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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nifft" data-source="post: 4232410" data-attributes="member: 6562">IMC Elves in general are a bit different.There are no Drow on Earth, for example. The critters that use the stats for Drow are called Thern, and they are albino ("bone white") cave-dwellers on a low-gravity world where caves are the best place to find abundant water and air. Thern speak Elven, because they are Elves.(If you are a player in my game, don't open the spoiler blocks!)[sblock=Shaderiven]There is a difference between the darkness of the high night sky and the darkness of truly deep places. The night is merely a passing shadow, but in the deep places, there is a texture to the darkness that does not flee before light. It's said that if you go deep enough into that darkness, you can find a darkness that has never seen light -- a darkness that is the memory of the time before there was light, before the arise of the two, the three, and the ten-thousand things.The darkness in the deepest places of a world is kin to the darkness between worlds, and kin to the darkness within all other worlds. They form a dark river, plied by Gith in their godbone skiffs, Dwarves in their great stone galleons, and Yugoloths in war canoes stitched from the living flesh of their damned oarsmortal slaves.Anyway. Darkness within worlds = "Shaderiven" = transportation, and that's why you find big monsters rising from deep places. Shaderiven is also somehow kin to the universal darkness which preceded time and space, so it's not something to mess with, unless you enjoy temporal paradoxes.[/sblock][sblock=Thern]Elves are not religious, because they know the origin of the gods. Well, most elves aren't religious. Thern are. Their goddess is Lolth, the demon-queen of spiders, and the first lich ever to attempt an ascent to divinity.Lolth was cursed by the other gods of her original world, her undead form twisted into a foul mockery of living flesh. Now she can only survive in a similarly corrupt and twisted layer of the Abyss. She is suspended between undeath and immortality. Unlike other gods, she is not tied to any particular world, but rather her power flows through any Abyssal gate or menhir; unlike other gods, she does not shelter the souls of her followers, but rather consumes them; unlike other gods, she was never a protector against the alien evils which eternally batter the barriers around the mortal worlds -- she is one of them.Many elves saw this and turned from the worship of all gods, when they fled their original world's devastation. Some settled on Earth. These elves may be Druids or Rangers, but not Clerics or Paladins.The thern chose differently. They fled the apocalypse to a different world, a world long dead, having been lost to the Hells thousands of years previously. They were able to find the necessities for life buried deep: ice and air, silt and soil. The rest they were able to manufacture (or steal) with their magic, and today much of the surface is livable, though the deep places are more comfortable in terms of water and atmosphere.They have a fragile peace with the Diabolic forces who own their world. They keep their own population low, and sacrifice the blood of a thousand slaves each year. As life progresses across the world's surface, Fey spontaneously arise, and the thern hunt these fey mercilessly as a part of their Diabolical pact.However, the thern know damn well that Diabolical pacts usually turn out poorly, and they intend to corrupt theirs to the fullest degree possible. In the deepest parts of their world, they have toiled for centuries, constructing a massive magical apparatus. They are condensing the darkness of Shaderiven, threading it with the souls of their slaves, hunting trophies, and captured fey. It is because of this condensation that their world is now heavy enough to hold a half-way reasonable atmosphere.The few scholars who know of the world-spanning apparatus differ in their guesses regarding its purpose. Some think it is intended to breach time and steal the essence of their dead world's gods when they were quick. Others conjecture that the apparatus will eventually be triggered to consume their world entirely, feeding all of its magic and vital potency to Lolth directly. A third hypothesis is that the apparatus will allow them to fragment their world into a maze of linked extra-dimensional spaces, which presumably would somehow negate an important clause of their Diabolical pact. A fourth group wonders if the apparatus is intended to steal or siphon some resource, perhaps souls or magical potency, from other worlds through the Shaderiven's flow. Finally, some claim that the apparatus is constructing (or gestating) a new physical avatar for Lolth, who will be bodily reborn into the prime -- with unknown consequences for the thern's world, and the material plane in general.[/sblock]Cheers, -- N</blockquote>

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