The Underdark beneath Terra
A noble house of drow with deep roots in the underdark and quiet ambitions on the surface — patient, calculating, and not yet finished moving their pieces into place.
Overview
The Al’ar are a drow noble house operating out of the underdark beneath Terra. They are a military power who hold privileged knowledge of the underground — its passages, its ancient ruins, and whatever the previous civilisation left behind — and they have no intention of sharing that advantage freely. On the surface, they present themselves through intermediaries and proxy projects, preferring influence to visibility.
Their long-term goal is the establishment of drow dominance over the surface of Terra. They believe the current surface order is unstable — that the oripathy crisis, unchecked originium use, and factional conflict will eventually bring it down — and they are positioning themselves to fill the vacuum when it does.
Current Speaker:
Location: The underdark beneath Terra. Surface operatives active in Town Malachite and Chrysalis City.
Public Projects: Officially, facilitation of trade between the underdark and the surface through the RALA alliance. Publicly, their most visible effort is backing Leonore of Alyss in the Chrysalis mayoral election.
Key People
- L’oriel Al’ar — Surface operative; Dragon Logistics manager in Malachite
- Daeloth Al’ar — Enforcer; handles debt collection and coercion on the surface
- Leonore of Alyss — Tiefling protégé; Al’ar-backed mayoral candidate in Chrysalis
- Lygrith — Affiliated with the Al’ar
Projects
- RALA — The Regional Alliance for Logistics Advancement; a partnership with Dragon Logistics and Kristen Wright of Rhine Labs, officially for facilitating underdark–surface trade, in practice covering the Horizon Arc Project.
- The Chrysalis Election — Backing Leonore of Alyss as a mayoral candidate to gain a foothold in Chrysalis City’s political structure.
Reputation
The Al’ar are not widely known on the surface by name. Most people in Chrysalis or Malachite know only that there are drow operating in the logistics trade and that someone is backing Leonore of Alyss — they do not necessarily connect these threads to a single family. The Al’ar prefer it that way.
Those who do know the name associate it with the underdark’s power structures and with a level of political cunning more common to courts than to trade houses.
Background
The Al’ar are an established noble house in the underdark with knowledge of the old civilisation that predates current surface society. Their interest in the surface is relatively recent — the discovery of originium and the destabilisation it is causing have created what they view as a historic opportunity. They have embedded operatives in Dragon Logistics, cultivated Leonore of Alyss as a surface-world figurehead, and entered the RALA alliance with Kristen Wright to access Sarcophagus technology and the Horizon Arc Project.
Notes
- The vault is light on internal Al’ar detail — house structure, the matriarch, underdark territory, and their knowledge of the old civilisation are all mentioned but not developed. Good candidates for expansion.
- The dungeonsanddragons notes refer to an Al’ar matriarch and describe the family as a queendom; this is not yet reflected in the wiki. Worth incorporating when expanding.
- Daeloth Al’ar and L’oriel Al’ar started as player characters and have been repurposed as NPCs.