Elves are either mystical Tolkien-esque otherworldly beings of pure good and awesome that put humans to shame but are...

This is basically what drow are.

Also elves in Elder Scrolls.

And Dungeon Meshi to some extent.

And a bunch of other settings.

It's like you didn't even try with this bait.

The Wild Hunt are all extraterrestrial elves that are evil.

Yes. They were elves.

In Corum's saga, the humans were the dissolute overlords overthrown to let the elves take their rightful place as rulers of the world. This reversal of roles happens a lot in the Eternal Champion series.

God, why are the Aen Elle such cool antagonists?

They're extradimensional Imperialist space Elves that love to hunt and murder people because they can. They've obviously got a wide range of personalities and inclinations, but their most prominent face and the one shown in the setting most often is a cold metal mask.

They ping as cooler than the Thalmor and other evil Elves to me because, unlike most, they're actually not that scrawny.

In my setting, elves are humans that have been tainted and are slowly turning into children's horrors like bogeymen and shellycoats. I think that's kind of evil.

How were they beaten, if ever?

Though I agree Elric's people took the same place as elves usually do in fantasy settings, I disagree about them physiologically being elves.

>Elves are either mystical Tolkien-esque otherworldly beings of pure good and awesome that put humans to shame but are somehow in decline

>beings of pure good and awesome
not Tolkien's elves
>but are somehow in decline
>somehow
Actually pretty well explained in the Tolkien mythos.

Shit thread OP, check your facts next time.

To be fair, OP only knows about elves from browsing Veeky Forums.

>Tolkien elves
>"Pure good"

Fucking lmao

Tall, lean, angular narrow faces, taller than humans yet stronger and far more magically adept.

How are those not elves?

Surprisingly, I actually have a bit of both - I've got fairly generic elves on one side of the world(typical dusk/high/wood elves) living together in not so much harmony, but generally political distaste.

On the other side of the world, however, I have 'Savage Elves'(aka wood elves) that are responsible for a human Empire rising up, because all those elves did was enslave and eat them. Also the BBEG of my setting was an Elf who was like "lmfao fuck this" and became a Lich.

They were just a slightly different ethnicity of human. Like comparing Africans to the Chinese. Their magical prowess was because of ancient pacts with the gods.

I'm honestly surprised that you posted a demon despite talking about elves.

>Elves are either mystical Tolkien-esque otherworldly beings of pure good and awesome that put humans to shame but are somehow in decline, or they are cute longeared waifus who may or may not be sluts

Only as long as you consider just the two or three most mainstream fantasy settings and all the other unoriginal ones that just copied them, honesty.

>Why aren't elves (not drow, elves) more common as a villainous race? I could imagine them being [...] and sometimes even overcome the odds to be little more than droll.

Use this concept in your setting then, it's not bad at all.

>In other words, would such a perfect and nearly infallible race not make for better villains than heroes?

I'd say that any fantasy civilization becomes more interesting when it's something else than purely good or purely evil. These wouldn't be any worse than other imperialist/conqueror civilization, I'd guess. You could have them as antagonists but they wouldn't be straightforwardly evil (like tolkienesque orcs are in opposition to the Free People, for example)

I more or less played this.
The PCs were all orc, goblin and hobgoblin chieftains surviving by sacking elven caravans. Drows were subterrean Bizantium and most other races were elven tributaries or slaves.
In the end the PCs decided to cause slave revolts in a province so the elves and their auxiliaries had to go sedate them and left some otherwise unsackable fortresses and cities defended only by a skeleton force (litteral: roman elves had no problem with necromacy).
This filled them with phat loot but also meant that the Elven Command finally started paying attention to them so they sent Elven-Ceasar (still a general) to reinstate order in the region and beat them to a bloody pulp.
He was more or less succesfull doing that, using illusionists to make The pcs believe his army was marching behind a hill while actually preparing an ambush.
The PCs retired into their land swearing revenge and that's where we left it because people wanted to try Hunter: The Vigil.
We might still get back to it some day. We still have the notes and the sheets.

>Houtengeki
>Clearly an elf
>Calls it a demon

Didn't we have this, like, three times already.

My elves are pale, cannibalistic carnivores that scheme in the far places away from human expansion. They prey on human fears and plant changelings in human cribs. They ride out of the frozen north on dragon skeletons. They originally came from the stars, and elf liches inhabit the moons in their ziggurats.

Terry Pratchett.

i guess pikemen and longbows lel

I saw succubi getting tagged as elves.
>clearly an elf
She doesn't have japanese elf ears.

Nigga you racist

I've made a setting for D&D some time ago where the ancestors of elves came from a land heavily based on ancient China; they were all obsessed with keeping 'harmony' and 'balance', not in a druidic way, but in a way that favored themselves.

They kept korobokuru and other races as slaves, because having them do all the heavy lifting was part of 'the balance'. They went to war with each other from time to time to regulate 'the harmony'.

Simply put, they were using a pseudo-philosophy as an excuse for being dicks most of the time, but they weren't plain evil like drows; it's just that their weird system was the only one they knew for thousands of years and they had literally no reason to change something that has been working all right.

I got to say, they did catch him in a pretty Alzheimer-ish expression here.

>'Savage Elves'(aka wood elves)

My group tends to do this.

Elves are haughty self important shitbirds regardless so they make easy villains

I've personally run a game where i doubled down on that and portrayed orcs as a sort of Greek analogue with a bit of the Jewish diaspora thrown in, the elves basically having stolen all the interesting parts of their culture from the orcs and then displaced them as world power.

The ugly pig nosed marauding orc was played as a racist stereotype, and while orcs might be, for example, bandits, it was less because ALWAYS CHAOTIC EBIL and more because of the socio-economic and political climate they lived in

>I've never paid attention to any fantasy story in the past 20 years

I found them rather underwhelming honestly

>Why aren't elves (not drow, elves) more common as a villainous race?
Because this isn't your magical realm, op.

The elves in the setting I'm playing in have long ears that serve as antenna for a biological wireless network that allows them to communicate at a subconscious level with nearby elves.
Makes them fantastic crewmen for capital ships. Very efficient.

Elves are a different ethnicity of human

Citation needed.

>minute physical differences
>can breed with humans without difficulty
>monocultured as if entire race is part of one ethnicity

>either
>not and
it's like you don't want cute longeared otherworldly waifus of pure good and sluttiness in your setting?

Personally I was let down how little the third game actually went into the whole Aen Elle thing despite it being such a major point.
I like Witcher 3's plot overall, how you're trailing leads and getting into variety of happenings, but then the world hopping with Avallach is over so fast and you get to know next to nothing about them after all, not much more than you get from the books.
I suppose it could be that they didn't want to step on Sapkowski's feet too much more than they already did with their games-that-aren't-canon-except-in-effect-they-totally-are but I feel they missed a lot of potential by not exploring it further.
It's not like they were against of expanding the universe with the games.

>can breed with humans without difficulty
So can demons and dragons. Are those also ethnicities of human?

All of the fiction references are in, now here's one for an actual RPG system - go look up Children of the Sun. There's a whole lot of races, and in the info for each race, it explains why you don't want to be that race - if you're an elf, it's because everyone you ever meet blames you for everything that is wrong with the world. Personally. And they're probably right, you stuck up jackass elf.

Demons and dragons can breed with everything. They're gene rapists

When in Elf Rome, do as Romans do. Do Elves.

Elric himself stated that he wasn't technically a human when he and the other three incarnations fought agak and gagak. Also the Melniboneens are called "half human" several times. I don't think Moorcock intended them to be elves, but elves are the stereotypcial fantasy race that has the most similarities with them.

Good thing I run Eberron.

I don't think Elves ought to be any more advanced than other races, in fact they should be less so. Innovation is something that would only be seen in a short lived race. Elves are stagnant and traditional and suffer from a stale perspective from having lived so many years, and their lifespan ought to generate a general apathy in regards to progress. Why does it matter? They've seen kingdoms rise and fall and trends come and go, why should they give a fuck about technological advancement? They're nonmaterialistic, worried about the things that "really matter" like philosophy, magic, art, and chilltime. Hence their reluctance to get involved in world affairs.

I partially agree with the regard for humans bit but I think it should be leaning towards more wary rather than admiring.

>Why aren't elves (not drow, elves) more common as a villainous race? I could imagine them being a highly efficient race with a civilization that is fair and just to elves, but considers all non-elves closer to livestocks than to themselves.

Because elves are the archetypal 'good' race of fantasy. They're usually so ancient that their society has progressed beyond the want for things like empire. They are characterized by wisdom, intelligence, spirituality and learning - things we as humans, especially in modernity, don't generally attribute to warmongers or racial supremacists. Most elves in fiction only interact with the more mundane world because they are there to fight some terrible evil - elves are on Middle Earth to fight Morgoth, elves only ever go to the Old World of WHFB in number to fight Chaos, etc. Contrary to Veeky Forums memery, most elves are not really characterized by condescension or snootiness - this is something that doesn't really appear in that many depictions of elves, and is probably a result of people projecting their distaste for more attractive/more successful/smarter people onto the fantasy race that is attractive/more successful/smarter (and it's probably exacerbated by Veeky Forums having a lot of 40Kids whose main exposure to elves is Eldar).

Evil bad guy elves are subversion of what elves are in most fiction. You don't see many of them because they are totally counter to the basic idea of elves.

>Tolkien Elves
>pure good

Fuck's sake, it's not even nessecary to have read the Silmarillion to know this is wrong. The Mirkwood Elves in The Hobbit are bigoted backwoods hicks and drunkards.

Racial supremacist elves are so fucking done to death by the TTRPG community, I can't help but roll my eyes when I hear anyone talking about them. It's like making elves into SuperNazis is some kind of weird edgy phase all roleplayers go through in their late teens or something.

I'm pretty sure everyone I know has taken part in a campaign with Nazi Elves of some form or another.

>Elf Rome
>Evil
>Rome
>Literally the only empire that was ever conquered in self-defense

Okay, that's not strictly true; Rome was pretty bad by our modern standards, but the Roman Empire itself was mostly Rome going, "Stop attacking us. Seriously, fucking quit it! Right! I'm going to MAKE you stop!" or, "Quit fucking helping the guys attacking us! Right; YOU'RE NEXT!"

Seriously, most of the Pax Roma was, "Don't make me fucking come over there again!"

>he unironically thinks Rome was evil
My ancestors were barbarians and even I know that's wrong.

More like
>You raided our farms once so we're going to your homeland to burn your house, salt your earth and enslave your children
Carthage did nothing wrong

Read Elizabeth Moon. The most hateworthy elves in all of existence. Making people hate elves for two decades before Veeky Forums's inception.

It's actually a videogame, but what I know, tales of phantasia's antagonists are elves, afaik...

In my experience, high elves are very common choices for villains, their sense of racial superiority and longevity being their motivations. Forgotten Realms and TES come to mind.

In my homebrew setting elves are kind of bad guys in a way, I guess.

Essentially, the elves realized that they can't outpace humans in terms of military, and breeding. No matter how many times they figure they'll just fuck like rabbits to keep pace, humans are always a step ahead because they have this innate need to keep moving forward.

So, they use their ethereal beauty to instead interbreed with human nobility. After a few generations, and because Elves (and even half elves) live longer, most of the higher echelons of human kingdoms are elven descended.

Sure, you have some lower noble families still purely human, but those are mostly earned as rewards for services during War or something.

The worst part? To keep human populations in check, The Elf nobles will often go to war with each other just to keep the human population down, and to get rid of the lower noble castes that are predominately human since the elites don't fight.

>Elven nation of isolationists. The society is run, ostensibly, by the ‘Lord Protector,’ who may or may not be simply a personification of the secret cabal which may or may not really be pulling the strings. Most citizens see only the featureless, uncanny porcelain masks of the Ministry of Public Safety, and the firm-set expression of the Lord Protector watching them from nearly every surface. It exists as a police state, governing its people through rampant propaganda and ruthless efficiency. Its rulers are masters of manipulating public opinion, and encourage a culture of reporting one’s friends and neighbors for even minor infractions. Dissenting opinion is suppressed by force, all printing done by official government permit only, and the limited licensed individuals permitted to interact with outsiders are subject to periodic ‘psychic screenings’ to ensure they remain uncontaminated.

The elves of Lorwyn will straight up murder you if you aren't beautiful. And, of course, their standard for beauty is "go elf or go home."

Orc/elf rape has become such a cliche at this point, that even parody of it has become stale.

Snavely did something like this in his trilogy, though his race wasn't exactly elves, they were immortal human-lookalikes who felt no emotions, and they were pretty fucking terrifying despite being low in number.

so basically Contractors minus the freaky powers/prices

>pure good
I guess you think genocide of fellow brother elf race for the sake of getting some jewels is pure good huh

Or maybe youre just a faggot that inly know elves trough internet memes.

I kind of played them like that in my homebrew setting. They were called dark elves, to differentiate them from the wood elves (which is what people in the setting would consider the standard elf), but didn't really have anything to do with DnD drow. They had a very advanced and sophisticated civilization, and saw themselves as the chosen people of the gods, destined to act as the priests and rulers while the other, less enlightened races would serve them.
The gods they worshiped were also of the horrible eldritch variety, so they tended to combine their imperialism and slavery with human sacrifices and unleashing horrible gribblies on anybody who disagreed with them.

I thought they were descended from dragons?

Already have Elf Rome in my setting.

Don't tease us user, tell us about your elf rome.

Read Three Hearts and Three Lions if you want some elven villains.

>Draw a satyr
>Call it an elf

Have you heard of the High Elves?

More-or-less always the goodest of good guys.

>once

Carthage was destroyed at the end of the THIRD Punic war. A war they started, just like the other two!

Made up of a part of the old human empire before it fell, the region was the largest supplier of goblin slaves. They were also head in alchemical research, trying to create superior slaves, leading to the creation of things like the hobgoblins and bugbears. The latest creation was the elves, superior to goblins, and even humans, in many ways. Practically immortal, immune to desease, faster, stronger, the only weakness was sterility.

Deemed a failure, and only a few batches were made. Then came the destruction of the empire by the impact of a great pillar of crystalized fire. In the ensuing chaos, the elves rallied the goblin slaves to overthrow their human masters, only to instill themselves into power. Arrogantly, they view themselves as above all others, tolerating their slaves, due to the secret of their reliance on, in more ways than one.

For 200 years, the elves ruled a loose collection of city-states, feuding and politicing amongst themselves, until recently the machinations and alliances of the first empress came to fulmination and the states were unified into the Probus Imperium.

>My elves are an evil, xenophobic, slaving empire!
It's the fastest way to reveal your setting to be a complete meme.

The Nightmare Stacks' elves were cool as fuck. First of Liars best waifu.

Even fucking Baldur's Gate II was packed with elf villians.

thanks for the new read!

Post elves that speak to your ficki ficki urges.

...

Satyrs are rarely described as slender, black-eyed, or having long ears.

They're dudes with goat legs and horns.

...

>Elf Rome
>2000 years later the Germans are still pretending that they're elves

Congratulations, you've made Melniboneans.

That's the Roman history, and we can't exactly ask Carthaginians what lead to the war.

And the brits.

They want to be Romans so goddamn badly.

Are you sure you wanna go there?

It's hard to make effective elven villians when they're all sex slaves, and there are no males.

Ever heard of the Good Folk? Elves can be in that category.

Yes!

In my setting humans are actually a form of atavism among the high elves evoked in order to keep elven peasants and slaves at the bottom.

I thought I saw a bulge. I stop going to /d/ for a while.

I AM THE SHARMAT
I AM OLDER THAN MUSIC
WHAT I BRING IS LIGHT
WHAT I BRING IS A STAR
WHAT I BRING IS
AN ANCIENT SEA
WHEN YOU SLEEP YOU SEE ME
DANCING AT THE CORE
IT IS NOT A BLIGHT
IT IS MY HOUSE
I PUT A STAR
INTO THE WORLD'S MOUTH
TO MURDER IT
TEAR DOWN THE PYLONS
MY BLIND FISH
SWIM IN THE NEW
PHLOGISTON
TEAR DOWN THE PYLONS
MY DEAF MOONS
SING AND BURN
AND ORBIT ME
I AM OLDER THAN MUSIC
WHAT I BRING IS LIGHT
WHAT I BRING IS A STAR
WHAT I BRING IS
AN ANCIENT SEA

This incessant chim posting is starting to get old.

THE SIXTH HOUSE IS RISEN AND LORD DAGOTH IS ITS GLORY

Elves I'm making are a separate race entirely that live slightly longer than humans (Max 150ish years to a human's 100) and are incapable of procreating with them.

They're not really more skilled or anything than humans, to the contrary, humans have made many more advances in technology, while elves have a bit more of a magical advantage
Recently (last century) most of the elven gods were killed by their own demigod creation, the fey, and the last ones around banished the fey to the old realm the gods lived in before to not allow them to do any more harm in the real world.
Now elves are stuck godless and wondering what exactly makes a god a god, living in fear that the fey is coming to take them away because the fey want to bring their "brothers" home.