#also. wood elves should be a little feral. high elves should be unsettling and not ethereal

[deconstructthesoup]

Sorely tempted to run your typical high-fantasy game of D&D so I can fulfill my worldbuilding dreams of just making elves Weird

Like, oh, high elves are isolationist and snooty and live far away from people and are usually characterized as being calm and emotionless? Great, let's make them live in the mountains and wear fluffy coats for flavor, and let's also take the "elves are tall and skinny" thing and make high elves Uncanny-Valley levels of tall and skinny, complete with blank white eyes and a tendency to speak in unison when in groups. Make it so they deliberately suppress their emotions in favor of cold, hard logic, and make it so they're so disconnected from time due to their lifespan and their environment that they truly feel like relics of the past.

Wood elves live in the forest and are big nature people but aren't that different from high elves usually, and also elves as a whole come from the Feywild? Awesome, let's give them cat's eyes, claws, and tufts of fur at the end of their ears, make their teeth a little sharp and pointed, and throw in some green blood for good measure. They're our baseline elves, so some of them might live in cities and some of them might live in the forest, but make it so being a jack-of-all-trades is part of their culture, so they tend to have insanely niche knowledge of an insane amount of useful skills. Hell, make them a little bit chaotic and freespirited, moving away from the "I am calm and at one with nature" thing and more towards a "nature is a force that will fuck you up and I embody that" thing.

Drow live in the Underdark, an underground realm that's filled to the brim with weird-ass Aberrations and all-around freaky creatures, and worship a spider goddess? Perfect, let's make it so their purple/blue skin is something that's meant to help them blend into the Underdark and that their white hair is a blessing from said spider goddess, and let's take some inspiration from The Magnus Archives and spin their spider aesthetic into a culture that values charm, family, and forming "webs of connections---" and this can mean anything from making a drow character who's just a really nice person who wants to make friends to making a drow character who's straight-up a mafia boss. Make it so that because they live underground and are therefore closer to a lot of natural resources, they're more technologically advanced, but also make it so they've embraced the weirdness of the Underdark, creating a steampunk-meets-Lovecraft society where there's radio towers made in part with the psionic powers of mind flayers and trains created combining machinery with the carcasses of Aboleths. Maybe all of this weirdness is why people are so scared of the Underdark---a lack of understanding, rather than drow being genuinely evil by default. But also... make drow a little bit too charming, a little bit too used to how alien their home is, and have them feel like they're time travelers who've gone back in time and are just a tiny bit lost. They're disconnected from time like high elves, but in a completely different direction.

Idk, man, I just. Elves should be weird.