AWW: Elves and Race
Apr. 17th, 2013 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinJust as a note to begin: I've decided to adopt the term "Folk" in place of "race" to describe the types of magical fantasy people in a magical fantasy world. This isn't done to erase discussion of race from the world, but to make room for it... we white fantasy writers have a tendency to assume that there's no reason to talk about race in any other sense once we've established that there are elves and dwarves.
The default Folk type is Human. The game system's rules are based around ideas of the sorts of things that human beings tend to be able to do and not do (e.g., we can't see in the dark or fly), so if your character is a different type of Folk, that's a notable exception.
Other Folk types are represented by Qualities, which people who've been following my design process as it's meandered back and forth know are the top level character resource, similar to "character class". You can have more than one of them, so you can be an Elf Warrior or a Dwarf Wayfarer or a Goblin Acrobat or whatever, with emphasis on "whatever" because the game doesn't lay out certain combinations as favored or prohibited.
You can also choose to stick to a single Quality (with the option of branching out later), so if you want to focus entirely on developing the things that come along with being an Elf, you can be an Elf. ("Basic" D&D did this, once upon a time. I tell kids this today and they don't believe me.)
Now, you might be thinking, "If no combinations are prohibited, what's to stop anybody from playing as an Elf Goblin?" And the answer is: nothing. Nothing at all.
Each Quality consists of a list of special abilities, some of which increase with level and some of which can be trained up. Actually, it consists of three separate lists representing individual tiers. When you take a Quality for your character, you get the first tier. It's not inevitable that you will rise to the second and third tier, even if you play your character to the deep end of the experience pool... you could keep the base abilities of one Quality while developing another, for instance.
This is significant when talking about Folk Qualities because I'm going to use the Elf Quality as an example and I want to make it clear that the progression I'm describing isn't inevitable.
Elves in A Wilder World are the descendants of a race of true immortals who visited from another world. Long term exposure to the mortal plane diminished them, making them mortal... some left, but some stayed and became mortal themselves. Their descendants are Elves.
The most numerous Elves are called Common Elves. They're found all over the world, and they've intermarried with mortals (mostly Humans) for centuries and so they tend to resemble the local Humans in skin tone and facial structures... for all intents and purposes, the race of a Common Elf can be said to be the same as the race of whatever Humans they're closest to.
There are other races of Elves, though, that are separate and distinct from the races of Humanfolk. For this, I drew heavily on the "inverted dark elf" idea I've blogged about before. The black-skinned Sun Elves trace their ancestry back to a group called the Three Monarchs In The Sun. They are known for their pride, their mirth, and their beauty... the sun brings out scintillating undertones in their dark skin. When human poets speak about the beauty of the Elves, they usually mean Sun Elves.
The Forest Elves are brown-skinned. They're thought of as shy... think of Thranduil's wood elves in The Hobbit who abandon their revels whenever the dwarven company draws near.
The Gray Elves are harder to explain in a single high concept than "shy forest-dwellers" or "outgoing sun-lovers". They're the Elves of twilight... among themselves, they live a crepuscular existence, being active in the hours just before dawn and just after dusk, though they can easily adapt to a diurnal existence to participate in other peoples' societies. Their theme is boundaries and interstices. They're inquisitive and drawn to mysteries.
And then there are the Fair Ones... the others don't even call them Elves, and in fact many people don't speak of them if they don't have to. They're the ones mothers warn their children about, who live underground and shun the light of day.
There's no mechanical effect or character requirement to say that your Elf is a Sun Elf or a Fair One, that's just as much a choice as eye color or gender. There are a number of Details (the low level character resource; think "perks", "feats", or "secondary skills") that represent cultural traits. D&D 4E took a similar approach to handling the sub-groups of dwarves and elves in established settings with a note that if you take something belonging to X Elves, you can't take anything for Y Elves. AWW Doesn't include any such restrictions, because there are things like mixed heritage... Common Elves by definition have mixed heritage, that could easily include traceable amounts of more than one Elven race.
Now, I mentioned a tiered progression. The first tier of the Elf Quality gives you what people basically expect from a D&D Elf: small bonus to hearing and sight, small bonus when aiming ranged weapons, small bonus to quickness and lightness of feet. Those small bonuses can be trained up as you go, for a character who's more focused on elveny things... basically taking a D&D Elf (pointy-eared human with a few attribute bonuses) and turning them into Movie!Legolas (elf-themed superhero).
Separate from training up the tier one abilities, you can advance towards the second tier, which I'm currently calling Elf Arcanist. At this point, your character has made contact with their supernatural roots, reigniting the spark of magic and immortality within them. The least important thing that happens is aging slows, extending your lifespan from a couple of centuries (longer than Humans) to thousands of years. That's not even counted as a game benefit, though, because what campaign lasts that long?
The main things Elf Arcanist actually gives you is a bonus to magic used to confuse and deceive, and an ability called "Elven Step", which is sort of like teleportation that only works when no one can see you at either end... which does let you do things like step behind a pillar or tree and step out from behind another one, because no one can see you while you're obscured. There are other restrictions on it, it's basically harder the more obstacles you're circumventing. The basic idea is that it doesn't let you reach a spot you couldn't reach, but it does let you reach it without having to cross the intervening space.
(This is a frequent feature of magic in AWW: the easier a thing would be to do without magic, the easier it is to do with magic.)
If you're a D&D 4E player, you might be reminded of the Eladrin, and that's intentional. D&D 4E split elves into separate "woodsy people with pointed ears" and "magical fairy people" archetypes... AWW treats the latter as a progression of the former.
The third tier is called High Elf, and this is Galadriel territory. This is Titania and Oberon. A High Elf becomes completely ageless, able to change their appearance (illusionary) at will, and is protected by an aura of power and unapproachability that literally makes people think twice before attacking them. And that's really pretty much it. If it doesn't seem like a lot for a Faerie Monarch type character, bear in mind that if you reach a high enough level to get a third tier and train up its abilities to a significant degree, you will have had a lot of chances to accumulate a lot of other cool/powerful stuff. A lot of the stuff a High Elf "should" be able to do are covered simply by being an epic-level Magic user.
That's Elves. As a bog standard fantasy race, Elves are going to be included along with Dwarves in the "starter pack" of Qualities that go in the Basic Character Guide, which is why they're the best developed. My end goal here was twofold: I wanted to make it clear that it's possible for an Elf to have black or brown skin in the same way that people in the real world (people who might want to play this game) do, but also that there can be black and brown Elves who are black and brown in a magical sparkly way.
You might be thinking that, in the absence of a specific Quality for Humans, the fantasy gaming trope of "Half-Elf", "Half-Orc" (with the other half implicitly being Human) is missing. But bear in mind that the "default" Elf in this world has a lot of Human ancestors already. If your heroic adventurer is the offspring of a Human and an Elf, you can represent this with the Elf Quality if the Elf part of the character is going to be a big deal, or using Details if it isn't... each Folk Quality will have a matching "Heritage" Detail that confers some of the tier one benefits at a static level.
The default Folk type is Human. The game system's rules are based around ideas of the sorts of things that human beings tend to be able to do and not do (e.g., we can't see in the dark or fly), so if your character is a different type of Folk, that's a notable exception.
Other Folk types are represented by Qualities, which people who've been following my design process as it's meandered back and forth know are the top level character resource, similar to "character class". You can have more than one of them, so you can be an Elf Warrior or a Dwarf Wayfarer or a Goblin Acrobat or whatever, with emphasis on "whatever" because the game doesn't lay out certain combinations as favored or prohibited.
You can also choose to stick to a single Quality (with the option of branching out later), so if you want to focus entirely on developing the things that come along with being an Elf, you can be an Elf. ("Basic" D&D did this, once upon a time. I tell kids this today and they don't believe me.)
Now, you might be thinking, "If no combinations are prohibited, what's to stop anybody from playing as an Elf Goblin?" And the answer is: nothing. Nothing at all.
Each Quality consists of a list of special abilities, some of which increase with level and some of which can be trained up. Actually, it consists of three separate lists representing individual tiers. When you take a Quality for your character, you get the first tier. It's not inevitable that you will rise to the second and third tier, even if you play your character to the deep end of the experience pool... you could keep the base abilities of one Quality while developing another, for instance.
This is significant when talking about Folk Qualities because I'm going to use the Elf Quality as an example and I want to make it clear that the progression I'm describing isn't inevitable.
Elves in A Wilder World are the descendants of a race of true immortals who visited from another world. Long term exposure to the mortal plane diminished them, making them mortal... some left, but some stayed and became mortal themselves. Their descendants are Elves.
The most numerous Elves are called Common Elves. They're found all over the world, and they've intermarried with mortals (mostly Humans) for centuries and so they tend to resemble the local Humans in skin tone and facial structures... for all intents and purposes, the race of a Common Elf can be said to be the same as the race of whatever Humans they're closest to.
There are other races of Elves, though, that are separate and distinct from the races of Humanfolk. For this, I drew heavily on the "inverted dark elf" idea I've blogged about before. The black-skinned Sun Elves trace their ancestry back to a group called the Three Monarchs In The Sun. They are known for their pride, their mirth, and their beauty... the sun brings out scintillating undertones in their dark skin. When human poets speak about the beauty of the Elves, they usually mean Sun Elves.
The Forest Elves are brown-skinned. They're thought of as shy... think of Thranduil's wood elves in The Hobbit who abandon their revels whenever the dwarven company draws near.
The Gray Elves are harder to explain in a single high concept than "shy forest-dwellers" or "outgoing sun-lovers". They're the Elves of twilight... among themselves, they live a crepuscular existence, being active in the hours just before dawn and just after dusk, though they can easily adapt to a diurnal existence to participate in other peoples' societies. Their theme is boundaries and interstices. They're inquisitive and drawn to mysteries.
And then there are the Fair Ones... the others don't even call them Elves, and in fact many people don't speak of them if they don't have to. They're the ones mothers warn their children about, who live underground and shun the light of day.
There's no mechanical effect or character requirement to say that your Elf is a Sun Elf or a Fair One, that's just as much a choice as eye color or gender. There are a number of Details (the low level character resource; think "perks", "feats", or "secondary skills") that represent cultural traits. D&D 4E took a similar approach to handling the sub-groups of dwarves and elves in established settings with a note that if you take something belonging to X Elves, you can't take anything for Y Elves. AWW Doesn't include any such restrictions, because there are things like mixed heritage... Common Elves by definition have mixed heritage, that could easily include traceable amounts of more than one Elven race.
Now, I mentioned a tiered progression. The first tier of the Elf Quality gives you what people basically expect from a D&D Elf: small bonus to hearing and sight, small bonus when aiming ranged weapons, small bonus to quickness and lightness of feet. Those small bonuses can be trained up as you go, for a character who's more focused on elveny things... basically taking a D&D Elf (pointy-eared human with a few attribute bonuses) and turning them into Movie!Legolas (elf-themed superhero).
Separate from training up the tier one abilities, you can advance towards the second tier, which I'm currently calling Elf Arcanist. At this point, your character has made contact with their supernatural roots, reigniting the spark of magic and immortality within them. The least important thing that happens is aging slows, extending your lifespan from a couple of centuries (longer than Humans) to thousands of years. That's not even counted as a game benefit, though, because what campaign lasts that long?
The main things Elf Arcanist actually gives you is a bonus to magic used to confuse and deceive, and an ability called "Elven Step", which is sort of like teleportation that only works when no one can see you at either end... which does let you do things like step behind a pillar or tree and step out from behind another one, because no one can see you while you're obscured. There are other restrictions on it, it's basically harder the more obstacles you're circumventing. The basic idea is that it doesn't let you reach a spot you couldn't reach, but it does let you reach it without having to cross the intervening space.
(This is a frequent feature of magic in AWW: the easier a thing would be to do without magic, the easier it is to do with magic.)
If you're a D&D 4E player, you might be reminded of the Eladrin, and that's intentional. D&D 4E split elves into separate "woodsy people with pointed ears" and "magical fairy people" archetypes... AWW treats the latter as a progression of the former.
The third tier is called High Elf, and this is Galadriel territory. This is Titania and Oberon. A High Elf becomes completely ageless, able to change their appearance (illusionary) at will, and is protected by an aura of power and unapproachability that literally makes people think twice before attacking them. And that's really pretty much it. If it doesn't seem like a lot for a Faerie Monarch type character, bear in mind that if you reach a high enough level to get a third tier and train up its abilities to a significant degree, you will have had a lot of chances to accumulate a lot of other cool/powerful stuff. A lot of the stuff a High Elf "should" be able to do are covered simply by being an epic-level Magic user.
That's Elves. As a bog standard fantasy race, Elves are going to be included along with Dwarves in the "starter pack" of Qualities that go in the Basic Character Guide, which is why they're the best developed. My end goal here was twofold: I wanted to make it clear that it's possible for an Elf to have black or brown skin in the same way that people in the real world (people who might want to play this game) do, but also that there can be black and brown Elves who are black and brown in a magical sparkly way.
You might be thinking that, in the absence of a specific Quality for Humans, the fantasy gaming trope of "Half-Elf", "Half-Orc" (with the other half implicitly being Human) is missing. But bear in mind that the "default" Elf in this world has a lot of Human ancestors already. If your heroic adventurer is the offspring of a Human and an Elf, you can represent this with the Elf Quality if the Elf part of the character is going to be a big deal, or using Details if it isn't... each Folk Quality will have a matching "Heritage" Detail that confers some of the tier one benefits at a static level.