How do you write non-cliched elves in a world/campaign?

Go hardcore with the Fey angle, instead. Make them spirits of wood and river and stone, chaotic in their temperament and alien in their values. Make them perfect, beautiful, and immortal in ways that evoke confusion, infatuation, and sometimes horror in those witnessing it.

What you see elves as is cliche, but not by any means traditional. Tolkien's depiction of elves already differs massively from modern fantasy authors' vision, but even his imagination of them is the more modern, Christianized/Sanitized one. He inherited the idea of elves as angelic beings and put it to paper. But before that idea became pervasive, elves were -to say the least- a more ambiguous presence in men's lives. They were just as likely to assemble a massive hunt for any flesh unfortunate enough to cross them as they were to revel in the woods. Just as likely to steal children as they were to teach them how to dance. And it seems to me like many elves didn't entirely understand the consequences of their actions in the first place. Maybe your elves find human beings just as terrifying and awe-inspiring as we found them? I'd certainly be weary of a race that could safely handle a metal that'd make my skin boil on contact.

Just take a behavioral characteristic of some other group and stick it on them in place of the thing you don't like.
perfect becomes weak
beautiful becomes alien
immortal becomes vampire-like trait for something
holier-than-thou becomes misunderstood nerd

Just look around you, it's not hard.

Well the elves in dargon age are treated like third world refugees.

In magic's lorwyn setting the elves consider non-beautiful (ie not elf) things less than anything and have great hunts to kill them wild hunt styles.

Could go full fei-tard

.... lizard elves

>What you see elves as is cliche, but not by any means traditional. Tolkien's depiction of elves already differs massively from modern fantasy authors' vision, but even his imagination of them is the more modern, Christianized/Sanitized one. He inherited the idea of elves as angelic beings and put it to paper. But before that idea became pervasive, elves were -to say the least- a more ambiguous presence in men's lives. They were just as likely to assemble a massive hunt for any flesh unfortunate enough to cross them as they were to revel in the woods. Just as likely to steal children as they were to teach them how to dance. And it seems to me like many elves didn't entirely understand the consequences of their actions in the first place. Maybe your elves find human beings just as terrifying and awe-inspiring as we found them? I'd certainly be weary of a race that could safely handle a metal that'd make my skin boil on contact.

His elves are more or less the Tautha dé Dannan in style, actually. The "nasty elves" is true for the medieval/modern tales of northern Europe, but it's not really that they were alien as people would think.

this is the closest to your answer
there is a reason the elves are obsessed with getting out of the feywild and into the prime material plane
at the same time, they are well aware that they are far more capable than any being on the prime material plane
so ultimately it is a phyrric victory if it is one at all
play that angle to the max and you'll get your different elves

Or go the Zelda route and make humans the only PLAYABLE race, so that the other races are actually allowed to feel unique and different.

ugh, This thread again. Fuck off
Sage

Corrupted. Tribal. Cannibalistic. Demon-worshiping. Dinosaur riding. Performing raids on the civilized people, and dragging prisoners back to their dark, temperate rain forests to either eat or sacrifice.

Emphasize elves as ancient, even a fallen civilization living among their own ruins.
I've recently done a setting in which the only elves still around are somewhere between wood and dark elves. The elves of old lived high in the canopies of giant forests, all of which are now dead and petrified, the canopies like a cave ceiling. The elves that remain are basically dark elves, scavenging and subsisting in the dark rather than reigning over their world.

I think that in most generic settings such as DnD and most of the time elves end up coming across as an obnoxious mary sue race it's not so much the fault of the setting but the fault of the author in turn, like you get all the masturbatory shit about elven feats but when you get down to their stats and particular characters they are not actually that great, basically there's a couple of bad seeds who push the elven supremacy trope.

What I do is simply add some actual defined drawbacks to match their virtues instead of simply handwaving them, like yes they get to be generally more agile and graceful than humans but they are also generally weaker and frail and this is reflected in their stats, that kind of stuff.

>implying there is a thing such as a concensus
>being this triggered by someone daring not play your mary sue straight

fuck off brainlet

Except that's literally not true, especially in Tolkien's work (which Dungeons and Dumpster Fires draws from) where elves are literally stronger than humans despite being more lean and graceful.

No dude, this actually that happens in Tolkien's works too, when you look at the cosmology they are described as basically superhuman demi-gods but then you go down to particular characters like Legolas and the only thing marvelous about him is that he doesn't sinks in snow.

Being immortal isn't marvelous?

just make elves either ayy lmaos or fallen angels.

>so fucking retarded he can’t read

Well I just killed a majority of them and then made my leader desperate to keep the rest of his people united and pure. Sounds pretty /pol/ I know but its mostly wants his people to not go extinct instead of "save the west from degeneracy." my players dig it. I also made them at war with a demigod of nature.

Go back and read the actual source material for elves. Not Tolkien. Read the folklore, myths, and legends that involved Elves. There's plenty around, including the Sidhe, Scandinavian elves, fae folk of all kinds.
Don't get them confused with fairies, that's what the situation was pre-Tolkien. Elves had become just another type of small spirit-folk, like brownies. Tolkien ended that, but in doing so he then became the "source" material for elves, and though LOTR and Middle Earth is great, it is the work of one man and cannot compare to the literary and conceptual riches of the diverse array of folklores that feature elves.

I mean, the current counter meta to me is actually elves as an oppressed servant race to humans. So you could go with something like that, though in itself it's kind of a cliche at this point.

In addition to oppositional, different but not better, to humans you can make them more monstrous by human beauty standards. Long heads, sharp teeth, inhuman eyes, etc.

Super-Ranger Wild Elves are fun

As someone who's been influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, I don't mind dabbling into the insignificance of man in my Fantasy
campaigns.

Humans don't have to be at the center of every Universe.

>Elves are elves
That's just not true though. When Tolkien wrote his books the public's idea for an elf was Puck from A Midsummer's Dream, an image that Tolkien hated. In fact, he considered not using the word elf at all because he was afraid people might imagine his Elves as tiny people with silly hats.

Make them goblinpunch druids.

Personally I'd play up the "elves are stupidly resistant to change" angle combined with a healthy dose of universally insufferable arrogance and strict adherence to some outdated code completely ill-suited to the world they live in. I did a flintlock fantasy campaign once, and the elves in that were the laughing stock of the world. Sure, they were a little stronger and more agile than humans, had much longer lifespans etc., but they'd confined themselves to their own little semi-feudalistic military dictatorship in the barely hospitable arctic, getting shat on hard whenever they tried to do anything because while the human world was industrialising the elven view of warfare was "charging at things with lances has always worked, why stop now".

The party ended up having a fairly major hand in the complete destruction of the elves, which everyone was pretty happy about.

Don't make them perfect/immortal/beautiful/holier than thou. Bosmer are a good example of elves like this; they're still clearly elves, but they're primitive, cannibalistic hunters with a tie to nature. IIRC they aren't much longer lived than humans (and them being long lived isn't important at all), and they/their culture certainly aren't perfect or beautiful.

This is also a good idea. Listen to this guy.

Reminder that no elf is perfect compared to pic related.

bump, some good ideas in this thread