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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 2624518" data-attributes="member: 2020">Ok, bear with me.  I fear I say too little with far too many words, and right now I feel sickish as well.  Adopting to Florida has it's rewards, but it has it's prices.  For my purposes I used some of the D&D rules for support.  Some of my logic is questionable at best.  And I don't pretend to be a great writer or the most imaginative guy around, for I'm not.  Also, I used cliches in my logic, so if you see one and grit your teeth, my apologies.  Haldendreevan was a city originally called Haldendrea, and Haldendrea was an unimportant but large elven city of 100,000 in the elven nation of Delrune, population 3,000,000 (95% high elven, 4% grey elven, 1% wood elven.)  The Fluff on Delrune:  The elves were Highfolkish, cosmopolitan, used magical roads to get around quickly in their country, enjoyed the company of humans and demihumans, tended towards neutral good, had a King, had a sizeable standing army of nearly entirely males, protected their females as humans would, and most of their energy was spent on growing food, building beautiful homes, and creating works of art and treasures.  These elves mostly lived in cities, travelling via their magical roads to their fields to tend them.  Delrune itself was hilly and heavily forested, temperate in climate, and similar to the Ohio River Valley from Pittsburgh to Paducah.  The Crunch on Delrune:  These were 1st edition elves, most were 0 level (in 3rd edition, most would have been 5th level or less, with very few in adventuring classes), the country was magic poor (a lot of 1st and 2nd level spells known, some 3rd, a scattering of 4th, and a very few 5th, and only a few hundred wizards in the nation), the standing army consisted primarily of green recruits led by officers of 1st through 3rd level, the women of the nation were virtually defenseless since their society kept them so, and Delrune had only one fortified border (the fortress city of Archendrea in the north.)  Delrune relied on isolationism and the protection of friendly neighbors to keep the peace, and this had worked for many centuries.  Elven political infighting and entrenched ways led to stagnation, internal rot, and an inclination of the heroic minded to leave the country.  What happened at the beginning:  An Enemy came and attempted to destroy all the countries in the region Delrune was within.  (The enemy was known as the Solistarim, but this is not relevant:  what is relevant is that there was an Enemy.)    This Enemy, as is common in many fantasy stories (cliche, I know) desired the extinction of the elves (and the drow ... all elves were elves, to them.)    The Enemy did not intend to attack Delrune first, but it was in the way on their path towards greater targets, so they destroyed half of it to clear the way.  They killed half of the elves, and destroyed their capital city, their magical roads, their crops, their meager stores of magical items, their King, their standing army, most of the rest of their leaders, and most of the heroic minded in the country.  They accomplished this easily.  Sometimes life is not fair.  The Enemy consisted of CR 10 creatures and up, and had planned the war for a century.  The elves were primarily CR 1 or 2 beings, with no experience in war.  The result was equivalent to machine gunners attacking defending swordsmen.  The war ended in a stalemate, and the Enemy fell back, leaving what remained of Delrune in peace (another cliche, but there it is.)  What happened next:  The elves suffered severe hardship due to ruined infrastructure, crops, lack of leadership to pull their country back up, and lack of help from devastated neighboring countries.  The elves suffered psychological devastation.  Many elves committed suicide by choosing to prematurely go to Arvandor.  Many more fled the country.  All suffered an extensive period of starvation, disease, and anarchy.  During this period of travail, the elves turned their backs on the Seldarine Pantheon, claiming they had been abandoned (ala, Krynn after the Cataclysm.)  Elven clerics were chased away or lost their powers.  (A reasonable argument could be made that the Seldarine did abandon the elves, really.)  This reaction to suffering, greatly intensified the suffering as plagues swept the country, and wounds could not be healed.  A secondary reaction begin, in which all those who remained loyal to the Seldarine were driven out of the country, attacked, or even killed.  The idea that it was ok for elves to kill or harm elves, a very rare event previously, became accepted and normal in Delrune.  This, despite the fact that the elves of Delrune had an inherent nature to love living, life, and to treasure life in general.  This innate tendency was whelmed and submerged under dark emotions, and remained submerged as Delrune became corrupted into evil.    Seeking power, the elves now turned to the evil deities, such as Lolth, who were overjoyed to have them.  Elven wizards began intensive research into Vile spells, since evil magic is better at killing.  (all of this clichish, I know.)  They took the 'drow approach', thinking they too could become feared and powerful like the drow.  All elven females in Delrune, and all civilian males, were pressed into military service.  To compensate for the loss of manpower in the fields, the elves instituted slavery, first for outsiders, then for elves accused of wrongs real or imagined.  A convenient way to overcome the labor shortage:  the cost was to their souls.  But the elves were about survival at any cost, and they embraced the cliched evil principals eagerly, and they did indeed reap great power and short term reward for it.  Lolth, among others, was eager to reward them, and all that military training and magical research begin to pay off.  This sorry state of affairs was confounded by a new problem.  The massacre of so much life, the drenching of the land with so much blood, the psychological pain of the survivors, and the taint of evil, sank into the Delrunian Highlands and withered them.  The entire country rapidly eroded into badlands, and the level of the land sank, creating extensive swamplands.  The elven reaction to this new hardship was to become more violent, more aggressive, and more evil.  Food could be procured in war, taken from neighbors.  Disease and starvation became accepted and tolerated norms.  Swamps made great breeding places for monsters, suitable for experimentation and increasing elven power.    Those elven druids who had survived up til now, tolerated by the new leadership of Delrune, worshipping the land and not the Seldarine, fled the country or were driven out.  And then ...  The elves were comparable, sadly, to children who had lost their parents, and had become psychologically ill because of it.  Unfortunately, there was no comfort to be had.  The elves had turned their back on the only comfort that could have helped them, the Primordial Light, choosing Darkness instead.  (Another cliche, I know.)  This attitude did not change the reality of the world around them.  And that reality was:  there were Powers out there quite capable of defeating and destroying the elves, no matter what they did or what attitude - light or dark - they took.    After decades of building their country into a fortress empire, the corrupted elves believed themselves invincible to the kind of slaughter that had occurred previously.  Reality didn't particularly care what they thought, and a new slaughter was unleashed.  A Great Enemy (Vecna, but what is important is that it was a Great Enemy) came and conquered the entire world.  All the nations of the world were conquered, either destroyed or made to serve in slavery, or serving as terrified, obedient 'allies.'    The Great Enemy desired the extermination of all elves, drow included, and said Great Enemy did just that.  Every last elf and drow in the world was killed.  Every last one.  Except for the 30,000 elves in the city of Haldendrea.  The Great Enemy made a mistake people commonly make in real life when they are intensively involved in a project and paying great attention to detail:  they overlook something glaringly obvious.  An example would be someone who mowed the grass studiously throughout the entire yard, but missed an entire section of grass (and blinked in amazement when this was pointed out to him, after he came inside to rest.)  Or, to cite another real world example, a computer meticulously maintained and cared for, vital to the company's security, but it isn't working for some reason:  they forgot to plug it in to the wall (I cite this one from a professional engineer.)  Or a person who is very careful about maintaining his car, who forgets to change the oil (the basic oil change every 3 months.)  Or even the person who prepares for a trip and readies an exhaustive list of everything to take, and compiles that list, only to forget something obvious like the dogfood, the soda pop, the kid's reading books, the portable CD player, or (grimaces) the tylenol and/or anti-diarrhea medication.  So, the Great Enemy made this mistake, Haldendreeva escaped unscathed when all the rest of Delrune was utterly destroyed, and afterwards the Great Enemy overlooked his mistake for several decades, having other enemies to fight and great goals to achieve (his servants, of course, copied his error.)  The destruction of Delrune by the Great Enemy completed it's physical destruction as well, leaving it a poisoned swamp with shattered hills sticking out of the muck.  To the west, the mountains thence exploded into seas of lava, sending volcanic smog over Delrune, poisoning and heating the air, creating tropical conditions and an eternally darkened sky and fiery glows.  To the east, fell magic in use by allies of the Great Enemy created an icecap in the temperate region, and blasts of arctic air struck into Delrune from that direction.  The two airmasses collided, producing constant storms of acid rain and black snow, windstorms and tornadoes and hail, huge swings of temperature from below 0 to 125 degrees and back, the year around, across Delrune.  The faerie peoples of Delrune, decimated in the first war, then assaulted by their previous elven friends, then decimated again by the Great Enemy, were unable to halt the downward spiral and fled the region, taking with them the last vestiges of health and most of the remaining inherent good magic of the region.  Assaulted by volcanic smog, poisoned air and water, violent heat and cold in mad succession, and a land increasingly laced with evil magic, the natural flora and fauna of Delrune perished, leaving ten thousand square miles of deadwood, rot, and cesspools.  It would take years before new vegetation, mutated and freakish, magically adapted to the extreme conditions, would take root and refill Delrune.  It would take 20 years before a new silvan forest emerged ... forest is not the word really, when you are refering to a Mirkwood/Old Forest situation gone berserl, filled with hangman trees, strangleweed, undead treants, ropers, banshees, and other niceties of this sort (think of Degobah, from the Empire Strikes Back, then fill it with monsters strong with the Dark Side of the Force.)  Also, the elves who had survived now discovered that evil, apparently, doesn't pay.  Lolth and the other deities disappeared and granted no new spells, and they withdrew all their favors from the elves (Ghanadaur stuck around, of course ... he most certainly enjoyed the situation! ... and he refused in any way to help the elves.  He did help infest the swamp with his assorted puddings, molds, jellies, and slimes, though, and took great delight when yet another elf was eaten, even elves who had once venerated him.)  And last and not least, the elves found that only their low level wizards remained, with spells of 2nd level and below (had Haldendrea had wizards of higher level, the Great Enemy WOULD have noticed this and prematurely ended this nutty story of mine.)  Thus, the elves could not teleport out or magically escape by any means.  Physical escape was out of the question, since all the lands around the swamp were filled with the Great Enemy's servants, or terrified peoples (such as the illithid) eager to carry out the edicts of the Great Enemy (edicts such as:  kill any and all elves you find, or you will share their fate.)  The food ran out in days.  Then the fresh water stored in caskets ran out (all the wells were poisoned, obviously.)  Then Haldendrea itself sank halfway into the murky, poisoned waters and slime, and remained that way.  No new place existed that was suitable for building anything substantial, so the elves were required to live out in the open, helpless before the onslaught of arctic cold and volcanic heat, poisoned air and pummeling rain, blizzards of snow and huge black hailstones.  And this was The End.  Well, shouldn't it be?  In most stories, this would be the end.  The elves would have all died, of course.  There is no plausible way they could have survived that I can think of (barring Divine Intervention, or the sudden discovery of a Mass Teleport spell to get them out of there!)  What plausible story plot could save these people?  Do you know of any?  Can you think of any?  I tried to create a situation, with this history, where the elves of Haldendrea - in their darkest hour - could not have survived by any plausible, believable, sane, rationale.  Yes, some tried to run away, as is common in many stories (in Tolkien, where the surviving elves fled Beleriand; or in Dragonlance, where the Qualinesti fled and became homeless;  or in the Forgotten Realms, where the Retreat was called after Myth Drannor was destroyed.)  Those that ran away, may have survived and may not, but they are not of consequence to the story.  Yes, they tried to find that Mass Teleport spell.  Yes, they tried Divine Intervention.  Neither effort produced results.  Yes, they tried various extreme, ridiculous things you would escape people in EXTREMIS to do.  I won't go into the gory details.  Suffice it to say, none of these tactics worked, except to kill more elves.  This is where I came in, and used the travail of Haldendrea to take the elves down the Strange Road, which led to Haldendreeva and the odd traits of elves today.    I will continue, if someone is interested.</blockquote>

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