What kind of music do they listen to?

[Immortal Sun]

This thread also technically applies to Starfinder/Pathfinder, and it truly system neutral, so...let me begin:

I've been thinking about running some culturally-heavy settings, most notably, I'd like to run a Drow campaign, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized there were certain fundamental elements of culture I was missing. Reflecting upon the horror thread, I was analyzing what sort of settings I am good at, and what sort of settings I am not good at. Turns out, I'm pretty good at running pretty depressing things, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and all varieties of dystopias past, future and fantasy. Which then turned my mind to running a sy-fy Drow setting, but I realized that this didn't ameliorate the problems I was facing, but made them worse.

How has music developed? Are Drow perpetually stuck listening to "what if the Soviet Union had never fallen" operatic? Are they moored in the late 90s/early aughts emo phase? Is everything they listen to clad in leather and absolutely brutal?. Have the various Hoses evolved into whole "nations" each with their own unique take on Drow life, culture, music and art?

Speaking of art, how have the visual arts developed? Did Drow society (which is often shown as more culturally, technologically and socially developed than it's surface-world contemporaries) develop through analogous artistic phases? Since much of the performing arts are extensions of the literary arts, what sort of books do Drow write? Do they covertly write stinging social commentary ala 1984? Or is their literature more overtly patriotic? Do they even do comedy? Consider for a moment that Drow may not even consider the back-stabbing, oppressive, matriarchal society they live in to even be wrong.

This question can be extended to a variety of races, if not all of them. But lets keep this thought experiment focused on Drow for a moment since they're one of the few with any sort of truly established cultural baggage in their racial information. And ya know, I'd like to run a SYFY Drow campaign and am looking for ideas.

Lets say you advanced the Drow thousands of years, from the fantasy era we know them to a sy-fy time akin to Starfinder, how would their art look? How would their music sound? What sort of books would be written?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I once played a dwarf character who emphasized his clan’s music was centered on percussion, especially the steel drum. Given their cultural affinity towards hammers, heavy metallic armors, mining, refining metals and the like, it seemed a natural fit.*

After 1000 years, RW humans managed to go from purely acoustic music to electrically amplified music, including complex synthesizers that can mimic any sound and at least one composer (Brian Eno) who has created a music-making algorithm that will produce music in his style for as long as it has power to run it. We’ve also gone from chant and other forms of “classical music” to jazz, prog, C&W, Punk, new wave, metal, and so much more.

It’s conceivable that the Drow might progress just as far (magi-)technologically speaking. However, with considerably fewer generations, it’s possible that Drow aesthetic tastes might not change and diversify as much.

So I would expect to find some Drow musicians using modern instruments for playing updated “classics” or neoclassically inspired music much like ELP, YJM, 2Cellos, Rick Wakeman, Muse and so forth.

Others might create new genres & instruments based on what sounds cool in a subterranean environment surrounded by stone. Percussion- especially subtle and intricate- might be at the fore. So might instruments that mimic the sounds of flowing water...or incorporate flowing water as part of the instrument itself. Think...Mike Olfield, Phillip Glass, the first couple of decades of Tangerine Dream and analogues to ambient, doom/sludg, drone, post-rock and shoegaze.




* my expansion of this into something that sounded like Jungle remixes of Cutty Ranks’ “Limb by Limb” (with bagpipes added) PLUS developing an an unarmed combat system similar to capoeira did not, but was fun nonetheless.
[sblock]
[video=youtube;G8ZOBNdeu38]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8ZOBNdeu38[/video][/sblock]

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think it’s wholly preposterous to imagine 1000 years of development without any anti-establishment movements, satires, punk rock equivalents, etc.

I think a lot of Drow art would be subsersive. Possibly, in ways that most true believer types wouldn’t even catch unless it’s pointed out to them, where other movements seek to openly and brazenly raise a middle finger to the establishment and the status quo.

That said, Drow culture is entirely unsustainable as written. (Assuming Menzo culture as the norm) Even in the Realm, The culture isn’t sustaining. It is failing, bit by bit, in fits and starts, sometimes violently and sometimes via subtle attrition of the best minds to the surface or non-standard enclaves.

A thing to decide ahead of time is, what vision of the Drow is your starting point, before that 1000 years of development? Is there an edition you’re working from in terms of lore, or are you building your own take on the Drow?

 

[Celebrim]

The problem I have with answering this question is the Drow as presented are utterly incoherent. They seem to come from the mindset, partly the fault of Gygax, that 'chaotic evil' was more evil than evil, and they seem to have been aligned as 'chaotic evil' purely to represent them as ultimate evil rather than out of any coherent philosophy.

I have no conceptual problem with a chaotic evil tyrant organizing a society in a manner that it utterly loyal to and worshipful of the chaotic evil tyrant. That's what chaotic evil tyrants do. But I do have a problem with that if the chaotic evil tyrant is some mortal dictator, but an actual incarnated embodiment of something - that is the god or spirit of chaos and evil. You see, if the society is ultimately loyal to and worshipful of the chaotic evil tyrant and rigidly organized according to the tyrants whims, to the extent that there are laws, tests, and well a social structure, then the society is in contrast to the ruler a lawful society. Again, we should expect that chaotic tyrants would want to infiltrate a lawful society (or create a lawful society) with themselves at the head and hypocritically advance law purely to serve their own personal interests. But we wouldn't expect that from the actual god of chaos, because their interests are served by advancing chaos and if all their worshipers are actually lawful, then they are as a deity actually working not only against their own interests but against their aesthetic sense of how the universe should be organized. If you think that there is some connection between legitimate pious worship and a deity, or between the idea that the deity incarnates and the deities power and nature, then you'd expect that the deity cannot afford to be too hypocritical because a huge increase in the number of lawful worshipers actually undermines them. You would expect chaotic deities to actually work for a more chaotic universe, and to not be hypocritical about it. In other words, if Lloth was a god of treachery, you'd expect that she'd teach her followers to be treacherous to her as well. If Lloth was a god of whim, then you'd expect that she'd teach her followers to live according to whim as well - not her whim, but her own. Lloth is as a deity best served if everything is made over in her image. You'd not expect rigid hierarchies and pretty much anything that shows up in the works of R.A Salvatore or TSR/WotC sourcebooks about the Drow.

(Some thoughts about how this has all gone wrong from the start can be found here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?310345-Queen-of-the-Demonweb-Pits-what-s-so-bad)

Anyway, the point is that I have my own completely different take on what the Drow are like culturally, and they are far less structured and social than the normal take. So while the Drow may have established cultural baggage, I reject it all. I can't imagine Drow, for example, living in cities. It's antithetical to their culture, and it doesn't make economic sense for their circumstances.

My first point is that the Drow would have absolutely no unified culture at all. Maybe once a long time ago they had a culture, but now they barely even share a language. They can't agree on anything at all. To speak of them as a group is to miss the point. The largest functional group of Drow is about 30-40 individuals. What in contemporary life they look like more than anything else is gang culture, and if you are looking for inspiration, perhaps the gangs of the '70's cult movie 'The Warriors' would be typical.

Drow in my game world don't have a lot of time for writing books, composing music, or really anything else. They live in a harsh environment where every calorie counts. They enjoy art, they just don't have much use for it. They do torture instead of comedy. Their main artistic expression is their 'gang colors', the uniform, parlance, and rituals that they use to separate themselves from all the other bands doing the same thing. They express themselves with what they have at hand - decorating their bodies, their weapons, their armor. Males in particular may never own much more than that.

I can't imagine Drow functioning in any society. The notion is antithetical to what they stand for. Either the society goes, or the Drow do. There can be no compromise on that. You either have the ruins of a society with wandering bands of Drow, or you have dead Drow genocidally exterminated from the vicinity.

There music I'd imagine is unaccompanied, and they rarely make it. In the dark, sound is your enemy. It gives away your position. They would I think be like those Orca that do not sing, because they hunt other whales and singing is incompatible with the hunt.

When on the rare occasion that they do sing, it would have a distinctive character. Each band would have its own rhythms, preferred keys, and even styles. It would have some elements of stone age tribal music from around the world, which is similarly made out of poverty, with what is simply at hand. It would have some elements I think of military cadences - martial music meant to unify young men into a band of brothers. It would I think be haunting and terrifying - the victory yelps and cries of a tribe that thinks itself so powerful that it can dare to revel for a moment as a means of announcing to anyone that can hear just how terrifying they have become. Ironically, it might take some ideas from the territorial piping of songbirds, which are similarly battle cries even though to our ears the notes are too high pitched to seem as threatening as they are meant to be. I think it would be inherently alien, and irregular, a sort of anti-music that eschewed too much harmony or too much melody. I think it is the sort of thing that if you heard it, you'd be afraid, like a lion roaring at sunset, or like the howls of a pack of wolves as the sun rises. My knowledge of music is too limited to tell you exactly what it would sound like.

Perhaps female drow would dare from their place of security to do more, but I suspect that they would also established a highly individualized style and that they'd also perform solo, because ultimately that's what chaos is about. Chaos doesn't have choirs or orchestras. It doesn't have established modes of doing things. It's about self-expression and uniqueness.

 

[Immortal Sun]

(This was written after responding to the elements below.)
So, what do I have for a vision? Fair question. It must be a reasonably functional nearly-global society. It doesn't need to be universally "the same" society, but it should feel that traveling half-way around the globe would result in fairly minor cultural change. In the way that Star Trek's Earth still has remnants of once very distinct cultures, but has effectivly become "Americanized" around the globe. Some other sci-fantasy societies I have looked towards are Romulans (as much as they are simply "evil space elves"), Cardassians (particularly their development of the police state), Chiss (how to make noble houses function in the future) and Orville's Krill (for their religious zealotry). I think there's a fair point made in The Orville about how a religious culture reacts to the realization that they're not alone in the galaxy, either with a moderating of views or doubling down. I would wager the Drow would double down. And to note, I also think Roddenberry missed something truly unique about culture by generally disregarding religion in the future and among alien races.

This would be a society that is something of a cross between a autocracy/meritocracy/plutcroacy/theocracy (yes, none of the "good" political theories). Religion and lineage play a defining role in the ability of anyone accomplish anything but society at large recognizes those who accomplish things that are generally for the furthering of the Empire. Even if everyone likewise understands that noone does anything that isn't to serve their own personal advancement. But this self-promotion cannot be totally shameless, as paying tribute to the establishment, the nobility and to the church are all requisite elements. A drow who accumulates great wealth but doesn't tithe would be seen as a godless heretic and that would provide perfect "legal" justification to destroy them. Meanwhile a highly religious drow of low standing may be nearly untouchable for the holy work they have done in the name of Lolth. Fragging your superiors remains an effective tactic, provided you sufficently "get away with it".

Different nations on the Drow homeworld may emphasize different elements of this socio-economic-political system, but the underlying elements remain the same.

I'm not looking for a singular culture to stand the test of thousands of years (at least in measures of human lifespans). We certainly haven't accomplished it on Earth and I doubt I could develop one. I think referring back to @Dannyalcatraz and their point about the longevity of the Drow, it may be worth noting that even a fraying culture could take thousands of years to completely collapse. A cultural "rebound" could result in hundreds of years of stability, rather than a decade or two. When the Drow version of Rome falls, the Dark Ages could be 8000 years instead of 800. The new world powers could be considered "young" at only 2000 years.

So I'm leaning at this point more towards lawful evil, but also a sort of blue/orange aligment. The Drow don't look at life, the universe and everything like the rest of us do. But me the puny human DM is still limited in making them something presentable to the other puny humans at the table.

I like the recently put forth idea of Lolth representing a "lawful, but evil" alterative to Correllions "Chaotic and indifferent". After being led on an exodus from the elven world eons ago, upon discovering their mistake the Drow chose to double down on their decisions rather than abandon them. Resulting in a society with a powerful level of cognitive dissonance that even though they know there are holes in their boat so to speak they are inclined towards traditionalism, religiosity and fanatacism. With the addition of some generally accepted level of breeding programs, eugenics and society over family; I think I would reasonablly generate a society that is at fairly functional (at least in game-time terms) but terrifying to "dig into", and most people don't.

I do like the ideas @Celebrim presents for at least the counter-culture elements. For as much as the government tries, it can't control everything and that is what it manifests in.

A thing to decide ahead of time is, what vision of the Drow is your starting point, before that 1000 years of development? Is there an edition you’re working from in terms of lore, or are you building your own take on the Drow?

Fair. To kind of generally respond to @Celebrim that's certainly not the take I'm going for and yes, I realize that what is "established" is not really sustainable, but then looking at a lot of SyFy there's always an "evil empire" of sorts to, if nothing more, present an opposing viewpoint to the otherwise "American" or "Federation" approach to things. I'm not terribly concerned if a singular Drow empire lasted a thousand years, but functionally lets say the Drow had their own world, all generally inclined in a drowish direction that eventually reached space-faring capacity.

I suppose I'd be looking at something more akin to an internal federation of states than a one-world-nation of Drow. There would be lasting cultural differences but within a much narrower developmental range, everything stemming from the same established root culture; rather than several independant cultures developing in parallel, more of adapting their existing ways of life to the land, than developing new ones from scratch. For an IRL comparison, in the way that American, Canadian or Australian culture is unique, but clearly European and not Chinese. The original Drow society could indeed have fallen and new variations would have risen to take its place, some closer to the original material than others.

I think it’s wholly preposterous to imagine 1000 years of development without any anti-establishment movements, satires, punk rock equivalents, etc.

I generally agree.

I think a lot of Drow art would be subsersive. Possibly, in ways that most true believer types wouldn’t even catch unless it’s pointed out to them, where other movements seek to openly and brazenly raise a middle finger to the establishment and the status quo.

I think that's a good way to put it. Nothing in Drow society leans towards people wanting to make overt statements, everything is about subtetly and carefully crafting a message within an image that, to the right audience would become visible.

That said, Drow culture is entirely unsustainable as written. (Assuming Menzo culture as the norm) Even in the Realm, The culture isn’t sustaining. It is failing, bit by bit, in fits and starts, sometimes violently and sometimes via subtle attrition of the best minds to the surface or non-standard enclaves.

I agree in broad strokes. My concern is that fundamentally these "unsustainable" elements were written there on purpose in an attempt to make it clearly visible to the reader/player that this society is badwrong and (pardon my cynicism) celebrate Americanism. My larger concern is that these elements were written there unconciously by people who were unable to separate their conditioned notions of how a functioning society looks and how a non-functional society looks.

I once played a dwarf character who emphasized his clan’s music was centered on percussion, especially the steel drum. Given their cultural affinity towards hammers, heavy metallic armors, mining, refining metals and the like, it seemed a natural fit.*

After 1000 years, RW humans managed to go from purely acoustic music to electrically amplified music, including complex synthesizers that can mimic any sound and at least one composer (Brian Eno) who has created a music-making algorithm that will produce music in his style for as long as it has power to run it. We’ve also gone from chant and other forms of “classical music” to jazz, prog, C&W, Punk, new wave, metal, and so much more.

It’s conceivable that the Drow might progress just as far (magi-)technologically speaking. However, with considerably fewer generations, it’s possible that Drow aesthetic tastes might not change and diversify as much.

This last line stood out to me most as an element I hadn't considered. I was certainly initially thinking in terms of IRL parallels where music is highly generational. For a race that naturally lives such a long time, I think your point is reasonable that older tastes in culture would hold sway over younger and newer ones for a much longer period of time and that "new" culture would (outside of the distinct anti-establishment element) attempt to cater towards the tastes of the old in order to gain favor, leaning towards reinforcing cultural values until the "old guard" had passed on and they were able to experiment, though by the time they've spend several hundred years reinforcing what is known and accepted, their own societal acceptance would largely be based on the fact that they have continued traditions rather than birthed new ones.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I can’t respond in depth right now, but I wanted to respond to two points real quick.

First, longer lifespans could lead to greater cultural ossification, but it might instead lead to greater tension between the youth and elders, as the rigid authoritarianism of the older generations makes the youth feel stifled and violently resentful. Entire movements could be sparked by nothing more than this.

Second, I think a question you need to answer before going further is; do your Drow have genuine free will and individual agency, or are they born, to some degree, “menzo”?

If they are wholly possessed of free will, then you may want to look into a split within the Drow themselves, with a few “rebel” states who reject ALL seldarine/gods in general, or embrace the other Drow gods, etc. or a rebel movement like any future sci-fi distopia.

Also, anarchists, who aren’t necessarily good, but simply refuse to be subtle about subverting norms, and of course, the powerful who flaunt their ability to ignore norms simply because they can.

But if Drow are born with the desire to backstab, undermine, etc, things get simpler. Though, for my money, vastly less interesting.

 

[Celebrim]

If you are looking to Star Trek for inspiration, you have one of two choices. Either you can keep the traditional view of the Drow as lawful evil, and go with that - Elven Space Nazi's or some such. In which case, the Romulans as evil space elves are perfectly valid models to operate off of, especially as presented in the original series.

(Side note, the original Romulans were presented as Lawful Evil, while the original Klingons were presented as Chaotic Evil. The original Klingons were these mustachioed snarling stereotype villains that reveled in their own treachery and reputation for have no morals at all. When the script for the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was written, it originally featured the Romulans as the villains. However, the suits in charge insisted that the Klingons be used instead, because they felt the Romulans would be too obscure. The result was that a movie written for Romulans was made pretty much exactly if the word Romulan had been scribbled out and Klingon put in its place, and the result of that was the beginning of the Romulans and Klingons switching places in the story. The Klingons got cloaking devices and ships called 'warbirds', things that were originally Romulan. The Klingons would eventually go on to claim the 'honorable warriors' title from the Romulans and increasingly have a culture dominated by a code of honor, while the Romulans would go on to be masters of treachery and deception.)

Americans, for historical reasons, always have as the bad guy the Evil Empire. It's the Evil Empire that is always threatening and opposed to the good guys. And, any kitchen sink setting is going to need an Evil Empire, so you can certainly pick the Drow in that role. Star Trek ends up with a lot of evil empires.

But Star Trek has a relatively poor exploration of chaos. As I said, the Klingons were supposed to be chaotic evil, but the impulse to make them the evil empire was ultimately too strong and besides they were never really well defined except as 'bad guys' to begin with. In TNG, they tried to introduce the Ferengi as Chaotic Evil villains - snarling capitalist bad guys. The problem was they presented them in such a trite and over the top manner, that they never could be used as much of anything but comic relief. The Borg - evil assimilating empire - naturally became the main memorable villain. The Borg ironically could be described as chaotic evil if you insist firmly that the borg really are just a single entity spread across multiple bodies, but this alien idea was always too much for the writers and they always tried to humanize them into characters and individuals that were part of a society - even going so far as to give the Borg a 'queen'.

Still there are two Star Trek cultures, poorly explored as they are, which could serve as a model for a chaotic evil culture - the Orion pirates and the Ferengi Traders. I should say that I'm not a huge fan of sci-fi trope races living on worlds with single ecosystems and possessing single cultures. The elves as a whole are a believable species, divided into races and nations with their own cultures. The Drow are not. But if I'm designing 'Drow in Space', I'd translate them very different than you are suggesting. First, I'd give them no home planet. I'd make them space nomads that are adept at living in the dark of space, making their home in the ice of the Kuiper Belt and amongst the widely scattered rocks that make up asteroid belts. The Drow would reason that the true space faring culture was at home in space, and that planets were simply gravity wells which required enormous energy to lift matter out of home. The true space faring culture would take advantage of zero-g to excel in manufacturing things for use in space using comparatively little energy. To them, space would be home and those dirt bound races would be pitiable relics clinging to their primitive past. Scattered silently among the vast reaches of space, the Drow would not have anything corresponding to a government. Each ship or small squadron of ships would be a government unto its own, with its own family band aboard the ship being the highest level of authority. They'd have little or no need for cooperation with even their own kind. They are capable of living indefinitely in the vast reaches of space, building their ships off of seized resources that other races might not even consider valuable. A rock containing few kilometers of metal becomes dozens of Drow ships. A plague of Drow could infest a solar system for a century or more before you'd really start to notice, quietly hollowing out the inside of comets and asteroids and small moons, taking the occasional ship quietly in the dark. By the time you realized you had a Drow problem, they might have built a thousand warships. When the night came, you'd not even know what hit you. They'd have no compulsion about rendering a planet uninhabitable. What use have they for dirt? Kill everything and collect what is valuable afterwards. After all, what the Drow really want are your space rocks, not your planets. Kept in check, the Drow might operate as black market trades, slavers, smugglers and so forth. Drow tech and drow art might be quite valuable on the black market. There might always be individuals that think that they can deal with the Drow. And you probably could, right up until they hit a critical density and started to feel that they couldn't support themselves with the resources in the environment. Then, without any real need to organize, simply because it was the logical thing to do at the time, they'd all either attack at one or start attacking to get in on the action/loot as soon as they realized everyone else was attacking.

This set up would make them functionally equivalent to the Drow of fantasy. The dark between the stars (or at least between 'inhabitable' worlds) would serve as the setting equivalent of the Underdark.

 

[jasper]

Ok, What materials do they have access to? I don't remember any trees, so woodwinds are out. They access to skins, metals, and stone, leather, and? They have natural and carved caverns, so things which echo would be a thing.
...which is often shown as more culturally, technologically and socially developed than it's surface-world contemporaries)..... Never seen this bit of lore. Not including the fiction books, what splat books, campaign books, etc are you talking about.

But Drow opera in the original Vulcan is a beautiful thing.

 

[Immortal Sun]

First, longer lifespans could lead to greater cultural ossification, but it might instead lead to greater tension between the youth and elders, as the rigid authoritarianism of the older generations makes the youth feel stifled and violently resentful. Entire movements could be sparked by nothing more than this.

I could certainly see a long-lived society being punctuated with brief but highly explosive periods of revolution.

Second, I think a question you need to answer before going further is; do your Drow have genuine free will and individual agency, or are they born, to some degree, “menzo”?


If they are wholly possessed of free will, then you may want to look into a split within the Drow themselves, with a few “rebel” states who reject ALL seldarine/gods in general, or embrace the other Drow gods, etc. or a rebel movement like any future sci-fi distopia.

I don't like even having an answer to this from a meta perspective. Even in IRL we cannot, definitvly say we have free will. What do the Drow believe, what do their religions promote? Probably some form of predestination to justify established autocracy and to dismiss the anarchists as simply "part of the plan". I think there's almost be a sense of some kind of grand game of murder-chess being played across all of Drow society. "All the terrible things happen because they must happen because Lolth." The rebels rebel because that is what Lolth wanted for them. And they are defeated or victorious not for the righteousness of their cause or the purity of their ideals, but because that was how things were meant to be.

Also, anarchists, who aren’t necessarily good, but simply refuse to be subtle about subverting norms, and of course, the powerful who flaunt their ability to ignore norms simply because they can.


But if Drow are born with the desire to backstab, undermine, etc, things get simpler. Though, for my money, vastly less interesting.

I don't think being born with a general desire for subterfuge, backstabbing and so on means much about anyone. Less so among a species that has long-established breeding and eugenics programs.


For a meta answer: since I want the players to be Drow within this society they will at least mechanically have "free will" but will have been raised in an environment that fosters a certain kind of behaviour.


I don't intend to have Drow murdering each other around every corner, but I want to convey a sense that the Drow population at-large percieves corners as very good places for murder to happen around.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Fair enough. We approach this from different enough angles that I won’t be much further help on the cultural front.

As for music, it might be useful to also get an idea of what Elven music sounds like.

Also, this planet is theirs, right? So, no fear of going topside at night?

So, wood instruments would be a fairly new thing, but also a very ancient thing. Maybe look into rare string instruments and woodwinds, as well as weird inventions in those categories?