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

[MostlyDm]

For what it's worth I think Tony's ideas are also pretty good, and work better than most I've seen while trying to stay true to the traditional spirit of elves.

I just find elves largely intolerable, so I'm drawn to any depiction of them that shakes things up a bit.

 

[Morinth]

I didn't see his suggestion as bleak/dark/edgy.

Just a logical conclusion drawn from a race as implausible and perfect as the elves.

You can't have a race that is simultaneously: 1) in "harmony" with nature 2) perfectly beautiful and clean and above mortal concerns 3) possesses a vast amount of mineral wealth, finely worked goods, etc. 4) is a paragon of holier-than-thou moral virtue.

These are not really compatible. For one thing, nature is incredibly hostile to any sort of civilized life. To achieve great works, you need to subjugate nature. You also need to be willing to get your hands dirty by mining, smelting, farming, etc. So you can have #3 and #4 at the expense of cleaving closely to #1 and #2, for example.

Basically... The only way to have all of those things is for one or more of them to be a facade. His suggestion that #4 was the facade, which is in my opinion kinda clever and novel.

I don't see why there is any disconnect. For what it's worth, the "harmony with nature" bit is really just a function of low population, large territory, and minimal infrastructure. "Perfectly beautiful and clean and above mortal concerns" is a perception, elves themselves probably don't regard themselves as such, or if they do, it's a byproduct of other races finding them thus. They are gracile and have refined features, that's just anatomy. As for their mineral wealth and such, they have very long lives in which to accumulate it, and many skills with which to trade for items they don't produce themselves. And as for paragons of holier-than-thou moral virtue, again, I think that's just personal perception.

I think elven societies appear "too perfect" by some standards because every individual is highly trained and highly skilled. There are no elven "commoners" sitting around selling sausages to tourists. Every elf is either a ranger, a wizard, a cleric, a bard, a fighter, or an artisan of some sort. They invest in each individual, and they train their children rigorously. There is tremendous discipline instilled in them by the society as a whole. Those elf individuals who can't fit into this framework naturally leave elf society and become adventurers. But YMMV, if you just don't like elves I can't convince you that my perception of them has any merit.

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

You can't have a race that is simultaneously: 1) in "harmony" with nature 2) perfectly beautiful and clean and above mortal concerns 3) possesses a vast amount of mineral wealth, finely worked goods, etc. 4) is a paragon of holier-than-thou moral virtue.

I wouldn't really expect elves to have "a vast amount of mineral wealth" - that's more a dwarf thing.

I'd expect metal to be relatively rare and valuable, acquired by trade. Most elvish metal items are probably magical; you don't waste metal on ordinary stuff.

I'd expect their general tools to look pretty Stone Age -- ordinary knives, awls, etc. are probably stone or bone.

For one thing, nature is incredibly hostile to any sort of civilized life. To achieve great works, you need to subjugate nature.

Mmm... sorta/maybe/yes/no.

If you define "natural" as unaltered by humans, nobody's seen a "natural" landscape on Earth in close to a thousand years, except Antarctica and some polar islands. It turns out that even very low-tech, low-population peoples tend to change environments quite a bit with fire, introducing dogs and rats, etc.

'What is nature' is a big open question/issue in RL environmentalism/conservation these days.

So, on that principle, I'd say elves certainly alter their environments greatly - but the result "looks natural" to a human eye. It includes a wide variety of species, there are no monoculture grain fields or paved roads or brick-and-stone towns and cities, and when possible natural/ecosystem processes are incorporated into the agriculture/economy rather than replaced.

Every elf is either a ranger, a wizard, a cleric, a bard, a fighter, or an artisan of some sort.

Well... I do think there would be elven 'farmers'. But since elven agriculture is more like ecosystem-management, they're going to look like hunters/gatherers/trappers/fishermen rather than like wheat farmers or cattle ranchers or shepherds.

There is tremendous discipline instilled in them by the society as a whole.

Well, I think they tend to have chaotic leanings, so I don't think it's a discipline and intense training thing. It's more an accumulation of skills over a really long time (elves aren't really considered adults until 100). Plus, their form of agriculture doesn't require nearly as much time and labor as classic grain-field agriculture, so they have more time to learn other stuff.

 

[trentonjoe]

I like the comparison to the advanced, hunter gatherer societies. I don't see elves, farming at all.


Couple kinda random thoughts that connect to the real world and may be useful about hunter/gatherer societies:

1. They tend to spend a lot of time together. I read somewhere that around 4 hours a day are spent in common areas "relaxing".
2. They prefer to find permanent homes. People are only nomadic when they have to be. There's a significant portion of them who have seasonal homes.
3. Water is super important.
4. They keep the population down one way or another. Infanticide was common as are long periods between births for women. This could also be a reason to go adventuring, sort of like the Amish tradition of whatever it is called when they leave the community to experience the world.



Ideas that others have mentioned that I really like for elves are:

1. Few belongings with a high level of care for them
2. No human like agriculture
3. Lots of space-assuming a human like diet you need a few square miles per person.
4. No internal trade system. External trade would serve only to acquire goods they need with coins being a necessary evil only when, uh, necessary.

 

[ChrisCarlson]

I think I might like the idea of high elves (in particular) being the "Greeks" of D&D. The original civilized civilization. The rest of the peoples of the realms copied, adapted, and made what they took their own versions of their original, pure, society.

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

4. They keep the population down one way or another.

In a D&D world, I think elves would be struggling to keep their populations stable. If they don't reproduce until 100+... and D&D worlds tend to be full of dangerous monsters, and occasional big cataclysms too...

I think the only reason elves can survive is that their long lifespan also means comparatively large proportions of high level characters. If an army invades, the elves won't send out an army to meet it - they'll devastate it with area effect magic from a few casters.

3. Lots of space-assuming a human like diet you need a few square miles per person.

Well, I would tend to think that elven societies (due to slow or nonexistent population growth) would mostly be in lands that have been elf-occupied for thousands of years, and thus very modified - by both traditional techniques (careful management of what's hunted/fished/collected, replanting useful species, etc.) and by magic.

Their everyday food-gathering activities might look "hunter-gatherer", but probably 50%+ of the trees are fruit or nut trees, there are a billion ponds full of fish all over the place (somebody probably used Move Earth to make ponds), etc.

More like low intensity agriculture than hunter-gathering.

Plus, they probably have more magic than other humanoids - so Purify Food and Drink reduces wastage, Goodberry creates food, etc.

So I'd expect them to get a lot more food per square mile than the best human hunter-gatherer cultures manage..

 

[Celebrim]

I like the comparison to the advanced, hunter gatherer societies. I don't see elves, farming at all.

They farm, but most of it doesn't look like what we think of as farming.

I should back up.

In my game there are two basic races of (free) elves: high elves and all the rest. All the other elves, snow elves, desert elves, wood elves, ect. belong to the 'wild elf' racial group, and they are basically elven barbarians. Unlike some campaign worlds, I don't have like 20 different elven racial subtypes. The wild elf culture is still basically hunter gatherer, and if you are hunter-gather and basically humanoid you society has to be mobile. Without intensive agriculture, megafauna like humans with relatively poor digestive efficiency (but with ability to digest a lot of different things), has to be mobile in some fashion. You can't just stay in one place. So the wild elves live a lot like you'd expect hunter gather bands to live like. In fact, they are good bit more common in my world than human hunter gatherer bands. They hunt (offending their high elf kindred with their primitive savage ways) and go from place to place, largely independently of any larger economy.

The High Elves on the other hand look more like a society that has become what's known as "complex hunter gatherers". No, this may or may not be obvious, but the big problem with intensive agriculture is not figuring how to stick seeds in the ground and get plants to come up. Humans in the real world probably figured out that pretty much as soon as they became recognizable modern humans (or sooner). They were just as smart as you and I, and it wouldn't have been hard to figure out that plants are where seeds come from and that the seeds of one plant produce more plants like it. The big problem with agriculture is storing the food. The problem is after you harvest all this stuff, mostly it would get eaten by something else before you were done with it. And it would be big, heavy, and bulky, you couldn't really carry it with out. The problem with agriculture is figuring out what to do with the harvest - all this excess. And you had to do it in such a way that you didn't starve while transitioning to this new system. So the real problem was finding foods that could preserved, and figuring out how to keep say the rats from eating it all. That required technology. It required mastery of fire. It required pottery making. It required well all sorts of stuff.

The way hunter-gather's initially deal with this is that the plant something the year before that is naturally hardy and grows well, then move around between different climate zones, and when they come back next year they hopefully find a bumber crop of what they planted. It's not true intensive agriculture. It's more of a bonus. If it failed, that's a bit bad, but you can always go back to hunter and gathering wild food.

I said the High Elf society initially looks like complex hunter-gathers. But it's not, because they don't have to move around. It's simply been around so long, and understood the ecosystem so well, that it's tailored the whole natural environment to suit it. So the blackberry patch might meander around over the centuries, but its meandering in such away and with the appropriate nudges, that it never actually transitions fully from meadow to scrub forest and you always have as much blackberries as you need. All those oaks are infested with truffles, because why not. Morrels come up in their season. The hives are always overflowing from the seasonal flowers that come up practically the year round. The pecans and walnuts have been selectively bred to produce bumper crops of nuts, because well, if you are around for centuries you can actually selectively breed things that are around a long time. And as for pests, well, you can just _tell them_ that this is yours and you need your share, but that you'd be happy to let them have your left overs. Bits like St. Patrick and the snakes are doable (if you have the need), and you can treat that trick as part of your technology. So, too much rats, invite the snakes over for a temporary feast, for example.

The elves are manipulating the land just as much as the humans. But from the Elf perspective, they are preserving and healing it, and the humans are just mostly tearing it up and plowing it over with these primitive (but admittedly effective) mono-cultures that lose all the vast diversity that the environment is supposed to have.

Nobody coordinates this. They just do it.

Incidentally, if you were walking through an elf forest, and you were familiar with forests, you'd almost certainly get this weird vibe like something was not quite right. You might hit on the word 'uncanny' even, though you might not be able to put into words what was wrong. That vibe you'd be picking up is the subtle manner in which the forest was not truly natural. And if you weren't truly stupid, you'd get the heck out right then and there before someone put an arrow through your eye from 120 yards away (truestrike; wizard is an elf's favored class).

Every elf is either a ranger, a wizard, a cleric, a bard, a fighter, or an artisan of some sort.

That's possible, but its equally possible that with such a long lived race, most elves are just 6th to 12th level commoners. By the time your are 8th to 10th level, even if you are commoner, you've still had the opportunity to pick up a tremendous breadth and depth of skill. And in a lot of ways, a 6th level commoner is going to seem a lot like a 3rd level fighter or warrior, if push comes to shove - especially since elves are just naturally skilled with swords and bows. The elf didn't live a fierce adventurers life; he's just been slowly over the centuries accumulating knowledge and experience. Sure, elven leaders are probably not commoners, and probably also - if they've been around a while - higher level than their shorter lived counterparts. But in D&D terms, it doesn't require a fancy class to have extraordinary skill.

Living like an elf would require extraordinary discipline for a human because its unnatural. For an elf, living like a human would require extraordinary discipline.

 

[Morinth]

I guess I wouldn't call such elves commoners, but rather "experts" or some such. I think every elf has some kind of specialization and training, even if it's just "farming". By non-elven standards, that farmer would be an advanced herbalist/horticulturalist.

 

[GreenTengu]

I don't see why there is any disconnect. For what it's worth, the "harmony with nature" bit is really just a function of low population, large territory, and minimal infrastructure. "Perfectly beautiful and clean and above mortal concerns" is a perception, elves themselves probably don't regard themselves as such, or if they do, it's a byproduct of other races finding them thus. They are gracile and have refined features, that's just anatomy. As for their mineral wealth and such, they have very long lives in which to accumulate it, and many skills with which to trade for items they don't produce themselves. And as for paragons of holier-than-thou moral virtue, again, I think that's just personal perception.

I think elven societies appear "too perfect" by some standards because every individual is highly trained and highly skilled. There are no elven "commoners" sitting around selling sausages to tourists. Every elf is either a ranger, a wizard, a cleric, a bard, a fighter, or an artisan of some sort. They invest in each individual, and they train their children rigorously. There is tremendous discipline instilled in them by the society as a whole. Those elf individuals who can't fit into this framework naturally leave elf society and become adventurers. But YMMV, if you just don't like elves I can't convince you that my perception of them has any merit.

Actually, the issue is in regard to the resources elves have.

If a society has metal, someone needs to spend their time in the pitch darkness covered with soot and swinging a pick in order to mine that metal, someone needs to stand next to a roaring forge that can heat that metal to a boiling point and someone needs to pound that metal into shape.

If every single last elf without exception is trained to use swords... guess what? CLEARLY they have tons of metal to put towards that end.

Those big flawlessly white ivory towers they live in must be made from stone. And not just any stone, they have been picky about their stone. This means there must be a quarry site, there must be workers with picks and other tools cutting the stone from the quarry site, there must be large numbers of workers dragging that stone from the quarry site all the way up that mountain or into the depths of that forest over rough terrain in order to build these things.

If Elves get to participate in grand feasts every night, then you must in fact have a fairly sizable piece of land that is tilled and worked and watered and harvested constantly. Someone needs to be doing this labor.

If they have grand libraries filled with books, then someone must be cutting the lumber (even if they don't cut down the tree in its entirety), someone must be working it to pulp, someone must be forming it, someone must be bleaching it... creating paper, particularly with midevil technology, is quite an involved process.

And that goes for the clothing they wear too. For the elves to constantly have the finest in silk clothing despite living in conditions where it would get soiled constantly... you know how much work is involved in making silk in traditional ways? And to cloth their entire population with fresh clothing and cleaning it constantly is tons of hard work.


Look at what you wrote here yourself and if you put a bit more thought into it, you can see the problem. Just think about it.

Every single elf without exception is a wizard or bard or ranger or craftsman? Every. single. one?!!

In order for ANYONE to have that sort of position, to especially have their position dressed and surrounded in the kind of finery they get, it takes 7-9 other people doing the actual filthy, hard, rough, taxing, back-breaking labor in order to build where they live, feed them, cloth them, provide them with their tools, transport all this stuff and generally allow them to live without any distractions from their "enlightened" pursuits that ensure they do not have to do an honest days work in their entire immortal sleepless lives.

Someone must be doing this. And by your own very admission-- it is not a single member of their race. Universally their entire people live as elite nobles with all their cares and worries done away with and all their labor done for them. There are only two possible ways this is possible.

1) They are absolutely exploiting someone else's labor in a way that is morally murky and likely very much a form of slavery or serfdom that they just rationalize away.

2) MUCH MORE DAMNING, they have such extraordinarily powerful magics that they can, with a wave of the hand, eliminate all need for the common class all together... and sinisterly enough, keep this secret to themselves. They have spells that, if used, can provide all the food, shelter, clothing, etc. that a people could ever desire and if they simply shared those spells with the dwarfs, humans, halflings, dragonborn, orcs, hobgoblins, etc... then instantly all suffering people would be able to live in perfect comfort, all pain would be eliminated, all war would instantly come to an end because there would be nothing left to fight over and the 90% of humanoidity suffering across the world would be able to live like nobility and also devote their existences to higher, enlightened pursuits.... Yet they cruelly keep this power to solve all world hunger and strife to themselves while passing judgement on everyone else for not living like saints when they are the only ones who get to live in paradise.


Either way, elves must fundamentally be evil beings if every single one of them can live like nobility when we know for a fact that for anyone to live like nobility, so many more must live like commoners and they are unwilling to provide any sensible explanation as to where their commoners are.

 

[Morinth]

TL; DR: You hate elves. I get it.

Funny how you can only see one way for elves to live beautifully—through exploitation of other races. I don't think that really says as much about elves as, well, other things. I mean, this is a universe where magic exists and people come back from the dead, and THIS is the thing you find "unrealistic".