Elves, a breif outline:
Elves are generally tall and very slender, kind of like how the people look when you watch a widescreen DVD on a TV without letterboxing. They have long pointed ears that are angled back, not down. Much like skin and eye color are geographic markings on humans, ears are geographical markings on elves. How they are shaped, length, angle, etc. What they wear depends on their region, Wood Elves for example wear dark greens and browns, usually long sleeves and pants. Elves in general have remarkable visual acuity, and as such make better archers than anything else. In battle they wear light leather armor and use brush and paints for camouflage. Blending in and shooting from a far are more to there tactics.
Because Elves were one of the founding races of the Empire of Roads, they now mostly speak common, however in ages long past their languages were as diverse as their ears. The written language of the elves is still quite different from written common, and borrows many symbols and glyphs from the ancient tongues.
As mentioned before, the elves favor longbows. However, ranged weapons are not the beat-all-end-all. “Kill them before they get here” is a common Elvin saying, but in truth the Elvin warriors are well known for being down right vicious in close-quarters combat. The same strong, fast arms and visual acuity that gives them skill with a bow gives them great advantage with their favored short, curved blades. Usually they dual wield, but it is not uncommon to see an elf rip apart a group of men with a single knife.
While long-lived in pointy-eared, elves are not that different from humans. Many people believe they are “magical”, but in truth they are just flesh and blood. An elf puts his pants on one leg at a time, juts like a human (but unlike the Beluvien Thrall, a part-demon race from the dead zone, each of whom’s members has at least twelve legs. Beluvien Thrall’s commonly put their pants on at least three legs at a time.)
Another common misconception is that all elves possess a deep, reverent love for the land. This is in fact a falsehood. The truth is that there are just as many clear-cutting, strip-mining, capitalist-pigs in the Elvin world as there are among humans. In the industrialized areas of the Elvin world, there are few noticeable differences between elf cities and human cities. There value systems aren’t exactly like humans, but with the diversities of human and elf cultures, there are no differences important enough to note.
As previously mentioned, elves have a large and diverse culture; trying to make generalizations about them would be the same as trying to make generalizations about the humans of earth. There are a few important things to note; because elves have an average lifespan of 200-300 years, they tend to care a lot more about things that last. While humans would be content with say a building that is only designed to stand for a few decades, elves always build to last. One could say that Elvin culture moves a lot more slowly than human culture. Elves have a much greater perspective of time because they live for so much longer. A human who lives to be 100 will be old and senile, and spend most of there time sitting and reflecting on the past and there “long life”. For al elf who reaches the age of 100, its just a small milestone in their lives, somewhat akin to turning 30 for a human. Except that by 100, an elf has all the lifetime experience and more than a human who is 100, and far more than a human who is only 30.
Endurance is an important quality to the elves. Physical, emotional, structural, and the like. They value things that last, and a great deal of their ideology and belief systems focus around that.
|
