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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6612326" data-attributes="member: 4937">Really, entirely up to you.  I wouldn't want to impose my definition of 'elf' or 'fae' on your game.I would say in general, if you have even achieved a degree of alienness in your play, you are doing pretty good.  Getting a player to not think entirely in a human way is a challenge, and one of the reasons most DMs default their races to humans with bumps on their forehead is that its very hard to communicate to players how they should play their character if their character isn't basically human in concerns and modes of thought.Please don't take the following answers as definitive, nor are they the best.  They are just one mythological approach, and my advice would be to create your own (which you seem to be doing).   However, since you ask questions:1) What scares an Elf?: Pretty much everything that humans aren't particularly scared of.  They are a xenophobic, isolationist race whose long life has left them little willing to spend it.  Imprisonment in a dark and ugly place would have to be high on the list.  Mental anguish frightens them even more than physical anguish.  Boredom, tedium, filth, ugliness, brokenness... the average human cosmopolitan city is something out of a nightmare to most elves.  New York would horrify them.  Old London before sanitation would be like something out of Dante's Inferno.  A tenement apartment, a slave ship crossing the Atlantic, heck the restrooms at a stadium during the 7th inning stretch.. it's not that they couldn't even imagine how that would be inflicted on someone, but how a human could endure it without almost instantly dying.2) Right now they are going "home" for the first time in the campaign, and I have no idea what that will look like: Like a society that has spent the last 4000 years perfecting the techniques of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Falling Water' and has had the time and energy to patiently landscape the entire landscape in this way, so that there is no distinction between wilderness and parkland, and between natural and garden, and between wildflower and cultivation. 3) Do elves have daddy issues?: I have no idea what you mean.  They have fathers.  Sometimes they get in conflict with them.  Sometimes they don't have one present, and that's also sometimes an issue.  4) Do they have scandal and jealously?: Yes, though the sort of things that provoke jealousy and scandal might not perfectly correspond to any human culture.  But certainly they can feel envious of the social approval that someone else experiences that they feel they better deserve, and they can do any number of things that would cause coordinated social disapproval.  In some cases, the elf may even care that they are ostracized.  5) Do they have human realities, like food and waste and sweat and sex?:  Yes, but they don't always approach them the same way as humans.  Sexual lust is ubiquitous in most humans, but a fairly rare emotion in elves.  Gluttony for food is much rarer in elves than in people.  Elves are far more likely to overindulge in music or listening to poetry.  It would be completely in character for an elf to get so lost in appreciation of beauty of some sort, that they forget to eat and pass out from hunger.  Alcohol on the other hand is something both races appreciated, and the more jaded sort of elf can appreciate hallucinogenics and narcotics.   After you've been around for centuries, novelty is a very highly prized possession.   Waste and sweat provoke revulsion more akin to a modern person use to showering daily than would a medieval or early modern person.  When your race has natively low constitution, you can't afford to be around disease reservoirs.</blockquote>

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