Where Do Elves Get Their Metal?

[Norfleet]

Typical D&D elves have a large cultural dependency on metal products: Their melee weapons of choice are longswords and rapiers. Their other cultural weapon, the longbow, presumably requires metal for use in arrowheads, unless elves use stone arrowheads instead, but this would suffer from a similar problem. They're also noted for their chainmail, which is not only composed of metal, but composed of exotic metal: mithril.

Yet, elves have no interest in mining, according to the PHB, and only a few of them actually trade for this metal. However, elves obviously consume metal at prodigious rates: In addition to whatever metal tools are surely used to maintain their living standard, all elves are proficient in their racial weapons: This means that, unlike humans, nearly every elf will *HAVE* such a weapon to practice with, as the entire race surely could not become proficient in them if the weapons weren't widespread.

How, exactly, does a race that inhabits terrain generally unsuited for mining, and has no interest in mining at all, as elves clearly do not turn tracts of forest into festering strip mines to fuel their demand for metals, and has strong isolationist tendencies, manage to fuel their demand for all this metal that they don't extract? Why has a culture that engages in practically no mining come to favor weapons which require great amounts of metal to produce? Wouldn't it make more sense for elves to favor spears and staves, instead of swords? Spears also seem like the natural weapon choice of a race which finds the idea of being prematurely killed extremely distasteful.

 

[Hand of Evil]

You also have elementals that can be summoned and provide you with the material.

Then there are portals and gateways to planes that provide.

There are plants that take toxic material from the soil, you could say in a fantasy setting that the plants could generate it.

 

[the_mighty_agrippa]

Elves in Dragonlance practiced slavery for centuries. I suspect that much of the metal comes from magical sources - extraplanar, poly any object, etc.

 

[Voadam]

This means that, unlike humans, nearly every elf will *HAVE* such a weapon to practice with, as the entire race surely could not become proficient in them if the weapons weren't widespread.

Nah, they just have an affinity for them, even if they have never picked one up. Or at least that is one way to justify it as a racial instead of cultural ability.

 

[the_mighty_agrippa]

Actually, in my homebrew campaign, the Elves are very Gaelic and use spears in preference to the "traditional" weapons in D&D. I wanted a Cu Chulainn (sp?) feel for the race and a signature weapon went a long way.

Also, I allowed the various Elven gods to offer short or long spear as favored weapon choices.

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Wall of Iron

Duration is instant so it can't be dispelled. The metal is probably of poor quality, but when you live a couple hundred years you have time to refine the stuff.

 

[Savage Wombat]

In one of my campaigns, mithril was extracted from secret springs deep in the forest, for exactly the reason you described.

It also had the advantage of explaining why dwarves didn't use the stuff - they couldn't find it in the rocks.

 

[Felix]

They get it HERE

 

[diaglo]

is this going to be one of those summon/polymorph into balors and have them drop their vorpal weapons threads?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

They get it from dwarves via trade, which explains the traditional elf-dwarf rivalry: elves dislike being beholden to mere dwarves; dwarves don't want the world to find out that much of their wealth comes from trading with namby-pamby elves.

Edit: By playing around with the economics, you can explain why the dwarves don't have mithral. The elves pay such a high premium for it that the dwarves are better off selling it than making anything from it; they use the profits to finance the mining and refinement of a more expensive metal: adamantine.

Which suggests some interesting adventure ideas when the dwarves decide to up their monopoly prices a bit more (or the elves decide to try and break the dwarvish monopoly).

Anyone's characters feel like going into the commodity-trading business? Mithral and adamantine futures, anyone?