Tolaria - Elves

(This was developed as background for a fantasy campaign that never actually happened.  I did swipe "Sperethiel" as the name of the Elven language from Shadowrun - it's a good name, and I was only intending this for private use, rather than publication)

Physically, elves are around the same height as humans, but do not store significant amounts of body fat, giving all elves a slim, lithe look and resulting in them weighing about 10% less than an average human of the same height. Sexual dimorphism is comparable to humans.

Elven eyes do not possess distinct-coloured pupils; they entire eyes is the same colour – usually white, but green or orange in a small proportion of elves. Aside from making it impossible to judge exactly where an elf is looking, many humans and dwarves find pupil-less elven eyes rather disturbing.

Elves can see in black and white in low light levels, like a cat. Their pointed ears are more sensitive than humans, and they possess more discriminating senses of smell and taste.

Reactions are generally at the upper end of human norms. Strength is comparable to human norms, though their low levels of body fat mean that an elf will not normally be able to sustain physical effort for as long; elves engaged in physical labour will often eat several small additional meals during their working day.

Elves are generally largely vegetarian. Most foods are fruit and vegetables, eaten raw – the closest an elf will come to what a human would term “cookery” is making a particularly elaborate salad dressing. Most elves eat at least some fish, almost invariably served raw in a style similar to Japanese sushi or sashimi. Meat is rarely eaten, though there is no direct taboo against doing so.

Elves possess eidetic memories – essentially, they do not forget things unless they choose to do so. However, most elves choose to “edit” their memories, in order not to be swapped by the weight of their experiences. This process (called Edain, or “the forgetting”) takes several hours of meditation, and most elves undertake it on a weekly basis.

This has profound consequences for their behaviour. At its most basic, an elf may not remember someone they were introduced to, or what they had for breakfast, and many humans are offended to discover that their elven aquaintance has completely forgotten entire conversations with them as unimportant trivia.

The ability to forget undesirable experiences also leads some elves into strange avenues of personal development. It can be very tempting for young elves to wipe out painful or embarrassing memories, not realizing that these things are often essential to personal growth. Such individuals (Eorsach, or “Ever-children”) can become locked into a cycle of erasing such experiences, and are both pitied and looked down on by other elves, much as a cripple would be in human society.

Others become locked into a particular focus – a hobby, an art form, or a vocation – and forget everything not useful to this. An example would be the diarloeth (literally, “sword-saints”), dedicated to defending the elven people against external threats; they often resemble living weapons more than they resemble the mainstream of elven society.

Combined with their near-immortality, it makes imprisonment useless as a judicial punishment; there is no point imprisoning a creature that won’t age, and will simply not remember the days in a cell. Since elves attach little importance to money, fines are equally useless, and most elven punishments are based on physical mutilation of the offender, by scarring, tattooing or even amputation of digits or whole limbs, as the only way to ensure that the offender will always remember his crime.

Elves are not fertile year-round; humans do not know the exact conditions that allow elven women to conceive, but it is likely that mana levels are important, partly explaining the decline in the elven birth-rate since the cataclysm.

Births are generally single, though twins are more common than among humans, perhaps one in five pregnancies. Where such twins do occur, they are always a boy and a girl, and share a bond even stronger than that between human twins.

Elves become physically mature at around 30 human years, but are rarely considered to be adults by their communities until they are at least fifty.

Elves are not truly immortal, but they are so long-lived that they might as well be, for practical purposes. Almost all elves die of disease, violence or accident, rather than old age, and the oldest living elves are well over a thousand years old.

Elves living within the human realms of Tolaria live under the rules of those kingdoms, just like any other citizen.

Within the Elven kingdoms of Ulthuan, however, elves live under a political structure which could be best described as “Gerontocratic Elective Dictatorship”- there are relatively high age thresholds on both voting and standing for office – the equivalent of approximately 40 and 50 respectively, in human terms.

The Elves regard this as merely sensible, given their long lifespans, and the fact that their near-eidetic memories mean a closer link between age and wisdom than among humans.

The executive body is an elected council (Tiras-Kuan, lit “Assembly of the Wise Elders”), traditionally twelve strong, comprising the twelve candidates who get the most votes. All councillors have an equal vote, regardless of the number of votes they receive.

The council elects a “Tuatheaen” (lit “Brightest One”), who may be a member of the council but need not be, and acts as primary head of state. His word is law, but he can be removed at any time by simple vote of the council.

The Brightest one will then appoint subordinates (Sudharim, lit “Landmasters”) to administer districts and towns, though these appointments may be blocked by a 75% majority of the elders. Once appointed, they may be removed only by the brightest one, however.

Ulthuan taxes its citizens in time, rather than money – each must work one day a week for the community, doing necessary tasks. People are normally assigned to a job they have some skill for (e.g. a scribe will be assigned to record-keeping), but if there are too people with particular skills, they will draw lots for the relevant jobs, and the unsuccessful will go into the general labour pool. Particularly unpleasant jobs are usually assigned by lot.

It is usually possible for an elf to agree which days he will work for the community, or carry days of between weeks. It is possible (though uncommon) to pay a substitute to perform your community work for you, though the substitute must be capable of performing the same or equivalent tasks.

Ulthuan has a primarily citizen army, and each citizen must also perform 20 days military service each year in time of peace, which is primarily spent on training time and limited patrol work.

Elvish Political and military ranks are not usually meaningful if translated directly, and the closest human equivalent is normally used. (Prince, Councillor, Captain etc)

Little is known of political structures among the survivalist wood elf communities living in some of Tolaria’s deep forests, but given their rejection of organised society as one of the causes of the Fall, it is believed that few are organised at anything above the tribal level.

ELVEN RELIGION

The elven creation myth is – perhaps characteristically – very elf-centred. It says that in the beginning, the creator made the world. He then split himself into a myriad of pieces, and each piece became an elf. When an elf dies, its spirit returns to a place of waiting, where it joins the spirits of all the elves who have ever died. When the last elf dies and its spirit joins the rest, the creator will be complete again, and the cycle will start over.

Elves often say that they have no religion. Certainly, they have no temples, or anything that could be labelled as priests. They do have spiritual beliefs, but say that this is merely they way things are; they don’t worship the creator, any more than they worship gravity – only a fool would deny that it is there, but it can get along fine without anyone making a fuss over it.

Sperethiel

Sperethiel (commonly called “Elvish” by humans) is an extremely complicated language, requiring the eidetic memory of an elf to speak properly.

It is likely that no human has ever learned to speak sperethiel correctly; what most human elvish-speakers actually use is – by elvish standards – a kind of pidgin baby-talk.

Humanity was taught magic by the elves, and much of the technical terminology of magic, as well as the verbal components of many spells, actually have roots in somewhat debased sperethiel vocabulary.

Sperethiel is both tonal and highly inflected. To further complicate matters, it often has several different words, all meaning exactly the same thing; an elf will choose which to use based on which gives the most aesthetically-pleasing metre and balance to a sentence.

Almost all verbs are highly irregular, and there are far more case and gender variations than in any human language – for example “I went…” has only one version in English, but in sperethiel, it would vary depending on whether the speaker was a girl, boy, young male, young female, mature male, mature female, elderly male or elderly female.

There are also a myriad of social conventions – some words may be written, but not spoken aloud, others may only be used in particular ritual circumstances – and it is unlikely that any non-elf can keep track of even a sample of these.

The written form of sperethiel is based on a series of Chinese-style ideograms or characters, formed from flowing brush or pen strokes and each representing an idea or word. Where there are multiple sperethiel words with identical meaning, there is generally only a single character, which can be pronounced as any of them.

Utilitarian written sperethiel is usually read left-to-right on the first and subsequent odd-numbered lines, and right-to-left on the second and subsequent even-numbered lines. Elves argue that this is actually more efficient than moving back to the left of a page for each new line, but humans often find it confusing, at least initially.

Sperethiel inscriptions are often used as decorative motifs, and these inscriptions are often arranged in spirals or other unusual orders; the rules governing whether – for example - a spiral inscription should be read from the inside out, or from the outside in are complex, and most humans will simply have to puzzle out possible readings until they find one that works.

Most magicians will know at least a basic set of sperethiel characters, as they are commonly used in magical inscriptions and ritual sorcery. A conventional human dictionary of characters is compiled and updated by a standing committee employed by the colleges of magic jointly, and presently holds more than 5,000 known characters. The committee has also produced a phonetic alphabet for transcribing sperethiel, with 68 characters, but it isn’t commonly used due to its difficulty.

Sperethiel has dozens of separate sets of numbers; for example, one set is used to count big objects, another to count small objects, a third to count people, and a fourth to count named things that aren’t people, such as ships or cities. Most of these are base ten, though some use other bases.