What is it like to be a half-elf?

Half-elves aren’t simplistic biological crosses

Half-elves are in many ways halfway between humans and elves (the clue’s in the name), but it’s arguably a mistake to think of them as just a cross between kins. For one, they’re not a biological cross – in the sense that you can cross dog breeds and get something that looks like both parents – and we know this for two reasons.

First of all, there are no other known hybrids between elves and other Kin. OK, you can argue that halflings and goblins, what with their already-split nature, couldn’t create further-split hybrids (quarterlings?), even if you dismiss talk of moon-elves as wishful thinking. Maybe the same goes for ogres; orcs are inherently-weird and also maybe naturally slaves [citation needed]; nobody cares about wolfkin, or saurians; and whiners are too small. But even if all of that is true, why have there been no elf-dwarf hybrids? The two Kin have co-existed pretty-much peacefully for centuries, and you’d have though that Nebulos at least would have explored the possibility.

Secondly, there’s no indication that with enough effort you can ever get e.g. quarter-elves or three-quarter-elves, by repeatedly breeding half-elves with humans or elves respectively. There isn’t a tiny shard of ruby in an Elvenspring’s breast that is somehow transmitted to their children and will eventually grow into a full elf ruby. Nor can you dilute Frailer blood so much that you just end up with a slightly tall and thin human. Algadans, Algamar, Alvagard and Algarod all had a human mother but are all as half-elven as each other, regardless of how distantly-descended they are from Algared.

How do elf bodies work?

Elves are flesh, bone and ruby, but it seems pretty clear that the ruby is in charge.

For one thing, an elf can reshape their flesh, including changing its appearance, so while the body might have some idea about e.g. what colour hair or skin it would naturally grow, it’s clear that the elf mind and its ruby can override that.

More significantly, an elf can decide to have a body, or not have a body and just be a ruby in the Stillmist, or be an ent, in any order or permutation, and this doesn’t seem to change their personality.

Which isn’t to say that the flesh has no influence on the elf’s mind, of course. Muscle memory is a thing: a short and squat elf fighter who decides to become tall and thin is going to have to relearn a good number of moves. And if you manage to capture an elf and torture them for years on end, that’s going to have a lasting impact on their psyche. (Maybe a spell in the Stillmist, or inside Nebulos’s ritual of tranquility, could cure that, but it’s not guaranteed.)

And you can wonder why elves even need to look humanoid at all. My personal favourite theory is that there’s something about this world that says that this particular type of body shape is natural; and that the more anything departs from this, the more it’s likely to instinctively slot into the category of “monster” or “demon”. (Maybe Stanengist taps into this when it rejects demons, and not even a currently-humanoid Merigall is immune, because while Merigall is a skilled liar, we all spotted the weasel word “currently-“ there.)

But still, it’s clear that an elf body isn’t a standard biological body like humans, dwarves or orcs. It can be rebuilt from scratch with some effort, but it doesn’t / can’t breed.

The half-elf biology isn’t that special

The half-elf body, in contrast, is in many ways mostly human. OK, slightly taller, slightly pointy ears, strong will, lives three times as long, fine; but that’s not a huge difference compared to what you could have had. Half-elves still die, and don’t heal, or even shape-change a little bit. There isn’t a separate soul-receptacle thing that you can grab and stick in a tree.

No, all indications are that the original elves started with a basically human body and just tweaked it; because their main challenge was to work out the mechanics of procreation involving elves, given that elves don’t have eggs or sperm of their own.

(Do elves have genitalia? Well, if they want to breed with humans, yes, they need them; many don’t care and it doesn’t matter; a few very kinky elves care so very, very much. Jaded immortal shape-shifters laugh at your tame efforts at rule 34.)

Or, possibly, that they reckoned that the problem with humans wasn’t their biology, but their sociology.

Why design half-elves?

If elves wanted to explore a new body type, they could have just done that. Instead, they decided to explore the most alien things about humans, being the twin agents of change, mortality and sexual reproduction.

This is a radical departure for a race of immortals who have basically complete control over their physiognomy!

And yet we know that elves do nothing without consideration, so this can hardly have been a spur of the moment’s decision; and even if it had been, elves had the opportunity to wipe out Elvenspring and Frailers, in the first few generations at the very least, if they wanted to. So the decision to create elf-human hybrids must have been deliberate, considered, and endorsed as a thing that basically all elves agreed to.

The theory that makes most sense to me is that it was an attempt to determine the merits of nature vs nurture.

What is to be done about humans?

Humans are, not unreasonably, the bad guys of the Ravenlands.

Elves and dwarves lived in more-or-less harmony, with halflings and goblins doing their own thing, and there were probably wolfkin, saurians and whiners somewhere. And then humans turned up, crying that they’d broken their old land and could they have another? and before you knew it, there were humans spreading everywhere, claiming that land that they had no history with at all was nonetheless theirs by right because they really wanted it. All of a sudden they’re summoning demons, there’s a huge war, and just as the dust clears and things look like they’re settling down, nobody can go anywhere because some kind of sentient demon blood has organised.

But humans have a drive. Mostly they’re the victims of it, but they succeed enough that the wise expect that humans will eventually spread out to colonise everything. “That’s worth investigating”, say the initial half-elf promoters (my money is on the Shardmaiden). “Let’s iron out the major faults and see what happens”.

What else follows from half-elf design decisions?

Elvenspring reach adulthood at the same time as humans (Player’s handbook, p. 31), take slightly longer to reach maturity, twice as long to become old and three times as long to die (GM’s guide, p. 50). That seems like a deliberate attempt to move into the active phase of life as normal for humans, and then be able to slow down and take stock.

But that’s in direct opposition to the standard thing that happens to humans, which is that two young and horny humans end up having to settle down because there’s a baby coming. As well as not being sustainable culturally (see later), I don’t think elves would be comfortable about one moment of ill-advised passion - or, worse, violence - being allowed to change your life.

So I think the other thing that’s different about the half-elf body is that fertility is elective. Having a baby is only possible if both partners have agreed to become parents, and this is a decision that can be reversed, then taken again, at any time. A half-elf can say “I’m done with having babies now” and nobody can coerce them otherwise.

(I think the elves also cured a bunch of other annoying problems with human bodies while they were at it, like male pattern baldness, back pain, acne, stuff like that.)

Colonising humans with elf culture

If it still takes about 20 years to make a new half-elf, who then has at least 70-80 years of fertility ahead of them before they settle down, and the luckiest of them will live to be 300, the human concepts of generation and family pretty much have to go. A 21st century human has to try really hard to get to be a great-great-grandparent (each generation has a child at 20, and the matriarch lives to be 80); even if you double the generation gap to 40 years, nearly every Elvenspring would reach that level easily.

In our world, we glorify childhood sweethearts who end up married for over 70 years (e.g. Elizabeth II, Jimmy Carter), but I think Elvenspring would consider that a bit weird, and borderline creepy. Why should you decide to spend 250+ years with the same person; have you so little imagination?

Because, of course, elves don’t do anything like that.

I think Elvenspring culture is an attempt by elves to take the drive of humans, temper it with the inherent patience that comes with not fearing death anything like as much, and then taking the best of elven attitudes and seeing how they work out.

So, to the selfish human instinct of “there’s no such thing as society, just men, women and families”, elves say to this newly-created Kin “it takes a village to raise a child”. There’s no need to have children at the drop of a hat, they say: let the village decide whether it can support a new generation of children, and then everyone will help raising them.

And similarly, we understand that you can as easily fall out of love as in love, and that’s fine. People change, and the person you loved decades ago isn’t necessarily good for you now.

Let’s see what you can do if you still have the human drive to do something amazing, but without so much pressure to do it now.

The actual difference between Elvenspring and Frailers is culture

All of this assumes that the half-elves live in a nice village with benevolent elf mentors nearby. If you throw them into human culture, a lot of things can go wrong.

In a human society where power and status are inherited, a Frailer sticking around and not having the decency to die is going to annoy their children, who in turn are going to wind up their parent. Especially if Frailers aren’t aware that they can suspend their fertility, or choose not to.

Now, most of the time cooler heads will prevail, and there’s plenty of Frailers who will have reached a way of living side-by-side with humans (or decided that coexistence isn’t working and setting up a village on their own).

But things do have the potential to get violent, and in the absence of elf influence, thoughts are liable to turn towards demon-summoning, as a way of showing everybody.

Maybe you understand Zygofer and his followers better now?