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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8718061" data-attributes="member: 6704184">My dnd “elves” vary widely. In my Space Fantasy! games alone, you’ve got standard Tolkien, D&D non-lolthite Drow, tree people who turn into something like treants and dryads as they age, inspired partly by Hellboy 2, and magi-technologically advanced people whose language is music, and is intentionally complex, and rivals Gnomish for dominance as the technical language of the known galaxy. In my own game, Quest for Chevar, the Alfar and Svartalfar are descendants of ancient spirits of nature that took mortal shape in order to experience the world as mortals, and spent so long that way and indulged so deeply in that experience that it irrevocably changed them. Also sometimes a mortal spirit joins with the land spirits and eventually becomes something more than a ghost, and one path they can take is to eventually become alfar or svartalfar. The Alfar are tied to things like the trees and other plants, the sun, summer and spring and the rains and storms of those seasons, etc. They are generally emotional, enthusiastic, and very communal and social. They tend to cooperate more than they compete, or at least their competition is generally in group endeavors rather than individualistic contests, and they tend to fail to understand the jealousy or possessiveness of most humans and many other peoples. They can extend their awareness to the land around them and to eachother with a limited empathy. The Svartalfar are tied to the moon and stars, the cool winds that come after the sun sets, and the creatures of the night. They are more quiet but also more physically imposing than their cousins, can see in the dark like a cat, and have a reputation for being colder, but are fiercely loyal within thier family, and mark family by loyalty and obligation as much as by blood. They are competitive and daring, and hold great value on achievement as an individual and as part of a group. Their sports are usually either individual or a team based with a greater ability for personal achievement.  The two tend to grate on eachother, at least if you put archetypal members of each ancestry in a room together, but when they work together they are capable of feats that inspire legends across the Nine Worlds. They do have some things in common, like being able to speak directly to spirits without the use of ritual magic, and an affinity for Animism (the magic of communion with the spiritual) due to their origins, and long lives that are lived in cycles of centuries, in which thier old lives fade from memory and they regain their youth, becoming both a new person and a new life-stage of the same person, never fully losing their old selves even as they change and evolve over centuries. Some members of both ancestries instead hold off this cycle, becoming Elders, with strong memories stretching back sometimes thousands of years, but also becoming less and less mortal over time, more like the spirits their ancient ancestors were. Some folk theorize that Frey and Freyja were among the first Alfar and Svartalfar, and that they eventually gained so much wisdom and power that they broke through both the Elder state and the Cycle, becoming gods instead. Others say the two simply found kindred spirits in the two folk myriads ago, and became their patrons. Nomenclature: I have been trying to construct soemthing I like more than Liosalfar and Svartalfar, or simply calling the summer-plant-socialism elves “alfar”. Giving them both a unique name would allow me to call them both alfar, without making it seem like one is default and the other is a variant. Anyway, in my Islands World setting, there aren’t any “high elves”, but there are Eladrin, Boradrin (wood elves and sea elves, which aren’t seen as meaningfully different), and Döradrin (Drow). Just like sex, an eldarin can change from one of these to another over time, and the child of one can be any of them. At their most “human”, they are the upper class of several nation states modeled strongly on certain European cultures at specific times, with a twist or blending of a secondary time, ie Capet is Rococo France with elements of Medieval Frankish kingdoms as seen through the lense of romantic fiction, and Albarona is Reconquista Spain with elements of both Andelusia and pagan Celt-Iberia, and a complex origin as a culture that came from distant shores in the far off past. As this is a world without any humans (and if I ever allow humans it will be Dragonmarked humans with new lore), these folks and Khernadin (half-elves, where “half” means a mix of ancestries ranging from orcs to hobs to Goliaths and more, and this ancestry is socially and culturally the same race as tieflings, half-orcs, elf-orcs, and some others) are the closest to a “basic” people that the setting has. Hin (halflings) and the Fir Bolg (Firbolgs and Goliaths) are close to basic, as well, but the setting basically asks, “If there are a half-dozen “near-human” peoples that are easy to empathize with but with a little extra spice, do we need humans?</blockquote>

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