D&D 5E How might elven societies be different from the norm?

[Jester David]

In my campaign setting, elves are very communal. With the lack of sleeping, bedrooms are unneeded so elves just have chests or cupboards. They eat together and meditate together and bathe together. They have few personal possessions, and share with their families.

I go into cultures a little on my blog on worldbuilding:
http://www.5mwd.com/archives/748

 

[Tony Vargas]

How might elven societies be different from the norm?

I wasted a silly amount of brainpower thinking about that kind of question back in the day. This was back when elves lived like a thousand years, were all Chaotic Good, 'high' elves were the typically-woodsy sort, 'wood' elves xenophobes, more civilized/ancient 'grey' elves fading into legend, &c, so take it with a grain of salt...

In what ways would an elven city be different than a human one?

They just wouldn't have 'em, is what I concluded. They like living in harmony with nature, they're very long-lived, and they haven't overpopulated the world, so they likely have very low fertility (or very high mortality from fighting orcs &c, or practice infanticide, take you pick, I went with conscious-choice low fertility: elves conceive only if they really want to, and often not even then, or after decades of working at it).

'In harmony with nature' for a humanoid species means a foraging lifestyle, elves are well-established as living in the woods, which isn't bad for that kind of thing, and I pictured elves as not needing a lot of food in the first place, but their populations wouldn't approach those of a city, certainly not in density.

For example, since elves don't sleep, would they even have bedrooms?

I doubt they even have building in the conventional sense. In my campaign world back in the day, elves talked to and magicked trees into growing into shapes that provided shelter for them, literal 'treehouses.' The trancing instead of sleeping thing was a little later, based on the sleep/charm resistance, and, IIRC, came from an old Dragon article that also suggested elves should have ultravisions (low-light) rather than infravision (dark-vision). So no bedrooms, per se, meditating or trancing might be done under the stars, or during the day, in a deep thicket, if you go all the way and figure elves are naturally nocturnal (as you might expect from an above-ground critter that sees in the dark).

Would they have inns?

I imagined them having a general expectation of hospitality among elves, and extending that to other species when it seems right (which, since they tended towards CG back in the day would be often). But an inn in the traditional sense? Only at the edge of a community, as part of some sort of trading outpost.

Would elven cities be surrounded by small elven "farms" that support it with food?

Maybe horticulture. Elven woods might have an abundance of edible plants because elves coax and persuade and enchant them to grow there, and a relative lack of pests afflicting those plants because the elves use glamour to get them to go elsewhere (like human agricultural land). But cleared agricultural land? Fields? Enslaving livestock for food? No. Icky.

I'm a bit torn, because on the one hand I want the city to make sense given what elves are like, but on the other hand I don't want to have to create an entire city from scratch and force my players to learn how it all works.

If it's not fun, hand-wave it. Print out a picture of Rivendell off the internet, and leave it at that.

 

[feartheminotaur]

"These boots of elvenkind are are great for sneaking up on enemies."

"No, they are to sneak away. They are reinforced to keep us from stubbing our toes and slip resistant as well"

"Riiight. I'll take 'em. So, the money...do you want to open that bubble so I can pass it to you, or...?"

"No leave them on the table"

*Begins spraying disinfectant on the gold pieces*

 

[ChrisCarlson]

Yeah, wood elves mingling, scattered among the trees, living off the land. Okay. That's easy enough.

But what about high elves? Those ancient, more "civilized" elven peoples who do live in large, more formal communities? Anyone out there do anything other than the typical Rivendell style city?

 

[Springheel]

Maybe horticulture. Elven woods might have an abundance of edible plants because elves coax and persuade and enchant them to grow there, and a relative lack of pests afflicting those plants because the elves use glamour to get them to go elsewhere (like human agricultural land).

I like the idea of some kind of "elven bread" like LotR, where you need very little will sustain you. This seems to dovetail nicely with the "Goodberry" cantrip, so I've been musing about the idea of elves being able to grow something that is like a natural "goodberry". Maybe the berries were cultivated from some kind of magical berry from the Feywild, and elves now grow them. Every household would have its own "garden", intertwined with the architecture, that would provide enough berries to provide continual daily sustenance, while other fruits, nuts, etc, would be kept for variety and special meals.

This means elven homesteads can support themselves, even if they are close together, without having to ship food around. It also means elves have no real need to work in order to eat, which frees them up to pursue art and leisurely pursuits.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I like the idea of some kind of "elven bread" like LotR, where you need very little will sustain you...This means elven homesteads can support themselves, even if they are close together, without having to ship food around. It also means elves have no real need to work in order to eat, which frees them up to pursue art and leisurely pursuits.

Fits nicely.

This may sound cynical, but when thinking about what elves should be like in my world back then, whether culturally or physiologically, a guide I set myself back that elves tended to have characteristics were good (pleasant) for individuals more than good for society.
In part because, y'know, CG.
In part because I envisioned them as a fading race.

 

[Unwise]

For me, the stand out thing about elven culture is that nobody works, at least by human standards. On any given day, an elf may or may not turn up to work and everybody is OK with this. If the local blacksmith does not get his shipment of steel until a month after he ordered it, he is not that put out. Everybody will just have to wait. If the builder then can't make a building because he does not have his hammer and saw fixed, oh well, maybe next month.

If a PC turns up to see a Sage, they might find he has gone skiing and will be back in a month. They are expected to be OK with this, after all, what is the rush, they can just chill out for a while and catch him when he comes back, if he does. I use this to infuriate PCs quiet a lot. On the flip side, the elven idea of something being urgent is very foreign too. The elf king sends them on an adventure to do something with the utmost haste. They return a few days later and he is confused, as he only just sent them, he was expecting them to arrive sometime later in the year. The macguffin they busted their humps to get will sit on a shelf for 6 months until the court sage gets around to studying it.

Commerce is also a bit weird. They are not very greedy people and are happy to wait things out. You need a sword, but have no money to buy it, that is fine, they know you are good for it, just pay when you can. If you are an older human, they don't mind if your son comes back to pay for it some time after you are dead. They think humans are incredibly rude for demanding payment straight away though. Its OK in their books to offer to pay somebody 1000GP when you don't have a penny to your name. After all, sometime in the fifty years you will surely have the money.

Elves also already have what they need. Their city has more houses than they need, as their populations are generally dwindled. Living so long and making such good stuff, they already have their needs met, so they can live a life of reflection and song if they want. This also helps explain why somebody can be 100yrs old and level 1 and why humans achieve so much more in their lifetime than elves do.

 

[Morinth]

I always imagine elven societies to be rather Scandinavian in flavor, I think that was the motif that Tolkien was going for. And of course, elves as we know them in RPGs are all the stepchildren of Tolkien. So the depictions of Rivendell and Lothlórien from the movies are probably a good starting point. Whereas human societies are geared toward packing as many people into a square mile as possible, elven population is always rather low. They reside in areas that are easy to defend with few individuals, and areas that other races find too forbidding or desolate. They prefer colder climates, and wood elves would probably be in alpine forests and such. I picture them living in scenic places like Yosemite that are impractical for large populations, and are remote and distant from other races strongholds, with lots of natural barriers and choke points they can exploit for defense. Their martial skill is highly defensive in nature, it is rare that elves raid other lands for any purpose, they just don't value other people's land and possessions enough to risk getting killed. From a practical standpoint, their everyday lifestyle would be similar to Native Americans traditional cultures that were based in forested areas, like the Pacific Northwest or Canada.

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, wood elves mingling, scattered among the trees, living off the land. Okay. That's easy enough.

But what about high elves? Those ancient, more "civilized" elven peoples who do live in large, more formal communities? Anyone out there do anything other than the typical Rivendell style city?

Rivendell wasn't really a city though. It was a large fortified manor house or castle. Caras Galadhon and Mithlond were the last high elf cities in Middle Earth.

From what little we know of Caras Galadhon, the description I gave of an elf city in my earlier post would seem to largely apply, except that it also had a physical wall about it (and a river diverted to form a moat) and was perhaps larger in scale and slightly denser in its center. The very great size of the city in the text doesn't seem to correspond to the sort of numbers of inhabitants that a similarly sized human city would have - which would have been 100's of thousands. Caras Galadhon appears to have been something like a large number of ewok villages, somewhat loosely scattered until you reached the center of it where there were numbers of large communal buildings. Even this density seems to have been something designed to provide for security against nearby enemies. Typical paintings of Caras Galadhon don't provide for the economic and agricultural life of the city. So that Caras Galadhon for a D&D inspired RPG setting would look more like an epic scale version of the wilderness seeming city I described seems perfectly appropriate to me, and for my large elven capitals that would be very much the case. An elven capital might be a 20'x20' mile city with a population density of no more than 60-70 per square mile owing to large tracts of meandering parkland and orchards. Only in communal centers, normally collections of temples and government buildings, would it look anything like a city to human eyes or have anything approaching urban density.

Mithlond was a commercial center and a port, and as such probably had much greater density of buildings to provide for the labor needed to build large vessels and to handle cargo and so forth. And likewise, being threatened, it probably was walled and otherwise fortified. So it might well have looked something like a graceful version of a human city, and presumably cities like Minas Tirith were at least partially inspired by that sort of design. Indeed, Minas Tirith appears to be made something like a miniature scale version of Gondolin, notably having a less elaborate system of gates.

But one trope that is common to paintings of elven cities that I don't think you'd ever see in a real one is lots of waterfalls incorporated into the buildings. That's so clearly a human imagination of a city in a natural setting and not something they'd build. They might build near a waterfall, but only in such a way that the very predictable erosion the waterfall would cause over the course of centuries would not interfere with the design. A typical waterfall would erode back 10's of meters in the lifetime of an elf. An elf doesn't see trees and rocks as being stable enduring things, but as transient like flowers.

 

[ChrisCarlson]

Rivendell wasn't really a city though. It was a large fortified manor house or castle. Caras Galadhon and Mithlond were the last high elf cities in Middle Earth.

I know. But this isn't a LotR thread. There are already threads elsewhere for that sort of arguing. If it wasn't clear that I was trying to apply the Rivendell aesthetic to an otherwise elven cultural paradigm (by intentionally inserting the word 'style' between 'Rivendell' and 'city'), I apologize. But please keep the in-depth Tolkein scholarship debatery over in those other threads where it belongs. Thanks.

But one trope that is common to paintings of elven cities that I don't think you'd ever see in a real one is lots of waterfalls incorporated into the buildings. That's so clearly a human imagination of a city in a natural setting and not something they'd build. They might build near a waterfall, but only in such a way that the very predictable erosion the waterfall would cause over the course of centuries would not interfere with the design. A typical waterfall would erode back 10's of meters in the lifetime of an elf. An elf doesn't see trees and rocks as being stable enduring things, but as transient like flowers.

Except: magic.