Menzoberranzan
the Mighty is a seething power-house of Lloth-worshipping, tirelessly evil
drow, striving for supremacy in the eyes of the fell Spider Queen. “An anthill of
arrogant evil”, the archsorceress Laeral once described it. To map every room
and passage of a city so busy, and so
worked into
the stone (with many rising and falling levels, secret ways, and miles upon
miles of passages) is an impossibility and a hindrance to the creativity of Dungeon
Masters. Even a dedicated, unopposed drow citizen would need most of a lifetime
to walk every stone of the city - so here is
a brief tour of its highlights.
Menzoberranzan
is not a large city by drow standards; only 20,000 drow dwell there. It fills a
large cavern, formerly a giant spider lair known by its dwarven name,
Araurilcaurak (literally, “Great Pillar Cavern”), for a great natural rock
pillar at its center, that joins floor and ceiling in a massive shaft.
Narbondel
Known as
Narbondel, this pillar has been left unworked by the drow. It serves them, and
all visitors with infravision, as a gigantic clock. At the end of each day, the
city’s ranking Archmage (or a master of Sorcere, in the rare instances when the
Archmage is dead, otherwise occupied, or absent from the city) casts a fire
spell into its base.
The heat
created by the spell is conducted slowly upward through the stone, until to
infravision Narbondel glows red from top to bottom. Then it fades rapidly to darkness,
“the black death of Narbondel”. The time when the wizard casts his fire spell
anew corresponds to midnight in the surface
Realms, just as the cycle of Narbondel .s rising fire equals a surface-world day.
The Cavern
Menzoberranzan’s
cavern is roughly arrowhead-shaped, with the pool of Donigarten at its tip, and
two miles across at its widest point. The ceiling rises a thousand feet high,
and its floor is studded with many stalagmites and lesser pillars (stalactites and
stalagmites that have grown together, to fuse into an unbroken shaft of rock).
The cavern floor is broken by three major rifts and many smaller ones, and two
areas rise above the rest of the city: Tier Breche, the side-cavern occupied by
the Academy that trains all drow citizens for adulthood; and larger Qu’ellarz’orl
(House-Loft), a plateau separated from the lower city by a grove of giant
mushrooms, home to many of the city’s mightiest noble Houses.
From either
of these heights, a drow citizen can look out across the city. The view is row
upon row of carved, spired stone castles, their salient points and sculpted highlights
lit by the soft, tinted flows of permanent faerie fires. Except for Narbondel, not
a stone of the city has been left in its natural shape - everything has been worked
into a smooth, unbroken, unjointed expanse. Adventurers bent on vandalism take
note: unless one brings it along, there is no such thing in the better parts of
Menzoberranzan as a loose stone, lying around to be snatched up as a weapon!
Many of the
city’s largest dwellings, especially the compounds occupied by noble Houses,
were created by fencing stalagmites together with magically raised and melded
stone. The grandest drow feats are the carved, worked, hollowed-out stalactites
that hang over much of the central cavern and above Qu’ellarz’orl: “Overcaverns”
linked to the main city below by a hundred leaping, railless, stone
bridgespans, and by spiraling stairs and passages in the cavern walls.
Donigarten
At the
smoothest, lowest end of the city’s cavern is a natural lake or pond, Donigarten.
Its chill waters serve vital food needs for the drow, nourishing fish and eels (taken
from the waters by fisher-goblin slaves), flowing into carefully irrigated dungfields
(where orcs tend mushrooms and other edible fungi, renewing and expanding the
fields with excrement brought in wagonloads from the city proper), and supporting two moss beds.
The large
bed on the shore holds moss eaten by drow as delicacies; the second bed covers
an island, and feeds a herd of deep rothe (ox-like cattle detailed fully in Drow of the Underdark, FOR2) confined there
by the waters of the pond and by the diligence of orc slave-shepherds. On the
Isle of Rothe, rothe are reared for the tables of Menzoberranzan. Small pens on
the shore nearby allow the orcs to tend other animals (notably captured or
purchased surface-world delicacies such as mountain sheep, or edible monsters brought
back by drow hunting bands), and to breed rothe away from the crowded isle.
The slaves
pole rafts about the pond. They are allowed to swim, and even to dive with
spears or to tow nets if fish are needed in a hurry, but are forbidden to
explore the pond.s murky, muddy bottom.
Legends of
lurking, water-dwelling ropers and worse make the rounds regularly, but most
wise orcs suspect that any pond monsters are deliberately-placed guardians, and
the real reason for the prohibition is to keep slaves from finding magical items
and valuables lost to the drow in long-ago days, when two customs filled the
pond waters with treasures.
It was the
custom in those times to consign the bodies of Matron Mothers of the eight
ruling Houses, and drow heroes favored by Lloth, such as warriors who perished in
achieving victories, to the waters of Donigarten. The corpses were dressed and
adorned in finery (gems, magic, and all), then lashed to a stone spar of strong
adamantite content and dweomer radiations. This made the bodies sink, and
concealed the precise whereabouts of the magic from would-be thieves, masking
the area with many flickering magical dweomers.
The second
custom was unofficially but much more enthusiastically pursued; ambitious drow
who murdered friends, rivals, or kin would often sink them in Donigarten, in
haste and with all valuables that could
be identified as theirs, so that they disappeared tracelessly into the tangle of
other corpses below. Something below Donigarten.s inky black surface devours
drow corpses, and orc and goblin slaves do
disappear from time to time, but the slaves who swim and dive do not fear attack;
it never comes (at least, not in front of witnesses).
Even drow
children have heard persistent, age-old rumors of flooded tunnels that link
Donigarten to an underwater kingdom, or a lost temple of a god older than
Lloth, or a warren of watery caves inhabited
by creatures more powerful than kuo-toa. No sane drow tries to investigate such
tales; the magical chaos at Donigarten's bottom hopelessly confuses all scrying
attempts, and explorations must be made directly.
Tier Breche
The highest
part of the city “floor”, this side cavern is home to the Academy that trains
drow for adulthood and full status as citizens of Menzoberranzan. From the main
part of the city, Tier Breche is reached by a stone stairway. Its upper end is
flanked by two giant stone pillars. In the shadow of each, at all times, stands
a male drow warrior on guard: last-year students of Melee-Magthere, the school for
fighters.
Here
twenty-five-year-old drow come for training, and are not allowed to pass back
down the stairs into the city until they have been graduated by a Master or Mistress
of the Academy.
A male
whose aptitude for magic has not been demonstrated during his youth as
outstanding (or greater than his battle prowess) goes first to Melee-Magthere,
the largest and most easterly of the three structures of Tier Breche. This is
the fighters’ school, and here the famous Drizzt Do’Urden, like countless drow
before and after him, spent nine years training to fight.a schooling that
involved many patrols out into the Dominion and beyond, into the lawless
Underdark, but no visits to the city proper. The first half of Drizzt’s tenth
year took him to the sculpted stalagmite-tower of Sorcere, the manychambered tower
of wizardry, closest to the west wall of Tier Breche. Here, many of the most
powerful drow males of the city dwell, hidden from much daily intrigue - or as
fugitives from the deadly ways of House rivalries and politics, awaiting a
chance for revenge.
The
northernmost and most impressive building of the Academy is spider-shaped Arach-Tinilith,
where the priestesses of Lloth are trained. Males are housed here only for the
last six months of their tenyear training.
Drow leave
the Academy molded into the treacherous, vicious ways of Menzoberranzan, “The
Spite of the Spider Queen” as other drow have called it. Those who fail their
training die, or are transformed into driders or worse. More is said of the
Academy.s dark work in other chapters of this book.
The Dark Dominion
Over a
hundred tunnels link the city cavern with the surrounding Underdark - notably
with almost two dozen faerzress (magic power) spots, where adamantiteladen rock
gives off the dark radiations
drow value
in the making of their best armor, weaponry, and tools. The area around the
city patrolled by the drow is known as Bauthwaf (around-cloak), or more grandly
as the Dark Dominion. (The word “patrolled” is carefully chosen; only a fool
ever refers to an area as “controlled”, or “safe”.)
Monsters
roam the Dominion despite regular drow patrols, and even venture into the city,
following the ready food and guidance of merchant traffic. Most are quickly
dispatched; such is the drow that
strong
guards are kept only over the single entrance to Tier Breche. Its sentinels are
a pair of magical jade spiders
(detailed in Drow of the Underdark, FOR2),
over the several tunnels that open out of Qu’ellarz’orl (the guards there are
drow with magical items such as wands of viscid globs,
alarm horns to summon swift reinforcements, and servant giants) and on the
Eastways.
The
Eastways are three tunnels that open into the eastern end of the cavern of Menzoberranzan,
where no drow dwell and Donigarten.s precious water lies. Their mouths are all
guarded by scorpionshaped, poison-shooting jade
spider statues.
The
smallest of these tunnels leads to a chasm at the eastern edge of the Dominion inhabited
by driders outcast from the city. They slay and devour all who stray into their
clutches, especially hating and prizing the flesh of unaltered drow.
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