Category:Elves

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Elves are the second species created by the Gods Anilis and Senilis, after Dwarves and before Trolls. An elf is pretty much like a basic human, only they are not. They are immortal magic users, with stronger and faster bodies, and are sometimes more intelligent (not to be confused with being smarter). They have pointy ears and are mostly jerks (Well, maybe not any larger percentage of jerk-factor than there is in humans).

Elves can interbreed with humans, producing the imaginatively named half elves.

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Form persistence

One of the keys to Elven youth and immortality is that their magic continuously refreshes their bodies. Every few hours an Elf body slowly refreshes all the various features back to their natural state. This restricts their use of magic to make permanent changes in themselves, e.g. by use of the Polymorph Spell. They have to work harder to overcome this natural resistance to change away from their natural form and then their bodies eventually, in short order, revert anyway. This also makes them lousy shape changers and mimics. They can do it for short periods but at great cost in mana.

This, in elves and half-elves, is actually a boon and benefit. It tends to maintain their youthful appearance and is one of the factors that helps to increase half-elf lifespans, even though half-elves are still mortal. However, this becomes a real problem for Errants.

Elven society

One of the defining characteristics of elven society stems from their immortality. The practical effect of having a virtually infinite amount of time to accomplish something tends to promote a certain degree of deliberation. As Sarine notes, the elven languages don't even really have a word for the concept most humans attach to the word "love," particularly of the eternal or undying variety. Instead, they have Aetern Desiderium, a nostalgic longing for someone who dies before the couple has a chance to grow apart; this is considered an element of high romance in elven society, and thus many elves viewed the short-lived humans as ideal romantic partners, which in turn led the birth of many half-elves prior to the discovery of the Errant "problem."

Apparently, at one point in Elven society it was fashionable to make oneself look as "human" as possible, involving padded breasts, hips and posterior for females and padded shoulders for males. Whether this fashion is still current has yet to be discovered, and given the long-lived nature of elves and the fact that the elf describing the fashions is a ranger, this could even date back to the Errant War or beyond.

Although they presumably used different languages prior to them all having to live in one city buried under a mountain, all of them now appear to speak the same language, referred to as Elven rather than the fantasy standard of Elvish. According to Sarine, two elven languages remain (notice the present tense in her description of the difficulty in translating "love"), but only one seems to be used routinely. (See also Poe notes to the Translation article.)

The elven races

There are four elven races, although according to Sarine, they've intermingled with one another so much that there's basically no difference between them other than their names.

They don't use simple names like Wood Elves and Dark Elves, either. No, they use gratuitously hard to remember names like Rinkai Erufu.

Population

Poe (below) says there are at least 1000 elves left, but not more than a few thousand. Misa is the youngest elf, born 1500 years ago.


Poe Notes:|

(Taken from this thread in the Forum)

An elf reaches physical maturity a bit over 150 years of age; though socially they won't really be considered an adult till they are nearly 500+ years old. Additionally around that time it also becomes in rather poor taste for then to continue to refer to their parents as such instead of simply referring to them as relatives.
it's less an adolescence and more that period between 17-24 or so when they're not teenagers but not really expected to be adults yet ether.
Gestation period for an elf is approximately two years.
They require four or five hours of sleep. Though it is actual sleep, none of that bloody Tolkien/DnD trance stuff.

(Taken from this post in the Forum)

The surviving population of elves is "somewhere in the low four digit range."

Sarine is a very short 6' by elf standards

See Also

Subcategories

This category has the following 4 subcategories, out of 4 total.

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Media in category "Elves"

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