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

[Celebrim]

I'm a bit torn, because on the one hand I want the city to make sense given what elves are like, but on the other hand I don't want to have to create an entire city from scratch and force my players to learn how it all works.

So I'm going to assume you'll be able to recognize how radically different what I'm going to describe is from a medieval environment.

A typical elven city won't look like a city. Indeed, an unobservant traveler could walk through an elven city, and never see an elf or realize he's in a city, and walk out the other side (if not noticed and killed without warning by a wary elf).

Elven communities generally only have 1-2 households per square mile. They generally will not put to plow more than 1-4 acres per household. That means that compared a medieval country side where out of every square mile you have about 512 acres under cultivation and maybe 100 acres of wood, in an elven area you'll probably have 620 acres of wood and less than 20 (and often less than) 10 under traditional cultivation. Elven homes and farms are likewise shaped to appear integral to the natural settings, as if they grew or evolved rather than were made. They are often made by training trees or vines to specific shapes using as little cut lumber or shaped stone as is necessary. In the real world, the living bridges of Meghalaya are an example of construction through this technique. Humans who build in this fashion are building for their grand-children or great-grandchildren. But 60 years is just a season of life to an elf.

The first thing to understand is the typical elf is poor. They live lives of fairly extreme poverty and they own very few things. Those things that they do own are very well made, but they don't own much. A typical elven farm will be 1-4 acres of herbs, root and seasonable vegetables. The majority of their subsistence though is by gathering - typically fruits and nuts. One mark of an elfish wood is the presence of comparatively large amounts of chestnut, hickory, almond, walnut, and oak trees - all of which the elf delights in and finds edible. There will also be large amounts of apple, cherry and other fruit bearing trees. But unlike a human orchard with its small regularly planted and carefully stunted trees, an elf orchard is made of trees that appear to be growing wild and naturally. The elves use their great agility, their slender builds, their comfort with heights, and their friendship with living and growing things to harvest right out of the canopy, modifying their environment only slightly to allow access to the upper branches. They also delight in mushrooms and recognize any edible varieties. Dried fruit and nuts are typical winter provisions, and stereotypical elfin style 'iron rations'. They also cultivate various other crops in wild settings, such as berries, onions, chives, and garlic. The result is a highly distributed 'farm' that can sustain only a very low population density and has not nearly the productivity of human farming techniques, but which to casual observation appears to be natural. This is the elfish ideal of gardening, although they often practice different forms in their temple gardens to celebrate and highlight particular features of nature.

A typical elfish city will be about 7 miles across, yet contain in its near 50 square miles no more than 600 to 2000 individuals. A typical human city might crowd the same amount within a wall enclosing no more than 50 acres, with miles of cleared and cultivated land around it. For elves suitable gap of true wildness is regarded as essential between communities. So a 1000 square mile region might contain at most 10,000 elves, between a 1/3rd and 1/10th the population that the same amount of land would sustain for humans depending on the percentage the humans would find arable. It's pretty easy to see then why elves aren't conquering the world, or why humans might feel that they are settling uninhabited wilderness at the same time the elves feel they are being crowded and invaded.

Elven communities are somewhat loosely ordered. Each household is basically sovereign, and no problem is typically treated as pressing unless it involves someone immediately dying. Government might be best described as "government by whomever cares enough to do something". Most decisions that effect the whole community are supposed to be made collectively, but sometimes it can take years to reach a consensus, and often as not that consensus is, "You know, we should just live and let live; you go your way, and I'll go mine." Leaders are basically expected to smooth over arguments, give advice, serve the community, but not take charge unless its an absolute emergency. In an emergency, a community will generally pull together, especially against any outsider. Afterall, most are probably related to each other by close kinship. You might describe a typical community as somewhere between an Amish community and Galt's Gulch, with a nominal feudal Lord who has almost no real power but is very respected in theory.

Elves are xenophobic, in part because they have to be. They are not a durable race. They aren't known for their fortitude or recuperative powers. They are delicate, and their communities are delicate. Human cities look like huge festering reservoirs of filth and disease, and humans look like disease vectors and rapacious predators. They can't afford a plague. They can't easily recover from disaster. What they build over the course of decades can be wrecked in weeks or days or hours. It takes centuries for elfish populations to recover, and by that time usually some other disaster has happened. Trespassers are usually shot first and then investigated, unless they are obviously and completely helpless (in which case, they are usually enspelled and then investigated). Any friend would know better than to walk in uninvited, and would certainly be speaking elfish or sending animals as messengers on ahead of them. Walk into an elf would, and forget the fact they are probably CG, you'll get attacked - usually by something you can't see unless you are very sharp eyed.

The borders of elf land are almost always enchanted. An elf 'wall' is not a physical one. It's made of spells, protective runes, and magical traps designed to confuse, bewilder, and disorient any trespasser. Suddenly appearing thick mists, spells that cause you to lose a sense of direction and walk in circles, spells that cause you to be overcome with weariness and sleep until nightfall, spells that produce fear and panic, spells of forgetfulness, suggestions that they should leave or return to fulfill some duty that seems suddenly utterly important, illusions of nebulous attackers, distortions that cause the wood to appear frightful, and so forth girdle the edges of elf lands. The well-informed, upon seeing such signs would typically get the hint and try to go back the way they came.

 

[seebs]

In one of the games I play in, we were travelling and came across some elves. The elves had wagons, sort of; they'd been overgrown and settled into the ground. I'd guess they'd been there 50-100 years.

They determined which direction we were coming from, and which direction we were going, and made marks on sticks that had existing marks on them. They had apparently become curious and decided to spend a few decades tallying travel in this location.

 

[Hriston]

Among human societies, I'd say the closest to a wood-elven way of living would be that of complex hunter-gatherers, perhaps practicing a form of shifting cultivation. Such forms of subsistence are capable of supporting settlements of reasonably large size although probably not what we'd call cities. Elves tend to be chaotic in that they live in small migratory bands without a strict hierarchy except in that they often share a common allegiance to a hereditary ruler. The locale of the ruler's dwelling, therefore, is often the closest to what we'd call a city. Among wood-elves, these often take the form of large underground caverns and/or groves of particularly large and ancient trees.

 

[Springheel]

The first thing to understand is the typical elf is poor. They live lives of fairly extreme poverty and they own very few things. Those things that they do own are very well made, but they don't own much.

Some good stuff there Celebrim, thanks for sharing.

Couple questions: Do your elves use currency? Do they have anything resembling craft guilds? And if not, how do advanced things like armour and jewellery get made?

 

[Edwin Suijkerbuijk]

What would elven farming or livestock look like? I have a hard time imagining wood elves clearing large tracts of land for farming wheat or other typical staples. And would elves have typical farms with chickens, pigs, etc? I have a hard time picturing that too. But they're not going to be able to support a large town or city just from hunting. In most fantasy movies I can think of, they seem to completely gloss over where elves get their food from.

One thing elven farming could look like would be a cultivated forrest.
All plants that have no use ( food, building materials, spell componets herbs) have been culled from the forrest.
ending up with a forrest with lower bio diversity but where all plants are usefull in some way.

 

[Celebrim]

Some good stuff there Celebrim, thanks for sharing.

Couple questions: Do your elves use currency?

Yes. They see the value of having a medium of exchange the same as anyone else. In theory, many rural elves might not possess the currency to conduct transactions, so you'd have a lot of barter going on, but that would be a symptom of their general poverty and not a lifestyle choice. They would certainly have nothing against being wealthy, and indeed would find it an admirable condition to be in; they just simply don't prioritize acquisition of goods for its own sake.

In my ideal RPG world, the world would emulate the medieval norm by having currency be relatively scarce whether we are talking about how elves normally live or the quasi-feudal societies of men, but in my experience as a practical matter the effort in running an RPG with a low currency schtick does not enhance the game compared to the overhead it causes in play. Having a single universal standard of currency that is relatively common is a necessary or at least extraordinarily simplifying assumption of play.

Do they have anything resembling craft guilds?

They don't have a lot of organization. A craft guild is simply a government backed monopoly created to carry out price collusion between people who are former rivals. As Chaotics, they would tend to find this dishonest and distasteful on several levels. First, that there is a sufficiently strong and active ruler capable of enforcing this monopoly and seeing it is not trespassed against is distasteful. And second, while they might understand the self-interest that leads you to wanting that monopoly, they wouldn't think it fair that you'd be required to participate, nor that a would be buyer could not negotiate their own rate. The fear of the collective squashing the individual is pretty strong here.

As far as government goes, remember I said that in practice they work a lot like a "government by who can be bothered to act"? Generally speaking, most of the bureaucratic and civil functions of government are ultimately done by the temples, and most of the temples are themselves Chaotic in philosophical inclination.

Do they have anything resembling craft guilds? And if not, how do advanced things like armour and jewellery get made?

Forging something is generally just a matter of having a sufficiently powerful furnace and a few basic tools for shaping it - smooth metal rods, smooth metal bowls, anvils, hammers, etc. Most of those are themselves products of smithcraft. I haven't thought particularly hard about the economics of elven craftsmanship, but I presume it would work similarly to any traditional hand craftsmanship, of which I think the Japanese is probably the most well-preserved example given their isolation preserved medieval techniques up into the 19th century and allowed them to be then documented and preserved to some degree. So it would be an example of just figuring out how that worked. I would imagine you'd have a couple of families jointly working on something as complex as armor smithing. The skill would probably get passed down from the master to whomever showed the greatest zeal and interest in it. Of particular interest would be figuring out how to do that in a way that didn't mess up the neighborhood.

Jewelry isn't really that complex. A single person can produce jewelry, particularly because it works in soft metals. What most jewelry is, if you are using medieval techniques, is very very slow craftsmanship, for which elves are exceptionally well suited. For example, to polish hard stones in the modern world, you use a small fast spinning diamond covered wheel. In the middle ages, what you did was get a 6-10' diameter mill stone made of some hard fine grained stone, hung it vertically and used either hand or water power to get it very slowly spinning. Then you just laid underneath it or in some similar restful position and very very slowly let the stone be polished. Took hours or days to make a facet, but as long as the stone is beautiful, that's the sort of craftsmanship I can see elves getting into.

 

[Eltab]

I always imagined that Elves would use an "outhouse" or "septic service" kind of setup, rather than the City Sewers. Every so often, somebody - maybe nonviolent prisoners? - has to go through and shovel out the contents, which can be sold to nearby farmers.

Elf farms might look like very large herb gardens. You can see the artificial structure and order in 'the big picture', but up close it looks like the forest just grew back in over some long-ago efforts at cultivation.

I have a 4e Neverwinter elf character who wants to make spending cash in the background via maple syrup. He owns a plot of forest and every time a dead tree falls, he replants a maple tree in its place. Eventually the place will be a maple grove; but what's the hurry? In the meanwhile I make spare change via lumber.

 

[Warbringer]

start here

https://www.google.com/search?q=elv...ved=0ahUKEwj6gb-istDLAhUWz2MKHVwMCQgQ_AUIBigB

Pick a couple of images and start to think who build this? where did the materials come from? how do they maintain it? who do they protect it? how far way is the next city? How do the cities communicate and transport goods between each other? How do they trade? (a coin based system exists for trade - who guarantees the value of the coin (inherent, royalty, political houses, merchant houses). What is the word like between the cities? Monster ridden? Lost paths? Everybody living freely and happily ever after?

Start to think about why the cities trade, and what makes a city a city? All the same clan/family/royal lineage. Maybe based on trade advantage - (for example in my homebrew, different dwarven clans "own" the rights to make certain goods as long as the goods don't fall in quality - so one clan is axes/swords, another armor, other work tools - some houses share the rights, but for making steel vs mithril goods - other houses are the mining houses. Ancient old trade agreements set the prices long ago)

Finally how is society organized. Even "good" societies are not egalitarian. Is there theft? disagreements? betrayals? then there will be an under belly. So how does that look. How is crime handled when it occurs ...

and so on

 

[Ancalagon]

Another thing to think of is time. I see elves as almost having two "speed" of thinking/living. Some things cannot wait. If you are hungry, you must eat soon. If an orc tribe is hacking its way through the forest, you must act.

But for other things... elves have time. I told my player that we would probably start our game in the fall (taking a break this summer). But it would have been ridiculous to tell them that we were going to play in 10 years. But for an elf...it would be a reasonable proposition. An elf will take 50 years to finish a piece of art.

So for outsiders, if the issue at hand is one of those "now" things, the elves can act quickly and decisively. But for other issues... it may be very difficult to make them move on a more human schedule.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I would expect every element of elven society to be incredibly risk averse. Elves can live to enormous age, and most of the killers are simple, small things.

Elves don't hunt meat because hunting and raising livestock is dangerous, and meat contains deadly parasites, not because they don't like the taste or ethical considerations.

I would imagine that the typical elf does not ride a horse or use a wagon either, for the same reasons.

Modern farming techniques (like plowing) all incur risk. Since D&D has an alternative (1/30 elves are druids so that you can feed everyone goodberries), elves will stick to that.

Which all explains the 'living in harmony with nature'. The translation is 'otherwise nature might hurt us'.

I imagine elven environments are incredibly tidy (trip hazards!), single level and without perilous drops. So no cities in the trees.

No mining - it's really dangerous. Leave that to the humans and dwarves.

No stone construction.

No large scale wooden construction: multi level buildings? Nope. Heck, even a second story is pretty dangerous to build.

I would imagine elven forges to be very small-scale affairs that avoid using molten metal. They're probably out of town as well to guarantee no fires.

I wouldn't expect an elf to ever 'make do' with an inappropriate tool, or a makeshift repair. The products of elven crafting are either perfection or garbage.

I imagine that the average elf gets incredibly nervous if he sees someone wandering around with weaponry. At the same time, he will feel deep gratitude towards elves who take it upon themselves to be warriors. Expect rules requiring all weapons remain sheathed at all times, serious repercussions if violated, and with official pardons given if the unsheathing was deemed to be necessary. Which it almost never is.

Also I wouldn't expect elves to trade money for time, but I would expect them to trade time for money and either one for avoidance of risk. Hence elves being suppliers of master crafted arms and armor. They need to buy metal (because mining is dangerous). They have plenty of time to become master craftsmen, tons of time to spend enchanting things, and they are heavily averse to combat. The solution is to provide dwarven kings with chain shirts that took decades to produce.

On that note - if mithril takes decades to refine, that would explain a lot too.

I imagine that either elves consider other races unworthy of life OR consider all life absolutely sacred. Either way, killing an elf, even with extreme justification, probably carries an extreme sentence. Either way justice will be swift and it's unlikely that a trial will occur. Immediate death if elves are the superior life form, reconditioning or something similar if all life is sacred. Bear in mind that an elf can leave you in prison for 50 years and barely have changed when he comes back to visit.

Elves probably live spread out to avoid disease. I would expect that elves are somewhat hypochondriac, except they pop down to the local oath of the ancients paladin (cure disease at level 1) as soon as they so much as catch a cold, and quarantine themselves until they can be seen.

I wouldn't expect elves to experiment with magic. Much more likely that they trade magic with other races and build knowledge that way.

I wouldn't expect elves to have libraries (fire hazard!), but distributed collections of lore instead.

I imagine the elven word for an adventurer elf is 'insane'.