101 Bizarre Elvish Customs

[Electric Wizard]

1) To pass through the forest unmolested, travelers must petition to the king of the wood. The king is a recluse, and all communications must be through the "prime minister", a cringing, apologetic toady who takes days to deliver messages and often claims to not know where the king is. Travelers are allowed to wait for an audience outside the palace walls. Some petitioners have been waiting patiently for decades, and have established a rough town. Without the king's blessing, adventurers enter the woods at their own peril.

2) Elf children are not disciplined or corrected in any way by adults, because children are considered divine. Very few live to adulthood. Children who die of misadventure are believed to be blessed because they will never feel the pains and sorrows of centuries-long lives.

3) Trees may only be cut down for seven hours of one day every twelve years, when the constellations are properly aligned. Wild, Halloween-like festivals accompany the frenzy of logging and many elves die as they stagger drunkenly into the path of falling trees. Violators who harvest trees at any other time are exiled from the forest on pain of death.

 

[Ahnehnois]

4) The bodies of dead elves are dismembered and taken to the treetops, where they are left to be consumed by vultures ("Sky Burial").

 

[DnD_Dad]

5.) every morning at dawn. Elves sunbathe nude singing of about the day the were born.

 

[Marshall Gatten]

7.) Elves have a dislike for the number 6.

 

[Electric Wizard]

8) When elves from different forests meet, they take turns singing verses of different songs. If either recognizes a song the other is singing, he or she sings along and they can carry on as acquaintances. If they do not share any common songs, they must fight each other to the death.

 

[MarkB]

9) On Midsummer's Day, there is a special festival in which the Elven King may be challenged for his right to rule by a trial of music.

First, the King, dressed in a resplendent figure-hugging white suit trimmed wide at the ankles, performs a series of rousing songs from his own repertoire, accompanying himself by playing a stringed instrument of his choice.

Then any elves who wish to challenge him are given one hour to attire themselves in similar or superior garb, after which they must attempt to out-perform the King with renditions of one or more of his own songs.

If any one of these Elvish impersonators can manage to out-perform the King, he is declared the new King, and the former monarch is banished for a century and a day.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

10. Elves make underclothes from poison oak leaves as a test of endurance.

11. Two elves who arrive at a party identically dressed must dance-fight to the death.

12. Elves do not like to leave their woodland realms, because too much Vitamin D causes them to tan excessively and irreversibly. It's how the drow really came to be ...

 

[DnD_Dad]

13. If a elf is born on the first day of a new century then the father must venture forth into the darkest part forest and slay a cockatrice. If successful, he fashions a hat made of all the feathers and must wear it until the child learns the song of the cockatrice, all 2,000 lines of it.

 

[Weather Report]

14. They speak in a French accent, to annoy people.

 

[DnD_Dad]

15. They affectionately slap the rumps of every person wearing an eyepatch they pass on the street.