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124<br />
Relations with Others<br />
<strong>The</strong> Pol’Tah have few relations with other races. For<br />
millennia, the deep drow rarely encountered any sentient<br />
creatures other than shangu and their assorted minions, with<br />
whom they unsurprisingly had a very hostile relationship.<br />
From time to time, other races would stumble upon the<br />
deep drow, and those who survived the<br />
meeting returned to their homes with<br />
stories of the strange drow living deep<br />
in the beating heart of the earth and<br />
riding on the backs of enormous purple<br />
worms. Other drow heard these stories,<br />
but dismissed them as pure fancy.<br />
It was with some surprise, then, that<br />
a party of House Devoren Explorers<br />
encountered a group of deep drow only<br />
a few years ago, and it was with some<br />
degree of good fortune the sudden<br />
meeting did not end in violence. Since<br />
that day, the drow and their deep cousins have begun a<br />
tentative trading relationship.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Pol’Tah, despite the oral tradition of history so<br />
prevalent among the people, scarcely remembered the<br />
existence of other drow, and the revelation that the cousins<br />
they left so long ago have survived and flourished in the<br />
Underdeep came as quite a blow to the deep drow. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
had been isolated for so long in the heart of the world that<br />
the existence of other races (aside from the shangu) was<br />
difficult for the people to accept.<br />
<strong>The</strong> deep drow and their cousins still treat each other with a<br />
fair degree of suspicion, a situation made that much worse<br />
when the drow tried to take advantage of the Pol’Tah’s<br />
blindness and cheat them in the first trading deals. Both<br />
sides also view each other with condescension, the drow<br />
viewing the Pol’Tah as a race of cowardly cripples hiding at<br />
the bottom of the Underdeep, and the deep drow regarding<br />
their cousins as a race of weak fools who could never have<br />
endured the rigours of life in the centre of the earth.<br />
Religion<br />
<strong>The</strong> Pol’Tah left the other drow out of their continuing<br />
reverence for the elven Allfather when all other drow<br />
were falling away from that faith to worship the new gods<br />
revealed to them during the war with the goblins. Even<br />
then, however, the Pol’Tah were drifting far from the<br />
Allfather’s teachings.<br />
As they wandered in the Underdeep, Kez’Skul, the trickster<br />
of the new drow pantheon, appeared to them masquerading<br />
as the Allfather. <strong>The</strong> Pol’Tah thought they were delivered,<br />
but instead, they were fooled. In the millennia which have<br />
passed since that time, Kez’Skul, in the guise of Vermthizzl,<br />
the Light in the Deep, has long since lured the deep drow<br />
away from anything resembling worship of the Allfather.<br />
Considering the reason they left the other drow, it is a cruel<br />
irony the deep drow have utterly forgotten<br />
the Allfather, and have given themselves<br />
over completely to worship of Vermthizzl.<br />
For some time, Vermthizzl found this<br />
greatly amusing, but his interest in the<br />
deep drow has been waning in recent<br />
centuries. <strong>The</strong>y have paid for his joke<br />
and he found it quite entertaining, but<br />
now the joke is done. Whether or not he<br />
will abandon the Pol’Tah remains to be<br />
seen.<br />
More clergy of Vermthizzl are female<br />
than male, a fact which seems to be pure<br />
happenstance as there is no preference<br />
given in the god’s teachings. <strong>The</strong> cult recruits new priests<br />
and priestesses yearly, when 16 children, four from each<br />
clan, are chose to enter the temple. Once inside and settled,<br />
the children are subjected to an intense and intricate testing<br />
process comprehensible only to the clergy of Vermthizzl.<br />
At the end of the test, the priests and priestesses choose<br />
which eight children performed most satisfactorily, and<br />
those eight start down the road towards priesthood. <strong>The</strong><br />
eight failures are kept locked in the temple and used as<br />
sacrifices to Vermthizzl throughout the year.<br />
<strong>The</strong> high priest or priestess of the cult of Vermthizzl is<br />
known as the Bright Flame.<br />
Slavery<br />
<strong>The</strong> Pol’Tah do not practice slavery, as they have never<br />
had the opportunity to do so. <strong>The</strong>y rarely venture far<br />
from Drez Khelim, and have little or no contact with other<br />
sentient races. For centuries, the only intelligent beings<br />
they encountered were shangu, which the deep drow would<br />
either flee from or kill. Now that they have re-established<br />
contact with the other drow, the concept of slavery may be<br />
introduced to the Pol’Tah society, but it is too soon to tell.<br />
<strong>The</strong> chances are against slavery taking hold among the<br />
deep drow as they have so little need of it. Most of the hard<br />
and dangerous labour for which slaves would be useful<br />
is accomplished quickly, easily and safely with the tame<br />
purple worms the Pol’Tah have been keeping for millennia.<br />
From tunnelling to mining to carrying heavy loads, the work<br />
the worms are capable of performing in days is superior to<br />
what an army of slaves could achieve in weeks.