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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7559279" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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