This is the fifth article looking at the lineages in the Tales of the Valiant game, not as fantasy stereotypes but as if they’re alien species similar to what you’d find in science fiction.

The point of this is straightforward: your character’s lineage should be a cornerstone of deep roleplaying, not just a mechanism for gaining some bonuses you’d like to have. Elves, dwarves, smallfolk, and the crew aren’t just humans with pointy ears or lush beards. Like everyone, you and me included, they are products of their culture, their upbringing, and their genes, which are very different from one lineage to another: one might even say alien. They don’t think, act, or view the world the way humans do—and that’s a fascinating roleplaying challenge.

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The Assumptions

This article looks at elves with the typical, recommended heritage of cloud or grove. Some of what’s stated here won’t apply to elves with different heritages—and it might apply fully to other characters who do come from these two heritages. In general, wherever we state “elf,” we mean “typical cloud or grove elf.”

The traits ascribed to elves here aren’t exhaustive or universal. You’re free and encouraged to devise your own cultural details for your character, using these as a guide. But make it different, thought provoking, and most of all, a solid hook for a unique roleplaying experience. If you want to play your character like a human, play a human.

What Makes an Elf?

The recommended heritage choices for elves are cloud and grove. Both have features that call up images of classic elves, making the choice between them a tough one. Cloud elves are steeped in magic; grove elves are lords of the forest.

We’ll draw some distinctions between them, but because both heritages are so stereotypically elvish, it’s easier to consider them two sides of the same coin rather than two different coins. When we say “elf” in this article, it refers equally to both heritages. If we mean one or the other specifically, we’ll say so.

This may be suprising, but of all the lineages available in the Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide, elves may be the most “alien” of all. What characteristics set them so far apart from other lineages?

• Elves live centuries longer than characters of any other lineage.

• Elves believe themselves to be direct descendants from immortals who created the world.

• Cloud heritage elves live and breathe magic to such an extent that they consider themselves the stewards of all magic.

Grove heritage elves do the same with nature. Their focus is almost entirely on forests, which to them encapsulate all nature.

The Years of Our Lives

Barring a violent death, an elf can expect to live 700 years or more. Even that number is deceptive, because in addition to living for seven centuries, they spend only four hours a day resting in a trance instead of 8 hours sleeping. Those extra four hours of wakefulness every day make an elf’s day effectively twenty-five percent longer than a human’s. To an elf, 700–750 years are equivalent to 850–900 years to a human in terms of hours spent awake and accomplishing things! Even a dwarf’s 350 years pale in comparison.

This facet of life, more than any other, shapes an elf’s view of the world.

For context, a 700-year-old elf living in our world would have been born in the early 1300s. This elf has lived from the age of chivalry through the Renaissance, the age of Discovery, the Reformation, the age of Reason, the industrial revolution, up to the digital age. A warrior might have fought in the Hundred Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and both World Wars. They could have dined with Tamerlane, da Vinci, Queen Elizabeth I, Mark Twain, and Snoop Dogg. Of course, we typically assume fantasy worlds change culturally and technologically much more slowly than the real world does (if at all) but the awesome span of time remains breathtaking.

Such longevity also leads to the inevitable question: why don’t elves run everything? They have so much time to learn, practice, and grow that logically, they should become masters of whatever they set their sights on.

The answer to that riddle is rooted deep in elvish culture and psychology. Elves dislike change. Or, perhaps more correctly, they treasure stability.

The great elven cities of the world were built so long ago that not even elves are certain when or how they were founded. In all those uncounted millennia, they’ve barely changed. The oldest Earthly structures that are still in use are about 2,000 years old, and they’re “in use” chiefly as museums showing off how old they are. Elves casually use and live in structures that have been continuously occupied for 10,000, 25,000, even 50,000 years or longer. That’s what an elf calls stability.

Elves don’t become experts at everything, despite having many human lifetimes to learn and practice, because they’d rather pursue perfection at one thing. An elf bard may spend decades composing a poem, writing and rewriting and rehearsing and performing and rewriting again until it’s as near perfection as it can be—and it may never be truly finished. An elven smith might labor over a blade for years before getting it as near as possible to the ideal in their mind. Humans, who seem always pressed for time, would be frustrated and angered if they were compelled to that degree of iteration and polishing and doing the same thing over and over with minor adjustments. To elves, that repetition and refinement is where the joy and fulfillment of the work is found. True perfection is always out of one’s grasp, but striving for it is enormously rewarding. And thus, elven buildings last for millennia.

Their incredibly long lives also push elves to develop close bonds with other long-lived creatures, such as good-aligned dragons. Consider that an elf who lives near a human town will see thirty(!) or more human generations be born, live their entire lives, grow old, and die. Here is a very poor analogy, but it may be the best we can do; to elves, having a community of humans nearby would feel somewhat how having a string of pets feels to humans. No matter how much we love our dogs and cats, they age, sicken, and die before our eyes. A human who loves dogs might have to say farewell to ten or more beloved companions in the course of life. How much more emotionally devastating would it be for elves who form close bonds with humans? It’s no surprise that elves hold shorter-lived people at a distance and form close friendships only with other creatures with comparable lifespans. What seems like aloofness or keeping others at a distance may be nothing more than emotional self-defense.

Ichor in Our Veins

Elves are undeniably proud. They believe the immortal beings who created the world were their immediate ancestors. Not their makers, not their guides, but their direct ancestors, removed by many generations but otherwise not substantially different from their grandparents and great-grandparents. In other words, they are literally the children of gods, though the elves might not use that label.

Perhaps the surprising thing is that elves aren’t even more haughty than they are.

Magic on Our Minds

Cloud elf communities are steeped in magic. It saturates the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the light they move through. With seven centuries of life, elf mages can achieve depths of understanding far beyond any human’s.

Understanding is the vital word. Elf mages don’t simply learn to cast spells, they devote energy and time to unraveling the theory, philosophy, and principles of magic. Unlocking knowledge is more interesting and rewarding than mastering conjuring tricks.

Like the bard who returns again and again to the same poem in pursuit of perfect structure, rhythm, and imagery, the mage seeks to deconstruct magic, discover its first principles, and see past the veil of mundane reality and glimpse magic’s inner workings on its terms, not theirs.

It’s a Metaforest

The way cloud heritage elves feel about magic, grove elves feel about nature overall and the forest in particular.

Nature is vast. It encompasses every environment from forest to prairie, mountain to valley, desert to ocean. Grove elves can be found in any of those environments, but they love the forest most. It is, to them, the perfect expression of natural harmony. For grove heritage elves, nature achieves its maximum richness and density in the forest. It is a metaphor for all life that grove elves wrap themselves in.

Besides that, trees are some of the only entities that live as long as elves do, which makes the forest one of the few places where elves can see old, familiar friends century after century.

With their exceptional perception, elves sense more of what’s happening around them in the forest than other people can, and with their natural camouflage ability, they always feel secure in the forest.

Roleplaying Your Elf

Elves are ancient, proud, educated, and thoughtful. When roleplaying your elf character, keep these principles in mind:

• Barring violence, you will outlive all your non-elf companions by centuries. However extraordinary they may be, they will grow old and die, their children will grow old and die, and their grandchildren will grow old and die, while you remain young and move on to other adventures with other companions—who will also grow old and die. Their entire lives are mere episodes in yours.

• The blood of those who created the world still pulses in your veins. You are not like people of other lineages that were molded from clay by some deity. Your people have existed since before the dawn of time, and they will continue until the ending of all that is.

• Anyone can learn to cast spells. Magical ability exists even in creatures that are no more than animals. But the elves stand alone in their understanding of magic’s deep secrets. Never miss a chance to add to that knowledge.

• The forest is your sanctuary and the trees are your most reliable friends. Respect and protect them as you would your home and friends, and demand the same from others.

Roleplaying an elf according to those principles is a challenge. Elves are very different from humans in ways that make them hard to understand or emulate. That’s also what makes them so interesting, and the effort you put into it will pay off with a roleplaying experience unlike any other.