What are some good reasons for an elven nation (non-Drow) to hobble along on the edge of failure?
Particularly looking for a banana republic or dictatorship flair.
And I want to exclude some obvious ones like wont breed enough, too druidic to farm (although a nice famine brings ambient scarcity) and just have been pummeled by enemies.
Declining birth rate and over indulgence in elder worship. You end up with very few kids who are subservient to dozens of generations of grand parents. Society is breaking down because all the older elves feel they are entitled to respect and an easy life, but they didnt have enough kids to keep such a system going.
The elven kingdoms of Cerilia (Birthright, an oldschool setting) were driven to near extinction due to slow breeding, attempting a genocide on all humans at the height of humanity's invasion of the continent, and lack of priestly magic. They still hobble along in small isolated kingdoms, mostly because the might of the humans was itself broken by the arrival of a dark god (who then died, causing all kind of OTHER problems).
>"And I want to exclude some obvious ones like wont breed enough"
But old elves being a drain is a good thought. Most of the time they are portrayed as capable far into centuries old, but maybe they stop being useful for cultural reasons. A bloated caste where everybody wants to be quasi nobility.
Lorwyn's elves are a good inspiration. Their society is built around the idea that Beautiful = Good, where the ugly are hunted and the beautiful hold positions of power. In such a system, an incredibly fair and graceful (but utterly insane and inexperienced) elf could be shunted into power, even against her own will, and rule as poorly as you need.
So Japan?
Go LoTR mode; remember how when the Fellowship was in Lorien, they just kind of lost track of almost a month?
Do that, except all the time. And the Elves aren't immune to their own effect. They just kind of trance out for 3/4 of the time, and most of them spend the bulk of their lives in a stupor. Consequently, nothing works the way it should, houses are falling down, crops are planted and harvested haphazardly, the military is a joke, etc. Make them have a really complicated interlocking republican form of government that needs high degrees of participation to get anything done for maximum lulz, as that never happens due to 3/4 of their people absconding at any given moment.
Some Habsburg inbreeding throughout the whole of their society would be pretty easy if you also account that any genetic inferiors or imperfect offspring being quietly removed. A strenuous social taboo or expectation where elves that don't mate within their families, are banished for any intimate relations outside the family seems like it'd be pretty standard elvish behavior.
Thus you have elves on the brink of extinction because of their own hubris.
>Literally modern day Japan
>Also probably literally the United States in another 15 to 20 years and discover that when the Baby Boomers get too old to work that their kids low-wage jobs aren't going to pay for their retirement at all
Kleptocracy.
In fantasy worlds the elven high prince and his court of nobles are always seen wearing the finest silks and jewels. And living in opulent palaces made of painstakingly grown centuries-old trees and polished silver. And having banquets featuring the finest and most effervescent wines, exotic foods and the music of musicians that have spent a centuries-long lifetime mastering but a single song or poem.
Does that sound like a strategically wise use of resources to you?
Imagine the long supply chains that must exist for any of that to happen. The armies of elven serfs (or slaves) required to pick the finest herbs and fruits from the forest every day. The surveillance and police states required to keep those serfs/slaves in line. The blood and treasure spent on military ventures and constant resource wars to acquire the rare spices and exotic oils and rare silks and jewels. Now imagine even a fraction of that being spent to ensure a stable society and a prosperous populace. Welcome to every failed, corrupt third-world shithole you've ever heard of.
Eleven magic and elegance kind of undoes all that.
>Welcome to every failed, corrupt third-world shithole you've ever heard of.
You just described Rome
They lasted longer.
Yep. A thousand years of corruption and murdered senators/emperors, punctuated by some lead silverware and german raiders. Sounds like a great way to end an elven empire.
A gradually growing portion of their population developing ptsd from surviving dozens of wars in their century-spanning lives.
Considering how ageless elves are, and how in just about every world they're on the decline from a great world spanning civilization, this is very fitting set up. Elf Romans, stretched too far, armies filled with humans who fight their wars for them, too arrogant, too stuck in their ways
Japan's aging workforce problem, dialed up to eleven.
>What are some good reasons for an elven nation (non-Drow) to hobble along on the edge of failure?
Well if you're going by the idea that elves live in forests, love nature etc etc then in a standard fantasy setting they're already fucked. Where do they get all the metal they need to make weapons and armor capable of staving off invaders? What if somebody burns half of their fancy forest down?
Or alternatively, what if some fungus, insect, or predator comes along and fucks up the ecosystem of the forest they live in?
Socialism.
Massive cultural class divide compounded over eons.
The rich keep on getting richer and living in increasingly opulent conditions, as the poor slowly become more duidic until they don't really even have a shared culture anymore.
General degeneracy
If you really want to ham it up with the dictatorships, then have them be prone to inter-faction conflicts. High elves and wood elves can't really get along and are constantly fighting each other (maybe throw in some other elf subraces for kicks) while vying for some symbol of authority over all of Elvenkind, like some big-ass tree that acts as a font of magic or something. And whoever holds that gets the right to call themselves Emperor, and then has the power to subjugate the other elven subraces.
But just because that one subrace triumphed over the others doesn't mean that it will last long, because the other subraces are petty vindictive fucks. And so the Emperor inevitably finds himself with a dagger in his back, and the fighting begins again.
It's obviously not sustainable, and the elves are slowly but surely losing ground on every front to all sorts of invaders, and their population numbers aren't replenishing fast enough to maintain this chaotic state of near-perpetual war.
They're all such snobs no one wants to trade with them.
Alternatively, because they live in total isolation hidden-elven-city style, they don't trade with anyone at all because that would expose them. This leads to an abundance of goods they produce (fine silks, grown wooden/plant furniture, magical trinkets, works of art, certain fruits and berries, honey, horses, etc) which (according to supply and demand) makes most of them worthless. At the same time, goods they cannot produce are nigh impossible to get (worked metals, ores, black powder, wheat and flour, etc), making them all extremely expensive.
As a result of everything they produce being worthless and everything they need being extremely expensive, their economy is destroyed. Elven money is entirely worthless leading to a crude barter economy and a state riven with rioting and violent theft to steal the food needed to survive.
OP said >hobble along the edge
Stagnation.Their songs are old,their jokes stopped beign fun before my grandpa's balls dropped,their food is disgusting and flavorless,their high quality goods were surpassed by those made by the slant eyed humans from the east and the dwarves are already making high amounts of steel with the bessemer process.They can't mine as deep as we do and they don't even know some of the things we mine,their farms give pitiful harvests and their manufacturing sector is shackled by immensely powerful guilds.Even their military is a joke,their famed bows already useless by the time we invented the minié.
With nothing to trade with the other races,no military power to speak of,unwillingness to learn and adapt and that old stuck up attitude they are doomed to poverty.
Hedonism
The more liberal elves import orcs from third-world regions into the community so that they can virtue signal amongst their citizens and gain popularity. However, the orcs form ethnic gangs, turning portions of the elven kingdom into no-go zones, where orcish laws are heeded over elvish ones. The elven languages as well begin to die out as they are replaced by the black speech. Orcs also have bigger dicks than elves, so all the female elves go for BOC (big orc cock) these days.
GREEN'D
Oh you wanted a dictatorship. Okay, so after affirmative action, the more liberal of the elves, who tend to live in communes at the core of the elven cities where housing prices have been driven up by their luxury cliques, funnel more and more orcs into positions of power. The orcs then act like orcs and install a totalitarian rule where orcish laws become official throughout the kingdom. The elves as a whole are committed to a live of semi-slavery and eventual extinction.
Sauron is an Eye of Peace you xenophobe!
Long lives have meant the same generation of the ruling class has been in control for a long time and nobody younger has any experience om government. One freak accident/mass assassination later and they are out of good leaders.
Depends on whether Elven society functions as a caste system.
If so, depletion of the ruling caste would lead to a power vacuum that senior caste members might either take advantage of, or (more likely) just ignore to do as they always have.
Massive economic failure due to lack of resources and trade as the rest of the world goes into industrialization
>Land has no minerals worth mining
>Land isn't suitable for farming, vineyards, plantations or ranching
>Their previous export, artistry, no longer sells as tastes in fashion has changed and other races grew tired of dealing with the stuckup assholes or someone else is doing it better, cheaper, and faster.
>Forestlands are struggling to supply the population and rapidly failing as they have made in investments into it other than making the trees look pretty which fucks with their ability to produce and grow
>The treasury, which may have helped them through this tough time has been used in a failed attempt at rejuvenating their economy through public works only to have the merchant families overcharge, then take the money and ran leaving half completed or incompetently built works all over the place.
Disease, have the same thing happen to them that happened when the Native Americans met the European settlers.
Holy shit, this is brilliant.
Stagnancy. They hate new ideas, they hate new people. They stifle all forms of creativity, always refer to an idealized former golden age where all the traditions and rules of the elven society supposedly come from. Young elves are taught from young age to always follow their elders and never question them, never change their ideas. The least brilliants of the young elves are usually the most militants, always eager to stamp out any deviation, crusading against any percieved degeneracy in the elven society so they can be accepted by their elders. A lot of the most brilliant young elves leave the state, convinced they have no future in such a society. Hopefully beyond the border of the elven state, other kingdoms eagerly embrace them, and their new ideas bringing them prosperity, knowledge and wellbeing.
Easy one. They won't advance. Their long lives is their downfall as they want to continue following their familiar footings and won't move onto greener pastures. Since that is the case, those opportunities of bettering themselves are being hogged by the lesser races, and the elves slowly dwindle to near nothing because of it.
>dirty dumb boomer scum
>Particularly looking for a banana republic
The US invades them because some industrial wants to rape all the wimmen?
What about a plague of substance addiction caused by another empires need to export something to the elves in order to reign in their trade defict? Possibly a war to stop the import the substance was fought, but the elves lost.
>see the various opium wars
>also the century of humiliation
But capitalism has worked perfectly fine for the last 200 years
Nah. Just have them follow the same kind of cycle humans do, in that their society advances with the death of the elders. Take the issues that all the sciences ever have had forever and make it so that the average lifespan isn't 70 years, but about 6 times longer as 500 years.
>After a thousand years of the Elf King ruling over his kingdom he dies/is assassinated
>While he could keep his numerous children in line he cannot in death
>His hundred sons and hundreds of grandsons all begin a series of coups and civil wars for the throne
>A thousand years of growth and success is thrown in to darkness as different clans in the Kingdom support different hairs to the throne
>Every time a heir manages to gain supremacy and is declared king he is assassinated starting another series of civil war and back stabbing court politics
Slow breeding elves are an awful meme, make them like normal creatures.
How about complacency?
Let's start with the idea that Man is somewhat new. Maybe 2000 years of Man, but 10000 years of Elves. So we have a situation where for 8000 years, elves were dominant aboveground. They fought each other, but eventually became a singular Kingdom. They got peaceful. Idealistic. Powerful in theory, but in practice, lazy and sitting on their own laurels.
But then Men come along. They start trying to have their own state, but are cowed by Elven dominance for a long time. Afraid to bring down the hammer. But then, eventually, a group risks it. Takes a large chunk of land, declares it Human land.
And the Elves don't go to war. They try and do economic warfare, thinking they'll starve without Elven help. But humans don't. They grow more confident, start taking more land. The Elves grow worried, but at the same time, the regular people believe so much in their own superiority that they think they can wait it out. They think the Men will die off before really settling down. But it keeps going. More and more land goes to Men, and the Dwarfs are looking from the unnaground and starting to see an opportunity, too. So now two different groups are land grabbing, and only now do Elves start moving to fight. But it's been maybe 100 years or so since the first Man nation, and they've grown. Elves couldn't win the war. The citizenry feel a broken national image the same way Romans did when Gaul sacked them. And now, in the present, the most the Elves have is a little peninsula on some shitty plot of land that the Men only let them keep because they needed some place for the Elves to live, if not integration within their own system.
> to hobble along on the edge of failure?
Technology advances and they don't. Think China around the 1800s, for example.
>Particularly looking for a banana republic or dictatorship flair.
That's easy. The previous Monarch wanted to start advancing the Elven State, but one of the more powerful noble Houses objected strongly to the violation to elven traditions this was causing and so staged a coup and took over.
>Think China around the 1800s, for example.
I'm now thinking about opium'd elves.
/thread
Inability to compete with industrialization of races like humans and dwarves. Lack of desirable resources to make a good trade partner and instead serving as someone to be slowly conquered or parceled out.
Or they themselves run out of ethereal ores that they use to create their beautiful cities and have to cannibalize older areas of their cities to create new expansion. Cue elves slums and rich vs. Poor a la Israel/Palestine West Bank type scenarios.
Watch it, man, this is how we get twitchy heroin elves with missing teeth trying to steal from your stables.
God that was a good post to read, helps that I agree with it.
Apart from not breeding enough, which OP said he didn't want, stagnation is the next best bet. They might be producing above even, but they just sit around and don't do shit. Their idea of procrastination is waiting for fucking MONTHS because a day means nothing to them, eventually nobody wants to keep putting up with that and they become excluded over time, then they introvert, then they stagnate because nobody wants to fuck an elf and have a lazy asshole half elf kid who takes like 3 days to reply to an invitation to your function that you already got replies about from all your human friends.
They have the most fun civilisation ever. At their peak they were able to invest vast amount of energy into the creation of art and culture. They creating systems for making the most beautiful music the most thrilling stories, delicious food and potent drugs which created vivid, interactive and fantastical dreams.
When their power began to wane they did nothing because they were too enamoured with the beauty they had created. Even now they turn out more and greater dreams fuelled by the knowledge of their own destruction. In fact the closer they get to ruin the more beautiful their world becomes and the more enraptured it's people become with it's beauty.
At one time they were able to slow their fall by exporting their creations but their former trading partners have grown fearful of elven goods. Their crafts are addictive, once you've had a taste of elven life it's hard to go back. They have devoured noble houses, treasure hunters, whole towns. Elven lands have become perilous lotus gardens from which few return, their neighbours have ether fled, been absorbed or died.
If it weren't for their advanced systems of semi-mystical infrastructure they would have died out long ago, instead they are kept on a kind of automated life support. They spend their days in complex, hypnotic state experiencing simulated joys and sorrows only achievable through their craft. As their systems fail their manor's become tombs.
Elven adventurers are those that have managed to break away from their world. These particular elves will be incredibly strong willed, resistant to illusions and enchantment or simply emotionally neutered.
tl;dr
>Elves are too busy playing vidya and watching anime to keep themselves alive
>Elfland is a pretty Chernobyl or a mental blackhole
>Elf adventurer stats are due to necessity, not genetics
>elves not attacked for centuries from the outside, and the different factions learn to settle differences through ritual combat
>only a scarce few learn to fight, generals and military traditions vanish
>ritual combat solution falls apart, likely one accusing another of cheating
>decide to go to war, can't be that hard
>conscript massive armies which subsequently starve en masse due to no logistical knowledge
>fighting in cities turns to just burning everything, as there is no discipline to actually fight
This is what I'm going to do with my elves, obviously works best if they're on their own island or somehow physically separated from everywhere else to make invasions unlikely.
>drug epidemic
>hedonism
too deep in the woods they wandered
dark corners where devil's weed grows
so like an island of elves that are just slowly destroying themselves into savagery?
Elves are being turned into faeries, stretched thin due to the ever expanding forests, and fighting a war on all fronts against various monsters and civilisations.
Essentially, yes.
This. This is a good campaign idea.
thats like, 3 settings
you can ignore the elven entropy kingdom and play high adventure, delve a little into the implication for low fantasy, or timeskip until there are huge abandoned cities of dead elves in their houses, everything looking untouched and perfect
Remove the BOC stuff, and you are golden. Liberalism kills societies. They tried to civilize orcs, even if they were their mortal enemies for centuries.
Obviously it failed.
>What are some good reasons for an elven nation (non-Drow) to hobble along on the edge of failure?
In Forgotten Realms it was first the Crown War between the Elven Races and later Multiculturalism.
The Myth-Cities where the crowning achievement of elven civilization and literally all of them fell because they let in human and dwarven immigrants.
>letting in rockjews
Of course they fell.
In my current campaign it's because almost all of them left.
Imagine if, in Tolkien's world, the Elves had a schism where all the really powerful and ancient sorcerers went West and the mostly young and inexperienced Elves stayed behind.
After the Great Exodus, where most of the Elves disappeared altogether into a utopian demiplane, the Elven empire seemed to shrink into itself. Those who stayed behind don't really know how to maintain the great works of their ancestors. Most people on the outside are unaware, because Elves are secretive and they all appear youthful to outsiders, but one nation has already discovered the secret and is waging a war to steal all the ancient marvels of the Elves.
>extreme liberalism kills societies
>also extreme conservatism
This might yet be a cheap one, but maybe elven magic stops working or being effective - their land gets turned into a magical dead zone, their enemies develop magic-resistant armor or something. Something that they heavily relied upon is now useless, and they're scrabbling to keep any form of social cohesion or control.
It'd be like in the real world if electricity stopped working. It'd cause a panic, we'd probably have to jump back at least a couple of centuries in terms of tech and governance, if not even farther due to societal collapse.
>also extreme conservatism
Japan disagrees.
>Implying the capitalist wouldn't be sitting on the stone threatening to fire the employee if they didn't work hard enough
Don't go patting yourself on the back to hard mate.
>It'd be like in the real world if electricity stopped working. It'd cause a panic, we'd probably have to jump back at least a couple of centuries in terms of tech and governance, if not even farther due to societal collapse.
If electricity stopped working we'd all die as our nervous system ceased to function.
Japan was an exception because it went hermit for a while, then had westerners knocking on their door with guns and realized 'oh shit we need to keep up with this.' They did it early enough that they managed to keep much of their cultural traditions, even as they adopted western-style government and weapons.
Korea or China, on the other hand, stayed so conservative and unwilling/slow to change that they became pawns of nearby powers or even got conquered. They not only refused to learn anything from foreign cultures, but they refused to change their way of thinking about them, treating them like minor kingdoms or like traditional rivals or threats.
>Elves don't breed because they have the ability to create perfect waifu/husbando tulpas
>Elves can come off as standoffish or elitist when it comes to food and art because compared to their shit everything else is flavourless
>Elves can seem incredibly alert, even paranoid because their expecting a bombardment of complex senses and ideas to meet them. This is the source of thier naturally keen perception.
>Elven immortality wasn't an inherent trait to elves. They discovered it through mystical experimentation. It's a pickling process.
>Elves create plants and animals to suit their needs. Elven cities are surrounded by defensive forests filled with bizarre and deadly flora and fauna. Many monsters are descendants of elven creations from the time when they ruled the known world.
>Elven soldiers are disorganised by fanatically violent. They need the thrill and sense of purpose that comes from combat and they desperately want to die in a glorious way. Other elves eat this up, they use astral projection techniques to follow patrols, cheering on their heroes.
>Astral projection and dream manipulation are common. Many elves spend their lives in virtual realities or distant planes of existence. When their body dies in this state their spirits remain, trapped in the last world they occupied.
>The greatest elven composers have created complex systems to create dynamic pieces of music. These pieces can be so complex as to contain a consciousness. A master's music literally contains his soul
>Despite their age elven adventure can still start at level 1. They spent most of their lives listening to amazing music and playing astral videogames.
>Beware when raiding elven ruins, elven art doesn't immediately hypnotise but the longer you stay the more likely you are to get sucked in. Move fast, don't stay in any room more than a few minutes. If you have to take a bunch of hirelings blindfold them and plug their nose, tell them not to touch anything.
The exist in a permanent war economy because every other state that borders them considers them a future invader and the elves return that feeling mutually. The wages of this long term detente are paranoia and autocracy. Have them have already turned neighboring human and wood elf populations and puppet states that they keep in line through violence and poverty.
This is the case of the elves or alfar in my campaign setting. They were the immortal servitor race of the gods who descended to earth to battle the giants in Not!Ragnarok the first time. Those that were left behind were infected by the impermanence and mortality of this world and so had to learn what it means to grow old and die.
And they hate us for it.
It doesn't need to be declining. Elves take decades or a century to recover from wars and to populate new lands.
Superior races can field new armies and fill conquered lands in just a decade or two.
Elves need a tech edge to survive and even then they should fill their kingdoms with a human lower class.
Most IRL failed states are filled with low IQ races who have only known despotism for their entire existence and wouldn't recognize rule of law if it slapped them in the face so some kind of deeply engrained servile attitude towards the ruling class could go a long way. Now make that ruling class incredibly incompetent for some reason.
I like the idea of overly worshipping elders, especially considering what an elder would be by elven standards. Most of them would probably be blind and half-senile. I like the idea of the drawback of being so long-lived being that relatively more of that lifespan is spent with all the drawbacks of advanced age.
>The exist in a permanent war economy because every other state that borders them considers them a future invader and the elves return that feeling mutually. The wages of this long term detente are paranoia and autocracy. Have them have already turned neighboring human and wood elf populations and puppet states that they keep in line through violence and poverty.
Roman elves? Why not?