Tell me about the elves in your setting...

That's actually pretty rad. Gives me a sort of changeling vibe

Thanks, that's sort of what I was going for! Goal was to play up elves being unsettling and alien to humans, while simultaneously being inextricably connected to them.

Bonus points that it makes the closely-knit, ancient elf communities make sense and human/elf couples are canonically a thing, for elf waifus.

Yer, I see that now. The shading made me think it was a tiny boob pointing upwards with no nipple.

I think I've seen some manga that use a similar pose to imply that someone is moving forward after jumping off of something, but her back and legs are entirely in the wrong position for that pose.

Ohhh haha took me a second to see what you were talking about. I stared at it like it was a magic eye painting, but yeah I can see why you saw a tiny boob. Makes the picture more hilarious that way.

The Eberron elves seemed pretty well received

>Elves have one boob much smaller than the other, which they are capable of moving independently, including making it point straight up

Oh I see, like a gymnist who just vaulted over a horse.I guess your legs would kick up, but you'd be using two hands. The problem is the girl was drawn first then the background was added later. There's no object for her to interact with, making it look like she's flying through the air. Also just noticed how weird her left foot was. Kinda looks like a hand.

I though it was like a movement thing. Like she was jumping so it moved up... leave me alone. God mum in a minute .

I'm positive this has now become someone's fetish.

Elves are as tall as a Troll or an Ogre, but much more thin and gaunt.
Their skin is completely grey, and their eyes completely black. They are wholly hairless.
They wear enchanted armor according to their rank, almost indistinguishable from one another.
Their clawed hands and feet, as their head with sharp teeth, at the end of their disproportionately long limbs, are always bare.
Every tree branch, every natural cave, every forest, mountain and river in this world was made for them to inhabit. They see humans as usurpers that don't fit into the great design of nature, so comfortable to them. They are huge and intelligent creatures, of unnatural speed. They see humans as vermin, and instinctively hate them all since birth. The smell of them, the sound of them, their looks, everything seems unnatural, alien and enemy to their eyes, and they tirelessly march in armies, filled with hatred, against humanity's bastions, being their greatest enemies.
They speak an alien language in unnatural, echoing roars, and kill themselves once captured.

The males and females, all gaunt and bald, can't be told apart.
Their society is cold, loveless and enigmatic, and based around abusing and dominating the natural landscape, which, unlike with humans, renews itself and shapes itself at the will of its Elven masters.
They are the firstborn, most prideful and intelligent children of Nature, who will stop at nothing to eradicate the other inferior races, less close to Nature.

They are the big bad of the setting. PCs are not supposed to fight them one on one (they move in legions anyway) or even try to talk to them.

>Implying it wasn't already
They call Veeky Forums "/d/-lite" for a reason

But what would be the evolutionary benefit of a single undersized, prehensile boob? Or are we saying the gods just thought it would be funny? And are there warring subfactions depending on which of their boobs is weird?

Plains Elves. What is an elf without an Underdark, a city or a forest to hide in? What are they without proper access to metals to fold or cast?

Influenced by Semitic people as well as the Zulu, the Plains Elves are as 'orcish' as an elf can be. Their prefer more arid climates and open plains, raising magical beasts for their meat, milk and fibers for textiles. The Plains Elves are hyper focused for pottery, ceramics and glass blowing, with many crafts and creations that rely as much on low energy processes to manufacture out of materials as cheap as they possibly can, for as much strength with as little substance as they can afford.

As far as elves are concerned, they are barbarians, savages and brutes. Where orcs are rocks and ore, humans are refined heavy metals, elves are polished mirrors, glazed crystal and pure radiant glasses. Their language is still beautiful, but to elven ears, strips out much subtle sophistry and beauty. Their crafts are still amazing, inhuman in their function and form, but they lack the aesthetics of artisanship for the sake of artisanship. To elves, they are blunt and unremarkable clay.

To any other race, however, they are nightmarish. Leaving little sound as they move for the mass they carry (roughly as much weight as a human, but with less volume) and unencumbered by armor, making bows of enchanted bamboo and enchanted obsidian toothed paddles, they rain down endless volleys of jagged glass and grease on whatever battlefield they inhabit. Substances they themselves can walk on top of to no detriment to their footing, but chew into and destroy the footwear, legs and bodies of those that slip and fall. Exceptionally great at area denial and guerilla tactics. So long as they have a steady supply of the livestock milk they drink, you could no more catch them in the plains by chasing or missiles than you could an elf in a forest.

There are many reasons for their aversion to metals, but they don't speak of them to outsiders.

Grimwyrd
Elves are physiologically / Thaumatology dependant on Mana. They slowly starve without it, on the tempo of food starvation.

Because of the tie with magic, their auras manifest by birth, and their Talent for magic develops by puberty. Coming of age rituals involve testing for aptitudes in basic elemental powers, divining, healing, and animal or plant empathy. Odd cases sometimes see a talent for death, teleportation or even extraplanar binding, but these are harder to test for specifically.

Otherwise, physically fit and dextrous compared to humans, with Lodoss War comparable physical descriptions.

>But what would be the evolutionary benefit of a single undersized, prehensile boob?
Could it be similar to the Amazons, where the boob needs to be smaller as to not interfere in hunting with weaponry? So the larger, fully formed breast is meant for breastfeeding, and has the proper capabilities and anatomy, whereas the musculature below the other allows for finer control of it, up to the ability to point it straight upwards or causing it to squish flat.

The main problems being 1. that it would imply elves have been using bows and spears to hunt for long enough that it resulted in an evolutionary adaptation, but still have not advanced technologically past that point, and 2. that the simpler adaptation would just be to have one breast instead of two that have wildly differing sizes and capabilities.

Perhaps there was sexual selection against the monoboobed elves in favor of ones who still had a second breast, or perhaps it's not a natural adaptation at all and as part of elven puberty one side of the woman's chest is bound tightly to inhibit the development of the breast on that side.

Neither accounts for the physical structure that would be required for it to be prehensile and able to change shape though.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be that she just did some kind of one-handed vault while brandishing the spear. But it's not really drawn properly for that; a one-handed vault would have the legs off to the side, not splayed out like with a two-handed vault. And the legs are a bit awkward even for a two-handed vault.

funny thing about human boobs: no one really knows why human female breasts are always like that.
Our closest ancestors aren't like that. Other mammals aren't like that. The breasts grow when they're lactating for their offspring and then recede when done. But human boobs? Wobblewobble 24/7.

A humanoid species need not necessarily have breasts all the time. They may just grow them when they need them during gestation.

Cows don't lactate once they're grown. Only after their calving do they get that udder working, and then they keep them knocked up to keep them that way. Else the udder would shrink and all but recede.

So elf titties that only balloon up when preggy makes perfect sense. They're a light and fey people.

They were extincted dozens of millenia ago by a magical plant zombie plague. Later those feral plant zombies gradually developed sapience again and created new civilizations on the ruins of the ancient elf empires. There are multiple elven nations with different cultures, but the main ones are sort of Renaissance Italy-ish, with sailing, trading and establishing of colonies and trading posts in other continents

I just go with the original from before Tolkien's version.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf

In my setting there are two major groups of elves

The high elves, who live in walled cities and rival the Draw in political dickery.

And the wild elves, who tend to form lodges and villages in the mountains, hunting , fucking, and drinking pretty much year round.

This, but whatever.

Elves were the servants of gods when they walked the world, ordering it from the monster-spawning primal chaos.
When the gods left the material world (or die? it's mythology at that point), some elves, mostly among those closest to the gods, remained in the abandoned divine homes awaiting their return. They are basically bitter or fanatical high elves, sometime with a guilt complex or a desire to prove themselves worthy of the long gone gods' presence. Their sacred lands are unapproachable as those elves are still more magical than anyone else, full of godly artefact and kill any non-elf. So pretty much everyone went on with their life while they remain stuck in the past.

Some felt betrayed and abandoned and rejected the gods and everything they stand for. That means pretty much civilisation, so they went feral. Some sort of hardcore wood elves, as they want to become literal beasts with no need for morality they failed and they hate that.

Other, mainly among the lower castes who never met the gods, actually moved on from the past, and after a civil war they lost, moved away from the sacred lands. They formed more standard elf realms and are less magical than the other two. Some even speculate that humans are fully degenerate elves, but that's questionable.

HAHAHA OP! LOOK WHAT I HAVE DONE TO YOUR THREAD!
SINGLE STRANGE BOOB !
I wonder if breast size has got bigger over time?
People find breast attractive so girls with big boobs have more sex as such more girls are born with big boobs?

Surviving hominid with better hearing - went back to the trees during hominid radiation, but kept hairlessness due to lack of great impact on survival. Elves are terrible at throwing weapons because of this.

Halflings and Dwarves are similar, having developed on small tropical islands and small polar islands respectively.

It could be that human women grew breasts because human men got a little retarded.

In the animal kingdom, MILFs, the pregnant and the nursing are boner kryptonite. You're not supposed to go after those. It's reproductively a dead en, since for a few months afterwards she doesn't want sex or it won't get her pregnant. Thus, pointless to rut.

But what should have been a turnoff may've become a turn on to men, who rather than avoid them, preferred them. And well, natural selection meant he hit on the ones that were clearly fertile enough to fire out babies. They went on to have daughters with slightly bigger boobs and sons with a predisposition for interest in bigger boobs.

Fast forwards 400K years, the species defining traits are the big ole monkey udders the women wobble around.

>So elf titties that only balloon up when preggy makes perfect sense.
So both breasts are small and prehensile normally, but one breast swells massively when pregnant?

That would mean our OP elf would have to be in the early stages of pregnancy then, correct?

Mating face-to-face means you can't see the butt - the usual primate attractor. So, similar structure, but in the front!

I think that is an inane explanation, honestly.
no prehensile boobs, plz.

You don't mean to say that boobs are "front-butts", do you?

Correct. Can't you see, shes got a motherly glow about her.

I once dated a girl who could hold a sharpy between her tits and write her name by pushing her elbows in and out. It was her party piece.

In shape if not in function, unless that's no longer the working consensus?

Physical anthropology is a fast-moving field.

They're ancient desert snake people with uncomfortably lithe, uncanny-valley proportions I stole from this and a natural affinity for magic.

So not elves at all really, I'm not sure why I'm posting this.

they do like the Noldor. But the Fingolfin spammer is literally just Fingolfin. Elf Berserker.

iirc the predominant theory for human breasts projecting outward from the body is that unlike other primates, human mouths don't protrude. if you look at gorillas, chimpanzees, and other close human relatives, their mouths extend out past their noses, while for humans the opposite is true. having the nipple significantly forward of the chest overall means that the child can nurse without fear of their air supply via the nose being cut off.

Basically Puazi from InCase's original works.

They drain mana/magic from any source they can find. Fortunately for them, High Elves don't need as much mana to continue their long lives. Unfortunately for them, magic is getting harder and harder to find so they're either dying out, killing magical beings to absorb their essence (congrats, high elves are now vampiric), or they belong to a high caste of elves who rule the lower elves at that tree of magic and basically take all the fruit they want. Those elves put up with it because though all the elves are starved of magic, high elves were least affected by it (which isn't saying much).

Space Romans.

Elves before Gods Judgment of the Earth where great Fay Spirits that held the knowledge of Magic from the Mortal World. After aiding Dragons with the creation of Man they where damned to live in flesh in the form of there godless creation.

Now they just live around the world just trying to make bye in life, they formed a self loathing religion with numerous cults dedicated to redemption/repentance in there own ways, including, but not limited to Death Cults, (Dark Elves) being slaves, (normal elves) guarding ancient elven city's from everyone including themselves, (Wood Elves) saying "fuck it" and being super Amish and restarting with civilization by being cave men, (wild elves) and elves who pretend to be regretful but leach off of human civilization (high elves)

In my settings, the Elves are generally deliverance-style swamp hicks that ride on giant chameleons.

Dark-skinned desert gypsiy nomads pushed out of their lands through hardship and war. Basically kurds.

>sweatingman.gif
>look closer and see breasts
>disappointedman.jpeg

>my cosmology
>prime material
just fucking kill yourself

Wtf is this picture? Guy (allegedly) leaping through the forest while at the same time having the muscle definition of a Holocaust survivor. Do powwow not understand how difficult it is to jump?

I know it's an elf, so confusion can be a given, but what guys do you know have tits like that?

Large breast are easier for nursing while also showing an ability to store the required body fat for survival.

Natural selection should actually get rid of flat chested women who can't nurse, not the other way around.

Elves 101: Until you've checked for a dick, assume it's a man.

But that's cosmetic. A woman's butt holds more healthy bodyfat than her chest, and a woman's thighs and hips demonstrate greater potential for childbearing. Boob size actually has no effect on milk size or quality.

>Elves live in the biggest forest in the world
>Seriously, this forest is the size of half of the continent
>One day the world's first necromancer invents necromancy
>Leads an undead army across the world
>Nobody knows what the fuck an undead is, so nobody is prepared
>Necromancer takes over the entire forest, drives the elves out

150 years later

>Necromancer has dissapeared, but undead still infest the forest
>Remaining elves live as gypsies, moving nomadically in caravans and squatting on whatever land will keep them

Basically, take elven arrogance and give them something they can't beat.

There are two types of elves in my setting. Originally, all the elves were pretty much assholes. They enslaved the other peoples of the world, built great sinister machines, and refused to pay heed to the gods. Eventually, fed up with the wicked ways of the elves, the gods declared war, but were driven back by the powerful weapons the elves had made to fight them. While the gods retreated to lick their wounds, the elves began to war amongst themselves, with the entire world eventually consumed by their civil war. In the end they destroyed themselves and an entire continent in the process. However, the last few survivors retreated underground. Most have long since gone insane, but they continue to develop their powerful magics and technologies deep in their laboratories, workshops, and underground fortresses, each longing for the day when they can reclaim the world above.

The other faction of elves would be called wood elves if anyone knew they existed. The god of life suffered greatly at the hands of the elves during their war, and he refused to let the grudge go. He captured a group of surviving elves and has slowly twisted them over the millennia, using magic and selective breeding to eliminate their famed immortality and aptitude for magic. They live a life of hardship in the heart of the deepest jungle in his domain, worshiping him and only him, knowing nothing of their people's history.

I've done a few types. Lot of generic high elves (long-lived and arrogant) and when I've got more leeway, I go for Dwarf Fortress elves -- long-lived beings dedicated to the ruthless defense of nature who will murder you for cutting trees and eat you because they don't waste kills.

My favorite, which I haven't gotten to the gaming table just yet, run as such
>They ARE magic, but some elves are more magic than others. They have a strict caste system where rank is tied into arcane ability and longevity; Slave-caste elves are just knife eared humans, Royals are immortal archmages.
>They're empire builders, but their territorial aims are based on the most important resources to them: Leylines and other magical manifestations. Magic access functions as something of a limiter on their spread; too many elves and they'd be born lower caste than their parents.
>They practice cannibalism, which began as a ritual method for reabsorbing the mana of the dead but has sense become both that, though slaves are forbidden from tasting elf flesh, and an show of opulence by the nobility.
>The lowest caste of elves were Pariahs, who were basically mana vampires, able to and needing to consume magic by siphoning it out of living things or the land. Elven society eventually decided they had enough of the parasites and systematically executed or banished the Pariahs from their number. Some Pariahs, contrary to popular belief, survived. They function as the setting's dark elves -- destructive, hungry, and naturally rather bitter at their ancestral lot.

Breast size does not affect nursing. I didn't know basic anatomy.

Damn it.

Time to commit sudoku.

knowledge is a learning experience, not a wisdom one, user.
ignorance is only a death sentence if you're playing with death.

In my setting, elves are not available for PCs. Standard, or "high" elves left the world after a big civil war in their own culture about 1000 years ago.

They do currently exist, but they dwell in a negative-energy aspected demiplane adjacent to the plane of shadow. They've devoted themselves pretty much exclusively to necromancy, particularly negative energy effects and ghostly minions (as opposed to diseases and corporeal undead servants) and shadow conjuration type stuff. To the material world, they're boogeymen or aliens, occasionally popping in from their home realm to abduct living prisoners or recover ancient elven artifacts, only by night, as sunlight unravels the magics they use remain in the material plane, leading to the incorrect belief that sunlight kills them.

Half-Elves, however, do exist, and represents the original elves who stayed and re-attuned their energies to the roads and forests instead of becoming necromantic aliens in another dimension. Between the dilution of their original more magical nature and lots of interbreeding with humans, they're all effectively Half-Elves, which have a large true-breeding population and a culture much like traditional storybook gypsies, traveling in caravans, lots of fortune-telling and music by the campfire, etc.

> High elves are literally high all the time, and lounge around in dragon-headed opium nightmare cities in the sea. When they get off their asses, it's usually to enslave, pillage and destroy in order to fund their addictions. The deadliest poisons give them erections. They have the best clowns in the world.

Inspiration: youtube.com/watch?v=dbJABjVH-0k

> Dark elves are morbid masochists who won't stop talking about how the Helves dicked them over and started worshiping demons. They worship devils and could conquer the world if they stopped dicking each other over trying to emulate their gods. Goth as fuck.

Inspiration: youtube.com/watch?v=gwv0rVUc9ps

> Wild elves live out in the forest and just want to kill things in peace. Seem noble and refined until you realize their veneer of civility is hiding the closest thing the setting has to actual rednecks. They shoot trespassers on sight.

Inspiration: youtube.com/watch?v=mIP3wZwWJA4

Not really a setting but my mod for Dwarf Fortress will soon be adding a subrace of elves that I'm proud of. Here's the gist of them:

>Group of elves start caring less about nature and more about being wizards
>Eventually get ostracized and run out of their nation for their heretical ways, on the verge of destruction.
>take refuge in cave, find a race of troglodyte creatures within
>educate and subjugate them in order to have a slave-race to do all the hard work.
>infuse their bloodline into the trogs via magic so these fast-breeding creatures will randomly pop out pureblood wizard elves every so often, ensuring that even if the original clan were to die there would always be more more of them so long as the trogs survived.
>teach the troglodytes to revere them as the master race so no matter what happens purebloods will always end up as the ruling caste.

Basically they're cave-dwelling NEET wizards with a race of cave men serving them that occasionally shit out more NEET wizards to be inducted into the noble class.

Humans colonized the planet in an emergency withdrawal from their homeworld from the next-planet outward from the sun. The ones that landed in the northern jungles/swamps of the main continental formation were discovered by the kobold sovereignty and the majority of the crash's survivors were biologists, botonists and geneticists that were charged with helping their people survive whatever their new climates and habitats might be since their departure was rushed and their passage uncertain and interrupted.

Between mixing splices of local species, particularly draconic ones though with a handful of sahuagin, gnolish and some magical tampering, the initial results were a mixed bag of freaks and strangeness that scarcely seemed human. Over generations however, the alterations to their respective bloodlines faded, boiling down to a much more human-shaped collective result. Variants that maintained their aquatic traits of their progenitors likely came from Sahuagin splices while their more sorcerous talents are likely traced to the draconic lines.

The resources that allowed for the initial formations were spent in less than a decade, but their knowledge was imbued into the culture and a caste system began to form around the racial alterations. More physically apt lines became the half-orcs, orcs, and goliaths. The aquatic became Sea-elves and Merfolk. The magically talented were gathered into an enforcer caste while the leadership, largely either pure elves or winged variants (plain winged elves or strixes and harpies) stood into a rulership position via tradition of being descended from those that were pivotal to the decisions at the start.

So they're high and mighty magical mutts who got what was coming to them when the whole system crashed on itself.

The idea that elves are 'peak beauty' taken to an extreme. All of the elves look the same, outside of height variations for child to adult, and slight differences between individuals/genders. To combat this, they have created a culture around masks, using them to stand out more, as well as help advertise what their chosen role in life is. Similar to a personal totem with important achievements, family lineage, current career, etc. Important in this is that they have developed an ink for these masks that cannot be overwritten, for use in such things as high crimes, used to mark murderers and the like, so they may forever carry the stigma of their crime.

As such, after generations of this, they see uncovered faces as sort of taboo, and offer at least masquerade type masks, as well as bandanas to wear over your nose and mouth. They understand other races don't have this taboo, but take it as a great courtesy if visitors at least try to follow it in their lands.

I also have 'wild elves' like in OP's picture but they aren't related to the elves above, and have a different name.

Alternatively, showing that one has big breasts can indicate that they are great nurses for young, though I don't know if breast size is relevant to milk production like says. and may be onto something.

Isn't their an anime or manga that claims that "breasts are mere imitations of buttocks"?

>I challenge you to make a variation that the grognards of Veeky Forums would actually like.
Veeky Forums doesn't like anything that makes money, so I just create generic pointy eared humans who to a man are like Neo and let normies eat it up.
I'll have a young queen who works her way up from a patriarchal society to become queen so I can sell merchandise with shitty memes.

90% chance that you just wanted to post that pic and couldn't think of a better question than this bog-standard topic we had several times and which doesn't require anyone to have played tradtional games.

they reproduce at the same levels of the humans with the same lifespan. leading to generations of young elves with no reason or capability to connect with proper society. This lead to the dark elves coming into existance once a charismatic old hero elf who was spurned by the king leading a massive rebellion of young elves against the old legendary hero elves.

But some elves decided to go to human lands, where every petty king and baron will pay top dollar for an elf "Advisor" to sit around and look pretty.

Elves in my setting have very poor senses of direction. Its why they live in the woods. See, every tree is a slightly different shade of green, and only the Elves can tell the difference. So when they get lost, they just climb up a tree and look for the color that matches their clothes. It's how they remember which tree they're from.

They also can't admit that they're wrong. Ever. It's not a pride thing, they literally can't do it. Of course, this doesn't stop them from being assholes about it.

>I challenge you to make a variation that the grognards of Veeky Forums would actually like
Hm. That would entail figuring out what grognards want, which is an exorcise in madness.

Aeven are ugly creatures that lurk outside the realms of decent men. In the old days they "Supposedly" had an empire forged from the very heat of the world, but they pissed off the wrong god or something and it froze everything over. That's why your mum tells you to be worried about crops when the temperature ever crosses 80. Nowadays? Mostly just annoyances who prey on the villages, nappin kids from their beds or killing lumbermen in the forests.

Capital Boys think they're tied to the land, because of their like'n to kill the frontier folk in the wood. If you hit one, kill it fast, they tend to call for their friends fast. Take an eye or ear and put it in a jar-o-tar for safe keeping. Each one nets us around 1000 KAR each coving the bullets, food, and coats for these damn trips.

Shh, keep quiet, I think they spotted the kiddo out there.

grognards want whatever is most different from what actually is; they are the transcendental negative

elves in my setting are started out as 1 group in a evil imperialist empire who one by one left because of various reasons wood elves(or nature elves ) left because they disagreed with creating vast armies of slave soldiers (orcs goblinoids cat folk etc.) the northern elves (which are Prussian expys Pickelhaubes and everything) were banished after they failed to overthrow the evil emperor before he ascended to evil god emperor drow were created after the emperors sister and her followers failed to steal his power high elves are the remnants of the elven empire who retreated to their islands after a massive slave revolt and demonic invasion broke off their continental holdings. Sea elves are a subculture of high elves who basically reave and pillage for a living and the so called low elves are the elves who didn't flee to the home island or didn't get killed getting there ass enslaved

There was a total war with magic abuse in my setting, so it's basically post-apocalyptic. Elven metropolis was destroyed and elven nation divided.

Star Elves retreated to remote and dangerous forest, their high priestess has created a time capsule around it, which will let elves survive long enough to use appulse in Great Magic Restoration ritual (1 year inside of time capsule is 20 years outside). Unfortunately it will take too long even inside time capsule, so there's no guarantee that high priestess will live to see it, so she's training an apprentices. Sometimes elven scout go beyond the barrier, or some foolish non-elf wanders inside it - that's the source of numerous stories about "spirited away".

Shadow Elves was originally a small group of sorcerers, which subdued lesser fae and started abusing their magic. They are insanely powerful, crazy and dangerous individuals. Fortunately, their consciousness has warped to be too fae-like, so they are unable to reliably coordinate their actions and come up with elaborate plans and strategy, simply following their urges.

Desert Elves was a most numerous part of original elven nation. They has fled from humans and orcs to deadly desert, and rebuilt their civilization here. They have lost most of powerful magic, their natural lifespan has shortened from 2-3 thousand of years to only 500-700 years, but right now they are the only part of elven race which is not endangered anymore.

This thread is full of people that think writing an extensive background makes for a good character.

When did Elric get tattoos?

Good thing we're talking about an entire race and not a single character then.

Robber Baron Elves with fantastic height-based discrimination.

They generally tolerate Humans(Elven women are homebrewed to be roughly the same height as Human men) believe it should be illegal for Halflings to not be in their Chef/Butler/Maid/Jester uniforms and that Dwarves should be kept on a leash at all times when not confined to the factory.

They do archery for sport but use guns(which are made by Dwarf slave labour so the Elves can dedicate more of their lives to artistic pursuits like music, painting and poetry) for war alongside an assortment of golems and a variety of exotic mounts mounts.
Dwarven uprisings and wars with Dwarven freestates are common but the Elves tend to hold the advantage due to being better at enchanting.

The plothooks vary between smuggling Dwarves across the borders, running weapons to help the Dwarves stage uprisings, breaking into Elven Chateaus to steal enchanted gear to even the odds between the champions of both parties,sabotaging/stealing the Elven war machines/releasing the warbeasts or siding with the Elves and acting as enforcers trying to prevent the aforementioned.

If the players choose to side with the Dwarves, the campaign pits their sneaking abilities against a race that's unusually observant. If they side with the Elves, they can expect a lot of fighting because the Elves would rather not need to dirty their hands keeping the servants in check.

My players have yet to give a shit about liberating the Halflings.

It's the same, most of this doesn't really tell you how they act, how it is to play them, how it is to speak with them. Not even important parts of their culture, their spirituality, their destiny. It's just very impersonal background noise.

There are two elven races in my setting

The Attan
>Brown islander elves, 4-5ft average height, slender builds, pale hair and eye colors, 500 year lifespans
>Can not breed with any other race
>Have been used and abused by slavers until recently, which has destroyed their original culture
>Specialize in nature magics, but less druid style and more "force nature against its will" style because life isn't fair fuck you tree!
>Enjoy their tropical islands and participate in the annual Regatta sail boat races the local civilized nations hold
>Masters of astronomy, ocean sailing and navigation
>Absolutely hate the Riddari

The Riddari
>Pale skinned elves, 5-6ft average height, dark hair and eye colors, slightly higher than normal body temperature. 5% of the population has natural telekinesis.
>Used to live over a 1000 years, now only live just over a hundred for unknown reasons
>Can interbreed with Humans but not Attan, offspring will always be a Riddari elf.
>Had a massive continent spanning civilization that was destroyed between a Dwarven apocalypse that ended that race and wiped out all life of the entire north half of the continent, and a magical Soul Plague that nearly finished off the survivors.
>Decided the Soul plague was caused by uncleanliness of soul and body and dedicated their lives to beauty and honor
>Have since rebuilt in their remaining territory, large cities of white stone and marble with an undercity directly underneth and mirroring the city above. It is meant to hold undesirables, manufacturing and waste management.
>Wants to be the center of all art, style and music for the world.
>Wields a military of armored warrior and mage knights who are just beginning to experiment with gunpowder weapons in the form of rifled lances.
>They have a network of steam trains connecting their cities and their trade partners on either side.
>Hates the Attan and believes them to be a lesser species, lower than even goblins.