Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6085049">Certainly, even in a fantasy world I agree that we're still reproducing a psuedo-medieval world where distinct cultures have significant distance between them and travel usually takes a fairly long time for the majority of people.  Perhaps we could add a darker side to the hippy-tree-loving of elves, and they are so perfect and adept not because of generations of training, but through harsh eugenics programs that weed out "imperfect" children, the weak, sickly and stupid.  It's really everything you expect from a culture so wrapped up in perfection.  Every elf culture might go about it in different ways, perhaps high elves have lengthy compatibility studies and ways of examining the "genetics" of a child before birth.  Maybe wood elves take a more savage approach, stranding children in the wild and seeing if they have the wits to survive.  Perhaps Drow have children often(their society is often shown to be the largest elf society), but practice a variety of disturbing experiments upon them to artifically enhance their strength, beauty, or magical prowess.Through through these various practices, the elf race is kept powerful...but few in number.....probably not something that's going to get written in canon, but certainly a more interesting take if you want to present elves as "not all that glitters is gold" trope.  But my point about the Fey portals is more along the lines of: What if the Elven kingdoms we see in the "human world" are like the ghettos of the Feywild?  The more powerful, wealthy or elite elves live in the Feywild, and faced with the choice of getting dumped in the unforgiving wilderness of the Feywild or moving to the "human planes", the elves choose to go to the human lands.  So even the great kings of elves the humans know are little more than the trash of Feywild, but since few Fey are that poor or desperate(since to many, getting eaten in the Feywild is a better way to go than sharing a homeland with humans), elf numbers in the human world remain low.</blockquote>

Verification