Celebrim
Legend
Endur said:
Among other things. Strict heirarchies, rule of law (granted a highly unjust set of laws but laws nonetheless), stable traditions, unified societies, large settled communities, and the rest all are marks of lawful society. Lloth as portrayed tends to the diabolic rather than the demonic and her plans seem to follow that. There is no real difference between how she and her court is portrayed and how the lords of Hell are portrayed.
If I were doing it, I'd model drow society after leonine society. Martriarchs and thier female relatives would control prime hunting/farming terroritory in the underdark, supported by a reutine of soldiers/lovers and eternally at war with all the neighboring clans (and anything and everything else). True cities would be rare, as it would be difficult first to maintain a large population and difficult to maintain blood ties between a large population of ambitious females (by the time you get out to fourth cousins, ties of kinship are getting really loose). At best, you'd have villages of a couple hundred females.
Male children would be cast out into the wild some years before achieving adolescence. There they would either die or else manage to form a male brotherhood or be adopted into one. Male clans would live as nomadic bandits, raiding other races until they gained sufficient strength. Thier driving ambition would be to replace the male clan of one of the neighboring matriarches, thereby obtaining a relatively good and comfortable life (and the right to breed). To do this, they have to murder every member of the existing brotherhood while slaying as few of the females as possible (because many females means wealth and happier males). Upon succeeding at this, they would then murder all the male children of the clan (female children being too valuable) so as to ensure no future rivals from within the household. All this murdering would be seen by the surviving females as an unbearably sexy act, proving the new clan worthy lovers and guardians and the minute it stopped the drow females would come to loath their previous lovers and flirt shamelessly with the males who moments ago were murdering thier kin.
And possessing a fit reutine of male warriors would be absolutely essential. Because the slightest sign of weakness, and a neighboring ambitious female clan would seek to expand thier holdings at your expense.
Rather than tyrant, Loth's role in this society would be heroic ideal. She would be seen as the supreme example of what a female should be - the most beautiful, most cunning, most skilled, most fecund, most dangerous, and most successful. The matriarch of the largest and most powerful clan conceivable. Someone worthy of emulating in every way, and in the eyes of male drow someone infinitely desirable as a mate and regent. She would make no universal laws, set no univeral rules, and directly govern noone but her immediate abyssal clan. But she'd still be in perfect control of the race, and she'd do so completely without the risk that her subject population would adopt lawful ways - and therefore cease to give thier worship to her.
It's one thing for a lawful mortal society to be led by a chaotic tyrant, but it makes no sense at all for the divine patron of a lawful society to be chaotic - or for a incarnate idea of chaos to create a lawful society.
