How do you make elves Badass?

How do you make elves Badass?

if you stop wanking over humanity fuck yeah for five seconds u can see elves are pretty cool dudes

...

By playing them straight.

Get their girls out of the picture. There is this strange trope in fantasy that female elves are as capable as fighters as the male ones and I'm not talking about PCs here. PCs are always capable regardless of their sex. I'm talking about that you see more female elves as common soldiers, while most of the time all the other races armies are all male What I learned from the DoW games is that when you put their girls on the front, even though they do badass things, people will only draw lewd fanart of them and turn them into a degraded meme version of an all-female race of cute girls that you can waifu. Imagine Fingolfin was a beautiful elfen girl. She did the same thing, but that doesn't matter anymore, people will draw her fighting Melkor in boobplate, in metal-bikini or how she gets raped by Melkor afterwards.

I wish it could be otherwise, because I also like girls being badass, but to me it seems that to make them badass is to focus on their males doing badass stuff. There were no badass Noldor female warriors.

I have no idea. How would you make a longlived race that's objectively more intelligent than most other mortal races badass?
>B-But they're small girly faggots xDDD
Look up Caesar's accounts of his wars in Gaul, especially the part where he describes how the Romans were a bunch of manlets and the Gauls huge, muscular dudes who cracked Roman skulls for a hobby. Discipline, strategy and ingenuity win the day. That's how you make elves badass and feared: alone they're not much, but when working together they're much more than the sum of their parts. They will fuck you up in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. You may be able to crack an elf's skull with your bare hands, but they will build machines that crack a dozen human skulls at a time simply because their engineers had nothing better to do. They truly make war into an artform.

The way I believe an elven army should be described by its enemies is as the most elegant yet most intimidating thing they've ever seen.

Wow that took a lot of effort

I'm torn over this. On one side I think it;s part of the character of elves that femininity is powerful. It's not SJW feminism and more musicians and costume of 80's glam and pop where everyone was a little fucking feminine. On the other side the internet will be the internet and sexualize feminine things, no matter the context.

I say go the AD&D route and make their female elfin warriors be the more elite sorts, mounted on fucking unicorns. They're not among the rank and file, they're the kind who were able to tame fucking unicorns and ride them into battle like some wild force.

Warhammer manages to have tons of female elves in its armies and yet, while r34 of WHFB exists, there isn't an immense abundance of it.

Everyone takes WHFB elves seriously despite having loads of females all over.

Furthermore, as that guy said elves already have all they need to be badass. Especially when we go back to Tolkien, when the Noldor where supposed to be ancient greek demi-gods fighting apocalyptic wars. Even though more modern, "DnD" elves are somewhat different, you can stress that elves start with the skills to fight with swords and bows, something that humans don't have automatically. The average elf with be more martial than the average, everyday human. Then there is the magical appitude. People shouldn't be afraid of putting an 600 years old elfen archmage against the party and make him a goddamn terrifying wizard. He's spend so much time being a wizard afterall. He may have a guard of elf swordsmasters that trained for fucking 300 years. You can make these badass by not making it easy for your party of 20-30 something guys steamrolling through them.

Mind you, I'm not saying that you should elves OP and not exclusively elves. The thing about age works with dwarves as well and should work the same way, or with any other long-lifed race. A huge lifespan is just one of their features and one that can make them truly badass, when you have veteran heroes, and I mean veteran by their definitions, that may look young but have seen, and fought things most mortals don't even have names for.

You dont, because you cant. No one can

Depends on your definition of badass.

Show me on the chart where the Elf hurt you.

Shamelessly rape Tolkien's legacy, throw in subtle weeb-trash samurai faggotry, and a bit of elf-supremacist facism. It's what I did, and you can to.

But why did you post armor?

This is retarded.

Porn of elves existing has nothing to do with the grognardisms that fuel the idea that elves a shit. Those are just memes born from people simply having personal problems with the ideas elves represent.

Porn is omnipresent. Porn is made of everything.

So
>Suicidal ERUFU-NIPPON BANZAI charges against inferior greenskin orcs who should be genocided
right? So shit like elves strapped in bomb vests running straight at the RED UNZ?

just don't make them talk

And at last, give them their own destiny, their own identity. Don't make them too close to humans. They will always lose something to the humans, for they are the protagonist race, the writers/readers race, they will get absorbed by humans, will be dependant on humans. Get away with half-elf fagotry, 90% of the times it will be a human self-insert male "conquering" the female elf, there is a power-struggle right here, where the just "cute" elf is again nothing but a female whose sole narrative purpose is to be fucked by another race, leaving the male elves, that most of the time should do the badass stuff, well, I hate to say it, cucked.

They need to be their own, independant of humans. Of course they can be allies, of course they can fight with them. But they need to have something in their own manifest destiny that differentiates them from humans, even at worst puts them in an adversarial position.


Also, don't make them hippie faggots.

That was my drunken rant. I will read the replies tomorrow to be embarrassed.

just turn them into arnold schwarzeneggers

one of my elf subraces was exiled into the arctic, they became rlly tough and with six packs. then the continent got arcane nuked so they came out and adapted to the wasteland well. when they die they turn into a pile of dust

make them ninjas

also the engineers from prometheus reminded me of elves for some reason. they are pretty badass and with long hair they would definitely be space elves.

The answer to all of these threads is take a break from games and come back after a few years. Everything will be refreshing and exciting again

>tons
I disagree. You have some dark elf fanatics that aren't regular soldiers for sure. All the other female soldiers aren't regular, but just few elites.

This. Fantasy games need to go back to 80's action movie tier stuff. Bad ass dudes doing badass stuff, keep the girls out of it.

Personally, I prefer Imperial Japanese Elves myself.

That's juvenile as fuck. Aliens had a badass female protagonist. Terminator 2 had a badass female protagonist. Female protagonists can be badass.

>The answer to all of these threads is take a break from games and come back after a few years. Everything will be refreshing and exciting again

Or just stop wringing your hands and worrying about what Veeky Forums will think, and just do things that you enjoy.

How sexualized were they?

Shill mode engaged:

I think Song of Swords does a good job of making elves special. They've got strict conduct requirements to maintain their immortality but they're objectively stronger and faster than humans, with special powers to make them even more obviously inhuman and supernatural.

Ohanedin are cannibal nature zealots who can't touch metal or break a vow freely given. Some Ohanedin have been serving the same noble family for a thousand years on some ancient vow. An Ohanedin can put his fist straight through your chest and out the other side if he really wants to.

D&D oversaturates elves I think, which is part of the problem. They just become frilly humans. Doing things to make them less human is good, but then it becomes an RP issue if elf PCs in your game don't want to be like that.

Lord of the Rings elves, like mentioned above, are basically ancient demigods. The Mirkwood elves are scary.

Eldar in 40k, at least in the lore, have zero compassion or empathy for humans and would gladly kill a billion humans to save one elf.

The Fair Folk in the Witcher are baroque-armored immortals from another world who come here to catch slaves and hunt people for sport.

Old mythology about fairies is a good place to look usually, for inspiration like this. Badass elves should be inhuman and a little frightening. They shouldn't act the way humans do, especially when you consider the average one is a few hundred years old.

--------------

In my current 5e campaign I've removed Drow as a playable race and basically made them a cross between dark eldar and morrowind elves. Ancient fertile crescent imagery and names (The rulers of the drow empire are Marduk and Inanna), Lolth is an Old One style chaos monster instead of a regular deity, and the elves themselves are pic related. Hellraiser elves who augment themselves with fucked up surgeries and come to the surface to pillage and murder for kicks. Humans think it's an invasion, to the drow it's a safari.

Take away their Simarils, clearly.

Not enough. Women are for decoration. Men are for getting shit done.

I think most of these examples are trite and boring. If you want fey, use fey, don't make elves as playable race into fey. They're related to fey, or descended from it, but they aren't it. It colours them and their actions, but that isn't their totality. The elf is the foreigner. They're weird, but still relatable.

Also fuck this idea of cannibal elves. It's edgy bullshit.

>Song of Swords
And yet, as far as I know, they still have to fuck humans.

I always thought the best way to go about it is make them go full-on Vietkong, to play up the whole forest archer aspect.
Before you see any elf, you see an arrow in Ronald's throat, and before that, Valkor falls into a pit of punji spikes. They're behind every tree, waiting and watching. They refuse to fight directly; they bait you into sniper sights; their forests are a no-go zone for a reason.

A war with elves means a war with ruthless fae guerillas, who spend literal centuries learning every tree's placement, every toxic plant's effects, the habits of every animal, and how to stick an arrow through your eye from a hundred yards.

this

Norse mythology dokkalfar and ljosalfar straight, or modern fantasy archetype straight?

You aren't helping with posting anime elves.

Here's your (You)

Because there are more then enough retards to mix women inbetween their ranks way too much.

Just look at warcraft and the night elves. Now they're all known to wear skimpy armor, useless armor in battle but somehow they emerge victorious, which is bullshit since women generally suck at fighting.

Its the very notion to create an all female army, be it for fanservice or just because of feminism.

Women don't belong on a battlefield and they simply are not made for fighting, that's why elves are shunned upon by many.

Turn them into robots

Remember WC3? When a night elf army had a majority of badass buff druids turning into wild animals?

Fuck that, let's change that for WoW they said.

They already are. Veeky Forums just has a memey hateboner for elves

You don't. Elves are as boring as humans with none of the appeal of humans.

Elves only really work as the perfect villain type, never as a protagonist.

The high elves can be knightly paladin-esque protectors for the land. They are separate to the kingdom's politics and are a free force that help the land whenever there is a threat against it. Probably quite obscure too, so they really aren't seen unless it's something huge.

However, they are probably in other wars too. They may have to split forces to other lands or planes, and don't reproduce as often as they should. Seeing one has become rare, and they don't show up unless huge stuff is happening now.

Wood elves can follow along a similar theme, although remain within the forests. Their home remains within another plane, but a wood elf family dwell near a natural place that they think needs to be protected, like a spring or waterfall. They typically don't stray too far, although will go to the nearby cities to trade.

They may even make it a portal to another plane. They are also responsible for creating several creatures, such as the dryads and the centaurs. They can be the creators of other creatures that have connections to the forests.

I ran a campaign once where the elves and dwarves had been fighting for generations, as elves and dwarves are wont to do. The dwarves struck down from their mountainholds, and the elves up from the plains they lived in. For thousands of years they keep this up, until one day something crazy happens.

A great evil force appears both in the mountainhomes and in the plains, and both sides think it only attacked them. Gone almost as soon as it appears, but kills thousands nonetheless. Both sides decide that their ancestral homes are no longer safe, pack up, and crusade out into the other's lands. The two mass-migrations miss each other by pure fluke, and they basically wind up reversing positions.

They take their time establishing new homes, and eventually realize what happened. There is a huge battle, many killed on both sides, and both civs basically indirectly agree to a few hundred years of truce to build back up.

Thing is, now the elves have access to metal that they didn't before. They'd been keeping up with the dwarves on their own merits for millennia, and now their culture goes through a crazy industrial revolution. Where the dwarves tend to stagnate, the elves innovate.

So, eventually the dwarves prod another nearby civilization of warrior dog-people into attacking the elves. An enormous army of these badass canine murdermachines marches into the mountains, and gets gunned down, because the elves have not been messing around. They've progressed to just post-modern-day in terms of tech, with the benefits of added magic. They basically see everyone else in the setting as lesser barbarians, and make no attempt to contact any of them. They sit in the mountains, killing anyone who approaches, and because of this nobody else in the setting knows what's up with them beyond "they will kill you if you come close".

Gives them mysteriousness, aloofness, power, and a reasonable justification for it. Little says power like anti-material rifles in a fantasy setting.

Yes.

So where/how do elves got metal, anyway?

Prince motherfucking Nuada

Capitalize on their strength
They aren't the big hairy dude in the barfight swinging a barstool around, they are that quiet guy whos actually a serial killer with a scalpel up their sleeve.

Coordination, agility, ludicrous amounts of skill

The same place everyone else gets metal.

Also space.

After a while, paradoxically, the more superhuman a feat gets, the less impressive it actually is.

Superman lifting a skyscraper is boring.
A father struggling and lifting a broken tree of a child is far more stimulating.

I still like the idea that humanity becomes so old and technologically advanced that they become the space elves of the space opera.

two words

Christmas elves

Trade with dwarves or forest gnomes, conjured with magic, or fairy metal.

I dig the christmas elf look.

Look how fucking fashionably weird this elf and half-elf are.

This is from AD&D 1e.

Eberron.

Bring them back to their roots in Irish mythology as a race of drunk berserker gods that live in barrow mounds.

Eldar are badass.

Eldar are way too human looking cute waifus now.

doesn't that count for all elves?

What are you talking about?

Elves come from Norse mythology. Even the name 'Elf' comes from the old Norse 'Aelfar'.

Old Irish 'Elves' are not actually 'Elves' but a different type of fairy folk onto whom the moniker has been applied.

You can't. Elves are destined to be cute and for lewds.

That's sexist

>beautiful long eared humans are too human looking

whfb doesn't have much fanart.
The r34 section is overrrun by furries.

I dunno, of a normal dad lifted a skyscraper off his kid I'd be pretty impressed.

make them rare
make them old and hardend
make them deadly
don't mkae them "one of the party" or if so only a youngling that gets mocked every time you meet an elf.
And the rare is not because there are few but because they don't see the need to interact. Have it implied that if you where to piss them of they will come over and wreck your shit and any shit in their way

I maintain that "how do you make X Y" threads are the worst part of Veeky Forums

I think he means that Tolkien based his elves on the Tuatha de Danann. Todays fantasy-elves have barely anything to do with alfar or fairies.

/thread

>Everyone takes WHFB elves seriously
Because WHFB was known only to couple of grognards before videogames, when TWW DE and HE will came out there will be tons of porn with witches and high elves.

>>beautiful long eared humans
But they aren't humans and you can find all kinds of official art that depicts them differently. The too humanly looking Eldar are always the worst, laziest, boring depictions and may attract people that only want to masturbate to them, which gets in the way of making them badass.

Nothing is better for the Eldar than a healthy dose of alienness.

So video games will ruin them, just like DoW did.

Do you have a femdom fetish?
(y/n)

Prince Nuada was my first crush.

>elves can't be badass since they're too hot too be badass
>too skinny to be badass
>they'll only make porn of it

Fucking. Own it.

Make them the "alien" race of the setting, weird and otherworldly with loads of mind fuckery normally reserved for Cthulu Mythos wankers.
Make them the object of desire, but fuck with it's formula. Twist the beauty and elegance into something horrific.

>ruin them while miniatures themselves look sexy
>described in every source as attractive

>This. Fantasy games need to go back to 80's action movie tier stuff
So skimpy clothed Red Sonja and Taarna from Heavy Metal?

Yes, they can ruin them by putting more girls on the front, by stressing that single aspect, by making them more human-like looking, maybe create some more female lords and heroes, because official fluff doesn't have enough of them. Because you need to display some tits in video games and it's always on the elves or space elves.

This is a wardancer you won't find in the video game.

Proceed to get upset about people normally finding attractive things appealing to them.

Also BB2 has male wardancers.

This is not the problem itself, but you have no argument.

I'm not playing this dlc-fest yet but all pics I can find paint them as an all female-unit. Which would go against the lore.

>all pics I can find paint them as an all female-unit.
What?

>blood bowl

He said wardancer and videogame, this is wardancer that looks like exactly that pic .

>in the video game
We were talking about Total Warhammer before.

>By playing them straight.
Corellon disapproves of your non-faggotry

>dark eyes
Nice. That's always a good sign to me.

There are male and female soldiers in the standard infantry for both dark and high elves.

Wasn't that just black library thing?

I'd say play them a bit more like a very foreign human civilization, they need to be at least a bit relatable to be badass imo. Like others have said; less female centric combat units, more realistic looking armor, and perhaps things like heavy cavalry. Having them be great scouts is all well and good, but there needs to be an iron fist behind those scout forces.

Caesars texts were hardly biased and made to make him look good. Well trained elite soldiers became manlets, women and children fearsome barbarians and all that saved rome by the end of the day was his intellect and tactical genius.

There's tons of porn of literally everthing. There is tons of Dark Souls porn.

The argument that giiirrrl cooties make elves bad because porn is absolutely ridiculous. There is porn of everything.

>hardly biased
you mean heavily, right?

I am with you on that one.

Nigga, there are men and women among the actual models.

Did you even play WHFB?

And yet when it's about elves the porn will override existing lore because a lot of people know elves only from porn.

Case in point: the "elves always get raped" meme.

I feel like this is actually how most elves are.

Most of the things people are complaining about only apply to Veeky Forums HFY meme elves.

Yeah, I think FR as a setting did the most damage to their image. Tolkien had them be pretty badass, FR made them into frilly weaklings.

>I feel like this is actually how most elves are.
Pretty much. I mean, elves in D&D don't even have a sexual origin myth. They were born out of blood spilled in a battle. How does that not have "warrior people" written all over it?