When was the last game you've played/setting you've read where elves were tiny, winged...

When was the last game you've played/setting you've read where elves were tiny, winged, and lived in flowers rather than either being Tolkien-esque demigods or MAD, BEAUTIFUL SPIRITS?

Those are called fairies. They can both exist in one setting.

Yeah, but they were also called "elves" back in Victorian times, when all the fairytales were made lady friendly. I'm not saying it's the "better" depiction, I'm just saying that after all the other flavors we've gotten in recent years it'd actually be refreshing.

All I'm saying is that fairies are considered different fantasy creatures, which at some point shared a name with elves, share some characteristics but are different enough that they can still coexist. I don't see a reason to turn elves into fairies when you could just have fairies.

Well, MtG's Lorwyn/Shadowmoor setting captured Faeries well...

Elves, and fairies as well, are creatures from so deep down folklore that they really don't have a "proper" definition, and in a historical sense, never had. They could be the same thing, they could not be, they could look basically however and attributed whatever traits and you bet there's some village in Bavaria where it's traditionally true. What OP seems to be suggesting is a setting which doesn't have the standard PC race elves at all, only the "fairy/pixie/sprite/whatever" type standing-in.

Which would be a hellish mess to turn into a proper PC race, warning you now. Massively different sizes make a mess of party creation and interact funnily with the mechanics.

I think Lorwyn/Shadowmoor pretty well matches the "MAD, BEAUTIFUL SPIRITS" stereotype that's become pretty tired lately.

The thing with elves, the elves we usually talk about on this board and we play in our groups, is, that they have changed a lot from their mythological sources and comparing them to these various myths gets really confusing and ultimately seems like a fruitless endeavor to me. Fairies still seem to be more based on their myths.

But what am I doing here? I don't want OP to stop it or think it's a bad idea, it's just my autism speaking.

Only in Shadowmoor, really. Except for the elves.

i love how both sides of this argument refuse to do any research.

How bout you read a fuckin' book?

Research? Argument? Sides?

How bout you read the fuckin' thread? Everyone was agreeing with each other and nobody said anything research worthy.

Lace & Steel (I think it's called) has them. It's a fairly interesting setting, it's definitely got a fairytale vibe but uses it to create a believable swashbuckling world, of all things. And the most common civilized peoples are humans and CENTAURS.

>tiny, winged, and lived in flowers

You're describing fairies, Brospeh

People always call elves "faeries" (always with those extra "e"s in, like adding the K in "magick" to suddenly make it serious and totally not childish like "fairies") when they're going for MAD AND BEAUTIFUL

Veeky Forums is far too autistic to accept a radically different depiction of a core race, no matter how historically backed. You're lucky you didn't just get a bunch of angry "WHY NOT JUST MAKE THEM FUNGUS PEOPLE FAGGOT".

Also you get that in Bloody Basic - Mother Goose Edition from John Stater. It's basically a trimmed down, streamlined version of white box D&D with a fairytale theme. It's nice.

There's no point in calling what are now understood to be fairies "elves" just because they used to be called that. It's good for the language that these distinct concepts now have distinct words to refer to them.

...

Fairies are different though, they're more associated with magic and granting wishes than those flower girls you see on postcards.

>the final stages of "Tim Burton-itis"

I grew up with this impression with elves. When I read Tolkien, my mind somehow backflipped all over itself to reconcile the elves, and I ended up with a very different picture in my head of happy hatted little River folk.
I've never gotten to play any setting where I dramatically changed elves from whatever is in the rule books but I've sure thought some up.
D&D seems to have tried to blend the two images by saying elves are actually a few inches shorter than humans and sometimes giving them a fey bent, but it doesn't work out well.

The elves from The Hobbit were slightly more fairy-like than in The Lord of the Rings.

I don't know, having proper elves based on norse mythology might be something worth investigating.

Even when you're limiting yours(elves) just to Norse mythology, you're still dealing with a body of folklore (fractured and inconsistent by definition) stretching over hundreds of years and square kilometers. In Norse mythology alone, elves have been depicted as anything from immaterial nature spirits to indistinguishable from humans to something that people can turn into after death (I shit you not, look it up).

It's a type of supernatural being so ubiquitous that trying to find a "correct" depiction for it is a doomed cause.

There is nothing wrong with Tim Burton.

>depicted as anything from immaterial nature spirits to indistinguishable from humans to something that people can turn into after death
Given the creepy bad stuff they were sometimes associated with, it's no surprise the word eldritch comes from them. A modern day interpretation could make elves eldritch horrors and they'd be etymologically correct.

Shit, not just that, but troll-like creatures, gnome-like creatures and goblin-like creatures too.

Of course, goblins were basically a type of fairy too.

And so were banshees. It's kinda funny that those mostly show up as undead creatures now, when "bean shee" literally means "woman of the fey".

>no one ever makes elves the Bright-folk, the Spear-folk, who seek human adventurers to slay their monsters

>who seek human adventurers to slay their monsters
Sounds boring, user.

Wasn't goblin originally an evolution of the word "kobold"?

That would have to be really, really far back, then.

Pretty much. Like, kobold>gobold>gobbelin>goblin or something. Like over thousands of years, probably moving across countries.

I've seen some translations call Puck a 'fairy', but most seem to stick with 'elf'.

Isn't he a "sprite"?

Read?
Fairy Meat.
Always gives me the creeps.

In my campaign fairies/sprites/pixies are tiny, winged, and live in flowers...

Well, next to flowers, of course it's hard to tell because they look like flowers as well.

Their faces are actually the flower-part, with sensory antenna-like stamens, and petals forming the facial features.

Nah, it's far too "wacky" to be creepy.

Sure, until you start thinking about it seriously. And overthinking things is one of my specialties.
I mean, one of the examples, if I remember right, is a bunch of fairies fighting for the chance to eat a human child. That's fucking horrifying in any other context.

>Quest hooks are boring.

You must be a joy at the game table.

>always with those extra "e"s in,

Learn to count. Hint answer = 7.

One E in Faeries is the standard way to make the plural of a word ending in Y and the other is not an addition any more than Fairies has an extra I. The traditional spelling of Faery has an E because Færy which was a representation a now largely lost letter and the pronunciation of faery/fairie/whatever was different to how it is said today. The use of the E variant was re-popularised by Professor Tolkien who was interested in people taking faery stories as worthy for both popular reading and academic study.

>faery

It's usually Faerie as the singular.