Well, most Eilistraeen communities that we know about (with the possible exception of the Promenade) tend to be fairly small, tight-knit groups. For such groups social structure tends to be fairly straight-forward I think; there might be one who is (unofficially perhaps) considered the leader but for the most part they’re all on the same level.
Now, I’m not sure how hippy communities are structured, but for Eilistraeen drow I’d imagine some extension of the above. I’d imagine that they’d encourage personal freedom and wouldn’t have strict ranks as such, but with members respecting certain others who have shown themselves capable as leaders or such. This ties in with how Qilué leads more by being a wiser big sister than by being an overbearing leader. And for the rest I’d imagine the community working together almost as through peer-pressure; people are encouraged in their individuality but at the same time things need to get done for the community too and those that cause problems for the community find their lives harder at least, and ousted in the worst case.
It helps, I think, that they’re all of similar mindset.
Of course, for a player community I think it might be a good idea to have a tad more structure to things as that tends to make it easier for people to understand and fall in line with. As per the designs I had for the Eilistraeen city there is a clear leader and there are clear roles (people who are guards and people who are priestesses, etc) even though I think an Eilistraeen community wouldn’t have such clear distinctions. But I kept things purposely very light with only a very few ‘ranks’ (pretty much just “acolyte”, “priestess”, “high priestess”).
On a similar note, regarding titles, I don’t think that any particular roles and titles are directly assigned to individuals. I think it’s more a matter of individuals taking up the tasks associated with certain titles on their own and through their work and knowledge in this area the title sort of “grows” on them as the community recognizes their dedication here.*
In short I see an Eilistraeen community as very free-flowing, encouraging individuality and placing no one person over another, but recognising each individual’s abilities and how they can contribute to the community. For some that is the ability to lead or wisdom in Eilistraee’s ways, for others this would be something else, giving respect to their ability (thus they’d follow a leader’s advice not because they’re the leader, but because this individual has shown wisdom and ability in leading people). But none is placed above another in value and thus no ranks would exist to place one above another, just titles as a mark of this recognition.
As for how they’d look at other races. The ideal is obviously that all races would live with each other in harmony and as such ideally one isn’t seen as better than another. Humans, fair elves, half-elves and half-drow (and dwarves and Halflings and orcs and all that) are all considered equally to drow. But at the same time I can imagine this not being quite as easy for any drow, particular those coming from Lolthite societies, to accept and I’d imagine a lot having trouble accepting other races. But in the end the ideal is most clearly that all races live together in harmony.
At least, that’s how I look at it.
Love -x-x-x-
Shir'le
* To bring that back to this site for a moment, this is how I’d like the “tasks” to work here as well; I keep getting requests from people at times whether I want to give them a certain title, but invariably I think that people should show their value in this field on their own. If you want to be Master/Mistress of Dancing (to name a random example) then show your expertise and how you’d contribute in this, show your dedication to writing a page dedicated to this (I’m quite happy to give people access to the Temple site so they can write in those sections), etc. Anyway, sorry for this side-bar.
