Non-Tolkien Elves In D&D

Non-Tolkien Elves In DnD

In the latest issues of my Dungeons & Dragons zine, d12 Monthly, I have an article on a new type of elf – one that is definitely not Tolkien in design or appearance.

I designed these not just for the latest issue, but I have been playing with this new elf design in my own campaign world for a while now. Firstly in my solo campaigns, and then in the two-player group campaign I run.

I wanted to move away from Tolkien elves for a number of reasons, the first being that the lore I created for the elves didn’t really fit in with the standard elf you find in D&D books. But I also wanted to make elves weird to the rest of the world.

Elf in Issue 58 of d12 Monthly – Art by AlexTheMapMaker

The Lore

The elves in my campaign world are beings of energy (as opposed to the other races, who are being of flesh), and this comes with some odd benefits and drawbacks.

The first thing you should know however, is that elves are not of this world – they were ejected from their Fey Realm (one of thousands that exist for the multitude of fey creatures) right before it collapsed.

To find out more information about Fey, check out Issue 14 of d12 Monthly as that issue is dedicated to fey.

They had no way to get home, and needed to adapt to this world.

Given they were ejected into various sites of the world, they took on the appearance of the creatures and objects they first saw – be that animal, plant, or humans – and became an amalgam of all of them.

Elven Traits

Given their alien characteristics and nature, they have their own unique characteristics:

- - They cannot be raised from the dead as they have no soul
  - This is the same reason they cannot be affected by magic that affects the soul (Soul Bind, for example)
  - They do not sleep – but meditate for 4 hours at night
  - They have a fairly hefty penalty to reaction rolls with other races for being such a different being
  - They have keen sense, even being able to see magic to a certain extent.
  - They roll twice on the unique appearance table, and once on the unique personality table – both of these tables are just for elves*.

* The appearance and personality traits are merely descriptive and don’t add any mechanical benefit.

You can find all the information about these new elves in Issue 58 of the zine.

As with the rest of the standard races in this issue, I tried to keep their traits fairly simple and straight forward, but they have the most traits out of any of the races I included in the issue – the others being humans, dwarves, and halflings.

This was mainly due to their alien nature, and it was a trade off between this and keeping the traits to a minimum.

I am not sure I have succeeded, but I am pretty happy where they landed.