In settings where elves are allergic to iron, does that mean they have copper-based blood like a crab?

Not just fae. Even God almighty could best a mother fucker in an iron chariot.

No, but in Wolsung they have cobalt based blood, like lobsters, making them literally blue blooded.

Yep, in Discworld they do and iirc the iron is also fucking with their magnetism senses.

The only known oxygen transport pigment using colbat is actually amber yellow when deoxygenated and clear when oxygenated. Not saying there couldn't be a blue cobalt-based blood though.

In my setting, the fey fear and revere iron because after thousands of years of advancement, when all the peoples of the mainland were using steel or higher metals, the first humans came from across the sea wielding iron and destroyed the great fey witch that had been plagueing the land and all people, even fey, for hundreds of years.

Iron does not actually have any particular effect on fey. It's just fear and reverence. Iron is sacred to the elf witches, who consider it the bane of evil, and gnomes often use iron in liue of higher metals when building gates or shields. Eladrin and trolls detest iron as a symbol of the power of "Earth's Plane". Most other fey fear iron simply because they are ignorant, since they don't enter the Earth Plane as much as the other fey.

Fun fact: the reason iron-based blood is so predominant is that it allows red light to pass through, which is then absorbed by the photoreactive enzyme 'cytochrome c oxidase' in the mitochondria, which is heavily involved in the process of cellular respiration. This is why red light therapy is an effective treatment for a huge number of various seemingly unrelated maladies. Look up "LLLT" on pubmed and you'll see that shining red LEDs on people is accepted practice for everything from healing cuts to treating depression.

What this means is that if your elves have blood that isn't red, they probably live underground or something where they don't get sunlight anyway, or they split evolutionarily from humans fairly early on in the multicellular organism stage and don't rely on mitochondria.

>blue blood
That would be copper based

Elves?
In MY setting?!

...

If they have hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin, doesn't that mean that their blood would be somewhat blue-ish? And their skin also more in the hues of blue?

Real nobles, aren't they.

Nah.

Blood is red because it's blood. And everyone knows blood is red ya big dummy.

Obviously they're weak against iron because they're really Wood elementals.

Metallic iron and haemoglobin are very different things in the eyes of your immune system and chemists alike. Try putting out a fire with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gas instead of water and you'll notice what a difference chemical bonds can make.

Ah, and iron is just a single element away from axe.

>In settings where elves are allergic to iron

...this is a thing?

So molluscs and horseshoe crabs are not exposed to sunlight? Pretty sure they have mitochondria too.

A lot of creatures live without sunlight. Their mitochindria have adapted. Or maybe it's that many of those that are in the light have adapted to get some extra use out of the light. Either way, not every creature works the same way.

Fuck you, get your chemistry out of my fantasy. Elves are allergic to iron because Jesus.

2ndin'

I thought elves were dead in Discworld? What book did you learn that from?

Why should a little thing like being dead stop elves from messing with people?

Dead as they're mentioned as being long gone in a footnote and that's about it, as far as I've read. So what Discworld book goes in further detail about elves?

>fact
You misspelled 'horseshit'.

Lords and Ladies is about their invasion to Lancre.

I think there was another book about them in the Tiffany Aching series, but i can't recall the title.

The second science of Discworld books also has elves in it.

Hmm. A dragon's core body temperature is often high enough to boil water. What is their blood comprised of?

Fuck you, I'm going to add the full periodic table of elements to my games.

I always thought of it as symbolism. To forge iron, you have to strike the earth, tear it out, cut down trees and burn them for charcoal, and this generates a large amount of destruction and pollution. This iron is then battered into weapons used to take lives.

Due to how long this has been going on, the existence of iron ingots is synonymous with the destruction of nature, making it effective against Fey.

And what will you do when your players start summoning stupid shit like Chlorine Elementals and Uranium Elementals?

That is cool as hell and I wish I had known that before.

Probably laugh.

>I think there was another book about them in the Tiffany Aching series, but i can't recall the title.
The Shepherd's Crown.

Elves are crabs.

I'm pretty sure the dermis is the first living barrier to light entering the body, and not the blood

Same thing with elemental mercury and the mercury compounds in vaccines

"Stupid shit" doesn't really cover what they can get up to if you have the full set of chemical elements available. If we suppose plutonium is about as dense as elemental earth, then a Small elemental is 80lb. That's several times critical mass. It's a walking nuke that's gonna go off the moment the spell finishes summoning it. Compare

> The demon core was a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb), 89-millimetre-diameter (3.5 in) subcritical mass of plutonium which was involved in two criticality accidents.
> The core, assembled, was designed to be at "-5 cents", or 5 percent below critical mass.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Found the fae

Elemental plane of axes

Also Lords and ladies i think

If they summon a francium golem I'll laugh, then pick up a gallon bag of d6's for explosive damage.

All Fae are negatively affected by iron in traditional folklore.

If I drop a coin sized lump of lithium in water it will react pretty violently, yet oddly, despite being 70% water, I don't explode every time I take my lithium medication.

Just as terrible as the Elemental Plane of Endless Punching?

Both the shepherd's crown and the first one have elves.

This guy has it right. What on earth does iron have to do with the four humours?

That's the opposite of how colours work, idiot. Because blood doesn't emit light, it being red means that it REFLECTS red light.

>In settings where elves are allergic to iron
It's because they're god-spawn and gods where dipshits and made them allergic to iron.
t. Anima

It is because elves were bronze age creatures. Then iron age happened
Humans got iron weapons and started to wreck shit and generally develop their cultures, not even because of the iron, it was just contemporaty to it, and became the symbol of human expansion and fey dwindling
So now they are scared to shit by it.

Also, they're not afected by iton physically in any way. It's purely mental reaction, but fey are super-emotional because their souls are magical. Basically, the effect of presence of iron nearby for fae is like effect of a large spider crawling on the cheek for arachnophobic person. Times square.
That also means it won't work if fae is not aware of the iron presence.
Unfortuntely for them, their senses are so keen they literally can smell it from few meters.

Nah. They have silicon based blood.

Lrn2english, faggot.

Would this means that to the fey, humans have xenomorph blood?

...

Murcury kown poison 5000 years bed coils array repotomemes

That's because it's a lithium salt.

An allergy to elemental iron would by no means entail an allergy to the iron cation in hemoglobin. That's not how biochemistry works.

plant juices since they are like little ents.

Summoning an elemental that explodes in a nuclear holocaust the moment it appears is itself an INTENSELY strange notion, because where the fuck did it exist previously?

Despite being further down the periodic table, francium is less electronegative than regular old caesium. It is, however, more radioactive.

All tg questions can be answered with one of those question, pick the one that aplly
a)myths
b)lord of the rings
c)d&d
d)fatal
e)hybrid
f)gurps
g)depends on setting
h)because it a non hard fantasy setting

pick the one that apply

The Elemental Plane of Plutonium, obviously, where the planar traits inhibit nuclear reactions.

pretty ironical that our souls is basically our body irl.

>Times square.
In New York?

See this is part of the problem with D&D lore. Sometimes it's like the people writing it don't understand it's supposed to be used for an RPG. The "elemental plane of _____" would work fine in narrative fiction (Rick and Morty pulls a similar thing off in scifi), but as an element in an RPG it's so open to abuse

>D&D lore
I'm pretty sure this is nothing to do with D&D lore, it started when said "I'm going to add the full periodic table of elements to my games" and then autists did autist things.

The reason that otherworldly beings dislike iron is because iron is the blood of the earth.

You certainly sound like a god damned fairy

None of the electron transport chain cytochromes in animals have their function affected by light or require it in any way. Otherwise we'd be fucking dead because at any point 99.9% of our tissue is receiving essentially zero light.

I think having a full periodic table in a fantasy world would give alchemists near permeant boners, and make them the most powerful class.

No longer do alchemists wonder if the reaction has enough of one leaf or another the just cut to the elemental compounds needed. Equally they start to enrich uranium once they discover radioactivity.

Problem vome come when they start adding science into the game and start trying to tack on how they think the rules would handle it.

It is no different then trying to apply real science to 40k.

There are planes of infinite water in one, power cells that can discharge beams of noticeable hard light that can be charged in a camp fire in another. Adding science just does not work.

>cold-forged iron
'Cold-forged iron' is something invented by D&D and the fact that it's leaked out is an example of how incestuous and unhealthy fantasy in general is right now. 'Cold iron' refers to the fact that iron is cold to the touch. So, when folklore says that you're supposed to bring 'cold iron' to bear against the fae, that's linguistically synonymous with saying you're supposed to bring 'hot lead' or 'cold steel' to bear against them.

It has nothing to do with magical weaknesses or allergies or anything like that - or at least it's not supposed to, anywhere outside of D&D's dumb misunderstandings of mythology that have turned in on itself. Saying that you're supposed to use 'cold iron' to end a fae is a historical way of saying that you're supposed to just stab/shoot/whatever faeries when you meet them rather than let them work their trickery.

The fact that morons then took that to mean that you're supposed to nail a horseshoe to your door to ward off the fae, and D&D took it even further, doesn't change that its actual intention - one that was understood in the era when it was originally uttered, in the same way that saying 'hot lead stops demons' is a euphemism for shooting people who are possessed, but people a century from now might have drifted linguistically enough to imagine that you're supposed to pour a dollop of hot, liquid lead on someone to drive out their demons.

Also, blood in fantasy settings is just one of the humours providing you with vital energy. The closest thing to chemistry is alchemy or metallurgy, and they don't work on real world principles in fantasy either. So even if elves were allergic to iron - which they're not - that question still wouldn't work.

"Cold iron" is a reference to a poem written a while before D&D was a thing and "cold iron" was a metaphor for how weapons are to be trusted above people

In "the long earth" series iron is a very stable element and therefore not able to cross dimensional barriers, people in the series can't bring iron or steel to other dimensions, in "the long earth" elves are sapients that managed to naturally cross dimensional borders and use this ability to disorient and kill prey if you're in any area with large amounts of iron it screws with their senses but if you stab them with iron it'll trap them

This is hardly just a dnd thing, classic fantasy works like The Broken Sword from at least a decade beforehand had fae beings having a fatal weakness to iron too.

Light isn't necessary to the function of mitochondria, but it does make one step of it function more effectively. Animals that live in caves or deep underwater or are nocturnal or have thick chitinous shells will have less reason to evolve red blood because they're not getting a significant amount of red light anyway. For most land animals, red blood is a simple optimization with significant benefits to basically the entire body.

Cup your palm over a light and look at the back of your hand. It will appear red because of subsurface scattering. That's because you have a shitload of red blood in your hand that reflects red light, which bounces around in there until it comes out the other side. If something doesn't reflect a color, that means it absorbs that color. What you don't want as a human is blood that absorbs red light, because it hinders the function of your mitochondria.

It's a situation like vitamin D. Obviously humans don't use photosynthesis, but there's a lot of systems that rely on light in order to function. If you raised a baby in total darkness, it would grow up to be badly deformed because vitamin D is very important for skeletal and cerebral growth. As an adult the side effects are less obvious, but can still be very serious in the case of chronic deficiency.

The fact of the matter is that we use light for a lot more than just being able to see.

What part about the "example of how incestuous and unhealthy fantasy in general is right now." is fucking exclusively pointing at D&D?

The difference with vitamin D is that it is produced in the skin and then transported to other tissues. aerobic respiration on the other hand, takes place all the time in every tissue in the body. And light cannot be transported from the skin to these tissues. I didn't say light wasn't nessisary for normal human development or function, but it's certainly not a requirement for basic metabolic function.

You were that kid who would just continuously make up bullshit facts and get in fights with the teachers in school weren't you user?

I think that your (A) underestimating how deep sunlight penetrate the body, even through hair, skin, and bone, and (B) overestimating the requirements for a trait to be selected by evolution. How much more effective is five fingers in comparison to four or six? What's the least amount of increased effectiveness that will reliably be selected for by evolution? Even if the benefits are only available to the skin, slightly increased healing speed and hair growth rate count for something in a time before clothes and medicine.

Also, take in to consideration that iron based blood was selected long before primates ever existed. When blood first evolved, organisms were probably simple enough that sunlight would pass at least halfway through, so every cell could experience the benefits of passing through more red light. Even if we've evolved to the point where it's less of a concern, it's still important enough that LLLT is a thing.

>that kid who would just continuously make up bullshit facts No, that would be these assclowns with the doctorates: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065857/ Fucking nerds, always coming up with bullshit with no emperical evidence.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Lllt

Visible light does not penetrate the human body very far at all, certainly not anywhere close to being able to get to all body tissue.

But more importantly, even cursory googling would show you that light exposure has literally nothing to do with animal cellular respiration. None whatsoever.

LLLT is bullshit. And even if it WERE real, which it isn't, it wouldn't have anything to do with the ETC because none of the proposed benefits of LLLT have anything to do with cellular respiration.

>Fantasy in general is incestuous and unhealthy

No, fuck off. That this place is stuck in the era of D&D morning cartoons and thinks generic fantasy means World of Warcraft doesn't mean that fantasy isn't in a good place.

Broad sweeping statements like that generally just means that you ought to get out of the imageboards.

We have iron only in hemoglobins? I thought we had it on other tissues as well.

>That's not how biochemistry works.
How would it work in this case, then? Seriously curious, my ignorance itches to know.

Cold forging is an actual thing.

It means forging of metal below it's recrystallization point, as in when it is not hot. It is usually done at room temperature and is common in die stamping type manufacture. It requires way more force and very strong and well tooled equipment, and is commonly done with steel.

Obviously it's a bit silly in a fantasy or medieval context, but still.

>Didn't read the article
Here it is again.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065857/
>because none of the proposed benefits of LLLT have anything to do with cellular respiration.
Everything in the body has to do with cellular respiration. Bodily functions require energy, energy is stored as ATP, and cellular respiration is what creates ATP.

The only way to write rpg lore is to ignore that it's for an rpg and just write the world the way you want it.

Writing lore that's obviously meant to facilitate an rpg always ends up awful. That's how you get adventurer schools, godawful species wide wars and random dungeons and temples littering the countryside, like boobytrapped atm machines for adventurers.

You said it was invented by DnD and is not supposed to be an 'allergy' outside of DnD which is objectively untrue, the Broken Sword had Elves being fatally weak to iron decades before.

So claiming its just because the genre is unhealthy 'right now' is an ignorant statement. Its an idea that has been around for a while and its frankly stupid to get mad at it.

He doesn't actually know what he's talking about so I'll step in.

Iron, regardless of its oxidative state, is toxic to humans and most other life. That being said, most of the time we encounter it, it's in a form which has a very low level of biological activity. If you eat a ball of iron, you will be fine because the body isn't capable of stripping apart the solid metal. (That being said, you can suffer iron toxicity by eating way too much iron supplement pills, which does sometimes happen to children)

Where most people who suffer iron toxicity run into trouble is when you have free iron running around in your tissues in such a way that it isn't eliminated by the digestive system. Examples of this include hemolysis, the death or red blood cells, which in turn release their hemoglobin. While contained, hemoglobin acts as a chelating agent, effectively sequestering it away, but protein comes apart when on its own and releases the iron atom, which acts like a sort of biochemical wrecking ball, making transient bond after transient bond with all sorts of different biological molecules and causing all sorts of dysfunction. I believe this can also happen because of liver trauma, where old red blood cells have their hemoglobin recycled.

>Everything in the body has to do with cellular respiration.
That's like saying everything in society has to do with oil refining, because we use petroleum products in everything. The presence of the product of a reaction does not imply the fundamental relevance of that reaction. In the same way that supplying my house with refinery reagents won't improve the milage of my car, improving the rate of cellular respiration would not improve unrelated reactions such as healing, because they are primarily determined by other processes.

it's a shitty review of dozens of shitty papers. Multiple reviews by people who's fucking job it is do determine whether a therapy actually works show that it's a bunch of malarkey

devicewatch.org/reports/lllt.shtml

Yes, all living cells do cellular respiration, but not all tissue dysfunction is due to dysfunction of cellular respiration. Certainly not pain or hair loss, which seem to be the most common claims

>In the same way that supplying my house with refinery reagents won't improve the milage of my car, improving the rate of cellular respiration would not improve unrelated reactions such as healing
You're going the wrong direction with this. In your scenario, every single house has thousands of refineries in it. Locally increasing the efficiency of those refineries will have an effect on society, even if you can't trade the fuel you make to other people.

Not that user, but compounds have totally different properties from their constituent components. Table salt is composed of sodium, which explodes when exposed to water, and chlorine, which is highly poisonous. Sugars are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, but a slurry of ground charcoal (which is mostly carbon) and water isn't going to be a very good energy source. If elves are intolerant of hemoglobin, it's likely at most tangentially related to their intolerance of elemental iron.