D&D General So how do Half-Elfs feel different to Elfs?

[Charlaquin]

Personally, I think a better question to ask is why do we want to depict the mentality of non-human species as significantly different from that of humans? There are many possible answers to that question, and they all point to different ways one ought to depict those species in order to achieve different goals.

For me, the answer is that alien mentalities can help hilight something interesting about human mentality by exaggerating it. Immortal elves are great for telling stories about grief, because their immortality burdens them with having to live to see everyone they once knew die, unless they isolate themselves from mortals completely, which can be viewed as analogous to pushing others away to avoid the pain of growing attached only to lose them. Elves can also serve as an effective representation of the time blindness experienced by folks with ADHD - an elf might struggle to manage their time because when you can live forever there is no real sense of time pressure. The temporal proximity to a future event can become abstract when the only real time-related categories you have schema for are “now” and “not now,” which can lead to things like important appointments and dates being completely forgotten.

Half-elves, on the other hand, serve a different allegorical role. Sure, they’re longer lived than humans, but in there case the purpose of that longer lifespan is not to explore stories of grief or time-blindness, but to reinforce their alienation from their peers. Too long-lived to fully empathize with other humans, too short-lived to fully empathize with other elves. As I’ve already gone on at length about in this thread, I see them as an allegory for the varied experiences of mixed-race individuals, and their lifespan and its effect on their mentality is in service to that allegory. Hence, the answer to the question of this thread of how they feel different from elves. They explore completely different facets of the human experience.

On this subject matter, if you want an incredible depiction of an elf character with this brand of alien mentality, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is one of the best, full stop. The second half of Delicious in Dungeon also does it quite well, in a rather different way.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Oh these kinds of discussions bring about all sorts of inspiration for roleplaying content to be explored in future sessions.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

But that's the same thing. Exploring "not X" is also just a way to understand X. A story about immortality is really a story about understanding mortality.

All Zizek coffee without cream jokes (and so on and so on).

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[TwoSix]

On this subject matter, if you want an incredible depiction of an elf character with this brand of alien mentality, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is one of the best, full stop. The second half of Delicious in Dungeon also does it quite well, in a rather different way.

I was definitely thinking of Frieren for a lot of these points.

 

[Charlaquin]

I was definitely thinking of Frieren for a lot of these points.

Frieren and Dragon Age are the two biggest influences on me for how I like to depict elves when I DM. I don’t tend to like what multi-centenarian characters tend to do to worldbuilding, so I fiddle with my PC races’ lifespans to put them all in the range of like 80-150 years. Except elves, who I have be truly ageless, but I stole the concept of Uthenera from Dragon Age, so your elf character’s age reflects the time since they last woke up rather than the time since their birth. But since other races lifespans cap out at around 150 at the long end, elves who spend time around non-elves tend to become pretty depressed after that amount of time due to the deaths of their non-elf friends, and will usually go into a long trance shortly thereafter. But the elves who live only among other elves will often stay active for much longer periods. Frieren is a great example then of a PC who had previously only lived among other elves, and is going through her first experience of becoming close with non-elf people.

 

[Yaarel]

I have no idea what you mean by that.

Are you talking about Norse elves? Because those aren't the traditional D&D elf.

Yes, the Norse alfar are fates, and the alf women are explicitly nornir. But all elves are forces of fate, in the British traditions too. Because both are "fates" and both are superhumanly beautiful, are why Brits merged the Norse alfar and the Celtic sidhe (sith, shee).

The word "Fey" means fate.

[Lat. fatum "fate" > fata "a decider of fate, a fate, a norn" > OF. faie, feie > E. fay, Fey. Related to ME. faie -erie, faierie, feierie, faerie, fairie, fairy, of various spellings "the realm of fey, the activity of fey", whence the original term for "magic"]

Elves are prescients who foretell the future, speaking magic to alter and navigate the future. They are fateful magic manifesting a human shape.

Elves are nonhuman forces of sunlight, fate, and magic. But they entangle human fates, including birth, blessings, sexuality, love, children, success, and time of honorable death. Whence they adopt human forms. All of this fate-fey activity is magic, speaking words to foretell and alter reality.

The British elves are more about fertile soil rather than sunlight, because of the sidhe merger, but the rest of the concept is roughly the same.

 

[TwoSix]

Frieren and Dragon Age are the two biggest influences on me for how I like to depict elves when I DM. I don’t tend to like what multi-centenarian characters tend to do to worldbuilding, so I fiddle with my PC races’ lifespans to put them all in the range of like 80-150 years. Except elves, who I have be truly ageless, but I stole the concept of Uthenera from Dragon Age, so your elf character’s age reflects the time since they last woke up rather than the time since their birth. But since other races lifespans cap out at around 150 at the long end, elves who spend time around non-elves tend to become pretty depressed after that amount of time due to the deaths of their non-elf friends, and will usually go into a long trance shortly thereafter. But the elves who live only among other elves will often stay active for much longer periods. Frieren is a great example then of a PC who had previously only lived among other elves, and is going through her first experience of becoming close with non-elf people.

Not exactly the same, but I have elves generally living and looking fairly “ageless” for about 3 centuries, and then fairly rapidly descending into senescence and death. An elf that actually looks old is probably less than a decade from dying.

In my settings though, elves, dwarves, and humans have all lived together and interbred; even the elfiest elf or the dwarfiest dwarf has some of the blood of the other races in their lineage. Race mechanics are more of a presentation of the common phenotypes within the shared gene pool.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

What I did with the elves in my fantasy setting is I do have them as immortals, but immortality is actually a relatively new thing for them. It was invented about 200 years before the start of the setting and so the oldest elves are only ~300 years old.

 

[Charlaquin]

What I did with the elves in my fantasy setting is I do have them as immortals, but immortality is actually a relatively new thing for them. It was invented about 200 years before the start of the setting and so the oldest elves are only ~300 years old.

Invented is an interesting choice of words for how they gained immortality. You’ve piqued my curiosity, how did they achieve it?

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Invented is an interesting choice of words for how they gained immortality. You’ve piqued my curiosity, how did they achieve it?

The elves in my setting are somewhat Chinese coded, and their quest for immortality is based on Taoist alchemy, which was divided into "external alchemy" (potions, chemicals and traditional Chinese medicine) and "internal alchemy" (meditation, cultivation, purification rituals, martial arts, quigong, etc). Its all about balancing the yin and yang within you, it's supposed to be hard.

Well a previous iteration of the elven government said "we can do that wholesale" and began a national program to "perfect" the population, and built a gigantic magical cauldron artifact thing in their capitol and started a big ritual to make everyone immortal. And it worked.

As long as an elf remains within a few hundred miles of the cauldron, they are immortal. To "go into the West" is an elven euphemism for suicide or being disappeared by the government, since if an elf who's outside of their natural lifespan leaves the radius of the cauldron they rapidly age and die. Because the majority of the elven population cannot survive leaving the borders of the nation, the government exercised a high degree of control over the population, but this and severe economic issues also prevent the elves from mounting invasions of nearby countries, as all but their youngest conscripts would turn to dust. Two other major infouences on the elves are the history of the Great Leap Forward and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, later adapted into Soylent Green.

Interestingly enough, the cauldron is located on the antipode of the laboratory responsible for the creation of intelligent, self aware undead in a horrific experiment; not only are immortal elves a recent invention, but so are things like wights and liches.