed the plane. The drows rebuilt. Some archives and schools survived the occupation; others were restored from living memory. A few matriarchs who lived through the war remain, old enough to remember both the humiliation and the humans who ended it.
Families scattered through the Underdark still look toward Zaran Mor without submitting to it. Its schools continue to teach forms lost elsewhere, including the city style Shara began learning before an elemental killed her family and she was taken to Cerberus. See 14.