Drows

Drows are a people of the Underdark who practice Psychic magic. The power is highly stable and very hard to renew: it returns only through meditation, at 10% of the reserve per hour on the surface and 20% below it, and never more than half a reserve in a day (see 4). A drow recharges faster at home, and never as fast as a Cerberus human. Emptying a drow costs it two days.

All drows possess Drow Darkvision. Their racial powers awaken in an unchanging order: Levitate, Darkness, then Telekinesis. Each awakening requires a formative experience. Drow society institutionalizes risk because a sheltered life may never produce one. In game terms, the powers awaken at Drow Levels 1, 2, and 4. They use normal blue spell slots and grant no free castings or second reserve.

Zaran Mor

Zaran Mor was not one capital among many. It was the drow civilization concentrated in a single immense cavern: city, archive, school, temple, and seat of power. Smaller colonies fed it and watched its roads, but no second city rivalled it.

The drows had little reason to seek the surface. Their eyes, diet, blue mana, and preferred temperature belonged below ground, and Zaran Mor already occupied the cavern they wanted. Brazzant was cold, the Ark belonged to humans and the Partage, Cerberus was full of giants, and the desirable underground territory beyond their own approached the dwarven kingdoms. The surface offered costly wars for land less suitable than home.

Zaran Mor grew slowly. Drows had few children, educated them over decades, and built for a people who expected to inhabit the same place for centuries. Reproduction remained under the authority of women, and political power accumulated around ancient matriarchs whose Psychic strength, descendants, students, and memories made them living institutions. The drows revered these elders rather than an outside god. Their rule held the families together because nearly every important matriarch lived in the same city.

Other Underdark peoples did not share that position. Zaran Mor held lesser species and powerful creatures in service, guarded the routes around its cavern, and treated the region as its own. The surviving fighting schools show a military culture built to defend that order rather than conquer a continent.

One of the creatures held by the city was a powerful elemental. When Perennus Albion fought it, the cavern came down on Zaran Mor. The matriarchs, the old and wise, every treatise of Psychic magic, and the advanced fighting schools disappeared under the same rock. A regional power ended as a side effect of a duel, and nobody who mattered to it was ever told what had happened.

After the Fall

The survivors had to become everything Zaran Mor had not been. They scattered into poorer caverns, had more children, shortened education, and made decisions for the next season rather than the next century. Their population began to recover while the depth of their knowledge collapsed.

They also retained the political habit of gathering beneath an overwhelmingly powerful mind. Without the old matriarchs, a Psychic monster could occupy that empty place. Service offered territory, protection, and enough authority to stop several families from destroying one another. What began as survival became worship.

The beholder Qormuza reduced one colony to servants tending orchards outside his palace. Cauchemar acquired advisers, a diviner, soldiers, and a city that built a temple to a god not its own. To the drows of Zaran Mor, worshipping a creature their ancestors would have enslaved would have been the final humiliation. To their descendants, it could be the reason their children survived.

The Families

Order among drows has never been institutional. Zaran Mor was held by a handful of ancient women, and when the rock took them it took the order with them, because there was nothing underneath it. What stands now is the family, and a drow family is whoever one strong drow can hold: relatives, debtors, students, and anyone who finds it cheaper to belong than to be prey. It grows while that individual lives and comes apart within a season of their death.

Most drows alive have never known anything else. The ones who talk about Zaran Mor are quoting people who were quoting people. What the fall left them is a language, a magic that still works, and the certainty that every treatise ever written is lying under the rock where it always was. Nobody has dug. Digging is a project, and a project needs somebody who will still be in charge when it finishes.

What They Sell

A drow can take a memory out of themselves and set it into fruit, honey, or wine over several days, and a human who swallows it receives the feeling, the images, and whatever the drow knew at that moment. The donor does not get it back. See nectar.

At Zaran Mor, surrendering a memory belonged to preservation and ritual, not ordinary trade. The surviving families turned it into merchandise because the surface wanted it and the Underdark demanded a price for survival.

It is the only thing they make that the surface wants badly, and it is why the surface keeps coming down. Marcus Crassus kept Nelvia and her settlement producing and drank a dose before any spell that mattered. Qormuza took a colony outright and set it to tending orchards. Cauchemar bought advisers instead and got the nectar with them. None of it was a conquest. Nobody has ever needed to conquer the Underdark; it is enough to find a family that is losing and offer it terms.

The most recent buyer intended to industrialise it. Vidock studied production under Myveen Tracy, costed it out, and concluded that the only obstacle was supply — donors with something worth surrendering, who surrender it once. Whose memories went into the vats was not a question that detained him.

They remain dangerous out of all proportion to this history. A drow fights in a darkness nobody else can see through, and against a party carrying torches it is very close to unanswerable (see Drow). The reason drows never threatened the great wizards of Cerberus is not that drows are weak. It is what those wizards became.

Four martial profiles—from young cavern runners to the lost duelists of Zaran Mor—are collected under Drow Warriors. Household adepts, mindbinders, circle priestesses, and selective Psychic enchanters appear under Drow Sorcerers.