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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3571918" data-attributes="member: 1645">Let me reiterate: Edena, I'm still not clear on your argument, and I'm not clear on your counter-arguments to SHARK's <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=197594" target="_blank">Elves Are Not Doomed</a> thread. If you want doomed elves, it's easy to have doomed elves.  If you want triumphant elves; it's easy to have triumphant elves.As I said in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=197594" target="_blank">Elves Are Not Doomed</a>: As others have pointed out, the elves don't have to be doomed, because there's plenty of room to make your elves militarily competent while remaining elf-like; it just depends on your campaign's model of what it means to be an elf. The elves of Tolkien's Third Age are clearly doomed and fading.  They resemble the Ancients, Greek and Roman, from a medieval perspective -- once great, but now gone -- and they serve as a metaphor for magic, which fades and disappears as we grow up. The elves from Tolkien's First and Second Ages are more like the epic heroes of myth and legend, with great powers and great passions -- they're much more like D&D characters. Although I don't like the notion of elves as 1960s hippies, I do like the notion of elves having almost modern sensibilities, which are totally at odds with all the races around them, which naturally have primitive sensibilities, born of constant struggle, hunger, and early death. I think you could have a wonderful campaign playing a group of outcast elves who "get it", who understand that the orcs really do want to kill and eat them all, while the council of elders keeps excusing orc forays into elf woodlands, etc.Further: I don't want to get political, so please don't read too much into the analogy, but if we give our elves fairly modern sensibilities, then that means that the top of their society is not an aristocratic class of warriors -- which puts them far apart from all other societies around them -- and their military is either a small subset of elf society that reveres the elves' martial past, or an underclass, or some outside group (of quasi-barbarians or Mamelukes), or something besides the high-status leadership of elf society. To outsiders dealing with the elves, they would seem a nation of poets and philosophers, with no fight in 'em -- but our own history has shown that a nation of shopkeepers can spawn a global empire (and after its fall, its former colony can become a global hegemon).  To a pre-modern enemy, it may not be obvious how the elves might harness their peaceful magic for war (as the US harnessed its peaceful industry for WWII); they'll have to find out the hard way.If you want comedy, you have the elves do the right things to maintain their place in the world.  If you want tragedy, you have them see the light too late.</blockquote>

Verification