Community

Faerieheart_Wolf wrote:

I would do that, but the standard elf seems too mundane for me. They are just too distant from fey and not innately magical enough. To be honest, with the creation of Eladrin (Sidhe), I'm not sure I even want Elves in my game, they aren't fey enough to be fey, and conceptually have too strong a connection to fey to be wholly mundane, and I don't want someone in the middle of the two. I may use the standard Elf stats for something else entirely. While fey losing their glamour and becoming something else from too much time in our world is a common theme, elves just don't fit that bill for me. Elf may even be another word that simply means fey (With emphasis on a humanoid seeming.)

The issue it hand isn't that elves are 'mundane', it is that they are stolen from LotR, but then watered down to be suitable for player characters.

Elves have to be 'mundane' to be player characters. If you wanted an ethereal, alien elf, just go back to the 1e/2e elf that was lifted straight out of LotR before the waters were muddied.

Elves are immortal. They cannot die because they are beings of spirit and not flesh. They can 'manifest' their true spirit form as it exists in the Undying Lands. They do not sleep, but go into a reverie where they continually relive the past. They don't exist in linear time because of the reverie. Memory is not truly in the past for the Immortals.

All of those LotR tropes have a place in various incarnations of DnD. Someone comes in to 2e and decides that elves need to be nerfed because they are 'too cool', in 1e. Ok, elves are now more in line with mortals. Then the Book of Elves comes out and reverie is back, Manifestation is back, physically passing into the Arvandor is pulled out of LotR as a blatant reference to the pull to travel beyond the sea.

3e comes out and elves are back to being mundane and boring again, because the 2e Book of Elves race, and the LotR elves aren't suitable to PCs.

Other devs come in along the way and come up with their own conceptions of 'fey' races, such as the 2e and 3e Eladrin, that form the Court of Stars, on Arborea. Truly immortal celestial creatures with inherent magical abilities, that of course, look just like elves. Many other elf substitutes like the pre-4e Eladrin.

The reason for the current Elf/Eladrin split and the consolidation of Elves as being "Fey" is because of the endless take on elves done by various contributors over the years.

An elf will never live up to being a LotR elf (that everyone seems to want; a supernatural, ethereal, alien creature), not the 4e elf, or the 4e eladrin and still be a player character, unless you are doing a party of all elves.

It is hard to make a race that has fluff or mechanics that designate it as being inherently 'cooler' than the rest of the mundane races. In 1e and 2e Book of Elves, that was definitely the way they went with the fluff. That was dropped in favor of making an elf is an elf is a human is a dwarf in 3e, and in 4e.

Non-mundane elves have existed in the past and they were dropped. If they went for the non-mundane elves again, they would be dropped, and then readded in as Elf-Substitute 183 in an MM, or some splatbook as yet another creature that is ethereal, superhumanely graceful, supernatural, alien, skilled with arms and magic and in tune with nature that looks just like an elf, but isn't one.

The problem isn't inherently with the elf archetype, but the fact that the most infamous of elf archetypes that DnD bases its image of Elfdom upon is unplayable.

Haldrik wrote:

Im ok with Eladrin as less "elf" and more "fey".

In stead of refer to Eladrin, Elves, and Drow as "elven" races, Id rather refer to the three as "Fey" races. So, Eladrin may be "elf-like", maybe even "elfish", but not actually "elven".

eladrin replaces grey elves and high elves in greyhawk. they replace moon, sun and star elves in the Realms

elf replaces wood and wild elves in both settings.