Elf thread 'cause why not?

Well its a nice and quiet Saturday where I'm right now. And I feel like 'lets have another elf thread because why not and its Saturday.'

So lets discuss and shitpost elves, right? That's how it goes right?

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First post for best elf.

This may sound retarded, but I really don't see how this is Veeky Forums related. It sounds like you just want to jack off to elves.

Veeky Forums - /traditional games/ not /fantasy fapbait/

If you have shit to talk about post it but having a fucking general like this and images like , what is that? How is it an improvement on the "sexual prompt in one line of greentext" threads that have actually started to get banned lately?

Elves would be pretty tolerable if people didn't double down on the shitty bits. Elves seemed arrogant in LotR because everyone around them were doing stupid things. (Admittedly it's been awhile and my memory's spotty; this could be - probably is - off.) And people have taken that little ball and fucking run with it like a running back who's gotten past the secondary. I'm sure my fellow old-timers remember the Complete Book of Elves, which was written by an ascended fanboy. So terrible.

Regarding your image, I feel like the most obnoxious elves got a big win and the infinitely more interesting blueberry elves got the shitty end of the stick. They always seem to, the Dunmer are like the Klingons. They're there to get taken down hard to show off how badass the Imperials, or the Nords, or whatever it is this week are. I didn't pay attention to reactions but I'm sure Skyrim's plotline didn't help the perception of elves.

Instead of just shitposting about elves, let me ask you: what do you think would make elves cool? Let's say we dropped the shitty bits like the arrogance everyone doubles down on, and stupid worldbuilding wherein elves do nothing wrong and humans fuck it all up. How would you make people want to play elves?

Elves now take the spot the humans usually take - they are the protagonists. Humans now take the spot of orcs - they are honorably barbaric at best, destructively savage at worst.
Problem solved.

The VERY FIRST THING elves do in LotR when they meet men is walk into a camp of sleeping men and start playing some dank elf tunes.

Now in Tolkien's world when the men wake up from this it's beautiful and wonderful and spectacular - and let's be honest here, these are all basically synonyms for "elvish" in LotR - but can you imagine that happening to a human being you create, mentally? Imagine a random primitive man who is camped by torchlight at night, and he wakes up and there is a creature he has never seen before making music he has never heard before right in the middle of his camp.

That would be some freaky-ass shit.

I do kind of disagree with your assessment of TES elves (I think you meant Aldmer over Dunmer). Much like elves in general the interesting and strange bits of TES' setting are mostly overrun in the current games for what's popular and generic.

Bluntly, I don't think I'd be interested in playing it. I think Elder Scrolls has interesting elves. I think that Song of Swords homebrew on Veeky Forums has interesting elves. I like to think in my game the elves are interesting, or at least potentially interesting. But just shifting stuff around in its stereotypical roles doesn't interest me.

>and stupid worldbuilding wherein elves do nothing wrong and humans fuck it all up
This exists?

>what do you think would make elves cool?
Give them their niche. Not really better than humans, not once-so-fucking-great-but-we-fucked-ourselves-for-plot-reasons. Just let them be confortable as the DEX-magic race, give them good characters that get shit done.

Tough I still like the Tolkien and Warhammer approach of once great people that shaped the world, without their deeds and sacrifices in the past the world would be a shittier place. It's not so much a problem with these elves but people seeing the setting from the perspective of the people currently living in the setting, at times in which the elves' great time is over, then thinking that the elves are shit tier compared to humans because they don't play the game at the age in which the elves were in their prime.

>Elves seemed arrogant in LotR because everyone around them were doing stupid things
But user, FROM ELVEN PERSPECTIVE in any of your generic fantasy. Elven arrogance is actually cool motiff, and for me it's even cooler if it's actually caused by subjective projections of superiority, and not justified by objective one.

Things I really hate about post-tolkien rip-off elves is oversexualizing them yes ed, we know you have fetish for knife-ears, but you don't need to turn them into all-bisex race of nymphos because of that, making them "just one more race that intermixes with others in multicultural society as a norm", downplaying the differences and making them basically long living humans with pointed ears, and "cute elves".

But while I love Tolkien's elves, I also like deviations from the trope if they are well thought instead of being shallow simplifications and/or forced contrarianism like the most.
The "fey-like" elves (in few different settings), Dunmer, and Moorcocks decadent elf-like races are ones I find cool.

>in any of your generic fantasy everyone around them IS doing stupid things

Huh, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion of TES elves. Reading through the setting history just seems like this litany of how many groups fucked up the Dunmer even though they split because the other mer weren't hardcore enough and had become lazy and decadent. Though I do agree that the series has gotten a lot more generic since Morrowind made it popular. Skyrim less so than Oblivion, in terms of setting, but far moreso in terms of mechanics.

Yeah, straight-up reappropriation of roles is the lazy way of doing things.

Yeah, it exists. I know it exists elsewhere, but the most notable one is Forgotten Realms, wherein the human empire of Netheril damn near destroys magic entirely.

And tying in to (for all that I disagree with you on arrogance being a cool motif) I think you're on to something here - Elves are Mary Sue-ish because they're basically snotty little pointy-eared fucks who're good at fucking everything. Maybe the way to make them seem badass is to tone down the 'good at everything', tone down the lifespan so you don't have hundred-year-old rookie adventurers who must be retards because they're centarian level one mooks, then fluff them out as being way less 'pointy-eared human'. Really make them seem alien and shit, culture-wise, maybe tie them to the Fey more. Thoughts?

>Elves
>Off-topic to Veeky Forums
>MFW

Uh, what?
Pointless threads and discussion about remotely fantasy or scifi related things like elves offtopic? In Veeky Forums?
What the hell do you think you are?

I honestly like the crack elves from warcraft that have to feed on energy or become feral energy vampires are quite interesting and the newest version (nightborne) brings with them a giant city that would be amazing to have a campaign center around

Counterpoint.

I can never understand or see threads like this being "too off-topic" I mean this is still fantasy related. As a matter of fact I've pretty much come here in Veeky Forums to discuss about general fantasy and sci-fi, ask draw requests in the drawthread and as of recently I've been writing stuff in the storythread.

Also I guess here in Veeky Forums if you're not here to talk about tabletop, you can talk about anything fantasy-fiction or sci-fi.

Also since this is an elf thread, rate the elves in this setting I wrote for a story:

1d4chan.org/images/d/de/TheDeclarationOfSurrendependence.png

The Men/Mer division mirrors the Lorkhan/Aedra division and sets up a Chaos, Fertility / Law, Sterility thing there. Aldmer are the purest form of this and the "corrupted" elves like Dunmer and Orsimer have been put on an entirely different track.

There's a whole meta element you can give regard to in the Dunmer suffering because they're trying to live an existence that is antithetical to what they actually are. Or that they suffer because they believe it's holy to suffer, they take a passive rather than an active view to the ending of the world. I mean the Dunmer originate from the lying of Boethiah in response to Trinimac's killing and lying of Lorkhan.

I really, really like the Dunmer as a fictional culture. They feel incredibly developed, probably more so than any other single culture in TES, and they hit enough 'elven' boxes for me.

But I don't know that elves in TES exist to spotlight the achievements of others. Maybe they do now, but I think in the setting as it was originally conceived things would have been odds-on on how the eventual final conflict would go down.

I think the fey-like nature is actually pretty common, people just gloss over it and play them as arrogant elves instead. The life-span can stay, just don't let a level 1 character be hundred years old.

Even in 5e I believe elves age physically as a comparable rate to humans - a little later so like 20s for full maturity maybe. But elven society doesn't recognise full adulthood until 100 or so.

I don't actually hate that and I think there's a bunch of places you can go with it. Property and inheritance are probably very different in an society with elven lifespans, and having a long period to recognition of adulthood may benefit that. Or young elves might be totally nuts and need those 80+ years to get into a mindset where they can actually be around other races.

>be elf son
>be elf son for hundreds of years of a wealthy elfen family
>dad is still clinging to his wealth
>still has thousand years ahead of him in which he could do all kinds of things with his wealth
>not sick
>not a fighter, just a merchant
>doesn't want to see the world as an adventurer and may have some unfortunate accident
>he just wants to enjoy his life and wealth
>be elf son, sharpening my blades

Fuck, wanted to reply to

Get a job you fucking bum.

That's fascinating. I haven't dug nearly so deep into TES lore as you, I just always thought they seemed pretty cool. You gotta admit though that for a bunch of people who did what they did for the reasons they did, they go down like chumps an awful lot.

I suppose that's true, and perhaps it could push them to adventure early in life. If you're physically mature at 20 and can't inherit or do anything meaningful until you're 100, that's a lot of time to burn. Though really, I don't like the elven lifespan thing because it leads to awkward questions, like "Why don't thousand-year old Elves rule everything with ludicrous magic" and "Why don't thousand-year old Elves keep the other elves in a state of complete savagery as that people were when they were children".

Damn pointy-eared gits
They come to our mountains and bring their twisted ideals and foodstuffs. They have already charmed the humans and you know how that worked out for them.
Their kind are an infection preying on our beautiful dwarven culture and building their mudshacks on the land above our tunnels and claiming that land as theirs.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a speciest but they should go back to what ever forest they crawled out of. Dwarven lands are for dwarves.

Elves may not even consider property in the same sense we do. It could even be like a Sapa Inca thing where you just never lose your property, even if you're dead.

>"Why don't thousand-year old Elves rule everything with ludicrous magic"
That's contingent of a whole bunch of additional assumptions though like:

>ludicrous magic exists
>ludicrous magic can be used consistently and relatively safely
>age is the only barrier to elves being able to use ludicrous magic
>age is the only barrier to elves being freely able to employ ludicrous magic

I think it's easy to knock enough those down. I'm not totally sure what you mean by your second point.

In the german pen&paper game DSA elves that don't grow up among humans don't understand the concept of money.

You seriously couldn't miss the point any harder, which kind of depresses me. It's not even about the magic, that's just an absolutely spurious example.

OK, so, it's spurious it's an example YOU made. Don't be an asshole about it. You can't just assume supremacy comes with time - if that were true we'd all still be speaking Latin right now.

Magic isn't the key factor in my additional assumptions either. Fantasy settings tend to ache in time: they have storied and conflict-ridden histories which go beyond the mundane history of our world. There is no reason why an elf or elves, by virtue of being able to live to 1,000, should automatically succeed over everything else.

Whenever I see this question, I always wonder why no one reads the Shanarra series, where they do fucking rule everything because they're ancient and magical. Or the Riftwar saga elves where they don't rule because they were literally assigned to be gardeners by their creators.

>A traditional race in traditional games
>off topic

Hi I'm a real elf ask me anything

To explain how elves work in my setting(s), I have to give a brief rundown of the cosmology.

The physical universe sits in the middle of it, surrounded by the Etheric Plane. If one passes through the Etheric Plane with the intent of traveling "beyond" it, one will eventually pass into either a realm of light (Faerie) or darkness (Shadow). Both Faerie and Shadow are twisted mirror images of the real world; in Faerie, everything is bright and eternally young, while in Shadow, everything is gloom and decrepitude.

Wandering beyond either these two semi-ethereal realms, our hypothetical planar traveler would then eventually pass into the emptiness of Limbo, which can be thought of as the four-dimensional surface of the vast Void of Chaos, the churning and formless eternity from which reality spontaneously emerged at the dawn of time, and which longs to swallow it back up again. To do this, Chaos also spawns demons (which are basically evil Boltzmann brains), who pass through Shadow and are given form, where they stir up the souls of the restless dead into undead, and try to invade and corrupt the real world. Because in this world, there are no celestial realms: the physical world is the world of Law, and Chaos abhors it like nature a vacuum.

The plane of Shadow is essentially the conduit through which Chaos tries to corrupt the world and swallow it within. Faerie only exists at all because the creation of Shadow by Chaos required an opposite to maintain the cosmic balance. But Faerie just as Chaotic and dangerous a place as Shadow; while the denizens of Shadow (demons, undead, and dark fae) are actively trying to invade the world, the light fae of Faerie simply go about their aimless existence, with no concern at all for mortals (and little awareness of how their timeless and beautiful realm can seduce mortal men into Rip Van Winkling their lives away).

(1 / 2)

Faerie is inhabited by light fae, including the lords of the Seelie Court, the sidhe. The best you can say about them is that they don't actively try to harm mortals, unless it would be really funny that week.

Shadow is home to the dark fae, whose rulers are the Unseelie Court, the sluagh. They're powerful and terrifying, on par with vampires and liches.

And then there are the fae which inhabit the Earth, ruling the Hidden Court. These are the high elves. They are ancient and immortal and never a player character race (they always have 9 hit dice *at least* and are powerful magic-users, although they cannot master the most powerful magics in the world; only human wizards get those). The high elves are in fact the progenitors of the race of fae: their power is the result of literal dragon-fire in their very blood, infused into them during an early age of the world. The worship the god of fire and smith-craft over all others, but (having dwindled in number down to a very few individuals left in the whole world) they mostly hide in their forest strongholds and let their "changelings" do all of their work out in the wider wold for them.

The sidhe and sluagh are the result of high elves who traveled the ethereal realms and settled in either faerie or shadow, where the ambient Chaotic energies warped and mutated them into their present conditions. All three of these fae races (high elf, sidhe, and sluagh) are able to mingle their bloodlines with mortal men and thereby produce half-fae "changelings"; over many successive generations, these have become half-elvish races unto themselves. Wood-elves (which are a playable race) are the mortal descendants of high elves; they live no more than 300 years, and they crave experience and danger and hedonistic pleasure above all else. Swashbuckling adrenaline junkies, basically. (briefly continued)

i like my elves a little untraditional, yet more conservative

ya get wut imma saying folks ?

The other two elf-like races are the mortal cousins of the sidhe and the sluagh, and these are much rarer.

The mortal equivalent of a sidhe is called a fay: the fays are obsessed with arcane knowledge and social influence. And so they'll invariably bend themselves towards becoming either great mages with collections of spells and artifacts; or politicians whose main aim is their own creature-comfort, like a hobbit on crack-pipeweed. This race is also playable.

The sluagh, meanwhile, have spawned a ghoulish race of mortals called the draugs. These are monsters which use D&D thoul stats, with the exception that sunlight paralyzes them. Sunlight will dust a vampire and it will petrify a troll; draugs (which combine several mythological sources: svartalfr, dvergr, draugr, sluagh, thyrs/orcneas/Grendel) belong to that broad category of folkloric whatthefuckery: is it a troll? a goblin? an elf? a dwarf? a spirit of the dead? No; it's the thing in the shadows that goes bump in the night and inspired all the confusion in the first place.

did thread just kill ?

>what do you think would make elves cool?

I think if you take elves straight out of the 3.5 MM/PHB, they're fine
now, cue the retards who clearly haven't read it

Anyway, my take is a race of sorta french/native american bohemians with a surprisingly conservative worldview. They look like perpetual teenagers (pretty ones, not acne ones). Altruistic, though racist. Forest-living stealth archers. Favored class: scout, not wizard. Agile/fast, but frail.

I don't like how they're portrayed as master swordsmen/wizards when their mechanics don't match that. PF elves are the best-fitting, mechanically, though I'd go a bit further and give them the ability to 20% of enemy concealment.

I see this so often that someone writes a wall of text about his elves and their origin, but at the end I still don't really know how they look, how it is to talk to one, what goals in life they have, their culture. Basically how it would be to play one properly.

But here I learn a bit about the fay.

Hilarious show

Shame there was some kind of drama and shit

>king

high elvis: rhinestones and drugs
dark elvis: leather jacket variant
wood elvis: vietnam war era

Elf thread never kill. Elf thread only sleep. Then wake.

Like Tarrasque.

>To explain how elves work in my setting(s), I have to give a brief rundown of the cosmology.
You actually don't.

>3.5
go to bed grandpa

The whole point is that the high elves AREN'T playable. They're too powerful, too alien. You don't get to be Galadriel at level one.

The two playable elvish races, wood elves and fays, are designed to be motivated adventurers. The wood-elves seek adventure for its own sake and fays do so mostly out of greed. Both races are driven by inhuman obsession and don't really have cultures of their own because they're changelings; the very point of their existence is that they're sent out by more powerful faes to be their eyes and ears in the world of men. Some will be loyal to their "families" and report back from time to time; others will use adventure as a means to escape and pursue their own aims, whatever those may be.

Appearance-wise, both wood-elves and fays are very difficult to distinguish from humans. They're a bit shorter and slighter of build than average, with wood-elves being a bit darker in coloration than average for local humans and fays being paler; but they don't have the pointy ears or other obvious characteristics; just a ridiculously gregarious personality and certain otherworldly, off-putting aura.

So you have wood-elves running around, all boisterous and laughing and shouting like Brian Blessed, goading their companion adventurers into ever-riskier ventures; and fays being more subtle, demure, intentionally mysterious, pursuing either arcane power or social influence so that they can live in high society like the foppish dandies they aspire to be.

Yeah, I guess I can see that. "There are light evels and dark elves and middle elves and they don't really come from anywhere special…"

That'd make the explanation way more coherent. Totally.

Their origin doesn't contribute much to the description you presented. You could ignore it and nothing else would be particularly hard to grasp.

m8, your elves are actually here right? And you start talking about them here in the third paragraph. So no, you don't need to give a rundown of the cosmology to explain how elves work in your setting(s). Starting at that third paragraph is actually arguably more interesting, I'd link to that Tolkien quote on mountains or any Borges story if I had them to hand.

IDK. Do your games generally involve the cosmology on a deep and active level? You mention setting(s) so I assume you either sometimes play in one of the other worlds or you have this in different worlds or universes too. I don't actually dislike the cosmology; I like that it's very easy to visualize and I like the Boltzmann brains thing, which would be interesting in a game or book where it's not up-front explained. But starting off with "The physical universe sits in the middle of it, surrounded by the Etheric Plane" has to be the dullest and most irrelevant way to get around to "this r elves" for your setting. It's a sin.

>D&D Elves can get 700 years old
Am I the only one who downscales this to 150-200 years? 700 years on this earth just screws up your perception of time, but living to be twice as old as the average human has a far less significant effect. It also allows elf women in their 40s to date late teens human men and they can still grow old together

no
here's mine:
Adult at 25, Middle-aged at 75, Old at 125, Venerable at 175 (+6d20)

>runestone rhinestones

>700 years on this earth just screws up your perception of time
That's the point.

This is an elf thread, please don't post demons.

But elves are semen demons

Seems pretty like a pretty standard elf-are-superior setting to me. But nice WW1 or WW2 setting though