this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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I like to think Elves go on an adventure at around age 70-90, get really super cool, take 100 years off, and then completely forget all their amazing skills because they've been learning the language of bees or doing sequoia trimming as a hobby for the last century.
Would be a cute fluffy class feature to just assign the very old elf an exceptionally difficult but totally useless skill at near-master level, to help explain why the Legendary Warrior of Old is now swinging for the minor leagues.
I do like the idea that elves just change their entire lifestyle every hundred years or so. They spend 80 years as a warrior, then decided to take up magic and became a wizard for the next 80 years.
I also like the idea of a human village that accidentally built 4 statues of the same elf who kept saving them with different skills.
Kinda-sorta the premise of the anime Frieren.
Both the anime and the manga are fantastic.
Of the three elves we've met so far (there might be one or two other minor ones in flashbacks) only Kraft can be said to have changed class (warrior to monk), and that was centuries before the time of the series at the earliest, and due to a crisis of faith (and possibly a midlife crisis, or the elven equivalent of one).
The other two have spent at least a thousand years focusing on very specific skillsets (and in Serie's case complaining about how humans don't live long enough to gain proper expertise at their crafts)...
The premise of the series is Frieren learning to appreciate her friends despite their short lives (well, the original premise was a cute immortal terrifying demon killing machine of an elf, according to the author, but it sort of evolved from that)... but when it comes to the nature of elves and how they learn, it's pretty much the absolute opposite of this.
Both Frieren and Serie would be extremely offended at the mere suggestion that they might possibly ever forget anything, and Kraft would probably be disappointed but understanding.
Series, definitely. But Frieren struggles to remember old things all the time.
What. She's basically got photographic memory. The whole series is built on flashbacks to her memories.
She's dense as fuck when it comes to interacting with people, sure (though she's been getting better), possibly due to being an elf, possibly due to having spent most of her life alone in the woods, and she's extremely disorganised, but she remembers perfectly every single word of conversations held a thousand years ago.
Remember the sour grapes, remember her conversation with Old Man Voll when she was offended at the suggestion of her possibly not remembering until she realised he really was senile, remember how she could tell that the steaks in the restaurant tasted different than they had over eighty years before.
There's a series of books called The Legend of Drizzt last time I checked (it's changed over the years, and the first book wasn't even supposed to be about him lmao) and in one of the books, our main character believes he has lost all his friends (not a spoiler, we already know who is okay and who isn't when he thinks this) and so he goes off alone into the mountains to kill orcs and goblins and shit until he maybe dies. A couple of elves way older than him meet him at one point, and since this is really the first time he's spent with elves long term since he left his underground homeland decades before, he doesn't really know "how to be an elf".
This is basically their philosophy.
Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.
Since you will lose 10 sets of "lifelong friends" at least, if they're human, many elves choose to stick with other elves.
But those that mingle, tend to segment their lives into smaller chunks.
Don't try to live your life all thousand years in one go, you will lose so much by doing so.
But if you think of your life as more "this is me now, I am very different from the person who wore this outfit 5 years ago, and this is who I will be for the next 100 years" then it becomes more manageable.
You never forget the friends and family you made in an old life, but you cannot carry your grief over losing them for the rest of your life.
Those that do end up sticking to their own kind, because it's less painful. (and also superiority complexes)
After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.
Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.
I had a character who's backstory wasn't too far off from that. The career changes weren't entirely voluntary, though, and usually were because he had suddenly lost all his money and needed to go adventuring again to rebuild his wealth. By the time the campaign was set, he was close to a millennium old, borderline senile, and making some very outrageous claims about things he had supposedly done in the past, like getting into a bar fight with Selune during the Time of Troubles or having once dated Lolth.
I feel like that campaign is just begging for Lolth to show up and just be like "I see you've done... well for yourself. Are you going to introduce me to your new friends or...?"
The Lolth thing turned out to be a misunderstanding with a Drider. The character was not high WIS or INT.
This also somewhat appears in the Orconomics book series (very enjoyable fantasy satire with some heart to it), where the elves in that universe are virtually immortal and don't die by aging. Instead they just slowly forget their previous lives if they live that long.
One of the main characters is an Elf who used to be an adventurer of great renown, but is a bit washed up and is constantly comparing themselves with the legends of what they used to be. Also applies that if you were an Elven prince or princess, eventually you age out and get moved lower socially to any newer born royalty.
I think there's also a fun opportunity for the world to just evolve a lot in that time. Like, you were a wizard 100 years ago, but then spells were super different and way less powerful, so now you get to relearn the newer better spells and casting techniques. I imagine it'd be like learning to programming 50 years ago and then starting again now
That's an interesting (and very Frieren-esque) bit of world building. But it does run contrary to the generic D&D settings/multi-verse, where the same set of spells have existed for centuries and across a multitude of worlds.
"When I was your age, you needed to know 9th level spells to cast fireball" is a cute crotchety one-liner. But it's not going to make any sense when you find a 2,000 year old spellbook with Fireball at the appropriate 3rd level slot. The DM would have to do a whole mess of retconning of an existing setting / pre-written material to make it work.
As someone who did learn programming roughly 40 years ago, there are definitely differences. But an if-statement is still and if-statement and a function is still a function. The libraries and syntax can change, but the basic commands are still fundamentally the same.
I would note that modern programming-as-analog-to-magic would be more akin to everyone having a magic wand in their back pocket to do a set assortment of 3rd level spells per day which they don't even really need to think about other than the command word. Meanwhile, you've got this ancient elf flipping through a spellbook and spending an hour every morning re-memorizing a boutique list of spells nobody has thought to make a wand for in half a century.
Also a very interesting spin on a D&D-esque setting. But hugely divergent from printed materials.
But D&D also massively changes the magic system periodically, and they actually add it to the lore as cataclysms and whatnot.
The Vancian magic system hasn't changed that much even from 1e. That said, settings do change the meta narrative behind magic regularly. Faerun loves to make Mystra and the Weave big elements of their metaplot.
I could see elves forced to relearn magic every time Mystra dies or gets kidnapped or goes on vacation or whatever.
Very good points, Thank you!
I guess the most canon-compliant way to make this idea work is that they were a cleric of a deity that died. That does happen in DnD settings sometimes and I would expect that would remove their access to divine magic. Of course I would expect that rules would let you substitute a different deity with similar domains, and there are definitely skills and feats you wouldn't lose with your magic, but it would be an interesting backstory.
An elf wrote this.
Last century? Most lore has them in the range of 1000 years to immortal.
In D&D, elves don't typically get several thousand years old.
D&D lore is relative rare in fantasy.
In the context of RPGMemes on ttrpg.network, it's not rare at all - arguably it's the standard elf lore here.