Drowlord Governance

The governing rules of the Drowlords can be sliced into four ages: The Kingdoms Age (Dawn-10,000BE), The Imperial Age (10,000BE-700BE), The Reconstructionist Age (700BE-1016AE), and The Three States Age (1016AE-Present). Here is information on those eras and the general rules for Drowlord society that are followed.
== Governance and Succession ==
The drow, above all else, do not value inheritance, as women are encouraged to sleep around and bear many fruits, and men are encouraged to find multiple partners outside of any civil union. this is due to the fact that as elves, they live long lives and have certain magical systems that make fertility quite awkward unless in a certain mood for procreation. Thus, there is not succession law, there are no bastards, there is no 'right' way to do familial structures in drow society, though there tends to be a trend for communal support and development.
Inheritance of wealth is based on simple division of assets, any non-liquid assets can be liquidated if a majority agreement cannot be settled upon, and any liquid assets are divided equally among all beneficiaries. All succession into nobility is handled through one of four ways: General Acceptance, Usurpation, Honor Duel, or Assassination. In a General Acceptance, the choice of the previous head is accepted and while there can be dissent, until they are confronted with a Duel, Assassins, or a take over, it's understood they are in power.
Usurpation is the illegal, but straightforward method of using military power and alliances to force, one way or another, the position to come under your command. This garners the least respect by the populace, but ultimately is an effective strategy. It is seen as a dirty thing to utilize the brutality of an army or militia to garner what you could not do by yourself.
Honor Duels are when one takes offense at the appointment of another and challenges them to a fair duel by way of the Sword, the Spear, or the Bow, they fight to the death of the other party or can accept exile in exchange for forfeiting the duel. Exiles cannot return to their regional home and are marked on the right shoulder, Honor Duels are compulsory, you cannot refuse without forfeiting the match. These are deemed the best ways of determining a victor in any power struggles as its based solely upon the strength of the challenger versus the successor candidate.
Assassinations are a very accepted and long held way of securing power, as when one cannot do physically, the use of the mind to instead take a target by surprise is an acceptable compromise. Generally speaking, you either hire the assassin or you carry out the assassination yourself, one is better received than the other, naturally. However, both are seen as a much more clever outcome than simply building an army and marching on your political opponents. In the case of a failed assassination, generally the failed noble would be found and killed in a turnabout to ensure that strength was not undermined.
Political rivalries, dissent, and generally all the things that come with living in a pluralist society of many different thinking people would also be settled in these ways, except the fact that utilizing armies, champions to participate in honor duels, and assassinating your political opponents were all deemed equally viable versus the staggered acceptance of succession rules. The reasons are thus, while its dishonorable to not handle personal confrontations personally, when it's rivaling state actors and those vying for power wealth or territory, it's all fair game and let the best ruler win.
== Kingdoms Age Rule ==
After the Dawn closed and Aradia left the mortals alone in the Garden, things gradually accumulated into pockets of the races holding station and power throughout Terros. The Dwarves and the Drow would begin to grow a ferocious animosity because both claimed all of Obscura for themselves, while others in the dark elven cohort left for the Sorrows in waves over the course of centuries, noticing that there were natives throughout the world, and slowly assimilating with them all as time worse on. Because of the ferocious fighting between the Dwarves and the Drow, kingdoms began to sprout up in order to form sufficient armies and controls in order to combat their rivals, and soon enough these kingdoms infested the Obscuran Range, the Northern Cradle, and down the eastern portion of Terros.
These would be highly recognizable, yet disparate feudal kingdoms held by simple landowners being able to accumulate enough wealth and people under them to crown themselves. As soon as the drow had managed to win a majority of the space in Obscura, and a cessation was forced upon them by multiple fronts of other kingdoms and clans pressing their weight to the neck of the overextended dark elves, they began to turn insular and battler each other for control of what was already settled on, lest they try to fight a war on so many fronts. This in turn allowed those opportunistic fronts to take control of their fringes, while the Drow were busy imploding.
Then the dark elves would push back out, before inevitably vying for dominance once again, repeating the cycle. Succession was dictated by birthright, wives and concubines had a staggered order of rights for their offspring to take control, and bastards were a concept but often they would be adopted and endorsed by rival families as knights to be allowed to gain some noble status and be used as a political chess piece. Thankfully for the Dark Elves, everyone else suffered the same problems, just on a shorter timeframe, which ensured that there would never be a case of unified danger for the expansive and long lived warrior race. they could simply overpower most, but the fact they were so over extended ensured that any time they took their eyes off the danger they would be made to fight and this kept them hemmed in.
Some choice kings of the era where known as the Three Brothers, Morvala, Xanvani, and Karesh, three blood pact brothers who were supposedly eternal as they had received blessings of vitality to stand as eternal guardians. They would gather their strength over the endless wars and then take their wealth and armies, and leave the mainland to conquer the east. Eventually they would come out victorious in their endeavors and become known as the Three King's Alliance to the east. They stood as a testament to what the drow could achieve if they could just work together as one common entity, they were an unstoppable powerhouse of authority and expertise.
This era of governance would end when Queen Nadia and King Narn would employ a plot to steal the holiest of holy relics of the Servants Faith, and ensnare their spouses in a contemptuous scheme that would allow them to found the Empire of Dusk in Central Obscura. As the decades wore one, the empire would slowly begin its encroachment over all of the drow territories on the mainland, and over the course of centuries, bring even the three Kings Alliance to its knees.
== The Imperial Age Government ==
Though it would take them decades to fully subsume the entire communal territories of all Drow on the mainland, and yet more centuries to quash each of the Three Kings under the crunch of their boots, the Empire would eventually win out and the Imperial Age would be brought into full power at 10,000BE, or by their logic, Year 1 of the Imperial Calendar. Imperial governance was at both times quite possibly some of the greatest and most devastating events of the history of the dark elves. At the one end, it was a centralized authoritarian regime that held strict order that managed to capture swaths of territory once held by proud human kingdoms, run out orcish warbands, and manage to contact the High Elven Kingdoms and the Wood Elven Kingdoms to propose a truce and ensure they could live in harmony and trade. 
They crushed wars under them, and enslaved humanity for their own 'protection' forcing them into communities where they were made to simply persist and be like children, under careful watch and barred from governance, industry, or war. Their biggest threats were the Storm Kings and the Red Orcs, one of which they quickly decided after a called off invasion, that it was not worth fighting the literal masters of nature and they simply ignored the western seas entirely. as for Red Orcs, for all their military might, orcish warbands were a massive issue even after bloodying the pigs' noses. not to mention the constant dwarven incursions and insurrections brought on by the Three Kings every century. 
On the other hand, generally speaking, there was such great and fantastic advancement, automa became common place, airships, fae, teleportation systems, universal healthcare, a forcible end to poverty and a dynamic culture of sports and leisure and opulence that sparkled like a shining beacon. all born on the back of complete and utter domination, every word, every thought monitored at all times unless you spanned out far from the Inquisition's spheres of influence and domination. There was not on thing out of place, no mage left unregistered, no child left unmarked, no aristocrat not without a knife to the throat of their families lest they raise a singular word of dissent. A paradise along the surface, a hellscape for anyone truly under the thumb of the god like beings at the zenith.
The Empire respected the High Elves and Wood Elves, as not only were they the holy races made first, they fearsome opponents with their own capabilities that if they came to blows, would be an even match for the Imperial Army despite the differences in size. Other factions they only hated, like Orcish Warbands and the Dwarves, who were threats, but without the prestige of the eleven hierarchies. The Empire persisted on a knife's edge, they had god like power but these were limited by the fact that overuse of them would warp reality, and change the stability of creation. They were not gods, just children playing with the tools left behind by their creators, bullying other children into being the boss while their parent was away.
In the Empire there was no hereditary succession, bastards were not made legally part of any family they were born out from, regardless of marital status, the Primacy Dictate was enforced. Only the strong would rule, and to be strong one had to kill their rivals and fight constant intrigue to stay atop the mountain. This was to ensure that there would be no such thing as a united resistance to the Empress. Combined with the Inquisition and the general oppressive amount fo surveillance, this kept things well in check and everyone at each others throats just enough to keep them at bay, but not enough to halt programs such as genetic experimentation to create a superior breed of the drow known as the Capitol Elves.
The only people not to follow these rules of thumb were the former nobility of the Three Kingdoms, their punishment was a regular purging every century of the most outspoken opponents, they couldn't kill them all because the amend Three Brothers still had enough fight in them to raise far more hell if the knife went too deep. Still, the centennial purges were not well wished and generally the most adamant would go forward willingly as martyrs always showing the world the resolve of true drow.
Despite all the contention, this system worked, and worked well, it nearly lasted ten thousand years after all. The Empire was working on space flight to explore the stars and planets of the outer solar system, then the Three Brothers assaulted the Capitol and in the fighting new problems arose, and the Crown Prince, King Karesh, and the Watchers of Dawn and Dusk died in the multi-pronged clash. As horrible as this was, it granted Xanvani access tot he Eye of Dusk and the Heart of Obscura, he'd use this to ambush Imperial Consort Narn in his laboratories, and send him into supposed non-existence, before he used the power of all three holy relics to create a great machine that would annihilate all life on Terros as his sanity slipped away.
In a final climactic battle, Xanvani would stand alone as a living god versus King Morvala, the Inquisition, Prince A'Draak Morvala who he'd forcibly pushed the Heart of Obscura on, and Empress Nadia. In the fighting Prince A'Draak would be flung over a dozen centuries through time and space, King Morvala would be bested by his brother in pitched combat, and the Inquisition would be wiped out saved for a young enforcer by the name of Al-Zehin. Xankresh nearly won at this point, utilizing both eyes to start the machine up before he had the Eye of Dawn snatched away and sent far into the Sorrows by Nadia. with the machine unstable, the two battled in a brutal affair matching demi-god magic for demi-god magic before Xanvani was forced from the mountain and escaped.
The Empress did the only unselfish thing she had ever come to think of and held the power of the Cataclysm at bay, and utilized her authority among the Fae to command them to help her hold back the apocalypse, and so they turned the destructive energy to snow and ice, and the price to pay for the safeguarding of the world was all that Nadia had built. The Capitol and most of Central Obscura was flash frozen, the rest of the world went into a low grade ice age that would last for the next seven hundred years, and in that time all that the drow had built would crumble away and enter into the Reconstructionist Age.
== Reconstructionist Age ==
=== 700 Years of Winter-Everglow Founding ===
With the loss of the Capitol, the central government, and the backbone of the bureaucracy, all hell broke loose and massive swaths of imperial territory were swallowed up in retaliation for eternal grievances and for the plunging of the world into a deep everlong winter. Dwarves conquered multiple frontier areas, utilizing the caverns and old mining tunnels as shields form the biting frigid cold above and taking the cut off drow by surprise. Malphasia became so coated in arctic freeze it destabilized the entire island turning it into the Northern Wastes, killing the vast majority of the population in mere weeks. The Humans finally were able to rise up and cast off their overseers in thewake of the chaos and the orcs took advantage and sacked the southernmost holdouts before retreating back with their stolen prizes.
The Easterners rose up and cast out the imperial watchdogs, but were leaderless, and soon became embroiled in their own civil wars, and it would be here that somehow Amora would be also lost in the biting frost. Avamor would see the court become subsumed in assassinations and sabotage, and Nagai nearly fell to ruin before Xanvani came back, badly injured but alive, and he managed to cut off Nagari from the rest of the world for the next century utilizing his Eye of Dusk and the Hurricane Palace. By the time the dust settled int he first century after the fall, barely anything south of the Maiden's Cradle and west of the Mournful Trail was completely out of reach of the people of the former Empire. there were certainly isolated pockets that were unchanged. Veroma somehow completely avoided the great arctic blast, Narn's Son was an isolated refuge for the nobles who had been vacationing there in the first place, and there were still some established minor households dotting along the Silkwood Region.
This led to what is known as the Reconstructionist Age, where political cohorts began to coalesce and consolidate power, execute rivals, and generally attempted to infer that the Empire still stood, but now with them in command. No feudal kings or queens, and no central authority to keep things form going out of balance, just power hungry aristocrats with more money to burn than they could even do with their extended lifetimes. It got bad, very bad, so bad that most of the former imperials were left questioning if there even was any point in living any longer now that it was all gone, they lived in constant cold and hunger, and the only people with any wealth left were too busy slaughtering each other in court intrigues and civil conflict to help. This would be the world people like Dul-Sansiska were born into, abandoned, and forced to survive in any way shape or form possible.
=== Year of Everglow-First Demon War ===
It wouldn't be until the close of the ice age, and the ceremonial founding of Everglow City, that this would even begin to change, as the drow could not handle the idea that the humans they had once seen as mere trivial children to feed and cloth and maintain, had managed to build a sufficiently advanced society while they had been locked in bitter civil wars for seven hundred years. so they sought to try and sack the city, uniting as an army and marching forward, but it was for naught, instead they were offered the chance to buy themselves into the system of rule that humanity was settling into. Where if one had enough money and power, but not the armies or steel to defend it, that one could join into a Senate comprised of Great Houses. They already had a system out west, but they were going to be moving it into the consecrated land now known as Everglow, and the Dark Elves, with their great military and wealth, would be welcome to buy their way into it and play along.
It was humanity's system that ended the worst conditions the Drow had found themselves in since, well, ever. It worked out for a while, and the Drow entrenched themselves as powerful lenders, and establishers of great projects and the insurance for trade throughout Aradia and Terros as they had the money to fund the voyages and defenses, and the manpower to ensure it. It was all going swimmingly, and while the drow still killed each other, it had retracted grossly. Then the Demons came, and the Drow, still attuned to their ancestral duties, united as one power once again, all the territories of the world coming and sailing great fleets, utilizing their remaining magical technologies, their great sky fortresses, and every last piece of remaining automa they had to their name. they leveraged it all alongside masses of warriors who had cut their teeth on civil wars and brutal frontier fighting.
[First Demon War Events]
=== End of the War-First Arkon War ===
By the time the war closed, none of the ruling powers would survive, destroyed in a deadly gambit orchestrated by Volia Dul-Sansiska, and enforced by her radically unhinged baby brother, Divankul Dul-Sansiska. The two would unite many smaller nobles and distraught factions of what scraps of the empire remained, and decimate the elites so badly, that when Jason Blackthorne marched on Everlgow City, the Drow were a united front once more and helped him to liberate the city and begin the healing of Terros.
Government under Volia's command was much like the Empire, but different, instead of keeping everyone at each other's throats, she forced compromises, and practiced what she preached. She bent the knee to Jason Blackthorne's authority, a mere halfer to the eyes of the dark elves, but this one had managed to save Terros. She signed an agreement with Jarvis Blackthorne to divide the banking systems into what was essentially a duopoly between the two mighty households, and so on and so forth did she mend broken branches with so many, and made herself at the very least a tolerated power in the eyes of the Great Houses, if not a beloved fair dealer to many of the smaller minor nobilities. So she commanded everyone else to follow along, those who didn't take the carrot of being allowed to work and build and interlock with humanity, would face the stick of her vicious baby brother, Divankul Dul-Sansiska, who had a myriad of ways to handle people, despite now being settled into medicine and research to ensure he didn't come unglued like he had during the height of the First Demon War.
This would come under threat in 550AE when Kor Arkon suddenly invaded and suppressed Verorma, then the Northern Wastes, Morvana, and was in the middle of conflict with Avamor and Alegora. this would begin the First Arkon War. This was a shocking development as Arkon had been one of the staunchest of allies in the Drow Alliance, a military powerhouse that unified much of the western households and gave the drow a far more impressive position in the Senate. Investigations into the matter quickly uncovered the fact that Kor was being commanded by someone else, someone who held great sway and forced the chessmaster to begin assailing the eastern territories. This was bad, because the East was not affiliated with the Drow Alliance, they were all fierce independents who even balked at the idea of participating the in the mainland's government and were happy to let things transpire without them.
This sudden ruthless expansionism was a threat to that calm and suddenly the entire Drow Alliance was under threat by the easterners who were ready to not only sack Everglow, but invade Mok-Surial and ransack the coasts in relation. Volia made them come to the table in Everglow, and it was here things quickly began breaking down as the alliance fractured along ideological lines, it was too much for Volia to defend against, and even the threat of Divankul being let off his leash, as well as the threat of Martal and Dul-Sansiska's soldiers suppressing them wasn't enough anymore. At the same time, the representatives of the east didn't give a damn, they'd slaughter everyone for the crimes of the mainlanders, humans, elves, it didn't matter, they were going to be broken. It would only be sometime shortly thereafter that a mysterious monster of a man would appear from the north in Amora, using a simple raft to somehow make it down to Alegora and raise a militia that not only broke the backs of the Alegoran nobility, but pushed out Kor's forces within mere weeks.
This creature was simply called The Lizard for his cold blooded and ruthless predatory strategies, Prince A'Draak Morvala, or by now simply The Lizard General had arrived. He soon took full control over Alegora and sailed to Morvana, forcing surrender and sweeping out Arkon. After 'convincing' Xanvani and Argavir, the triple threat sailed to the Northern Wastes and Veroma. On the Mainland, the schism had led to an all out invasion of Mok-Surial, and a siege of Maiden's Shield ensued, but this two would be thwarted by timely intervention of the man now going by the name of Drake and his newfound allies. 
Volia was strong armed into joining the new alliance, lest Drake take full control by force, the rest of the war was a disgusting slaughter fest that assailed the former allies on all sides and irrevocably broke down any chance of ever peacefully coexisting in the same ways ever again. By the time the dust settled, Arkon had fled, their fortress was scoured but could not be felled, invincible that it was. Drake had cemented himself and forced the whole of the drow of Terros to sit down and combine into one full blooded alliance. the Westerners had a bloody grudge, the Centrals were powerless and made to feel impotent, and the Easterners were happy to have the strong man on their side for the most part. However, once the deal was made, the mystery man simply stopped, the war over and peace secured, he seemed to settle into some kind fo a trance like way of living and never sought to enforce what he'd actually forced into being except when violence was committed on too large a level.
Over time he'd begin to lighten up far more and become a more respectable military leader, and policies would try to mend and begin anew a power sharing agreement, but each time the west and the central drow could come to a decision, the East would throw a wrench and the whole thing would always collapse into bitter infighting once again, and the grudges of the past would come bubbling back up.