Topic: Immortal Elves

[Marc R]

That, in itself, indicates a highly developed level of innate sageness. :-)

[Skaran]

The longer the natural life span the more likely an unnatural death.

Elves IMHO are not immortal (well Tolkien types anyway) not sure about the Sidhe and Unsidhe. (it was fun in a kind of wierd way when in one of my games the player turned out to be a daughter of Oberon and Titania), they are however unaging once maturity is reached which is not the same thing as immortality at all.

[jps]

I admit I didn't read every single post so I hope I'm not repeating someone else's ideas. I used to run a Vampire- the Masquerade chronicle and immortality is a significant issue even if it is adressed in a darker, more gothic mood.

Some points are imo interesting:

1) a human, reaching his 40s knows he's declining and tends to look backwards considering what he has achieved in his life if anything. Thus there's a urge at a some age to do something, it's not true for everyone but, as a whole, the human race may progress. An immortal being could be an eternal teenager. That is, I guess, the point of considering that elves tend to develop at slower pace.
2) the social ladder: irl people retire and die, this is both a bane when we talk about people we loved and a bliss because the youngs may climb up the social ladder and occupy the jobs of their elders. In an immortal society that's not an option: your boss will be your boss in  10 000 years. If you wanna climb up you'll have to fight your way up. Considering this the elvish society might be way less peaceful that we imagined.
3) In most fantasy settings deities are not a matter of belief but a matter of fact. Once an Elf accomplishes what he thinks to be his destiny it is possible that he wishes to die and live again in the afterlife.
4) There's a well known sayings that says "in the long run we'll be all dead", this is defintively not an elvish saying ^^. Humans may ignore long run issues or consider them to be irrelevent, after all in the real world we've benn waiting a long long time before considering pollution an issue. An immortal society will be more concerned about long run issues because there are not about some remote and foggy future it is about you in 100 years or so. I guess the society would be lead a very different way.
5) Elves and humans: everybody who've got dog/cat will tell you that animals or lovely but losing them is terrible. Just imagine the average PC elf, adventuring with his humans fellows, living countless adventures with them and seeing them dying of old age. In 50 years or so the elf will still be young and all his good fellow adventurers will be dead or very old, a shadow of their former selves. Will he go adventuring with humans again ? How will his former parteners react seing their friend as young as they were 50 years ago while they are old and sick ? It's true that it is generally not relevent in a campaign since they tend to take just several years, but you might consider that immortals rarely mix with mortal races since they die too soon and a friendship between a mortal and an immortal is likely to end up bad.

Just a few ideas.

[Skaran]

Then if you assume half elves have a longer than human but not unaging life span, perhaps a few centuries then they are out of sinc with both elves and humans, loneliness and a sense of not belonging anywhere could become overwhelming for them. Only other half elves would understand and only those of the same age and thus on the "same time line" could avoid watching their friends age and die.

[RandalThor]

All excellent points and ideas to concider when trying to put together a relatively realistic elven society. If I may be so bold as to add some thoughts/ideas/questions to your points:

1) Would being an "eternal teenager" mean they are progressive or concervative? The way you word it makes it seems as though humans get progressive as they get older, but that is not usually the case. There's some quote about being born a democrat and growing up into a republican........

2) This one, I feel would have to have been dealt with for the race to survive and still be a community, instead of a bunch of very small groups - or even killed off (by themselves). Something like term limits would probably have been instituted, say 100 years or so. When your term is up, you step down and the next (chosen, voted, in-line, whatever) leader is instituted. Maybe a challenge system - though I doubt it would be anything combat related unless they are a particualrly violent elven tribe.

3) Exactly. When you have proof of the soul and life after death, everyone changes how they deal with dying - not just elves. That, right there, would necessitate a change in the basic cultures of every species on (or in) that world.

4) Long term planning would be very typical of elven society. So long term that many of the other races would think they don't have any plan(s) at all. In this situation, selfishness (which is what I believe lies behind the vast majority of our problems: economy, ecology, etc...) actually helps in making - or maybe more appropriately: keeping -  the world and society "better" places. (I put society in quotes because, as we all know, one person's idea of good/better is not necessarily anothers.)

5) The big difference here is that these would be "pets" that you could form real....REAL...relations with. (Please, no cracks about animal lovers, it creeps me out  ) That throws a bit of a monkey wrench in the whole business. But would be a great explanation as to why the elves hold themselves apart from the other races. They have learned the hard way that feeling that loss, repeatedly, is nothing to seek out. Maybe some of them go further and victimize the other races to force themselves to think about them differently - less somehow. A defense mechanism of some kind. Or maybe why some human (or other race's) families are watched over by an elf - they are decendants of his/hers.

[rdanhenry]

Elves are plants, not animals.

First life
they are mobile humanoids (The pointy eared tree huggers you'd expect)
...

Reproduction is done between a mobile form and a tree form.

Tree huggers? I think what you've described is a little more than hugging!

[Marc R]

Male elves and female trees, female elves and male trees. . . .but recall, they are plants, so it's a lot less smutty, and a lot more like bees polinating flowers than one might think.

The concept of Elves as an Ecology, rather than a society, made for a lot of changes. . . .once I slotted the faries and other bits into place to fit the overall "Elven Forest is made up of elf-trees" concept, it actually made for a very different result than usual. (i.e. elves as mobile units of an immobile forest, which is not their home, but actually the vast majority of the elvish population in tree form.)

It worked out well, I found it interesting how the PC elf dealt with deaths of his companions as an opportunity to expand the borders. (you fight elves near the edge of their land, you kill 50, if they take those bodies and plant them along or outside the fringe, the border is moving outward, the elves are expanding.). . .end result, killing elves resulted in elves behaving expansionistly. . .the way to keep them at status quo was to leave them alone. . .and the way to hurt them was logging or otherwise attacking the trees.

[RandalThor]

#%&#^&#^*#&^# !!!!!!

In giving LM an idea point I promptly erased my whole post!!! ^@$^&*#%@^^#$%#

OK, the gist. Great idea (have an idea point (@#$#%&#&@^@^@$^)). Have only the trees being able to mate and the sprites and such act as bees in this situation.

A great story for newer PCs (no elves) can be where they get embroiled in a human-elf conflict around some logging. Ultimately they find out the elf/tree secret (which the elves do not want getting out). They will be allowed to live by the elves as either they have proven themselves friends and/or will be given an important task by the elves (like transporting an important elf/humanoid corpse to another elf clan (forest) to help cement ties between the two - sort of like intermarriage for the elves). This would be a great way to insitute an elf/humanoid PC into the group; though there could have been one from the start...

PS: It could be that only elves that attain a certain spiritual rank (which could be reflected in experience levels, of course) become a Great Tree upon their death, which is why the elf/humaoids go out into the world (among other, more mundane, reasons). All those that do not attain the rank may either go on to the "regular afterlife" or may become another type of fey (sprite, brownie, etc..).

[mocking bird]

Elves IMHO are not immortal (well Tolkien types anyway) not sure about the Sidhe and Unsidhe.

Considering Cirdan woke up on the beach to the light of two lamps before taking a walk west I will take being as old as Middle-Earth close enough to being immortal.

Slowest job in Middle-Earth - Elvish barber.  You would only have one customer who needs a shave.

Tree huggers? I think what you've described is a little more than hugging!

(Insert subtle walnut vs. oak vs. coconut joke here)

[markc]

 Side note: All this talk about elves and trees made me think of the blue giril on Farscape. I guess i will put that on my move list of TV shows to rewatch during dinner.

MDC

[Fidoric]

Slowest job in Middle-Earth - Elvish barber.  You would only have one customer who needs a shave.

And IIRC, some elven bows in ME supplements of old have unbreakable bow strings made of elven hair... So your barber would also have to use eog tools or something like that in order to effectively cut anything 

[Karizma]

Man, you guys are pumping out excellent ideas!

Reading this thread got me thinking about how I'll do elves in my campaign world.  One of the important themes in my world is that the world is about Humans.  Humans are more important than all the other races (even though they're not as "interesting", being something from real life).  With this in mind, I thought about Elves and magic.

So at the moment, I'm going to rule that Elves are a magical race (Dispell Magic, anyone?).  As far as using magic, they're natural casters, but they are NOT masters of the Arcane.  Elves are limited to one Realm of casting (I haven't thought through whether or not they're restricted to a certain realm, but at the instant I'm going to say they have access to any of the three), but Humans are the only ones that can *know* what they're doing, and know how to manipulate it further (Maybe Spell Mastery will be restricted for Elves and not for humans?)

I'm rewriting magic for my campaign world, so I'm working more with premises than crunch.  But some thoughts are there (Restrict Spell Mastery, limit to One Realm, maybe limit the amount of spell lists to only their realm, etc. etc.).

[Skaran]

Another take on elves could be Michael Moorcocks Melniboneans from the Elric cycle of his eternal champion series. Here we have a very long lived race (few of whom die of natural causes) who move from educators of humanity to rulers to considering the humans as playthings as they as a race become more and more introspective. Until finally the few remaining from the fatal intriges of their race betrayed by one of their own find their city sacked by humans and the race all but destroyed.

Gives a different impression on jaded elves who have already been everywhere and done everything.

[pastaav]

In my campaign world elves are air elementals (dwarves are earth elementals, dragons are fire elmentals and orcs are water elementals). A well kept secret around the dwarves are that these too have imortal life span. The orcs are also imortal, but they tend to live such violent life that they never has understood this.

Another feature are that these races have a limited number of souls. They can't have children unless some of their kind has been slain and is ready to be reborn.

The age aspect is not really a problem because they have the same kind of memory as all races and only remembers fragments from old times.

[Quasar]

Amazing...This conversation has been going on for eight months now, and we still haven't reached a consensus.

I have always considered High Humans to be "Mortal Half-Elves"   (ala Elros Tar-Mianstir). 

I thought it was pretty obvious that High Men were Dunedain with the serial numbers filed off.

As for Elves, I loved them. They are my race of choice, and Tolkien elves are probably my favourite of them.

[netbat]

There is a series of books by mercedes lackey that include long lived/immortal elves that deals with longevity in an interesting manor. Their culture becomes extremely ritualized, formal and polite as a way to deal with the friction of living with the same people for centuries. They also "fight" for position in elaborate competitions with complicated and expansive rules designed to eliminate bloodshed and the detrimental efects on society that would result in an immortal culture. It is a good reference for an alternate elven culture. In RM terms you could probably have "old" starting characters as high level with all but the last level's dp's spent on elven culture lore, elven language, and various "flower arranging" skills. Of course you would have to either use a skill based rather than level RR system or declare them to have level 1 RR by fiat.

[rdanhenry]

I was getting ready to do an "immoral Elves" joke, but it keeps coming out questionable for a "family-friendly" board.

Seriously, though, an argument could be made that immortals would just become more and more jaded and thus more and more exotic in their tastes in the pursuit of something (or someone) they hadn't already done a million times, so humans might find the life of the elder Elves quite shocking.

[Karizma]

I was getting ready to do an "immoral Elves" joke, but it keeps coming out questionable for a "family-friendly" board.

Seriously, though, an argument could be made that immortals would just become more and more jaded and thus more and more exotic in their tastes in the pursuit of something (or someone) they hadn't already done a million times, so humans might find the life of the elder Elves quite shocking.

This makes me think of Elves coming across as complete foreigners for the fantasy genre, and taking on some sort of modern ideals.  Like a hippy commune.  Let's face it, they're frilly tree-huggers.  No amount of R.A. Salvatore will change that.

[Marc R]

A lot of the mythos has elves as pretty vile, nasty buggers. . .the kind to steal your baby and leave you a changling and all that. . .or take you in for an all night party that turns out to last 100 years.

[dutch206]

. . .or take you in for an all night party that turns out to last 100 years.

I think I went to that party.  (Or, at least it felt like I did the next morning.)