Current plot

[Confined]

Never does a star grace this land with a poet's light of twinkling mysteries, nor does the sun send to here its rays of warmth and life. This is the Underdark, the secret world beneath the bustling surface of the Forgotten Realms, whoe sky is a ceiling of heartless strong and whose walls show the gray blandness of death in the torchlight of the foolish surfacedwellers that stumble here. this is not there world, not the world of light. most who come here univited do not return. those who do escape to safety of their surface homes return changed. their eyes have seen the shadows and the gloom, the inevitable doom of the underdark. Dark corridoers meander throughout the dark realm in winding courses, connectiong caverns great and small, with ceilings high and low. mounds of stone as pointed as the teeth of a sleeping dragon leer down in silent threat or rise up to block the way of intruders. there is a sulence here, profound and foreboding, the crouched hush of a predator at work. too often the only sound, the reminder to travelers in the underdark that they have not lost their sense of hearing altogether, is a distant and echoing drip of water, beating like the heart of a beast, slipping through the silent stones to the deep underdark pools of chilled water. what lies beneath the still onyx surface of these pools one can only guess. what secrets await the brave, what horros await the foolish, only the imagination can reveal---until the stillness is disturbed. This is the under dark.


there are pockets of life here, cities as great as many of those on the surface. around any of the countless bends and turns in the gray stone a traveler might stumble suddenly into the perimeter of such a city, a stark contrast to the emptiness of the corridoors. These places are not havens, though; only the foolish traveler would assume so. They are the homes of hte most evil races in all the realms, the most notably the duergar, the kuo-toa, and the drow. in one such cavern, two miles wide and a thousand feet high, looms menzoberranzan, a monument to the other worldly and --- ultimately--- deadky grace tthat marks the race of drow elves. Menzoberranzan is not a large city by drow standards; only twenty thousand dark elves reside there. where, in ages past, there had been an empty cavern of roughly shaped stalacties and stalagmites now stands artisty, row after row of carved castles thrumming in a quiet glow of magic. the city is perfection of form, where not a stone has been left to its natural shape. this sense of order and control, however, is but a cruel facade, a deception hiding the chaos and vileness that rule the dark elves' hearts. like there cities, they are a beautiful, slender, and delicate people, with features sharp and haunting. yet the drow are rulers of this unruled world, the deadliest of the deadly, and all other races take cautious note of their passing. beauty itself pales at the end of a dark elf's sword. the droaw are the survivors, and this is the underdark, the valley of death--- the land of nameless nightmares.


Station: in all the world of the drow, there is no more important word. it is the calling of their-of our- religion, the incessant pulling of hungering heartstrings. ambition overrides good sense and compassion is thrown away in its face, all in the name of Lolth, the Spider Queen.