Shendilavri Drow, Lolth, and House Dourden

BY 
davidfoxfire

Published: May 21, 2012

In the D&D/M:TG world of Shendilavri, what is good and what is evil as you know it has flipped on it’s end.  In the Feywild, it was Corellon Larethian who fell into evil, turning into a despot, and Araushnee, the being you’d know better as Lolth, rose and usurped him from his throne during the Dawn War.  Unlike all the other realities, Araushnee was successful, and spared the Feywild from the ravages of the war that tore the physical world apart.  In the climactic battle, Corellon attempted to curse her into the spider demon people are familiar with, but the spell backfired, turning Corellon into a demon that fell into the abyss.  What affected Arashnee only turned her skin color to rock, and her hair to ash white, a condition that affected her children from that point on, eventually resulting in this world’s Drow.  She almost became a spider beast herself, but when the spell backfired, she was able to separate from the spider.  The spider, Sharidon, remains by her side to this day, and Arashnee can merge with her loyal companion to form a drider when the need comes, something she shares with other drow when they deserve such a blessing.

When the war fell into a stalemate, with only a fraction of the combined Deities and Primorals remaining, it was Araushnee who spearheaded the repair of the world.  She using her symbol of Beauty and Shadow, the spider web,  to symbolize her knitting the fragments of the realms together into a patchwork that incorporated many realms together into a whole greater than the sum of their parts.  She started with the planes she knew about; Nerath, Abeir-Toril, Ebberon, Athas, and many others.  But with the arrival of Sorin Markov, the only Planeswalker who knew of the existence of the D&D worlds (and one of Araushnee’s lovers) the Spider Queen was able to draw other planes unheard of by Deity or Primoral alike: Mirrodin, Ravinica, Kamigawa, Alara, Innistrad, and so on.  The result is a campaign plane with a combination of several planes intermingling into its own unique flavor.

Perhaps the most telling difference between Araushnee and the Lolth you’d recognize is the most prominent house of Drow.  While the Dark Elves still have the familiar competing house system (and while not as vicious as the Wood and Wild Elves, Araushnee does encourage a healthy and rigorous sense of competition and gamesmanship.) the house Araushnee oversees herself takes from her source of inspiration of what she thinks a Drow should be:  Drizzt Do’Urden.  Using his moral compass as a guide, she nurtured her first generation of Drow into a noble Dark Elf race, to contrast with the savage, xenophobic, and extremist traits of the more traditionalist elven races.  Those who have a close lineage to the founding drow families, be it by blood, servitude, adoption, or some other special circumstances, acquire the honorific ‘Shar’ to their last names, similar to the ‘d’ in Ebberon Dragonhouses.  The Drow, as well as Araushnee herself, retained their more decadent and hedonistic natures, and they’re not above sowing, chaos, discord, or intrigue when provoked.  Even Araushnee herself isn’t without getting some amusement from another person’s expense, be it within armreach or by proxy.

(Before anyone asks:  Drizzt is not aware of Shendilavri’s existence, a Lolth that isn’t Chaotic Evil, or that there’s a whole house inspired by him.  If or when he does, however, I apologize to R. A. Salvatore in advance.  The poor dark elf’s head would be so puffed up that he’ll explode.)

House Dourden might be the largest Drow house in the world, and stretches the farthest, their influence isn’t felt save for the North Eastern section of the world, North of the area I started designing in the campaign world.  A House Dourden chapter or Family would prefer to operate in a low-key manner, observing the activities around them alongside doing their business, looking for ways to further their own influence as well as their House.  When they encounter another Drow House, they are cordial at least on the surface, but there will always be some dealings under the table of varying degrees.  A Drow House vs Elf House, however, is when you see Drow act and fight, more like the drow they know, with one difference:  A Shendilavri Drow will stab any other race in the front. A Shendilavri Elf will stab just about anyone in the back.  A Shendilavri Drow to a will stab a Shendilavri Elf six ways from Sunday.

House Dourden also differs from other Drow Houses in that they incorporate other Elf races into House their fold.  It started with picking up other drow from fallen houses—especially houses from other planes--and it branches on from there, taking in Elves, Eladrin, and the occasional human.  (In fact, the House Dourden matriarch is called Cattie’Brie Shar’Dourden, and rumors state that Araushnee found the soul of departed wife of Drizzt, impregnated herself with the spirit and rebirthed Cattie-Brie as her first official Drow.)

House Dourden’s base takes place in the mountainous region in the North East of Shendilavri’s main continent, where the world’s Underdark is closest to the surface world.  The House’s Mansion is built inside a dormant volcano, with a constant stream of rainfall and caving glaciers provide an underground aquifer that keeps the volcano cool and provides a heated underground river that streams into the premade campaign region, under Hedong and eventually into Shuisen.  Plate Tectonics have long since diverted any magma flows further east into a lava flume that empties into the Eastern Sea.

Inside the hollowed out, pyramid-style Mount Dourden, the inside is that of a lush forest, more temperate than the cold arid wastes on the top of the mountains.  People who go on Undermountain adventures might be reminded of Wyllowwood in its nature and its use of open holes in the roofs to let sun and air in as well as artifact panels that supplement the sunlight.  In the center of the forest, in a skyscraping tower that juts out of the volcano crater, Araushnee makes her home in the mortal realm, its inside resembling a maze of spider webs that those who seek an audience with her has to climb.

(Or get dragged up there kicking and screaming by Sharidon!  He’s not above keeping a couple prisoners cocooned for his soulmate’s entertainment.)

In the three Encounters seasons of 2012, which is heavy into Drow, House Dourden takes center stage in the characters I bring.  Not just to gather interest in the Shendilavri campaign world, but also to give my own fluff into the Encounters play.  And that some of my characters involved have some major drow influence.

The first of which is Caelynna Shar’Dourden, a popular Eladrin Cleric as well as my character for “Web of the Spider Queen.” In the Shendilavri story, Caelynna has a spit persona:  A pacifist healer who’s quiet and supportive, and a dominatrix-like dark cleric who’s not above spilling blood in Arashnee’s name and is riddled with voices in her head.  In “Web of the Spider Queen,” she’s a more traditional cleric who is sent to the Forgotten Realms by Arashnee to investigate her darker sister’s actions.  (What?  You’d think she didn’t sense what the Spinner of Shadows has done in Ebberon?)

Caelynna’s dark side is caused by an shift in realities which interrupted an historic ritual she was a part of.  This happened in a currently running campaign where the Fey became second class citizens because of this interrupted ritual, where she was found by the Drow Spider Hunter Clan—similar to the personal guard of House Dourdren’s Matriarch and Arashnee—and remade Caelynna’s shattered psyche into that of what some call “An Albino Drow.”  In Shendilavri, Arashnee discovered Caelynna as she brought the planar shard she was on in place.  She took her in and personally healed her mind and spirit so that she could function, but even Arashnee could sense some leftover madness in the Eladrin.

Later on this week, on the 25th, the beta testing for D&D 5th Edition goes online, and with it, the plans for my campaign world. While most of the mechanics can't be shown yet, because 1) of the Non-Disclosure Agreement and 2) because I haven't even thought it up at this time; I can set up the flavor of the campaign world for those who want to haggle with me.

In a way, it's wizards current campaign "Rise of the Underdark" that inspired most of this document, especially the earlier parts. For the unitiated, this campaign will cover many varieties of D&D, including Encounters, DDO, and even Heroes of Neverwinter, and focuses on Drow and Lolth. I'm sure that I'd focus on City-Based Adventures and political intrigue if 5th Edition was being play-tested last year.

But with this year, I get to continue with my "flip the whole alignment thing on it's head" concept which I started with the three-axis alignment graph in this [http://fav.me/d4ybs0o] , and it really shows on the one usually called "The Demon Queen of Spiders" [http://www.livinginafantasy.com/rpgfantasy/dieties/lolth.html] .

In Shendilavri, it was Corellon who fell from the deities. Are you prepared for a Protagonistic 'Lolth'?

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License