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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 3580806" data-attributes="member: 2020">(muses)  The reason the elves survived those first horrible years after Vecna's Ascendance, was because they were *elves.*  Not humans.  Not drow.  Not great warriors.  Not great wizards.  Not because they had great stats.  Not anything else.  But because they were *elves.*  As elves, they had inner strength and magic which arose to the fore in this crisis.  This was not something that had been recognized before, although it had been often seen ... and dismissed.  The elves developed Agnakok abilities, then became Agnakoks, gaining full immunity to the heat, cold, and poisonous air.  They became able to eat the sickly vegetation, along with the occasional monster caught and killed.  They also took to eating insects.  Later on, they attained immunity to sunblindness.  These abilities exist in all Oeridian elves today, seeded from that time and carried over to the present, hundreds of years later.  But it came at a cost.  The elves grew to greatly love eating leaves and bugs, and nothing else except ... captured enemies.  They discovered that a captured enemy eaten alive, granted life force and greatly enhanced sustainance.  A just killed enemy granted some extra power.  A simply dead foe, or a non-enemy (such as an animal, living or dead) provided nothing extra at all, and the elves never touched these.  The elves took to chewing wood, especially recently cut livewood.  It did not sharpen their teeth, but it seemed to promote health.  Chewing on the bones of eaten foes provided demonstrable energy, and was commonly practiced.    The elves discovered that they could call clerical spells out of themselves (in spite of the rules in the 1E Dungeon Master's Guide about this.)  The Power of Miracles did not just come from deities.  It came from within themselves.  But unlike the Dragonlance SAGA situation, the elves of Haldendrea found that they could pull full power from themselves, and raise in level as clerics, just from their own strength.  Thus they at first slowly, then rapidly, regained low and mid level clerical magic.  A greater part of the elves did not live to see this happen.  Faced with more pain, physical and psychological, than they could possibly bear, some chose to fade away to Arvandor.  Some foolish ones tried to escape the Swamp (they didn't make it out.)  Many died of hunger, poisoning, infections, wounds, disease, and infestation.  Still more died from the suffocating air, the frigid cold, and the sweltering heat.  Many just keeled over in exhaustion and lay in shock, too weak to act or stand or whisper for help, and went out into the dark.  The survivors, all 5,000 of them, who lived to see the day they had regained much of their clerical magic and become agnakoks, were the ones with a fanatical desire to live combined with the greatest inner strength to live.  Thus, the elves gained the Supernatural Abilities of Lifefire and Spiritual Adamance (great strength of body, mind, and spirit to resist and endure all adversary, supernatural physical resistance to dying, and a supernatural ability to resist being corrupted or broken by magic or psionics.)  None of this comes from the RAW, of course.</blockquote>

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