/elf/

...

Not the guy you're asking, but Elder Scrolls is a pretty big one. You have the elves that are better at magic than anyone else (Altmer), the elves that are better at stealth and archery than anyone else (the Bosmer), and the elves who are just the plain best at everything if you can put up with their edginess (Dunmer).

If you wana get really technical, you also have Furry-elves (Khajiit, by way of evolution) and smash-things-melee-elves (Orismer). Also the "super technology in a fantasy setting" elves (Dwemer), although they're extinct supposedly.

Oh, and lets not forget the special snowflake god-tier elves (Ayleids) who pretty much created modern society as the setting knows it.

Where are the humble elves? The elves that recognize that at least something in them is flawed, and will actually admit it?

Where are the elves who are good salt of the earth folk who don't hold themselves to something higher or more mystical that all the other races can't possibly understand which makes them so much better by default?

Where are the elves that don't try to entrance me with impossible beauty or impossible knowledge, but possible love and possible comfort? Where is the elf that I would actually want to be a father or mother to a son or daughter?

Where's the fucking elf that's not some bullshit?

Here, have your (You). That's why you posted it, right?

>a video games
We are on Veeky Forums, but let me bite.
>Altmer
Best at magic, shit at everything else.
>Bosmer
Best at archery, great thieves. That's it.
>Dunmer
Dunmer are awesome, fuck you.

That's still not what I asked for.

Any setting with Fey beings.

> Why would you do that? Or better said, how is it even possible for all elves? Elves are the most versatile of all races, in the sense that they're so varied that they can appeal to everyone.
It is precisely because of that.
Elves lost their niche.

Look at dwarves for an example. Dwarves have a very definite niche that they occupy - "bearded, greedy, love booze, blacksmithing and mining".

Elves, on the other hand, can be pretty much whatever you want them to be. That's exactly why elves are shit - they don't have a definite niche, or even a reasonably broad one - they can be anything you want them to be.

It's like saying "I like ice cream", and when you ask what do they mean by "ice cream", they reply to you "oh, I mean gelato, I don't really like other kinds of ice cream".

Tolkien Elves and Dwarves were both fairly Jewish in different ways.

In all honestly in D&D they are as well due to being a group that tends to produce a LOT of art that doesn't blend in with their surrounding culture completely. For example, Dwarves living in a human empire will take on more of the human culture than the Elves will.

There are ESG threads every weekend, so it's apparently Veeky Forums-related.

Also, the point stands, no matter what kind of character you wana play, a race of elves is going to be the best at it.

So do dwarves.

>There are ESG threads every weekend, so it's apparently Veeky Forums-related.
So let's hunt down the OPs and murder them.

>Also, the point stands, no matter what kind of character you wana play, a race of elves is going to be the best at it.
I like to play big, hulking, unsophisticated brutes. Checkmate.

Tolkien Elves. They have as much hubris and humility as the humans show. They're described as more graceful by others. Furthermore, Beren and Luthien is pretty much a full cast of Elves who think humans are awesome plus one dick who doesn't.

Elves in Tolkien are actually fascinated by men, they just mistrust some of the full retard decisions humans and Dwarves make and don't want to be dragged into other people's shit.

>I like to play big, hulking, unsophisticated brutes. Checkmate.

Orismer, king me.

>I like to play big, hulking, unsophisticated brutes. Checkmate.
Orsimer, and Wood Elves can be barbarians fittingly even if it isn't the usual racial hat.

Tolkien Elves were probably the most fleshed out and complex race in the setting, so when some hack is making his standard fantasy setting they're the ones who lose the most in translation. Comparatively, dwarves are pretty shallow even in Tolkien and it's very hard to fuck up humans or orcs

The other Tolkien race that suffers from this are hobbits/halflings

You blab on about technicalities as much as you want, but we all know that Orismer are not elves.

I prefer catgirls

Yeah, but it's also kinda bad for setting if one race gets like a thousand times more work put into it than any of the others. They end up looking like an authors-pet and are really easy to interpret as Mary Sues.

This was actually a common complaint against the Asari in Mass Effect. Completely different setting, but same problem.

But they actually are.
The root word "mer" actually means "elf".

Plus Tolkien Orcs/Goblins are also Elves. Just mutated and twisted. We don't know how the independants who didn't join Sauron live, so they may be more Elfy still.

Plus Shadowrun Elves are quite capable of being hulking brutes, and technically all metas in Shadowrun are just mutated humans.

I wish elves in more fantasy looked more different than just people with long ears.

Don't get me wrong, Men are fleshed out almost as much, but it's very hard to depict humans badly while being human yourself. So you can make whatever you want with them and it'll work.

Hobbits were close contenders to the author's pet title, since they and the Shire were supposed to represent the british countryside and even mimic fairy tale characters

I don't hate elves. In a way, I see them as one step up from humans, who are a step up from animals. As humans see animals as short lived, fast breeding, uncivilized beasts who have some use to them so too do elves see humans as such. Of course if you fuck with a beast, you get mauled. Humans generally know not to kick a wolf or break a bee hive without consequences. Thus elves usually don't go looking for trouble from humans or similar humanoids.

On some level one would expect elves to do as we humans have in the real world and just take over the world as the top species on the planet. But in most settings elves are far from the top of the food chain, with various monsters, dragons, eldritch horrors, and gods lurking throughout to keep one race from having a monopoly. But maybe I put to much thought into the whole "roleplay" aspect and trying to apply logic to magical fantasy settings. Better that than seeing an elf as a collection of stats for building a character.

Then again, my very first 5e game consisted almost entirely of elf PCs with the exception of Captain Neverdies D Snowflake the Aasimar Paladin

I've got a setting like that. Admittedly, that's because the primary offshoots of elves are both descended from an ancient population that got hit by a magical nuke that shattered and submerged their continent - the high elves survived by sustaining themselves in basically Atlantis, while the dark elves survived by going even deeper and digging into the caves beneath the earth.

So high elves have lived in a magic sea bubble and on the shattered cliffs of their homeland and are wiry, tanned sea-folk that sometimes have gills, and the dark elves are creepy, spindly morlocks with pale skin and reflective eyes.

Warhammer. Fantasy or 40k, although the humans of Fantasy are far less creeped out by the Elves than 40k humans are of Eldar.

Long, pointy faces and sometimes pure black eyes.

Keep in mind, this here is one of the good guys, who swoops in and saves your family by killing ten Orcs because, unbeknownst to you, your house foundation sucks magic out of the workd so Daemons are weaker.

Mmmmmm. I can dig fish elves and spider elves.

...

I have always kind of liked the idea of Eldar moving like just fast enough in the human eye to look like a video tape on fast forward, and the inherent unease that would create.

>Make thread about elves.
>Post girl that isn't an elf.

Also, I like how Elves in Shadowrun are handled.

To be fair, the primary inspirations are animu as fuck and I make no apologies for that, so the 'fish elves' are basically the merfolk from Soul Nomad and the World Eaters.

In fact, a lot of the setting is drawn from influences like Soul Nomad, Mega Man Legends, the Xenoblade games, and Grandia II. The aesthetic is very 'JRPG magitech', with ancient technology left behind by a more advanced race after its use devastated the world and magical castes enforced by nanomachines. For example, oracles in this world are granted their abilities but also their tendency towards erratic behavior because they have an unconscious connection to the AIs that used to run all this shit - the AIs aren't really coherent enough to be understood by mortals, since they're operating on a global scale, and so their impulses are transmitted to those capable of receiving them in the form of ambiguous visions. There's at least one nation that was nearly destroyed before they unearthed a factory producing functioning automatons. The mages who discovered it and activated it became the de-facto rulers of the nation and have turned it into a paradise where robotic soldiers protect the people and perform most labor (and some have even begun producing art and culture), at the cost of extremely severe measures designed to prevent any knowledge of the origin of the machines from leaking to their enemies, which becomes increasingly politicized as the original circle of mages has devolved into cliques of masters and apprentices with their own approaches to unraveling the mysteries of the ancients. It's a very comfortable, almost utopic terrifying police state run by technowizards.

I like the Space Elf variety. Planning on running a Spelljammer-esque campaign. Not sure what place Wood Elves would have in such a campaign though.

>Elves are the most versatile of all races
They're the most everything of all races. Which is why people hate them.

What can change the nature of an elf?

...

...

Evil divine beings.

Like in Tolkien lore, D&D, Warhammer Fantasy, TES.

Oaths

>Elves
There are more types of Elves than there are colours, shades of colors, materials & even atoms. You can take a shit & call it an Elf.

Don't forget sea elves, sky elves, fire elves, wild elves, sun elves, moon elves, star elves, silver elves, golden elves, painted elves, night elves, blood elves...

Seriously, It's nice that there's some fantasy race besides humans that aren't all pidgeonholed to one culture and one personality, but doe they need to have a separate subrace for every possible variation? It's not like humans have separate "desert human, arctic human, jungle human" subraces.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about muh Silmarils, you filthy Moriquendë? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class of all the House of Finwë, been involved in numerous secret raids on the fortress of Angband, and have over 300 confirmed kinslays on those boatfucking Teleri cowards. I am trained in gorilla warfare and am the top bowman of all the Calaquendi. You are nothing to me but just another spawn of Morgoth. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen since the War of Teleri Aggression, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Palantir? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across Middle-earth and your address is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, goblin. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can slay you in over seven hundred different ways, and that's just with my beautiful hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to all the hosts of the Noldor and I will use them to their full extent to wipe your miserable hröa off the face of the continent, you stunted piece of dwarf-shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down on you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit the fury of the Eldar all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

They very clearly are, it's in their name. They might be literal shit elves, but they're still elves.

I thought every TES race is the best at stealth archery

>It's not like humans have separate "desert human, arctic human, jungle human" subraces.
If you're being blunt then pic related has, from left to right:
>wood man
>jungle man
>steppe man
>praire man
There's also desert man and polar man. Unlike what progressives want you believe, the human (sub)races did evolve to adapt to different environments.

Yes, but humans from different places don't in most RPGs get different stats and racial abilities.

And I don't think anybody is disputing the fact that people from different places in the word have evolved to the local environment (like, people near the equator have darker skin than people in areas with less sunlight, and the people who live in the Himalayas and other high mountain ranger have higher red bloodcell count due to air being thinner up there). Just that race would affect personality or mental abilities.

>people that play haughty superior elves in D&D

little do they know that D&D elves are life-loving poets that travel the world because they want to see all its beauty, and that soldier-type elves are basically drafted into service, hence why they all have certain training proficiencies. They're halflings if halflings had any kind of organized society

>nigger and chink
>human

Tumblr out

To be fair "Wood Elves" and "Dark Elves" are what humans call them.

Elves probably call humans River Humans, Stone Humans, Dark Humans, Light Humans, and so on.

>Yes, but humans from different places don't in most RPGs get different stats and racial abilities.

Gameplay/lore segregation.

Underdark humans would probably get low-light vision though.

>humans from different places don't in most RPGs get different stats and racial abilities
>What is Elder Scrolls?

But I mean, can you imagine the absolute clusterfuck that would come from this if you did it with real races in a non-fantasy game?
>Euro man - gets bonuses to inventing things, and building empires
>African man - gets penalty against ranged weapons, and against authority figures

You do realize Tumblr is as racist as /pol/ and has at least one hundred times as much porn as SJW?

Tumblr is like Veeky Forums, its everyone.

here's your reply

I disagree with who you're replying to and I still think you need to go back to tumblr.

African=+1 exhaustion checks, -1 swimming checks.

Done. Scientifically accurate too.

hi

Go back to masturbating to dickgirls?

I'm not even joking, I genuinely think Tumblr being SJW is just a meme since that shit is so buried under porn you can only find it intentionally.

Deviant Art on the other hand is just SJW and Furries.

And that's why I am a namefag

I'm also a namefag and a huge faggot

But anyone can copy the name at will.
Only tripfags are immune, and nobody takes them seriously unless they only give us free shit.

May you suffer in the darkest corners of oblivion for thinking that.

>meme
Is that what you call every truth that you don't have the courage to confront?

Weirdly enough, i own an elf screwdriver.

>very hard to depict humans badly while being human yourself

Fucking normies dont know shit about real life, about how they are feral animals made to kill dominate and rape, literally worst than orcs irl, and more full of themselfs and best at everything than elfs. Ignorant cunts, bet they dont even know alpha fux beta bux is not a meme

we get it you're making website vs website bullshit so you can claim to have the clubhouse all to yourself here's your (you) now fuck off

Well, yes actually.

Literally every single thing on this or any other website, everything you can say or show, is a meme.

A meme is a human thought transmitted to another human. So basically yeah, everything is memes. This post, your post, all posts.

Not him and didn't read the thread, but
>everything you can say or show, is a meme.
>implying
Memes usually have rigid, uniform structures.
Languages are indeed memes. But the ideas and thoughts transmitted via the language meme aren't memes themselves.
What I frown upon is not the usage of meme, because without the language we couldn't reliably transmit information.
Rather, what I frown upon is the need to rely on a meme inside a meme (basically, a meme-ception) to transmit necessary information.
Memes exist to restrict the from of transmitted information of the need of universal reception and understanding by different human beings.
Needlessly restricting your thoughts by the excessive use of memes is just poor form.
Memes are there only because we need them, not because "the more memes we have, the better".
You use the minimum required amount of memes, not maximum, because the more memes you use, the less "new" information you transmit, because most of the "space" for transmitting the information is occupied by the memes.

A good analogy to the meme overusage is programming, and it's called overengineering.
You can just write "print 'hello world'", or you can use design patterns and needlessly overengineer your program. The same case is with the memes.
You use them only where you need them, and not wherever you feel like.

>it's an elves threat
Veeky Forums is taken me straight to cringecity

>didn't read the thread

There is never a time when you should post in a thread if that is the case.

Ever.

Saying "Tumblr is mostly porn" in response to an overused greentext meme is not a preexisting meme.

Someone replied to a meme with a statement, which had another meme replied ("Go back to /pol/Tumblr"), to which another statement was offered as sarcasm. Which you then called a meme without reading the thread.

What board did you just migrate here from?

>What board did you just migrate here from?
none of them, just know unironic faggotry when I see it

I've been cooking up an idea for an elven culture for my game, wanna see how you guys like it.
First, on elves themselves:
>Elves in this world are entirely of the world; their souls are different from others in creation, and they don't go to any god's realm after death. They were spawned by nature, not the divines. This also means that they cannot be healed by divine magic, but can be by druidic magics.
>Without the proper rites, their souls will become haunting revenants, desirous of the joys of the flesh. Most elven cultures have developed a way to counteract this. The primary church of the nations neighboring them to the southwest condemn them for their origin, but a man not from elven lands views them as signs of bad luck: if an elven adventurer dies, they'll be the ones haunted. Elven travellers are rare because of this.
>When elves die, they appear almost to unravel, leaving only a pile of leaves and dirt as their soul slips away on the wind. A plant will soon grow on the spot of their death; this plant will be unusually hardy, long-lived, and will - if the following applies - grow exceptional amount of fruit. Its seed, however, will never amount to anything; its child plants will die as soon as they are planted.
The birth of elven youth is undocumented; all that is known is that elves emerge from thickets of the plants of dead elves as children, with enough instinct to find the nearest settlement.
Now, onto the culture.
>Primarily elven land, they inhabit a very hilly area most well known for its eclectic flora. It is purported that almost all the plants there are from elven corpses, indicating either the site of a slaughter, constant warfare or that elves have lived there for untold millennia.
>They practice ancestor worship, believing that death is not the end of their time with those around them. They treat their death-plants as shrines to those past, harvesting whatever they need from them almost religiously.
continued

Do they have some sort of reincarnation cycle?
I'd dig it.

That has its own problems. Like everyone playing a caricature of Gimli

Yeah. It's more transparent that they're simply the wankbait race.

I fail to see the problem.
Archetyping races in fiction is GOOD.
When you need a different character, you choose a different archetype i.e. race.
I don't see how that is a bad thing, because, again, it's fiction.

Also, there is no need to literally copy-paste characters.
Like, I named at least 4 aspects your dwarf can focus on - mining, booze, greed, craftsmanship. Vary the amount of focus on each aspect to vary your character.
Is he a devoted craftsman, or is he a greedy warlord?

What the fuck do you mean I can't build stuff out of wood? Not everything can be built from stone for fuck's sake!

An archetype is different from a stereotype.

>Due to the nature of elven souls, it is a social taboo to leave one's homeland alone, for any duration. Should a fellow countryman die, people from this deathly forest are expected to bring back their corpse and - if the deceased is an elf - their death-plant.
>Once back in the region, the plant is planted in a special ritual with the compost of their corpse as its "first meal". If the person is not an elf, they are instead ground up and buried out of ceremony.
>They follow a calendar of eleven months of eleven days. The first ten days are in preparation of the eleventh. The eleventh day is the day of communion, where they will gather at sacred clearings that form the homes of their druids.
>Here, they will undergo a sacred and joyous practice. Believed to originally have been devised to counteract the revenant nature of elven souls, the people there, with the guidance of the druid, enact an ancient ritual filled with song and dance. The sky grows dark as the sun disappears, and a dense fog covers the forests.
>After this, distant wails can be heard in the distance, slowly joining with the music as they approach. The souls of passed elves appear in the clearings with their descendants, taking an almost corporeal form thanks to the magics. Brilliant starlight illuminates the previously blank sky, and the living and the dead dance, laugh and make merry for a day and night in a trance, sustained by druidic magics and the revitalizing fruit of death-plants.
>Once the day has passed, the souls of the passed dissipate, lulled into slumber for another ten days by the ritual. The fog clears, the sun rises with the dawn and all return to their villages for a few hours of slumber until the next day. This is the life and afterlife of the elves of this land.

> An archetype is different from a stereotype.
They are inclusive, though.

You guys are forgetting outside of Tolkien, where he didn't have any sort of game in mind, people tend to make elves dickbags on top of it. It's like everyone forgets that in these discussions. If you make your elves douchey and racist then people will tend to dislike them. It creates a self perpetuating cycle of people making hateable elves. I think we need the mostly wise and benevolent types again. I don't see that in games or their settings very much anymore. The issue is such a race is really out of place for game balance if fluff and crunch are 1:1.

Thank god D&D made them shorties and gimped them mechanically. There used to be this type of faggot who thought they should simply be better because they were playing an elf as in they would throw a bitchfit if they were spotted by human woodsmen because as an elf ranger they should be better at hiding no matter what or no matter how the die rolls. Luckily that breed of player has died for the most part. At least in D&D and similar games.

Well, what do you think, Veeky Forums?
For other elven cultures in this world I'm also thinking of one that dedicates the life to academic pursuits (in order to eliminate the material want of themselves in death) and very small, looked down upon one that enslaves the revenant ghost as a tool.
I'm also considering one that's been converted by churches devoted to the divines and has a paladin order type deal that hunts down their fellow elven dead.

I think you should start saging or shut the fuck up.

i just don't like it when someone thinks that they can have their cake & eat it too when someone wants to play a non human but still wants to look human

if you wanna play an elf that's fine but don't play one because you're too much of a pussy to play a something like a dwarf or a beast/monster race

bump

I love Elven pussy. Elf girls are so delicious, how can human girls even compete?

I like the fey-like nature. Though, but I see this a lot around here with "in my setting elves...", after reading this I don't really have an idea how it is to talk to these elves, how they speak, think, not even much about their society or how they look. A lot of these homebrewed elves only deal with their origin and such things.

By being nonfiction.

Please stop, it's embarrassing for everyone.

Because they're generic as fuck and barely have a niche anymore. Elves don't have anything unique or interesting about them, they're just smug pointy-eared treehuggers at this point. A fantasy race has to be truly non-human and FANTASTICALLY bizarre in some way and elves don't really do that.

Neither do dwarves, orcs, and other generic fantasy races for that matter. That's why I prefer human-only worlds, but if I must have fantasy races then I prefer an overarching "Youkai" race comprising all mundane monsters and a celestial and infernal race to go along with them.

>and FANTASTICALLY bizarre
No, fuck you.

The thing is we're so diverse in real life, we can't actually imagine ourselves as simplistically as the fantasy races we invent. However our brains work on categorization, which is why racism will never truly die, but we think of something different, we automatically stereotype, it's human nature, because we want our genes to survive, and things that look more like us have more of our genes, so we have to differentiate ourselves in ways outside of generalization, which is why to a white person from suburbia might be bad at telling Asians or blacks apart. However, since we invent even differenter races, which aren't even human, and since they aren't real it's not racist, so they can be generalized without anyone complaining (outside of SJWs and retards).

They aren't diverse because we're programmes biologically to be "racist", which really is a societal construct that isn't real, but the physical difference between humans is so strong we need to force our brains to hide it because we don't want to offend "people like us", even though our brains scream they aren't people because they don't look like us.

Yes, fuck you.