Tag Archives: Elves

Rethinking Elves 3 – Elves as an infection

July 14, 2011 7:22 am / 6 Comments /

Elves aren’t born. Not as elves, but as humans. They turn into elves when a true elf puts a spore in them. Spores are organs that grow in the back of their throats, much like tonsils. When they get too large, say grape or walnut sized, the true elf needs to spit them out.
The spores have legs and for about a week they can move up to half a mile away before they die. They crawl down the throats of unsuspecting humans and implant themselves in the stomach. Over the course of the next eighteen months, an elf will grow in their torso and abdomen. This elf will copy the host’s features, memories and personality. The host will start to lose those qualities, grow sick, lose appetite and hair. When the elf copy is ready, it will literally molt the human body off itself.
The resulting elf is not the same person (or spirit) but a copy of its memories and personality (depending of course on the metaphysics you use for your campaign). They are shorter because they can’t grow to full height (always wondered why, didn’t you?).
Elves do live forever, barring accident or misadvanture, but they can’y hold more memories than a human. After a few hundred years, an elf will probably not remember that she was ever human. The fragments of that life that remain will eventually fade and might be interpreted as dreams. Elves as a whole are ignorant of their origins.
This is why they are so keen on composing songs and writing books, to preserve what they can. Their rich culture is an amalgam of millennia worth of human culture, as remembered and recorded by elves and then read and reinterpreted by elves who don’t remember it anymore. The errors in interpretation trend toward the prevailing elven culture of the region and over time, it all skews into a very idiosyncratic synthesized culture that could easily be mistaken for something borne of its own.
What about these true elves that spread spores? They are the real elves. The ones we know are really sort of half. The DM should decide how they should look. They could resemble the gray aliens, or the ur-elf to out-elf all elves, or they could be some sort of yuggoth in the bottom of a well. Best not to reveal them if you don’t have to.
You can also play with this for other fairie species in addition to or in place of elves. Dryads or nymphs could come from the fruit of a certain tree, or sprites and pixies could be spore-infected halflings or gnomes.
With apologies to vampires, Alien, Chtorr and any other sci-fi or fantasy creature or trope this closely resembles.

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Posted in: campaign window dressing, character race, legacy D&D / Tagged: ,

Elves Don’t Sleep

March 5, 2011 7:45 pm / 4 Comments /

This is just window dressing, but I think elves don’t sleep.

I was listening to a discussion over on the Roll for Initiative Podcast about whether AD&D ever said that they don’t. Clearly elves are immune to sleep spells in the old school editions, but actually needing sleep? While they were discussing it, someone IM’ed them and told them it was an option 2e rule from an elf handbook.

I am all in favor of elves never sleeping. To elves, sleep is a close cousin to death. they only sleep when sick or injured. Elves only have beds in their hospitals (or wherever they heal).

Elves don’t need bedrooms, even for lovemaking. They go to the woods or something. Having sex on a bed is, for an elf, akin to having sex in a coffin or on a gurney. Which is to say, some very few of them really love it, but most of them wouldn’t be into it.

So elves can handle the entire night’s watch, unless they need to rememorize spells. Maybe there should be some chance they will be distracted by visions or something. Otherwise, every party will have an elf. Ideas are welcome.

Me? I like anything that alienates elves from humans.

Half elves? Eh, don’t even get me started. I don’t think there are any.

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Drow Are Elves Who Use Too Much Magic

December 7, 2010 1:45 am / 2 Comments /

Human magic is a chaotic, warping influence. Yesterday I suggested that Magic Users, should they somehow live to an old age, would inevitably become liches. I’ve also suggested that elves cast human magic, not their own magic, which has been lost to the ages. Where humans warp into liches, elves become dark elves.

If you think of the scenes where Smeagol becomes Gollum as portrayed in the Lord of the Rings films, you get where I’m going with this.

Drow are tortured, pale elves whose over-use of human-style magic has reversed their connection with nature. The sun hurts, the trees no longer speak, they hiss. Animals shun them. Only insects, worms and creatures of decay will come near them.

Their heads enlarge and features warp. They cast human magic as if they were four levels higher. They do not form underground civilizations, but retreat to caves and huts in the swamp.

Elves are not aware of why some of their elders get sick and run into the woods, never to return. Some think it must be a disease. Others think it a curse tied somehow to the fall of their civilization. A few are hoping to find a cure.

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Rethinking Elves 2 – Lost Knowledge

September 3, 2010 2:58 am / 5 Comments /

That a race that lives as long as elves is generally not in touch with the concept of their own mortality is a pretty fair assumption, and one I’m using this morning. The idea that knowledge can be lost, that the best elfin wizard, swordmaster, historian or weaver won’t always be around just doesn’t occur to them, especially the “older” races like gray elves, if you use them.

To an elf, there is always time to travel thousands of miles to train for decades under a master craftsman. Everyone will eventually train with someone well qualified and everyone will hear every story, so books, portable knowledge, can easily be counted out by the DM wishing to do so.

Now all it takes is some cataclysm or war to make the situation desperate, as many of the eldest elves might die or otherwise leave without passing on what they know to enough of their kindred to ensure survival of that knowledge.

This offers some interesting answers to questions about the elves.

If they have lived so long, why aren’t there level 100 elf wizards? Well, Billy, they don’t know how to do their old-fashioned elf magic anymore, since the last of their wizards died. So they had to learn human-magic from human magic users.

Why don’t they know how to use these strange artifacts we have found in their abandoned cities? Well, they’d never even heard of the cities until we told them about it, because they don’t have maps or stories about the wonders of their ancient cities.

Why didn’t they write more books, Mr. Wizard? They did, Billy, but they were all transcripts of human legends, histories and myths, which are more exciting and colorful than theirs. You see, Billy, deep down, elves are bored. They want excitement. That’s why some of them go adventuring.

And so on…

Assuming elves do manage to repopulate, they would have a very difficult time educating their children quickly enough for them to be useful in maintaining an ecological niche for elves. There would be great pressure on the students, and much of their history and lore would go unread by students who need to concentrate on mastering the sword, the bow and the spell.

Imagine the youthful rebellion…

The plight of the elves provides many adventure hooks just using the crises in population and information.

  • Elves who are apprenticing themselves to human mages are found dead in the forest. Is it prideful, racist elves or xenophobic humans? False choice, it’s BOTH!
  • The first known elfin settlement must be re-taken from a legion of lizardmen so the elves can contact their gods through a special device/hold in the ground/statue.
  • Inexplicably, all the babies born in town have pointed ears. Is an elf sneaking in at night and changing form to fool the village’s women? Or are these infants being magically implanted in the town’s maidens to be carried to term faster than they would in an elfin womb? (That might explain the virgin birth last week…)
  • There are verses long lost to men that would, if recovered, establish the “divine heritage” of the local human king. An ancient bibliography points to an elfin archive of human epic poems. You are sent to bargain with the elves for a copy.
  • A quest to uncover the elven spell of healing wounds, which was an arcane spell, not a divine spell.
  • Manticore spikes are said to be aphrodisiacs to elves. But you need the find both the ingredients, find the recipe and validate it.
  • The “naturalist” Oliverius has a theory that elves are actually half-human. Accompany him on his expedition for proof. See how long you can keep him alive.

Just a few. Roll yer own or finish these if you like.

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Posted in: content, legacy D&D / Tagged: , , ,

Rethinking Elves

August 31, 2010 12:19 am / 2 Comments /
Bjork

I was thinking about this, from the LotFP Weird Fantasy:

Once the epitome of enlightenment and responsibility, elfin civilization has fallen before the expansive nature of Man. Where once the Elf nations ruled the forests, the plains and the mountains, their now-small numbers live in secret enclaves, possessing great power but utterly impotent in matters of projecting it.

Bjork

Bjork. Photo by deep_schismic cc-by 2.0

There’s going to be some elves that don’t accept this at all. After all, being impotent in matters of projecting power is not the same as giving up without a fight. What can we do with that to make elves more interesting?

The essential qualities that fantasy elves have almost universally: Beauty, Magic and Agelessness. Add impotence to that and you’ve got some interesting options. Let’s assume you don’t have a western continent for them to sail to.

Elfin survivalists would recognize the need to repopulate in the face of ever-growing numbers of humans. That faction might capture and study human’s reproductive cycles. They might perform experiments on their own kind. They might go out on a pilgrimage to find a human fertility goddess to take them in. They might try to breed with humans to create half-elves that can breed true with one another. Or make a pact with a demon or devil (no spider-queens, please).

Perhaps they aren’t even full elves themselves. Perhaps they were always half-elves and their original stock died out/is in hibernation on their crashed space ship awaiting rescue/are their mortal enemies. Maybe their original stock are neanderthalish elves.

What if they can reproduce, but their cycles are much slower or they just aren’t in the mood often enough? They’ll need aphrodisiacs, potency vitamins, maybe some Barry White albums. They might need a chamber where time is sped up. Maybe they are bored with their own beautiful perfection and need imperfections such as scars or broken noses to catch each other’s eye.

What if they don’t understand some aspect of their reproduction that they never noticed before (since it happens so infrequently)? What if outside temperature during gestation determined gender? What if the entire race was blessed with a birth control spell or worshipped an idol that was radioactive? What if elfin magic swords gave off sperm-killing cell-phone radiation?

And what if they did manage to get preggers again? What would happen to an elf nation that had a one million percent jump in annual birth rate? They probably have no idea how to educate or care for their young. They might have long ago forgotten how to pass along any sort of knowledge whatsoever and need to apprentice their children to human mages.

What if they are stuck at a fixed number of elf spirits that reincarnate into baby elves? Where could they find more spirits? What if other spirits started incarnating in the baby elves? What if elf spirits are reincarnating into dwarves, halflings or meercats? Maybe they need to go out and kill dwarves, halflings and meercats to free up those spirits during the semi-annual fertility festival.

What if all this was happening at once in different parts of your campaign world?

I might just find elves interesting again.

More later this week.

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