Elven memories, history, and legends

[arcseed]

I find myself, while designing worlds, consistently faced with the problem of what to do about long-lived elves remembering more than I'd like generally known about history.

In a dark-ages/early reanaissance sort of setting, which I'm partial to, without widespread literacy, verifiable history should last barely longer than the lives of the people who witnessed it. Say 40-60 years for humans. But if you have elves around this increases by at least a factor of 10, and the transmission of unreliable history into legend should take correspondingly longer. Not only is this an awful lot of history to come up with, it also makes dark secrets of the past harder to manage.

In my current campaign, I manage this by having the dead gods get dead a good thousand years in the past, and having the younger gods taking action to keep people from knowing too much about them. Unfortunately, this has some fairly big flaws, mainly that exploring the dead gods' temples should require archaeologists more than adventurers. And I'm not quite sure how much natural decay should happen in a millenium.

So how do the rest of y'all handle this?

 

[Magus_Jerel]

Well - in a strict sense of the word; history begins with writing.

Until things get written down; so that they can be passed on by a means other than "from one individual to the next"... by word of mouth... and lose a bit of their truth in each retelling... It doesn't matter.

Answer this question first: When did the first written information appear in My setting?

now - just make sure that no "mortal" who is currently alive is around who was born before that time... including the elves.

Start your "history" from that point.

The first "records" - of a civilization occur when stories are written down...

 

[dave_o]

Lothlorien!

IMHO, Elvenkind, as a whole, is very mysterious and guarded about themselves. In most cases, Elves have suffered a great betrayal by a less long-lived race, and as such, as very guarded about things.

Elvenkind, though, would simply keep to themselves. Perhaps they could feel like the keepers of a great burden, in that they keep the knowledge of these dark gods from spreading across the land.

Listen to 'The Council of Elrond' from the LotR soundtrack for an auditory representation of this.

 

[Lothaire]

Well the elves might have long detailed accounts of their own history. But the stereotypical elf is very arrogant. They might not care about human or dwarven history and as a result never record anything about it other than in passing.

 

[Yuan-Ti]

Players will not like this solution, but one way is to make elves (as others also said) reclusive, arrogant, untrusting, or something that makes it unlikely they will be overly forthcoming to players and humans. Players, however, cannot be elves to prevent them from being either old enough to remember things you don't want them to or from asking daddy about something. Half-elves are fine, but not elves.

Or use the Scarred Lands setting and have PC elves be part of the "forsaken" who lost part of the identity when their god was killed in the Titanswar. They don't even remember their god's name, even those who fought with him against the Titans.

This has an added dramatic bonus as a DM when your players meet an elf, and he starts talking about things that happened 600 years ago! I love that scene in LotR when Elrond says, "I was there three thousand years ago..." (or however long it was) The drama is less when one of the PCs can remember what happened 200 years ago but the player plays his elf like a 16 year old human.

 

[Plane Sailing]

IMC there are no PC elves (yet) for this very reason - I love the idea that the elves are keepers of history, and look forward to the time when PCs first meet them - and find out that some of the ones that they meet participated in historical events that they were investigating earlier in the campaign!

To my mind, the ramifications of long-lived elves (or other creatures) is never taken seriously in the core rules.

Cheers

 

[arcseed]

That's just why I ruled out the 'aloof elves' explanation: my current campaign is pretty vanilla, for the sake of a couple new players, and I didn't want to rule out elves as PCs.

Another idea: in a dark ages sorta setting, information just can't travel very far reliably. So an elf can have some very good information about what went on within a couple days' travel of his hometown, but not much else.