The Drow Harmonium

A powerful collective of Drow city states unified under a council of religious fanatics of Lolth that originated in central Elinia and is working quickly to eliminate or incorporate the many small and scattered fiefdoms and feudal states under their banner. For now they seem far more concerned with the racial and religious purity of the Drow rather than much interference with the civil affairs of surface dwellers of other races; as such their highly organized structure and total intolerance of corruption or crime have had a net positive effect on commoners in their region, compared to the oppression and mismanagement of much of Elinia by its useless nobles and mostly ceremonial king.
While portraying itself as essentially a religious organization dedicated to reviving and restoring the pure worship of Lolth among the Drow, and recruiting the faithful from other races as well, in practice they are both military and political, and far more regimented in their military deployments and dogma than one would expect a mere Drow demon cult to be; their alignments are lawful rather than neutral or chaotic. They have much bigger ambitions and far more influence than the scattered and disorganized independent cults of Lolth-worshippers among the Drow.
To the people of the surface, the Harmonium seemed to appear virtually overnight, as if from nowhere; but they have been consolidating their influence and rule of the underdark for well over 50 years in advance of moving, methodically and efficiently, to take land holdings on the surface. The precipitating event appears to have been a lengthy, perhaps permanent, interconnection of the Demonweb Pits with an underground location in central Elinia, set up by one of the Arachnomancers of the Harmonium to stage their conquest of the surface, accomplished with very little difficulty and hardly any bloodshed as yet; nobles seem content to surrender their lands in return for keeping their own lives and fortunes, and the King is still the King as long as his continued rule maintains calm and stability among the surface peoples of the realm.
The first priority for them after establishing a surface base in Timbermarch has been to establish a strong border between Elinia and the Khazigiri Empire, for the sake of preventing interference in their efforts deeper within the borders of Elinia. The reactions of the people are mixed, as the average peasant farmer or woodcutter is safer and better fed now under the Drow than they ever were under their petty native lords.
Not to be confused with the planar Faction of the Harmonium, which is unrelated, though both do share an assumption that true harmony is a worthy goal and attainable - but only under their terms.

Structure

Like all classical Drow heirarchies, this one is almost exclusively matriarchal, though it favors those few Drow men with some real muscle on their slender bones; Harmonium Enforcers in full plate with their heavy mauls and two-headed axes are a fearsome sight. But the leadership is entirely female, broken up into a number of relatively independent "investigator" cells (since 'Inquisitor" has too negative a connotation).
These consist of a commissioner whose responsibility is to interface with the core leadership and ensure that the purpose, or commission, of a given cell is upheld at all times. This role takes on a combination of activities including supervisor and political officer. Under each commissioner are eight Legates, and under each Legate are eight Lictors, literally whip-bearers drawn from executioner and torturer classes and built, unironically, on the Khazigiri model by which Torture and Execution is a profession unto itself.
Each Lictor then has eight hammers, and these are generally enforcer and military leader types; the field troops follow a military structure which answers ultimately to one of the Hammers. In this way the Harmonium Core is able to reach far from its base in the deep underdark and persecute heretics and conduct wars without much day-to-day involvement in the details.
Drow civilians are also part of the Harmonium, with females outranking males, and mages outranking other martial skillsets. Drow Clerics called Arachnomancers commune with and pronounce the prophecies of Lolth, generally evocative gibberish that can later be interpreted to have predicted major events that in turn reinforce the evident blessing of Lolth upon the whole operation.

Eight Eyes See All

Structure: Cells of 8. Each commissioner has 8 Legates, each Investigator has 8 Hammers, leading to the following counts:

8 Commissioners

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64 Legates
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512 Lictors
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4,098 Investigators
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32,784 Hammers

If each Hammer is responsible for 8 Citizens that gives the Commissioners a fairly direct line to 262,272 people.

Type

Geopolitical, Theocracy