By James Gildard

One of my players is a dark elf. She’s joined a secret cult that plans to usurp Lolth. I could make some cool story hooks with this, but we need some supporting background lore.

Official DnD lore says that Lolth is this abysmal pit of cruelty and deception and nastiness and even though a whole entire race of humanoids worships her, she has none of their best interests in mind at all. Everyone who seems to gain her favor is only being propped up temporarily so that they may be brought crashing down to some horrible end. She is an irredeemable sadist and a paragon of evil.

That’s lame.

Well I guess not inherently lame. I’m all in favor of a villain who’s evil just for the sake of being evil, but if we’re going to explore their motives and personality then they need to be actually interesting. Also, no one worships a deity who so obviously hates them. “I cAn ThInK oF aN eXaMpLe” shut up, no you can’t, people in the real world have way more complex belief systems than this, and also that’s not the point. The point is that it’s no fun. Let’s make it more fun.

The baby in the bath water here is that Lolth is an evil bitch of epic proportions. We don’t wanna lose that. We want to preserve that evil bitch and develop her so that she’s also fun and interesting. 

I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with a friend about “pure-evil villains” (as opposed to ones that are redeemable or inspire some sympathy) and the difference between examples that are loved and ones that are annoying and boring. The discussion is ongoing because we haven’t really been able to nail down why some examples succeed and others don’t. Is it only bad when the writer goes into some detail about the villain’s motivations and the reader finds them convoluted and dumb? Is it only bad when the audience feels that the villain is planted there simply because the writer needed an obstacle for the protagonists rather than being a genuine product of their surroundings? We aren’t sure.  

Ideally I’d have all that figured out and be able to provide an ingenious little formula for us to employ that would just pump out kick-ass villains every time. Instead I’m gonna wing it and test run a couple hunches I have. Hopefully it ends up fixing my Lolth problem.

Let’s start way too damn zoomed out (as always) and try not to get lost on the way back.

I have always had a sneaking suspicion that a deity named “Lolth” who is depicted as feminine and evil is probably in some way based on the biblical character Lilith. After reading Lolth’s wiki page for the first time right before writing this, I am now COMPLETELY sure this is the case. 

This can be cool though, because we can use that as a pivot point. Let’s base our reimagination of Lolth on a more modern view of the biblical character she’s (certainly) inspired by. 

For all you non-sunday school kids, all you need to know is that Lilith was supposed to be the first woman, and Adam’s wife. She refused to submit to him however, so she was banished or sent to hell or something and everyone forgot about her because god made eve and eve was better, hooray, the end. Summ lik dat

So you can guess why she might be viewed a little more positively nowadays. Hell yea, fuck submission. The first feminist. A true punk hero. Whatever you wanna say. We can use this. Lets make Lolth punk as FUCK. Coincidentally, my homebrew universe already has a perfectly tyrannical deific monolith that dominates most of the world. They’re mostly good actually, but the patriarchy is a thing.

Lolth needs to be positioned against the Church, in sequestered rebellion. Convenient then, that her people live in the underdark. 

She needs to be ruthless and heartless, not only in her truest intentions but also in her most forward presentations. Let’s say the common dark elf understands that Lolth calls them to be their strongest most powerful self. She calls dark elves to manifest their place as rulers of the material world, both underdark and one day the surface as well. Lolth encourages effective means to an end. Slavery is condoned. Torture is necessary. Cruel and unusual punishments are the backbone of functioning society. Any properly raised dark elf child understands that pain is not only necessary, but pleases Lolth, and furthers the will of the people. To feel pain is to become stronger. To deliver pain is to educate. To enslave is to create order. To destroy the enemy and make him suffer is to manifest heaven in the real world.

In short, Lolth feeds the dark elves a twisted masochistic superiority complex over all other races, and calls them to reach and conquer and rage and rule. In truth, she cares not for mortals of any kind, seeing them as mildly repulsive insects. They are useful however, in helping her achieve her true goal, which is the annihilation of other deities, her real enemies. 

This can be cool and interesting if we feed a bunch of propaganda into it, and mix a dose of truth as well.

Elves aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t be sold a bold faced lie. Instead they learn of the horrors of other systems and cultures. The Hesayan church is very efficient at sweeping atrocities engineered in their favor under the rug. Mind flayers are unnatural and disgusting plagues upon the world, set to destroy the mortal races. No society is free of condemnable sin of grand scale, and the dark elves learn of them all.

The only solution to widespread mismanagement of the mortal races they see is to take control for themselves and set right systemic disarray with the grounded and calculating guide of their unholy mistress. This is a behavior encouraged on even the smallest scale. To forcibly replace one’s superior with strength and cunning, and correct their errors is virtuous and a mark of one’s merit. It is such that dark elf society is in a constant state of revolution and revolt at every level of organization. This is not something they are blind to either. They see power maintained as power gone stale and corrupted, and revolution as the force of restoration and cleansing. In this way their chaotic and backstabbing society is the truest manifestation of progress, and it has stood for millenia.

So in a way we’ve taken rebellion and made it fascist. Perfect. All we’ve really done though is make the fiction around Lolth and the dark elves a little more believable (for me at least). Lolth is still nonsensically sadistic. Why is she like this? The answer needs to be coherent and plausible without exonerating her in the slightest. I’ll start from a place of familiar evil: self obsession. 

Lolth is an ancient outer deity. She remembers a time before creation, when all was a unified primordial soup. Back then, there was nothing but the self. In her foggy memory, she wasn’t just a part of everything, she was everything. The singular divine identity. Well obviously things have changed since then. Multiplicity and complexity and separate sovereign agents, and all of that nonsense. Lolth saw a material world full of beings considering themselves conscious and laughed. ‘There has only ever been one consciousness’ she would think to herself ‘and it is obviously right here where it’s always been’. 

In other words, she sees all other life forms as complex puppets. Machines that imitate emotion and thought and pain, but have no actual internal experience whatsoever. This is all a game she dreamed up, cause she was bored. She is the only player, everyone else is an npc. 

Fast forward a little, to the time on Tersus before the great conquest of the heavens. Lolth basked in the favor and worship of these little puppets. So easy to convince them of your eminent benevolence in one hand and then pry their juicy little spinal chords out in the other. So easily deceived, so easily enslaved. The real joy however was to be heralded as their angelic champion. To drown in an ocean of misplaced love. It was ecstasy. Lolth was an excellent divine politician. She made the grandest shows of the smallest acts of altruism, and in small and private ways, continued to delight in her disciples’ hilarious demise. She was playing, and having a lot of fun.

Then an actual benevolent force came to unify, and try as she might to oppose, she was cast out. Forced to hide in the deep places where light never reaches. Humiliation of the highest order. Why would she have dreamed up such a farcical party of foes for herself. “Peace and unity”, what silly ideals for a grand power to have. Next time she’ll dream up a more interesting villain. At least this one does quite effectively rouse such delightful rage from her. Incredible to feel such hatred. She is still, as ever, having fun.