Lolth
Source: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes p. 53
- Alignment: Chaotic Evil
- Category: The Dark Seldarine
- Domains: Trickery, War
- Pantheon: Drow
- Province: Primary god of drow, spiders
- Symbol: Spider
Unlike Corellon, who asks very little of his followers, Lolth is a demanding mistress. What she demands most of all are sacrifices of treasure and blood. Time and time again, the screams of sacrificial victims echo through Lolth’s lightless temples as they fall under the knives of her priestesses. Her altars are piled with skulls picked clean of flesh by the giant spiders that lurk in the webdraped stalactites overhead.
In return for victims and adoration, Lolth grants signs of her favor, such as great success during a slave raid on the surface, the matron of a rival house being struck down by an inexplicable illness, or an heiress to the house being born under propitious omens.
Holes in Lolth's Web
Lolth is far from omniscient, despite what her priestesses say. There are drow who live without bending to the tyranny of her worship. Communities of renegades who dispute Lolth’s primacy often raise another of the Dark Seldarine up as their patron. Although this amounts to exchanging one evil oppressor for another, any escape from Lolth’s web can feel like freedom.
The Acropolis of Thanatos, erected in the ruins of a drow city wiped out by plague in the Underdark of Faerûn, was home to a drow settlement of a few thousand ruled by necromancer clerics of Kiaransalee. It existed for a few decades before worshipers of Lolth and worshipers of Eilistraee teamed up to eliminate its leaders.
Vulkoor
Drow of the world of Eberron worship a scorpion-god named Vulkoor, which is their world’s equivalent of Lolth. Vulkoor is often portrayed or envisioned as a giant scorpion or as a hybrid creature with the head, arms, and upper torso of a strong male drow and the lower body of a scorpion. The dark elves of Eberron revere scorpions, seeing spiders and other arachnids to be lesser servitors of Vulkoor. Many drow believe that Vulkoor and the Mockery (one of the group of evil deities known as the Dark Six) are one and the same. Drow from the jungle continent of Xen’drik ritually tattoo themselves using scorpion venom, leaving white scars etched into their skin.
Drow of other worlds rarely know of Vulkoor. Those who are familiar with his name consider him one of the weakest of the Dark Seldarine, a subordinate of Lolth who is disregarded by the other gods. Both visions of Vulkoor might be accurate, since Lolth seems to have little influence in Khyber but the drow there bear many similarities to the Lolth-worshiping drow of other realms throughout the multiverse.