Quote Originally Posted by ebarde View Post
If Lolth died, maybe the Drow would accomplish something for once. I feel that without the constant backstabbing in the name of Lolth and sorta being very evil stupid, the Drow might be much more of a threat to the surface world.
Probably not. In the absence of Lolth the drow are most likely to turn to the worship of some different, but equally horrible and erratic, deity. I mean, there already are drow settlements that worship Vhaeraun or Ghaunadaur and they aren't any more pleasant. Kiriansalee, the goddess most immediately active to the priestess of Lolth suddenly rendered spell-less (one of the things the silence of Lolth books got right is that she at least initially benefited massively from that event), is if anything even more chaotically crazed than the Spider Queen. Even non-drow deities that likely appeal to the drow are pretty horrible. In FR Shar comes pre-adapted to accept drow worshippers as the goddess of night and the underdark and is about as awful as it gets deity-wise (Viconia, famous for her appearances in Baldur's Gate, adopted Shar as a patron after breaking from the worship of Lolth, she remained quite evil).

There would be some long term changes. The veneration of spiders would be replaced with the veneration of something else, undead in Kiriansalee's case, oozes in Ghaunadaur's. The matriarchy probably falls in all cases save where Kiriansalee becomes the new patron, but only slowly, as it would take many centuries for male drow to rise from the ranks of acolytes into positions of power in the clergy. There would also likely be an overall trend away from theocracy and toward magocracy, since the extremely chaotic period in which new faiths vied for dominance would severely weaken religious authority as a whole, leaving arcane magic in a superior position.