| There is a
world beneath the world humans know - a vast, lawless land under The Realms
That See The Sun. It is a perilous wilder land of dark caverns, crevices, and
labyrinthine passages: The Realms Below, the vast and mysterious Underdark.
No surface
adventurer has seen all its depths and corners. Beasts that no surface-dweller
yet knows of lurk in its lightless depths - and surviving explorers say the
known dangers are bad enough!
To the
unwary (or merely desperate) traveler in the Underdark, a city may seem a
refuge from creeping doom in the darkness. It holds, after all, bustling life -
with food, tools, and perhaps aid.
Perhaps
not. Even the good beings of the depths, dwarves, gnomes, thaalud, and
svirfneblin, tend to be (rightfully) suspicious of intruders. Other city-вwellers include (among merely nasty
folk, such as jermlaine) the most evil and dangerous races of the Realms:
kuo-toa, duergar, illithids, cloakers, and most far-reaching of all, drow, the
dark elves.
The
essential guide to this deadly race is the sourcebook Drow of the Underdark. A DM familiar with it and the “Elf, Drow”
entry in Volume 2 of the Monstrous Compendium knows drow “basics”.
To understand the unusual power and influence of drow, however, one must see a
drow city.
Something
of what life is like amid the cruel, ever-warring drow can be gleaned from the
FORGOTTEN REALMS® novels Homeland and Exile by R.A. Salvatore, but bringing a
drow city to life needs more: this boxed set.
Of the set’s
three books, this tome is a guide to Menzoberranzan, a drow city of middling
size and importance that is (thankfully to most surface folk!) a week’s travel
from the nearest surface connection. Companion books detail its nobles and
suggest adventures.
We’ve
explored Menzoberranzan, of the forty or so known drow cities, because it is
the birthplace of the famous Drizzt Do’Urden (himself detailed in Book II of this boxed set, his
statistics updated from Hall of Heroes).
A look at the strange, harsh, and at times splendid cesspool of evil from which
he sprang shows how drow became a power in the Realms - and unlocks the door to
vivid adventures in the drow-ruled Underdark.
This set
can be used to create any subterranean drow city by changing the layout, the
names and detailed NPCs of the noble Houses, and the trade interests and
overall aims of the inhabitants.
Change the
all-pervasive worship of Lolth (“Lloth” to Menzoberranyr) to a tense rivalry
between worshippers of Lolth, Ghaunadaur, and Vhaeraun, and you have Eryndlyn,
a city that trades with the Sword Coast from hidden caves somewhere in The
High Moor. Change it to the worship of Ghaunadaur only (with reverence and
breeding of slimes, jellies, and oozes) and you have Llurth Dreier, a city of
400,000 drow ruling vast fungi-farm caverns under The Shaar, northwest of The
Deep Realm of the dwarves (detailed in Dwarves Deep). Let mages rule, reducing
priestesses to minor power, and you have the magical item-trading city of Sshamath, somewhere beneath The Far Hills.
Read on, and find adventure!
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