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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7559092" data-attributes="member: 4937">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: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?310345-Queen-of-the-Demonweb-Pits-what-s-so-bad" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?310345-Queen-of-the-Demonweb-Pits-what-s-so-bad</a>)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.</blockquote>

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