The Jimjam Times

The priests of the Weaver Mother paint eyes onto their faces when they wake from trancing. Their long robes and hair trail on the cool stone floors of their temples. Their eyes see the present and the future, their silk reach backwards for the past. Wisdom is sown when all three facets are carefully considered.

a nivaesi drow showing their surface friend around and being like “hey buddy check this out” and yells into a cavern wall and somehow it drops their voice ten octaves, shimmies the stone and reverbs all around surround sound like a fuckin cinema

no magic was used, friend is in Shock

[spoilers for Kaifeng Imperial Palace epilogue]

i do love the flirtery of two men crossing swords

nothing more flirting than that

i love doing relationship maps

so like we have this thing where we sharply refer to someone using their surname, but translated literally it’ll mean

“the one with the surname (X)” or “Surname (X)!”

“姓（X）的!”

it’s an extremely rude way to address or refer to someone, usually played for laughs in media. even funnier if the “surname” isn’t even their proper name. my favourite example is a silly idv compilation where the player yelled “姓勘的!” (“SURNAME KAN!”, for Kan Tan Yuan 勘探员 the chinese word for prospector, as though norton’s government name is Pros Pector)

in many asian cultures it’s rude enough to call someone’s name directly without honourifics (unless you’re close friends), but especially in chinese it’s often very openly disrespectful to only use someone’s surname to address them. doubly so if they’re older than you or have a higher “rank”. and there’s a whole thing where nouns serve as names perfectly well, so taking a noun and treating it like a proper name with surname + given name works very easily (again, the “Pros Pector” thing)

i’m sure i could just have some nivaesi drow straight up snap at another and call her by her surname, with side characters reacting appropriately to the Disrespect. but it does make me a little sad to lose the joke of it because it’s not a Thing in english and english-speaking cultures.

that and i think even in canon lore drow seem to just use their given names and their family names (if any) seem to serve more like titles. so maybe there’s a different sort of misunderstanding there where a faerunian drow would hear a nivaesi drow call out someone’s surname in anger/frustration, and they’d think it’s Weird but for a different reason

basing my homebrew drow off ancient chinese culture is fun because i get to think about hundreds of drow stressing out about Imperial Exams, drow scuttling around palaces and official buildings doing paperwork on whole networks of scrolls