Rebuilding Elves

1 Introduction

Following on from the previous two posts it’s time to look at elves.

Elves are more problematic than gnomes, dwarves, or for that matter, hobbits. Gnomes have a very vague and nebulous folklore in Britain and so any game treatment of them is likely to work reasonably well, even if they are a bit too tall. Tolkien’s dwarves stuck fairly well to the well-known tropes of dwarf stories - albeit without the supernatural strength that often appears - and so the fact that the game sticks largely with Tolkien’s version isn’t a problem. This goes even moreso for hobbits who are more or less an invention of the professor from the name down.

Elves, however, are different. The D&D elf is not a Tolkien elf for the most part but at the same time Gygax included the concept of the half-elf which is more or less a JRRT creation. It’s true that there are many stories about elf “changelings” and a few of mortals falling for elves of the opposite sex but the former are not clearly half-elves and the latter are not well known. The biggest influence from Tolkien on the D&D elf is the focus on elvan military harness which was certainly included to allow players to re-run the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit.

With the publication of the game came a culture clash between the largely British Folklore elves of the game and the expectations of a (predominantly American) readership that associated the word “elf” with the super-human race of that name from The Lord of the Rings - which in turn are derived from a much more Scandinavian version of the race.

The British elf is, in folklore terms, a very degenerate version of the Nordic/Anglo-Saxon being of almost god-like power which had first been demonised by the Christians and then reduced from that to a bugbear and finally to a race of tricksters who were a threat only at an individual level.

Shakespeare mixed in, or preserved, a tinge of their original magical and immortal character as well as the concept of the Seelie Court with a King and Queen ruling not just the elves but all fairy folk.

None of this has really ever bothered me personally - I read Tolkien long after starting to play D&D and never considered them as anything other than what I think Gygax had in mind - the little people of the woods.

For my purposes here, the main problem reconstructing elves along reproductive lines is the constraint of retaining half-elves, a popular and fun game race which I want to keep in play more or less un-touched.

Well, let’s get on with it.

2 Songs from the Woods

The elves are the tallest of the “little people” as humans call them. An adult male elf can look eye-to-eye with many adult female humans. Male elves range from 4’8“ to 5’6”; females from 4’2“ to 5’.

But this is a generalisation as the elves are almost as varied as the dwarves, and in ways which are more substantial than just skin and hair colours. For elves are creatures literally of the forest and the nature of an elf is bound up with the nature of the forest in which it initially grew and to the Deep Wood to which it can retreat or return when the world of humans becomes tiresome.

The Deep Woods

In elvan parlance, forests are divided into two types: the Plain Woods and the Deep Woods. The Plain Woods are, generally, woods which can be crossed in half a day’s walk, or are artificially planted, or which have permanent intelligent inhabitants other than rangers or the creatures of “Faerie”. These woodlands can not allow entry to the true Faerie realm.

The Deep Woods can be reached by an elf (or any Fay being) by entering a wood and walking for more than three hours beyond any part of it which could be classed as Plain Woods. This process will take the elf into the Faerie version of that woodland - the Deep Wood - and it can be assumed that entry by any non-fey being will be detected and assumed to be hostile until proven otherwise.

Faerie

Faerie is in effect the great Forest from whence all the creatures called “Fey” derive and the elvan word for “world” is indeed “forest”. This forest includes realms of snow and of steaming tropical jungle, as well as lakes and oceans. In D&D terms it is in fact a parallel material plane where there are no humans - and where humans are not welcome. It links to many of the material planes through naturally occurring conduits which connect the world forest to the lesser forests of those planes. Note that these links join similar types of woodland - jungle to jungle, kelp to kelp etc - each of which is thought of as a different Deep Wood.

Faerie experiences the seasons one would expect based on the type of tree but there is no wooded region which ever experiences 24hrs of day or night - 4hrs is about the minimum length of either (other regions do exist but they are not wooded). The sun of Faerie is very like that of Earth, but perhaps slightly more golden, and the single moon is a similar size and colour but the face of the “Man in the Mood” is slightly more like a real face but its features are changeable. Although the moon goes through the normal phases, the face is always at the same angle to the viewer, implying to some sages that Faerie itself is not a sphere.

The native beings of Faerie include many of the standard D&D monsters: all the standard demi-human races, all the beings listed as “humanoid” for rangers, dragons, unicorns, pixies, brownies, slyphs, dryads and nymphs, satyrs, giant versions of normal woodland animals (including giant lynx) as well as their normal counterparts, hags and annises, myconids, heraldic beasts (griffons, wyverns, and so on) etc. although not all of these are encountered in the same Deep Wood.

Almost all of these beings are able to walk through to the forests of the other PMP worlds, but only the more intelligent can easily find their way back in again, thus various creatures from faerie can be found wandering so-called “human lands”.

Travel from one part of the Great Forest itself to another takes a very long time unless aided by magic, and many creatures there do possess such magic, but it can be done. However, reports indicate that returning to whence once entered the wood can prove even more difficult.

Along the way, travellers will cross elven kingdoms and estates as well as the territories of various beasts and beings who may not be friendly.

It is not known as the Perilous Realm for nothing.

A Note on Alignment

Elves are as a rule Chaotic Good. Their social structure is one where social status is gained by actions rather than birth or wealth. Elves of lower status mostly obey or follow those of higher status due to admiration, and certainly not through fear.

The “Good” aspect of their alignment is most strongly expressed in relation to other inhabitants of Faerie. Foreigners who do no harm will not normally be robbed or killed. Initial responses will be to “guide” them back out of the woods and to their own lands.

Persistent visitors or ones overtly damaging the Wood or its inhabitants will be warned off and, eventually the elves will respond with force, either magical or martial depending on immediately available resources.

Although strong, elves are not capable of achieving the levels of ability that humans are and so it is difficult for them to eliminate some of the more powerful evil beings which are native to their woods - anni and dragons, for example. Agreements may exist between the elves and such beings which prevent all out war between them and which even allow the elves leeway to call on them if some common threat appears.

Thus, a particularly troublesome party invading the Deep Wood may find themselves facing not only elf maids on unicorns, but elf wizards riding green dragons!

The elves’ alignment will allow these measures only to combat some unambiguous danger and their potential allies will only cooperate if they can see no advantage of siding with the interlopers, so it’s a delicate balance.

Time and relative dimensions in Faerie

Faerie has one big downside. Time passes in a strange way, usually much more slowly than in the planes it touches but not consistently or predictably.

The mental state if a being affects the passage of time for an individual. The net effect is not problematical for trees and plants, or the less intelligent animals. But the other denizens: including dragons, bugbears, goblins, elves and so forth, must reproduce elsewhere or their young do not develop “properly”.

Hence they must travel out of the Deep Woods and into the human worlds where time is less flexible and more predictable. The different creatures do this at different points in their reproductive cycle, goblins being quite lax about it and dragons the most careful - leaving Faerie even before eggs are laid. Elves have three distinct phases to their infancy, of which only the last is normally completed Outside.

3 Seedlings

Elves conceive largely as humans do, although generally with much less frequency. Their long lifespans mean that there’s no hurry and many elves do not reproduce until they are over one hundred years old. Actual mating is a very personal event and almost never takes place in human lands but in the Deep Woods of either partner.

When they do choose to conceive, the chance of success appears to be 100% and a few weeks after the coupling the female will secret a small seed-like object. In theory this seed can be planted in any wood but in reality only desperation will lead to a seed being planted outside the Deep Woods. The seeds sprout into plants, like young versions of the trees associated with the father’s background but after a year, or perhaps two in colder regions, a flower similar to the ones on the mother’s ancestral trees will bloom and the falls away revealing a large pod.

This pod must be taken by pixies (sometimes brownies) and carefully opened to reveal what appears to be a young pixie. This pixie-elf will be cared for for 2 years. At the end of this time, it will become soporific and the pixies (or brownies) must weave a cocoon for it using dryad hair or some similar material. Inside this cocoon the pixie will become a baby elf, almost indistinguishable from a human baby. At that point the child must be removed from Faerie lest its developing mind interact with the nature of the plane and warp the child in strange and possibly unfortunate ways.

Normally it will then be raised for 20 years by the surrogate family on some other plane. But sometimes they may shirk their responsibilities by switching it for a human child (pixies being neutrally aligned; brownies never do this, although they may in dire straits try to add the child to a human family if there is no other safe option). What the pixies do with the human children is a mystery, but this may be the source of some of the unique monsters of Faerie.

At the end of this time, the elf parents will be contacted and the child returned to its family if possible and entering Faerie will be safe for it.

Because the female elf needs to put relatively little physical energy into childbirth, and takes no role in feeding the child, sexual dimorphism in elves is slight and sex in general plays a minor role in their society.

However, although among elves friendship is more highly prized than sexual partnership, the two can certainly overlap and long-term pairing of male and female elves are by no means unusual or remarkable.

Bardic songs about elves often include strong elements of what we would think of as “Courtly Love” and the sort of romance that one finds in Arthurian stories, and the admiration for this has influenced some human leaders and through them their kingdoms.

However, long-term pairings (and groupings) of same-sex elves is much more common than in human societies, leading to the words “fairy”, “fey”, and even “pixie” and “elfin” becoming pejorative words - or sometimes just plain synonyms - for homosexuality in many human societies.

4 The Races

We’ll look at the main races as classified by humans into Wood, Grey, High, Drow, Valley, and Aquatic.

The elves do divide themselves into groups or types and there is some overlap with the human ones, but in general the elves use much more fine-grained terms even when dealing in generalities and each “family” of elves is treated as an individual type when dealing with specifics.

Wood Elves

“Wood elves” is the human term for the common elves of the broad-leaved temperate ancient woodlands of oak etc. The broadness of this categorisation ensures that they are the most numerous. In fact, of course, there are many types of elves which elves themselves would recognise as different caught up in this definition and none of them is especially numerous.

Regardless of this taxonomic note, the Wood Elves are generally the most conservative and private of the large groupings - we’ll look at Valley Elves later - and are much less likely to be encountered in human lands than in Faerie itself; they are Rare in the former and Common in the latter.

Wood elves receive +1 STR and -1 INT rather than the modifiers in the PHB.

Grey Elves

The grey elves are generally those elves from woods dominated by cedar, beech, and hard maple type trees. They are the nobility of Faerie.

Grey elves must have INT 9+ and DEX 8+ in addition to other requirements. Modifications are +1 Wis, +1 Dex, and -1 CON rather than the values in the PHB.

High Elves

The high elves are the most outward-looking of the elves, although that’s a low bar, and by far the most frequently encountered in human lands or planes. Their woods tend to be birch, rowan, or even ash.

The modifications for elves in the PHB are for high elves.

Dark Elves

The dark elves come from the snowy evergreen woods of high latitudes or altitudes. Their skin is the blue-white colour of virgin snow, their hair of the deep shadows of a moonlight forest. Their young are raised by ettercaps and cocoon in spiderweb.

Chaotic and evil, they band together only in order to attack a strong opponent and feel no obligation to each other or to any “king” or “queen of the elves”. To the outsider it may seem that they are an exception to the rule that elven society is never ruled by fear, but in fact dark elves follow the leader most able to inspire fear in others, and an attempt to directly dominate the dark elves would be met with derisive laughter and contempt.

However. They are not numerous and they are often brought to heel by other Fay who can threaten them with force - the only language they respect. They also embody the sort of racial arrogance which other elves are prone to in their worst moments and will side with their relations against any serious human incursions, never dealing with humans as equals, although they may feign cooperation or even friendship when they actually feel nothing but distain.

Dark elf PCs must have a STR and CON of 7+ in addition to other requirements. They receive +1 Dex, -1 CHA and -1 WIS instead of the modifications in the PHB.

Drow

The drow are a mythical race of elves who live underground. It’s not clear how they would reproduce and so the assumption is that they do not exist.

Unusual Woodlands

Valley Elves and Grugach

These elven types are emblematic of the fact that the true effect on the nature of the elves is not so much the type of trees found in their wood, but the nature of the forest.

These types are examples of elves from woodlands which are isolated geographically. The elves of the Valley of the Mage dwell in woods which benefit from a micro-climate, resulting in a woodland of deciduous trees inhabited by animals more native to pine forests.

Grugach similarly are found in forests which are very isolated, for example on islands, and which have no other permanent settlement by intelligent creatures, not even ents or their ilk.

Other examples exist, including elves from jungles and eucalyptus woodlands, sequoia forests - basically any distinctive type of forest will result in some equally distinctive elven inhabitants (if it has any).

Aquatic

An extreme example of this are the aquatic elves, the most well-known of which are the kelp elves (not to be confused with Kelpies, or for that matter mermen).

The kelp elves have +1 STR, +1 DEX, -1 INT and -1 WIS in place of the PHB modifiers.

They are generally hostile to humans by association with fishermen who kill not only fish but dolphins and (usually accidentally) the elves themselves.

They have a 15“ swimming rate and although, like other elves, they suffer no short-term ill effects from leaving their ”native“ forests, they can not survive on land for more than two rounds, after which they temporarily lose one level per round until death at level -1.

Their clerics have spells specifically to allow more time on land, and the frequent trade meetings between aquatic and land elves will always include a cleric who will ensure that there is time not only for trade but also for some festivities.

Aquatic elves can not breed with land elves, but can breed with humans.

Internal Relations

Because they reproduce sexually, elves are much more prone to internal division and strife than the dwarves or gnomes and at times this can result in open warfare between even groups, even those which share the same ancestral woodlands.

External Relations

Elves and dwarves do not get along well due mostly to the latter’s use of wood for fuel and construction (pit-props, mostly).

The more itinerant nature of gnomes has the effect of preventing long term damage to relations with any one group of elves and so relations are on a much better footing than the dwarves’.

Halflings have fairly simple needs and are capable of supplying them from their own managed woodlands; their lack of interest in expansionism makes them another generally acceptable race.

Humans

The relationship with humans is strained for similar reasons to the dwarves but the human talent for managed forestry mitigates this and elves generally are only slightly suspicious of humans. As human populations expand, however, there are always going to be flash points when farmers start assarting.

The elves do struggle to understand how a race as short-lived as humans can manage to do so much, and the more rural wood elves are more likely to be hostile to humans - engaging in “tricks” which can escalate to hazardous levels. Grey elves are least likely to have anything to do with humans but if humans blunder into their territory the elves will take action and will be very harsh judges of alignment indeed. Crimes against the forest or elves may result in capital sentences, geases, charming, hostage-taking, or other measures designed to prevent repeat offences and the grey elf preference for humans is closer to ’A’ than ’N’.

High elves tend to be more exploration-oriented and are certainly the most likely sub-group to be encountered outside of their forests. They have most knowledge and understanding of human ways but this is a mixed blessing and the overall result is that they are also rather suspicious of humans.

Enemies

Elves can not reliably without access to the worlds that they enter from the Deep Wood so it is vital for the long-term viability of any elf family that they continue to have access to and from the Deep Woods. This makes them vulnerable to being cut off deliberately by hostile actions.

Thus, most of the “foreign policy” of the elves revolves around protecting ancient woodlands in the normal material planes from interference which would break the link back to Faerie.

Some of these enemies are other Fey - including dark elves working against other elves, evil dragons and so on - and some are simply forces of evil who desire to cut humans off from useful allies or who just want to wipe out elves in general.

Elves can be seen by humans as flighty and unreliable when their forests are not at stake; they become very serious when they are.

5 Orcs

Orcs are a special problem for me as I don’t normally use them. Unlike Hobbits, there is absolutely no folklore basis for orcs to make them universal enough that they don’t intrude a specifically Tolkien element into a campaign.

However, since I’m trying to rebuild the core races I need to include some handling of orcs for the same reason that elves have to be sexual: the existence of half-orcs as a player character race.

Indeed, this neatly mirrors the Tolkien orcs as for a long time JRRT viewed them as corrupted elves and in the Lord of the Rings there’s hints that the orcs are as long-lived as elves as a result.

Tolkien himself initially called orcs goblins but that did not serve his purposes very well and they became something different and much more brutal and bestial. As a symbol of Evil’s power to corrupt there was nothing better than the idea of the beautiful and noble (but hubristic) elves being debased to the level of Shagrat and Gorebag.

This notion proved untenable in the long run (the sheer number of orcs was probably the issue) and Tolkien moves away from it in his later letters. But, as in D&D, he left behind the concept of the half-orc.

In D&D we are told that there are female and young orcs. Given the vicious and clannish relations of the orcs, I think the best approach is to run with that and have orcs reproduce with each other in more or less the same way that humans do - not inheriting the reliance on trees which elves do and so leaving them free to destroy forests as a way of hampering and harassing their elven ancestors.

Orcs can also reproduce with humans, but no other races, not even the elves.

Reincarnation gone wrong

A more subtle influence of Tolkien on D&D is that elves can not be resurrected, only reincarnated.

Put simply, I propose that any evil elf reincarnated as “elf” will have a 50% chance of being reincarnated as an orc, whether rolling on the druid or magic-user tables.

In addition, reincarnation should be ca stable on orcs - which is probably already the case.

Sex and D&D: Making alien babies

It's what it's all about

"I don't understand - what does
'plant your seed' mean in your land?"

Almost all human history, politics, art, science, and behaviour is shaped by reproduction - how we do it, how it works, who decides. So I was thinking that if we change those things we almost inevitably start to approach a much more genuinely alien race. So, here’s a set of ideas to change the demi-humans.

Dwarves

• Dwarves do not reproduce biologically. Dwarven clerics use secret rituals to make new dwarves in huge stone pots. If these are destroyed, the tribe is effectively doomed to extinction unless new ones are made, and it’s very very hard to make them.
• Young dwarves (i.e., under 30) do not have beards and are sometimes mistaken for females.
• All dwarves have penises, which are for waste excretion only.

Gnomes

• Gnomes also do not reproduce biologically, but are dug out of geodes in metamorphic rocks.
• Most of gnome society is devoted to finding seams of these geodes.

Kobolds

• Kobolds (evil gnomes) also breed using these same geodes. 
• They have a process which converts the geode's contents into kobolds instead of gnomes. The process uses silver and they prize this metal higher than any other.
• They also preserve the stones rather than "hatching" them immediately in the way that gnomes do. The stockpiles of geodes has lead outsiders to believe that kobolds are oviparous.
• The geodes are saved for when new silver or gem seams are found and the tribal leaders want more labour. Kobold children - "scamps" - can work usefully from the age of two.

Elves

• Female elves have a gestation period of about two weeks, at the end of which they secrete a small seed which must be planted and tended for about a year before the child emerges in the form of a pixie.
• This form is retained for about two years before it finds a hollow in a tree and forms a cocoon. The following spring the child elf is born “for real”.
• Adult elves take no part in raising a child until it reaches the age of 20, at which point the pixies take the young elf to meet its parents (or wider family).
• Half elves born of human mothers grow like a human child.
• The dark elves of the high boreal forests with their snow-white skin and raven-black hair breed only in the winter and their children take the form of and are raised by goblins.

Halflings

• Halflings are much like humans except for a shorter gestation period of only three months, during which time the mother is said to be “eating for four”.
• Fertility rates are low, with twins being exceptional and most births being separated by 5-12 years.
• Halfling children mature slowly.

The more I think about these changes, the wider the ripples become. Dwarves are rooted to the place where their pots are; gnomes are nomadic; elves protect their woods as a matter of life or death; halflings are stay-at-homes. All common tropes, but with an underpinning beyond "because".

Demi-humans and history

An elven sage

It was recently suggested somewhere that any humans' questions about ancient scrolls, cities, dungeons etc. in a campaign could be solved simply by asking the elves, and to some degree the same argument applies to the other long-lived demi-humans.

The problem with this, is that it assumes: 1) that the elves care, 2) that any elf even knew in the first place, 3) that the elves that knew and cared enough to notice are still alive, and 4) the living elves who know are traceable.

1. Caring. The elves generally don't really like humans, and view them with suspicion. The things the elves are likely to be interested in are questions like "are the humans planning any colonies in places we live, eg clearing forests for farmland?" not "where is the Invulnerable Coat of Arn these days?" or "What is the name of the guy that dug that megadungeon in the hills?". Only if these questions impinge on elven history are the answers likely to be recorded therein. Otherwise, it's all just "Some stuff the humans were doing but by the time anyone looked into it they had all died of old age. Typical."

2. Knowing. While there is a case that one may study those things that you are worried about, the standard game takes the view that what mostly happens is that the demi-humans keep away from the humans except for a handful of "exceptional" cases, where "exceptional" has strong undertones of "insane". This leads on to #3:

3. Living. Demi-humans who mix with humans in the "standard setting" are almost exclusively adventurers. And what do adventurers generally do better than anyone else? That's right - they die at low level trying to jemmy open a tomb somewhere and are never heard of again. So the elves, dwarves, gnomes etc. who are most likely to know stuff relating to human legends are the ones least likely to have taken advantage of those long lifespans.

4. Traceable. We have an elf who is interested in the subject at hand, has actual knowledge of it, and is still alive somewhere. Where? The answer depends in many things but unless you're running the City State of the Invincible Overlord it's unlikely to be "running the tobacconist shop at the end of the street". Even if you are running the CSIO, the chances are they're keeping their mouths shut about their background in order to not be constantly inundated by amateur archæologists who want some bit of pottery identified.

In the end, "ask an elf" is a viable solution but there's not really any good reason to think that it's an easy solution to questions of object identification and that's a good thing. Because it makes "ask an elf" into an adventure hook, not just a dull short-circuit of a mystery.

The Other Side of the Humanocentric Fence

Here Be Humans

Having lost three long posts to Blogger's horrible HTML editor and had a stew about it for a week or two, I'm going to restrain myself to a simpler post format for now than I would like. I suspect in the long run I'm going to have to dust off my own website to post the sort of material I would like.

Anyway, part of the lost posts included this introduction to a scenario:

In the woods north and west of our kobold cave live many creatures who habitually avoid human contact. They know that where the humans go, farms and fields and towns and cities follow and space within these is found only for a select few of the wild's people, even when patronizingly granted the term "demi-humans".

So even those that are not violently opposed to the world of humans dislike what it represents. King of these are the centaurs, of all the intelligent races the one with the most claim to the title of "demi-human", but by nature probably the one least interested in making that claim. They run free in the forests and glades, strong enough to fight most threats and fast enough to avoid most of the rest. The human village to the south is of no interest to them.

Until now.

This was an attempt to summarise what I think things must look like from the non-humanocentric side of the default AD&D world. It's quite common to ignore the attitude of non-human non-evil races when building an AD&D world, I think. Generally worlds seem to get divided into "humans and allies" and "enemies of humans", and this applies to some degree to Greyhawk as well as later settings. It is true that several demi-human states and locations in Greyhawk are referred to as being to one degree or other xenophobic but the overall picture is that humans and non-evil intelligent races all sort of get along.

This isn't the picture one gets from just reading the DMG and the PHB. Let's have a show of hands, which demi-human races like humans?

Human Fan Club meeting
threatens  to become rowdy

Answer: no one.

Yes, that's right. Not a single PHB playable race actually likes humans. Not halflings, not dwarves, not elves.

All right, then; who is suspicious of humans?

Answer: dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, and half-orcs are all listed as thinking of humans "neutrally, although some suspicion will be evident".

It can be argued that in a D&D world, suspicion is the natural ground state of any meeting between strangers, but even so the picture is not one of friendly co-operation between allied races. In UA the picture remains the same except that the two new elven types are actively hostile to humans (moreso than drow!).

The DMG's inhabited area encounter tables bear out this image of a world where "inhabited" is synonymous with "inhabited by humans". Across the board in temperate areas, ogres are more frequently encountered than elves (even in forests) or and orcs than dwarves (even in mountains). Centaurs,  sylphs and their like do not appear at all. Where humans go, intelligent non-evil races leave.

The presence of the evil humanoids on the encounter tables probably represents a desire for a little bit of risk in overland travel during play but it also has an implication that the humanoids are actively resisting or attacking the humans in a way that the demi-humans are not.

"The woods are a resource?
Good luck with that one..."
(ElfQuest)

By and large, Gygax's first edition humanocentric default world means that safe areas are images of an idealized mediæval 11th or 12th century Europe, where magic works and clerics can heal the sick and cure the blind etc. But Europe did not have any dwarven populations living within its borders and its woods were a resource rather than an elven holt.

It's a bit like the red-squirrel/grey-squirrel situation in the UK today. The greys don't actually directly compete with the reds; they're just a bit better at surviving - they're stronger and they have sharper minds. Similarly, humans in AD&D have the ability to rise to levels beyond anything the demi-humans can, and in the long run that's enough to make the latter retreat instead of fight.

"Look at me! I'm 13th level!"

There's an old story about Sparta. An alliance of Greek city-states were facing some foe (probably Persia) and the Spartan general was laying out out the battle-plan. Some of the other cities' generals objected to the Spartan making these decisions without consultation them, because Sparta had only supplied some of the soldiers. The Spartan went outside and tells the assembled me to stand up. Then he says "All the potters, sit down", and all the potters sit down. Then "All the smiths, sit down" and they sit down too. He proceeds to name various skills and professions until only the Spartan troops are still standing at which point he says "All the soldiers, sit down" and, obedient to their laws, the Spartans sit down together. The General turns to the others and says "Sparta has not supplied 'some' of the soldiers; we have supplied all of the soldiers. That is why I am in charge."

Must remember...humans are our allies....

The evil humanoids, of course, simply want to conquer everything else and so there is scope for the humans and demi-humans to unite against an implacable foe. But in the end, Sparta provides the big guns and so Sparta is in charge. The humans supply all the arch-mages and all of the lords* and all of the high priests and in the end that is what makes the 1st edition AD&D world a world of humans and the wilderness a place where one meets not just dragons and trolls, but elves and gnomes and centaurs.

I think there's scope here for making the wilderness a bit more complex than it often seems and both high and low level adventures in it rather less clearly defined in terms of what a party of humans can assume in terms of who will help and who will hinder them.

*Yes, yes. STR 18 dwarves can be 9th level fighters. Don't fuss.

AD&D Races: Elves

Wood Elf?

Races are one of the big tone-setters in any fantasy game. A game with only humans is going to have a different feel than one where there are only demi-humans and AD&D's assumption that players can play any one of several races certainly puts a distinctive stamp on the default gameworld.

Elves are particularly interesting because of what they are not. What the word means to a person probably reflects that person's reading or movie-watching more than any other race. While AD&D's dwarves, half-orcs, and hobbits/halflings are inextricably linked to Tolkien's versions, the elf as described in first edition retains its own identity to a much greater extent.

High Elf?
Art: Wendy Pini

"Elves" can be, of course, Tolkien's superhuman serial-incarnating immortals from the dawn of time, or they can be the fairies of Rackham and Shakespeare, the wood/nature spirits of English folklore, Wendi Pini's shipwrecked star-voyagers, or the elemental magic-wielders of Scandinavian and Celtic myth. But Monster Manual elves are basically the English type.

Over time they changed, but from the start Gygax demonstrated a knowledge and interest in the beings found in the folklore of the British Isles, and not just English stories. The MM, MMII, and even the Fiend Folio have many examples which are straight adaptations by Gygax from English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh tales and myths into AD&D stats. Probably only Greek mythology rivals Britain for direct inspirations for AD&D monsters.

The elves fit into this "ecology" and are in fact a very poor fit for either Middle Earth or Vanaheim, while the more whimsical of Britain's "fairies" are given their own entries as brownies, pixies, sprites, booka/pookas, and so on, leaving the elves themselves as one of the main demi-human options for player characters.

Which is not to say that Gygax didn't try to ride more than one horse. Even in 1977, AD&D elves came in a wide variety of types: Grey (specifically given the alternative name of "faerie"), half-elves, wood-elves (AKA sylvan elves), aquatic elves, the default high-elves, and the rumoured drow or "black elves".

Although the tallest male elves can reach 5' 6" in height, according to the DMG, the average is 5'; not "little people" exactly but far from the imposing forms of Tolkien and many older tales of elves.

Elven Queen?

In (particularly Scots) folklore, the elves and the other fairy races are divided into two camps, the seelie and the unseelie courts, where "seelie" means "blessed" and court is used in the sense of a royal court, with a king and queen at its head - Oberon and Titania being the most famous examples of elven rulers due to their appearance in A Midsummer's Night Dream, although the "Queen of Fair Elfland" encountered by True Thomas is still also widely sung about anywhere where two or more beards and a guitar doth gather together. Presumably, the unseelie court likewise has its rulers, although I don't know of any specific examples off the top of my head (and I can tell you that Google is no help at all in this area!)

The influence of these stories is so strong, in fact, that they manage to impinge on one of the most clear of all the lifts from Tolkien - the ranger class. Despite its unarguable origins in Tolkien, in that class the list of "giant class" opponents is really a thinly disguised list of the Unseelie Court of British folklore.

Elven Royalty?

In the Players Handbook the "giant class" covers bugbears, ettins, giants, gnolls, goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, ogres, ogre magi, orcs, and trolls. Of these only orcs and ogre magi are not found in British folklore. The UA version of the list added some monsters from other sources (gibberlings, flinds, norkers etc.) but at the same time MMII had added many more examples of British monsters and intelligent races.

In the end, "seelie court" of AD&D consisted of the Booka, Brownie, Buckawn, Dryad, Dwarf, Elf, Gnomes, Grig, Killmoulis, Leprechaun, Nixie (Anglo-Saxon), Pech, Pixie, Pseudo-dragon, Selkie, Some Dragons, Sprite, Swanmay, and Sylph from the lists of intelligent creatures, although some of these races would be neutral to humans. These, plus their opposite numbers in the ranger's list plus the hags and many more non- or semi-intelligent British monsters - from cooshee to yeth hounds - constitute the "natural" associations of the AD&D elf much more than balrogs and wraiths.

Elf and Sylph?

For me, and many people I knew, these were the sorts of things we associated with elves, and in Irish Studies in school we were taught about some of them as well as hearing stories from our parents and grandparents long before we ever read Lord of the Rings. So I never had that urge that so many seem to have had to make elves into a super-human race, and similarly level limits never bothered me or seemed unreasonable. Many of the stories Gygax drew on told of the decline of the elves and their associated races and creatures - even Chaucer's Wife of Bath mentions it (as does, of course, Tolkien although for subtly different reasons). The "fact" is well established in myth that elves retreated in the face of the rise of humans and the game builds that fact into its default make up.

If elves in AD&D don't seem very elvish to the modern player used to later depictions both in film and in other game systems, it may help to consider why elves are the way they are in the game and what the source material is for that particular design and build some scenarios that emphasise those origins. There are a lot of meanings to the word, and it probably helps to know which one is being used.