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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8733700" data-attributes="member: 19857">Depends on the setting, but in general in my settings:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Elves make great villains.  They're like vampires - if some non-elf is in their way that they can't beat they can usually wait them out.  They can also have dozens or even hundreds of plots in the fire at the same time - some that potentially won't come to fruition for a century or more.  They make great mastermind villains in that respect.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Likewise elves make great plot motivators.  The elves have been around forever so they know where all of the secrets are buried. If there's an ancient creature or artifact or whatzit in the world it's very likely that the elves have at least heard of it, if not know exactly where it is and why because they're the ones that put it there in the first place.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Elven conflicts make for great adventuring space.  Since the elves are so long lived they don't fight wars the same way short lived races do.  They tend to fight their wars over centuries with long periods of what look like peace to shorter lived peoples.  Because you don't need to fight a war with the shorter lived races - you just hold them off while you wait for their leaders to die and manipulate things so their future leaders aren't so stupidly aggressive.  Elves only fight wars against long lived foes who aren't as easy to manipulate - dragons, gods, demons, other elves.  But during those decades or centuries of "peace" their leaders are always plotting  and sending younger elves or easily manipulated non-elves out to accomplish missions that are actually strikes against their enemies.  How is manipulating a motley group of treasure hunters into exploring and ransacking an ancient sunken temple that has been missing for a few millennia going to help them?  Only the elven lords know for sure.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I also play that we don't understand how older elves think.  Or at least not the older ones.  The younger ones think the most like the shorter-lived peoples and tend to associate with them.  The older an elf gets, the harder it becomes to understand what they do or why they do it.  The truly ancient ones can feel like agents of pure chaos to any of the shorter-lived folks who encounter them because their way of thinking just makes zero sense.  And that's where archfey come from <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></li> </ul>Basically I view the elven leadership as very long-lived manipulators of others.  Younger elves and shorter lived peoples alike.  They'll use subtle charismatic techniques to bend short lived leaders to their will where they can, more brute force magic where that doesn't work, and engage in long term feats of social engineering to shape the peoples around them to their own ends.  They especially like to shape the aesthetics of the shorter lived peoples around them to view elves as the most beautiful people around, because that generally makes it easier to influence them. If I were to remove elves from my setting I'd replace them with a similar long-lived group.  Vampires are an obvious substitute.</blockquote>

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