It's My Turn to Talk About Elves

Elves want us to believe that they are alien creatures, with designs and arcana far beyond our own and with vast societies hidden behind veils of forest and illusion.

The elves are lying.

Elves are Kin, just like us. While they may have a history of being technologically and magically ahead of the curve, at least since Doorfall and the Age of Heroes (and possibly before, cry a few human scholars), the elves have been overshadowed by the humans, halflings, dwarves, and other Kin of the world. The elves have been pushed out of the way in the name of advancement, the greatest elvish empires reduced to tiny, squabbling kingdoms fraught with the infighting of immortal politicians with nothing better to do.

Elvish propaganda, however, is some of the best in the world. The elves continue to project the illusion of mysticism, hiding the crumbling of their ivory tower with smokescreen after smokescreen. The drow in particular have a great cunning for propaganda. Lolth’s reign in the Underdark was the result of millenia’s worth of cultural manipulation and intense displays of infernal power. (Hence, the drow are not inherently evil, just culturally inclined to be very, very misguided as to what is just.) Elves and dwarves have a strained relationship, as the dwarves know that the elves have faltered from the grace and poise they once had. At least the dwarves embraced the fact that their past were their glory days, they grumble to any elf that will listen. (This starts many barfights, which is why taverns that frequently see crowds of both elves and dwarves have a “present tense only” policy.)

Elves are also rather bigoted. They are taught to think that their bloodline, their way of thinking, their way of performing magic, their way of living, their way of being is inherently superior to that of the other Kin, and that the elves should feel a sort of pity for their brethren. This often manifests in microaggressions and elvish stereotyping. After all, after many centuries, the halflings sort of blend together, wouldn’t you agree… Some anthropolgists theorize that this is part of the reason they hate orcs so dearly: most orcs are taught that THEY are the center of the universe, that their culture and race are superior to that of all the rest, and that their violence is a crusade to spread their superiority. There isn’t enough room on Aeros for two chosen peoples…

One thing the elves DO have going for them is their immortality. An elf cannot die of old age. At around 1000, their body can start to wither away, and they become Dusk Elves, almost living mummies of emaciated flesh whose bodies have begun decaying but whose minds ferment tirelessly. However, they are still vulnerable to starvation, disease, and violence, so a Dusk Elf becomes more and more difficult to sustain over time. (In most every elvish settlement, there is a Dusk Elf crypt full of near-corpses waited on hand and foot by priests of Barathari, the elvish god of death and birth and decay.) However, most elves view this as a self-indulgent egotism, and as such, the most common (and natural, say the elves) cause of elvish death is assisted suicide.

Elves don’t wield fabled magics anymore, their cities are crumbling and decadent. Their lineage grows ever more branched as the number of half-elves multiply. Don’t believe an elf when they talk about their homeland. If somebody says that the elves are mystical and detached beings, do not take them as an authority. Elves are just as shitty as the rest of us, but too snotty to show that vulnerability.

Man, fuck elves.

(I hate elves as aliens, so I wrote this as a counterpoint. Another angle to elves, if you will.)