What is it like to be an elf?

We all know what it’s like to be a human: you’re born, you grow up, you try to make a life for yourself, you probably have offspring who you hope will do well and not disappoint you, and then you die. The same is true for halflings and dwarves, with different emphases (shame and pride, respectively); other kin like goblins, wolfkin and ogres aren’t so different; even orcs are pretty similar.

Elves, on the other hand, are different. Elves don’t die.

Consider all of the things implied by age and death

Not only do humans die, humans only get to do certain things when they’re the right age.

Childhood is for careless playing, having fun, meeting people and learning about the world. And then you get older and you need to be serious, find someone to marry, decide what to do in your most productive years. In time you’ll have children, need to support them and make sure they don’t get into trouble; as you become more and more decrepit, they’ll have to support you. And at every stage, as you’re asked to do new things, you’re no longer allowed to do the old ones. If you’ve been unlucky, you made mistakes, or you’re just not as good at things as you’d hoped, tough: your failures are baked-in. One guy dies surrounded by loving family in a warm bed, another dies in a ditch, and there ain’t no justice. (You can see why murders and revolutions happen.)

Elf society isn’t like that. There’s no expectation that says that you have to go through your life in a certain order, because there isn’t a queue. Nobody’s waiting to take over from you, nor are you champing at the bit for the person before you to give up and stop. There’s nothing stopping a 500-year-old elf from deciding “I’m going to go adventuring”, other than game balance (500 years of elving gets you way more skills and talents than a starting character).

There aren’t that many elves

Human society, at the tech level where Ravenland is, is a constant battle between “maybe we could have more people?” and “oh well, that didn’t work”. Someone invents the horse collar or crop rotation or something and suddenly the same fields can feed more people, and for a few decades everyone’s happy and a rising tide lifts all boats, until a new Malthusian limit pops up, or there’s a disease, famine and/or war or something, a lot of people die, and things go back to being miserable again.

Elves don’t do that, and that’s because nobody has the instinct of “maybe if I get mine, my children will be well-off and thank me, and I’ll die happy”. Elves, being immortal, have no need for anyone to tell them cautionary tales about chess boards and exponentially-increasing numbers of grains of rice, and are happy to keep their numbers at a level where everyone is fed and happy. There’s no interest in consuming more resources than they currently need, because there’s no corresponding increasing demand. There are only ever more elves if the elves think there should be more elves. That’s not something that happens often.

(An aside about elf bodies)

Elves can change their appearance completely over a few months’ time (GM’s guide, p. 52), which implies that smaller changes can happen a lot quicker. Most elves probably stay the same for hundreds of years, not really thinking about appearance much, but I bet a small minority really experiment with appearance, even from day to day.

Eye, hair, skin colour? Sure. Tattoos, piercings, scarification, and the other stuff that 21st century body-modders get up? Some elves are really into that. (Elf kink can get wild.) Fighters might be really into pain, and decide that any day when you don’t lose a finger or a chunk of flesh is a day wasted.

Antennae or tails? You can be sure elves have tried that sort of thing. It might be hard to make them as versatile and manoeuvrable as proper limbs, but given how amazing it would be to have a kangaroo tail, you can be sure that at least some have given it a go.

Beyond that? For some reason, all intelligent kin and many less-intelligent species have a basically humanoid body pattern, so maybe elf brains have a hard time coping with significant departures from the basic two arms, two legs and a head shape. Although having said that, some elves decide to ditch their entire body and turn into a tree, so who knows?

The failure mode of elves

Before I go on: everybody wants to talk about how elves go bad. Ferenblaud was a bad elf, say; or, look at the stuff going on with the red elves in Aslene, isn’t it hilarious. This is as common as people writing gritty reboots of Superman, and uninteresting for exactly the same reason. What’s interesting about Superman isn’t that he punches muggers or beats up bad guys or what have you; it’s that he’s committed to being good, despite being so strong and powerful that he doesn’t need to be. And similarly, what’s fascinating about elves is how unlike us they are. Yes, writing about Superman is hard, because he doesn’t behave like most superheroes; tough! I want to read Superman stories anyway, precisely because they’re not the stories you’d tell about Batman, let alone any of the X-Men, or anything that Rob Liefeld has been involved in.

And OK, yes, it’s possible for immortal societies to go bad. You can easily dial up the fear of dying to grotesque levels, to a point where absolutely everything is wrapped in cotton-wool and all weapons are banned. You can exaggerate the “respect experience” bit and have one tyrannical elf rule over all others and demand that they bow and scrape. You can make elves ridiculous ivory tower parodies who continuously debate how many angels can dance on a pinhead and ignore boring things like where food comes from or whose rampaging army that is on the horizon.

The thing is, though, there are few enough elves that you can’t keep this up for that long: people will either leave for another village, or decide to do something else like become an ent until the moment has passed ( “Derekiel is doing his thing again, I see; wake me when it’s over”). Maybe the Blood Mist was the best thing that happened to the elves, because they could decide to just ignore some small troublesome villages and not get involved. (“Oh sorry, we didn’t get your messages; damn pesky bloodlings!”) Either way, if you want to have a minor encounter with some terrible elves, this could explain things.

Happy? OK, back to why elves are weird and awesome.

Long-term memory has to be managed

If you’re immortal, but you still have a mind made of meat, your take on memory and consciousness is going to be significantly different from anybody else’s.

Organised forgetting

Human memory is all stored in the brain. There’s short-term memory, which fades quickly, unless you deliberately reinforce it or it matters to you enough, in which case it becomes long-term memory. A hotel room number is short-term memory; your birthday is long-term memory. When you’re younger it’s easier to learn a new language or new skills; as you get older, that gets harder, because your memory’s “full”.

Elves live long enough that this sort of fuzzy biological setup isn’t going to work.

At the end of every day, I think an elf has to decide what to do with their newly-acquired memories: to remember, to fade (remember only the broad strokes), or to forget. This is similar to how human memories work naturally; people who have trained themselves at their memory can deliberately work at remembering things, or conversely decide to free their mind of memories they no longer care for. For elves, this can be a natural by-product of sleep, or something more deliberate and focused. For elves in society it has to be, because the decision about what to remember doesn’t just belong to you.

While details (schedule, frequency, degree of formality etc.) will vary from village to village, all elf societies go through a similar ritual, which is the pooling of memories. Each elf describes the salient parts of their day, including odd things they may have noticed; each elf decides whether to remember / fade / forget, as for an individual, or recommend that it be noted. The first three are each elf’s personal decision, and mean that if one elf notices a strange growth on a tree, say, they may decide to forget because they don’t care, but other more botanically-minded elves may decide to remember.

The final one is how elf societies last for hundreds of years.

Elves have memory libraries

It doesn’t matter exactly how memories are noted. Elves are all about their rubies, so I reckon it would make sense thematically for them to store their memories in, let’s say, prismatic blue crystals. The act of storing a memory is something that other kins can learn, and maybe it’s something that guests are asked to do, like signing a guestbook. A glow of coloured light emerges from your head and floats towards the crystal, refracting and then vanishing. The different component colours making up a memory mean something, of course, although a full analysis takes centuries to get good at, and in any case non-elves who can’t see in the infra-red or ultra-violet won’t get a full understanding.

Regardless, the important thing is that there is a collection of memories, much larger than could fit in any one elf’s head, that elves have decided needs to be noted down somewhere. These memories can be eventually recovered, in the same way that a modern day human would use something like Google Scholar, or a previous-century human would go through paper journals or microfiche. (This being elves, they probably need to brew a tea from a particular kind of rare mushroom to get into a trance and then shine a light through the crystal they’re “reading”, but you get the idea.)

At the simplest, this is the sort of “I’m sure it’s not important, but just in case” set of details that ends up being a clue to solving an infectious disease or a murder (two things that normally-immortal elves are uncommonly interested in). It can also be a treasure trove of data that elf anthropologists, linguists, sociologists etc. absolutely geek out about. And in general, it’s a collection of ephemera that add up to a pretty good description of what that elf society was like at the time.

This means memories can be moved and copied

For security, robustness, and internal diplomacy, I suspect you can copy these crystals and send copies to neighbouring villages, in which case you’d add significant recent events to the list. (You’d hope that the “do not rewrite” mechanisms on such crystals couldn’t be bypassed, and that other elves wouldn’t try.) Elves exploring or otherwise out in the field can probably record their not-important-right-now memories in similar ways, maybe send copies back from time to time via homing pigeon or some other kind of migratory animal.

Healthy elf societies probably have a similar arrangement for longer-term memories as well, although that doesn’t usually need to go into so much detail, or involve the entire village. An elf might decide that an entire category of recent memories (a failed experiment, an abandoned hobby, a dead mortal friend, a friendship turned sour) are no longer ones they want to keep, and may decide to fade or even entirely forget. Maybe another elf chooses to take them on instead, at least to fade; maybe the community decides they’re worth noting. (If an elf decides to ritually shatter their ruby, you can be sure that they’ll decide which of their memories they’ll want noted, and it’s unlikely that anyone will disagree.) Either way, this is a declaration that the elf has decided, to some degree, to change who they are.

This can potentially extend to skills as well. Maybe elves can decide that they don’t need to remember how fight in battles right now, so they can take all of that training and put it aside for a while, and pick it up later if the village is threatened. This probably isn’t quite as extreme as Neo in the Matrix suddenly knowing kung fu, but it’s not far-removed.

Corollary: short-term memory loss is brutal

The flip-side of this is that if an elf decides that a memory isn’t worth keeping, because it’s not worth the space it would take, they will actively forget it. It’s gone. Completely.

Say a bunch of humans turn up in an elf village. They’re challenged by a couple of elves on gate-duty, another elf guides them to a diplomat, who speaks to them and refers them to a healer. They chat with a few other people they come across before going to bed.

There is no guarantee that any of those elves will remember meeting the humans the very next day.

It’s really unlikely that they’d all forget, of course. The humans turning up would be a significant-enough memory that a number of the elves, in their evening’s remembrance choice meeting, would decide to at least fade the memory. And some might decide to actively remember, e.g. if the diplomat had made commitments to them, or the healer was treating one of them as a patient, or one of the elves on the gate was interested in exotic animals and hadn’t seen anything quite like the druid’s squirrel familiar before.

Still, experienced travellers should not be surprised that an elf they’d met only hours earlier would suddenly have absolutely no memory of them, and be startled in exactly the same way as they were yesterday.

A worked example: why were the elves so slow to respond to the Alder wars?

“The humans are coming, with thousands of men!” go the cries. “We need to do something about it!”

The military-minded decide to remember. The more academically-inclined choose to forget. The debate repeats itself from scratch every evening, in an infuriating way. Eventually enough elves in the centre ground agree to fade and/or the military elves demand that this constant demand be noted, and then ask the moderate elves to consult the records before the meeting, or something. But a society of immortals who need to actively cull their memories or go insane, is very bad at changing its mind quickly.

What this means for language

English, French and German have one word for existence: “to be” / “être” / “sein”. You just are.

Spanish has two: “ser” vs “estar”. The distinction it makes is between intrinsic and contingent truth. “Soy Luís” means “I just am Luís”; that’s not a thing that anybody should expect to change any time soon. “Estoy bien”, being “I’m OK”, has an inherent “at the moment” qualifier. There’s no reason to believe I’m going to carry on being fine; my life could become awesome or absolutely terrible at any moment, and I make no commitment to you about that.

I think elves, regardless of which language they speak in, will have a couple of similar grammatical foibles.

The first is that they always speak in the present tense. They are aware that your language has a future tense, and probably a variety of past tenses; they just choose not to use them. “14 days from now we meet at this same place” rather than “see you in a fortnight”; “Gemelda tells me to beware your kind when we meet, the last time that I remember” rather than “Gemelda told me to beware your kind”. This is because elves are aware that they are a constantly-evolving being who can only reliably and honestly talk about its current status, and also because it’s a weird way of talking that’s easy for a GM to do with some small amount of practice.

The second is that they’ll say things like “it is remembered”, “it is felt” and “it is noted” to describe things that they know because from, respectively, remembered or faded memories, or notes that they’ve read. (Yes, even their own memories that they noted before they faded or forgot them.) This will probably fascinate, weird-out or frustrate non-elves, but is absolutely necessary in a society where the epistemic value of a memory really matters. A small society is built on trust, and it starts up by fessing up to “I don’t know but I’ve been told”.

All elves are happy, because if they’re not they’ll fix it

“This is all very fine”, I hear you say, “but I just want to know what an elf village looks like when my players look like”.

That’s easy. It looks amazing. (Google solarpunk, and then strip out the electric cars.)

And it has to, because elves live for ever, and won’t put up with even the tiniest of everyday annoyances that we suffer from every day.

No elf fears a supervisor saying “if you’re not happy with this job, I’ll find someone else who will be”, because there is no someone else. If an elf says “there’s this annoying thing that makes me unhappy for about a minute every day”, and a human would say “yeah, but over the course of your expected employment that doesn’t amount to much, compared to the cost of fixing it, so suck it up”, an elf would say “yeah, let’s fix it” because elf lifespans are just so much longer.

So: every building is beautiful. There are no rough-hewn pillars or beams, no peeling paint, let alone anything resembling brutalism or bureaucracy. Every workplace is pleasant to work in, except when functional issues trump personal preference (e.g. if there are normally nice pot plants everywhere, with captivating aromas and fascinating leaves, maybe there aren’t any in the smithy). There are murals or mosaics everywhere.

The village’s economy adapts to the workers’ preference, not the other way round. If the people interested in tending to plants want to do a European-style monoculture of large fields of individual crops, that small numbers of people deal with for most of the year except when it comes to harvest time when everyone has to chip in, that’s what the village does. If they prefer to do an American thing of planting all sorts of crops together, like beans growing up maize plants and what have you, including between and up into the village’s houses, the village does that instead. If the bee-keeper likes to chat to the smith, guess where the hives are? (There are probably all sorts of birds, animals and reptiles wandering around the village, wild or domesticated, because more interesting than there being just a few elves.)

And of course this can change over time, because nobody necessarily wants to do the same job for weeks, months, years or centuries. Job swaps happen, practices change. Hell, if environmental factors change and/or the elves have decided they want to do things differently, entire village might move to somewhere that’s more appropriate to what the people want now.

But it’ll always look amazing. The point about being few people, but having the clout of “we’re elves and you’re not”, is that you can pick one spot and discard 99 others. So you can be pretty confident that any elf village is going to be on the side of a huge lake, or at the top/foot of an amazing mountain, or by/around/in a large waterfall, or what have you.

Why would an elf ever leave?

None of this makes it easy to explain why an elf would ever join up with a bunch of adventurers and go traipsing through the wilds looking for bad weather and violence. OK, so the first elves turned up and at least mapped the hell out of Ravenland, and depending on how much credence you give legends may have been responsible for building much of it, but the current elves mostly sit around in their villages and glory at how amazing they and all their stuff is. A kin whose response to humans arriving in their thousands from Alderland was, typically, “maybe in a few hundred years they’ll go away”, does not tend to produce many restless sons or daughters looking to make a name for themselves in the outside world.

Having said that, maybe it only needs to produce one or two; and you can be sure that an elf interested in adventuring will have the drive that a good PC has, and that most other villagers lack. And while it’s traditional to think of elves and immediately say “druids”, consider how scary a warrior could be if they could blithely decide to sacrifice a minor body part to their enemy’s blade if that meant they could be in a better position to deliver a killing blow. Or how effective a spy could be if they could literally change their face from day to day.

If forward-thinking elves noticed the blood mist starting to weaken as Merigall went about persuading the Bloodlings to bugger off, they might have decided that what the world needed was an elf adventurer, unbounded by past prejudices; and maybe an ancient elf who got up to some exciting stuff back in their day might be thinking of how best they could shatter their ruby. Or maybe there’s a 400-year-old elf who was hoping to take part in the Alder wars, except they ended far too soon, and they’ve been champing at the bit ever since. If you’re worried about skills and talents, note that the experience rules are all about “what have you done?” and maybe nothing has happened to this elf yet, not in 400 years; or for various reasons the elf may have decided to forget past training, better to fit in with the new batch of mortal heroes.

And that elf has a hell of a back-story.