Is it possible for your elves to be all inhuman and alien and fairytale-like yet still be a viable player character...

Frankly this thread is making me think that we need to make a Baron Munchausen style conversational game, where everyone acts as different members of the Fairie Courts. You can't lie, and you must answer any question, but you get points based around how much of your actual goal you can conceal.

Also, as per the good Baron, copious amounts of drinking.

I'm one of those people who find trying to simulate a completely alien mind entertaining.

I had this idea for a Sci-fi setting a while ago where one of the alien species were tribal egg-laying pseudo-mammal/insectoids that practiced natal cannibalism. When they hatched from an egg, the baby aliens would eat each other, and it was neccessary for their proper nutrition (at least until spacefarers came along) so it had to happen. The whole tribe of maybe 100-200 of the aliens would lay maybe 1000 eggs every few months, and then they'd take them all to a big trough in a cave, and when the eggs hatched the newborns would all cannibalize each other like baby spiders until they got big and fat enough to spin cocoons, and even then they'd only survive if no other larvae reached them first. It had a big effect on how the family worked in that society because after the giant roiling cannibalism ball was over nobody knew who's baby was who's, so they ended up having a sort of auction where the kid would be "apprenticed" to a adult to be socialized into the tribe and taught how to do that job.

They worshiped their binary suns and thought that a solar-solar eclipse was a sign of the end times (it would happen every hundred or so years) and fed off of the motile seeds of the giant fungal trees and the innards of these hanging flytrap crustaceans. It was a cool setting.

>Frankly this thread is making me think that we need to make a Baron Munchausen style conversational game

We already have two, newfriend.

And which are these? I haven't seen anything of the genre besides Baron since I started posting here.

Nope. My elves come in two types: fun-loving nihilists what want to party until the world ends, and magic-obsessed snobs who want to reclaim their past glories with sorcery. They're very human in their goals and nature.

What you're talking about is the Fae, which in my game are beings from outside space-time that are literally trying to screw with the world by inserting themselves into every important myth, story, or event in history. Every time the Fae show up they act like obnoxious GMPCs that want to make everything about themselves. Bosses in dungeons are found to have been defeated off-screen, mysteries are solved before the PCs get there, and books are re-written so that the Fae are the heroes or are the only reason the mortals managed to win.

The only reason why they haven't taken over the world is because they're bound to the rules of storytelling; they can bend them but they can't break them. They know that if they ever took over they'd end up actually becoming heroes or villains, and in stories those types tend to have all kinds of misfortune heaped upon them. They're tricksters that never directly interfere with mortal because they know that as soon as they enter combat or do thing that would require dice rolls, they'd gain stats and become killable.

Rogue Trader? You can play as Dark Eldar - The playstyle supports it. You have to gain pain tokens without it you die ,also they don't gain insanity points because all Dark Eldar are insane.
I think this is the best way, if the rules makes you to play in some form inhuman.

>inhuman and alien and fairytale-like
Fairytale elves didn't act that much more alien than anyone else in old stories. They had odd laws they had to follow because of magic and tradition but at their core their motivations were pretty human. They wanted love, wealth, power, beauty pretty straightforward human shit, they just had a tangle of bargains and geasa to work around to get it.
The same "crazy elf thing" also applies to witches, dwarves, gods and ancient people.

I find most of the time the alien-elf is an idea-baby rather than something that's really usable in game. The tend to ether be neo-cheshire-cat level gimmicks, unspeakable blanket handwaves or having to listen to the GM jerk himself off for half a session. Inhuman and alien is a poor direction for characters because it only tells us what they aren't and leaves what is there to a wishy-washy miasma with little substance.

>Only with race-as-class.

Like this, or another method that makes players pay extra chargen resources for the privilege of being an elf.

Yup this was solved 40 years ago. So much institutional knowledge was lost when D&D left TSR. There was a reason a lot of those "arbitrary" restrictions were in place. When race is just treated as a set of dressings draped across a tabula rasa, then every character is played like a tabula rasa. Only when forced to be unique will you get unique races.

Here are some fey elves: tenfootpolemic.blogspot.com/2014/04/tweaking-elf.html

You could go the ACKS route and make several race classes (elven enchanter, elven ranger, etc.) but they need to have defined paths to follow if you want them to act a specific way.

There's the basic stereotypes that form most races, and a specific personality and inhuman methodology that a player would be forced to maintain for this idea. The problem isn't whether players CAN take the role, the problem is that you cannot guarantee they will want to play that role, and if they can't control their own character there's little purpose in giving it to them.

No, because then they stop being elves.

This, I like the concept but they are not elves.

No, they'd just go back to how elves were at the beginning.

No.

Polaris.

Maybe it's because I don't know shit, but "race-as-class" seems too restricting to me. Not in that everything should necessarily be able to be anything, but it seems to restrict each race to one unique class. Couldn't you have at least a few race-specific classes by race? Or maybe I just really don't understand the expression.