The S.S. MMO System: Race; Deep Elves

Better known among the players of the game as 'Drow' but referred to in all official documentation and quests as 'Deep Elves', these subterranean cousins of the surface elves Occupy several major cities in 'The World Beneath'.

'Deep Elves', though having a diversity of body types and facial features, as well as a wide range of eye colors, bust sizes, and modes of dress, all have the same skin tone and hair color, in both cases being black as the earl of hell's riding boots. Their faces, like with the vast majority of elven characters, are naturally hairless, even among their men-folk, and even being able to grow facial hair can be grounds for ritual sacrifice, though this varies somewhat from one city to the next, especially in terms of weather this applies to visitors or only native and/or naturalized Deep Elves.

Their culture is matriarchal, with women holding all political and social power, and males used for little more than magically enslaved shock troops and breeding. It also is matrilineal, your father's contributions to your genetics being considered insignificant, only your female line ancestry is tracked and considered. This sometimes results in mild degrees of ****, with third cousins along their father's line having children together, but the negative results of such events, when they occur, are handled by using all deformed and mentally or physically defective individuals as Sapient Sacrifices to the 'Deep Elves' main gods, typically as well as the father in question. 'Mentally or Physically Defective' in this context also includes senility and Alzheimer disease as well as growing to infirm with age to handle day to day living without assistance, and it is considered a 'good ****' by their culture to be sacrificed in this way (though those sacrificed might disagree...), for which reason there are very few Deep Elves over the age of about 700, almost all of whom were mighty heroines in their youth, still possessing dozens of class levels though they have not gone adventuring in a century or more. Almost no male Deep Elves live much past the age of 400 however, being sacrificed to the gods as soon as the vigor of youth truly begins to leave them, and the very rare exceptions are always 'Madat'* to a 'Kurras'* which have taken up an adventuring lifestyle and no longer are citizens of any one city, thus being unable to chose a new 'Madat' and the one they have right now being so much more useful to their current employment and activities due to superior experience and class levels that they wouldn't do so anyway.
*(Keep reading for definitions.)

The basic social unit of the Deep Elves is the 'Kurras', which is a collection of between 2 and 20 sisters or half-sisters, their current 'Madat', which roughly translates to 'stud', and the sisters minor children. They will occupy one floor of one of the cities tenements which are carved from giant stalagmites or basaltic columns in the caverns where the Deep Elves live, and raise their children communally. The Kurras can break into smaller ones for a number of reasons, not the least of which is arguments over if they wish to sacrifice the current Madat to Armok or Lorchos, the Deep Elves two main gods (Who are ironically both Male...) and chose a new one from the city's pens where the males are kept, docile and be-spelled, until they are needed to fight off an attack or become a Madat. You would think that the arguments in this case might be about not getting enough sex with 20 women sharing one man between them, but this is rarely the case. Though the Deep Elves are more lustful than their surface dwelling kin, they ALSO are much more fertile, and with pregnancies where each 'trimester' takes a YEAR it is fairly easy for one male to 'service' 20 women. Instead the arguments are generally about decreasing fertility, decreasing libido, or decreasing quality of performance as their Madat gets to be past his sexual peak, generally from physical adulthood at 150 years old to about the age of 280. Some women will prefer a Madat with more EXPERIENCE under his belt, while others prefer one with more virility 'under his belt'. Mostly these conflicts are reconciled by either splitting the Kurras for a few decades, or even permanently, or by reaching compromises such as giving him till he has gotten all the women that wanted to keep him knocked up one more time or a decade whichever comes first.

A side effect of the way that the Deep Elves breed is that they, over the generations since the world was first created, have developed steadily larger average penis size in their males, since the members of most Deep Elf Kurras's, on the advice of their mothers or grandmothers, mostly chose males with the biggest cock and balls they can get, at least to a point, and some just flat out chose on the principle that 'bigger is better'. As a subsidiary result of this incredibly rapid selective breeding program their females are developing larger clitorises, which in the latest generation to reach adulthood often protrude slightly from their sheaths even when the women are not aroused, and actually 'stand up' into the open air when they are.

Above the 'Kurras' is and organization known as the 'Gintar', which is the aggregate collection of all the adult daughters of a specific mother. By longstanding tradition only sisters and half-sisters on their mothers side may be part of a Kurras together, and the "Gintar"'s organizes all of the Kurrases' and potential members thereto from each woman in the city. There is also one other member to each 'Gintar' which is to say the mother in question: who is it's titular authority and leader: her authority is supposed to be unquestioned, and she can invoke 'terminal sanction' on any of it's members, having them killed by effects that cause 'true ****' on non-PC characters. However in practice this is more threat than actually used, because even in the dark and blood-soaked society of the Deep Elves killing ones own daughters is considered heinous without a compelling reason. Many Gintar's the mother is only nominal in charge, with her adult children going their own way and doing their own thing, not the least of the reasons for which is that most 'Mistresses' of a Gintar are themselves part of another Gintar, answerable to their own mother, who is answerable in turn to hers, and so forth. This brings us directly to the matter of the 'Clan'.

Though the Deep Elves have their own word for it 'Nossic' this translates fairly accurately to 'Clan' and even the design team that wrote the Deep Elven dialect of the Elven tongue and programs the speech patterns for Deep Elf NPCs sometimes use the word 'clan' when doing dialogue trees for Deep Elves speaking in common rather than the elven word. A Deep Elf 'Clan' is comprised of all the women and men in any one of their city states that trace their ancestry to one specific female member of the 'First Generation' of Deep Elves. These days most cities have 'clans' tracing their origins to each known member of the 'First Generation' of which direct matrilineal decedents still survive.

Though officially the founder of the clan rules, as with the individual Gintuars bellow it and their respective Mothers, each Deep Elf city is also an independent and frequently mutually hostile nation, thus in practice even 'clans' hailing from the same stock are totally autonomous of each other if they are based in different cities. This is favorable to the survival not only of each bloodline, but the 'clan' system as a whole, because it has shown conclusively how the system can survive once the last of the 'First Generation' of matriarchs dies or is killed permanently.

Clan's in cities other than the one where the 'Matriarch' resides are ruled by a 'council of elders' made up of the members of the Kurras that founded their 'clan' in the city, which must always consist of at least 3 members, for which reason 'new' clans are typically founded only by a Kurras of at least 10 women, so that there is a good bit of leeway in case of true fatalities or women being adopted as PCs. In the event that the number of women in the leading Kurras drops to 2 or less, their daughters are supposed to **** or otherwise remove them and their eldest adult, 'noble', and living, daughter takes their place, with the same occurring, if that 'council' drops to 2 or less members, following matrilineal lines and, though they remain part of the 'clan', edging younger and non-noble siblings from the line of succession. If the Clan does not have enough 'noble' members to make up a council when their present one drops below the threhold of 3 and the new mistresses are chosen from among the founding bloodline's heiresses the other clans of the turn on them at once and hunt down every last member they can find in the city to sacrifice to Armok, propitiating him with the 'weak blood' that has failed to produce proper 'noble' heirs.

This brings us to the matte of Deep Elf 'Nobles' and 'commoners': In a sense the 'Deep Elves' are not one race, they are two, which can breed freely with each other and of which each sometimes spontaneously gives rise to the other, but which never the less have distinct traits, racial modifiers, and talents.

Until fairly recently neither 'commoner' nor 'noble' Deep Elves were available as PCs, but after YEARS of clamoring for this to change from the player-base the designers finally gave in and made them a PC race, which entailed some major additions to the game, including quest trees, tutorial zones, items, modifications to their racial upgrade trees, devising a 'Deep Elf' dialect of Elven, and a dozen other things which took millions of total man hours of work, and were finally rolled out in the last expansion pack, much to the joy of many players and irritation of the, then unacknowledged, Deep Elf characters who's AI had become sapient, especially due to it causing a rift in Deep Elf society between the Commoners and Nobility. Where once the commoners were clearly inferior and easily cowed by the nobles now in many places PC commoners agitate for increased rights for 'common' Deep Elves, who now have abilities that rival the nobles in areas other than magic, and many cities have seen 'commoner' uprisings, a few of them successful.

The three 'successful' uprisings each changed the nature of the government of the city state, in one case resulting in a True Democracy modeled on that of Ancient Athens, another a Constitutional Monarchy modeled after that of Japan, and the third a Socialist Representative Democracy very loosely based on that of post revolution France and modern Scandinavian nations. Though several of the uprisings have had at their core Maoist or Marxist Communists none of them have thus far succeeded, usually failing to gain broad based support, and in one recent case sabotaged from within by what is believed to have been agents from the 'Democratic' city states of Zorzercan, and Marzorkarbitzan, to the intense irritation of some sections of the game's Chinese player base, who have long agitated for the game to have a zone or city run on pseudo or actual Maoist Communism, and for a few glorious hours thought they would win one. This even has made some small government sponsored blogs in the Chinese section of the Net, which have called on all Chinese players to organize outside the game and orchestrate a united and more successful uprising in one of the smaller 'Deep Elf' city states by seizing control of EVERY non-noble character available in the city and rising in revolt as one, but so far there has been no action on this front: at least as far as anyone knows... Meanwhile the three city's which 'successfully' rose up are under siege form other 'conventional' Deep Elf states, intending to overturn the uprising and return the city to a normal state of affairs, but having once thrown off the yolk of noble oppression they will not willingly surrender their freedom and with so many PCs in the city it is easy to hold off the gangs of low level **** soldiers the rival cities send to raid or **** them.

Due to the incredible size that would be required to go further with this page I have decided to put the actual race profiles and upgrades on sub pages, scroll down and click one to view the actual content...