Quote Originally Posted by Dire_Flumph View Post
Didn't she already though once?

Looked it up, the War of the Spider Queen Novels.

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It was more of a rebirth cycle than anything else, but she was effectively "dead" to her followers for the length of the series.
That situation is different though because all of the other members of the Drow pantheon understood what was happening because it had occurred previously and therefore the steps they took in response were distinctly limited.

Lolth, in the Realms, could potentially be killed by Corellon Larethian following the events of the Reckoning (the Lady Penitent novels) in which Corellon was drawn into direct competition with Lolth following the death of Eilistraee because a number of drow were converted back into dark elves (no these are somehow not the same thing). However, the subsequent events of both the Spellplague and the Second Sundering undid all of that and brought the other members of the drow pantheon (aka the Dark Seldarine) back from the dead and restored a much earlier status quo.


Broadly, it's important to determine if this question applies to only in the Realms, or to the Planescape-based iteration of Lolth who serves as the principle goddess of all dark elves everywhere. There's a lot of weird overlap here because of cross pollination in the development of aspects of the drow for the Realms by Ed Greenwood and RA Salvatore that was latter ported over imperfectly into Planescape with certain elements (Elven High Magic, the role of entities like Ghuandaur) changed or erased.

Within the Realms, if Lolth dies as a result of the sava game she willfully participated in with other drow and elven deities, then her death would be binding per those rules and her portfolio would pass to the deity who killed her. Existing drow society would be massively destabilized in all cases but the subsequent direction would depend almost completely on who it was that won. The most minimal change would be from Lolth to Kiriansalee - in which case the drow stop worshipping spiders and start worshipping undead but still probably remain largely a matriarchy and many of their social structures would remain unchanged. Victory by Vhaerun would utterly upend all the gender based structures and probably result in a patriarchy instead after a massive amount of violence, but the drow would remain evil. The Jaezred Chaulssin assassin cult the followed Vhaerun and ruled a couple of drow settlements provides an example of how this would probably sort out. If Eilistraee killed Lolth, who knows. Some of the drow would follow her but the majority would probably reject her entirely and search out some other deity to follow (probably Shar, who occupies the right divine memespace). If Corellon kills Lolth hmmm...they probably take on the dark elves willing to worship him and just purges the rest of the drow entirely.

If some other, non-elven deity managed to kill Lolth outside of the sava context (which would be challenging outside of some kind of cataclysmic event that rendered the gods vulnerable like during the Time of Troubles), they would absorb Lolth's portfolio and would probably continue to pretend to be Lolth because they'd gain the greatest support from the Drow in that way and only very gradually alter drow society to suit their desires.

Outside of the Realms, well, in the Planescape context it's pretty much impossible to turn Lolth into a dead god without massacring a substantial portion of the drow as a species across the entirety of the multiverse. That's not very likely.