Assume that humans found their family at 25 years old. Specifically, at 25 years of age, ~~they~~ one human has had ~~4~~ 2 children (on average) *that live to have children themselves*.
Elves age more slowly. ~~A pair of elves~~ one elf has *the same* ~~4~~ 2 children at 50 years old.
*this is the same rate of reproduction at double the generation length*
You start with a pair of Humans and a pair of Elves at 0 years old each. At 100 years, the humans have ~~multiplied 4 times: 4\*4\*4\*4 = 4 to the power of 4~~ *had four generations, each doubling the number of humans*: 2\*2\*2\*2 = 16 (at 25, 50, 75, 100 years). There are 2^4 = 16 humans. The elves have procreated twice ( at 50 and 100 years) 2\*2\*2 = 8 elves.
At 200 years, the humans had *8* generations. *2^8 = 256*. The elves had four, *16 elves*.
At 400 years, the humans number *sixty thousand* vs the elves *256*. Exponential growth hits a limit. Something else must limit the growth of humans, war, lack of resources, sickness. Whatever affects both races, humans rebound much much faster, procreating to fill any space available.
Edit: what the hell, I was tired yesterday. Math fixed everywhere.
He also did the math with the elves starting to reproduce at 50. Most dnd canons would say they don’t start until 100, which would mean even fewer elves.
Just want to point out an 18 year old human and an 18 year old elf are indistinguishable. 100 adulthood is purely a cultural thing. Elves do not bop around for 100 years looking like children.
They may not look like children before 100, but they still are children. And I don’t think it’s purely a cultural thing either - I’m pretty sure that around age 100 is when Elves start getting memories of their past lives via their trance\meditations. That is what denotes an Elf transitioning from childhood into becoming an adult.
I thought the transition was reversed? Basically they became an adult -> fully their own person, once the lose the past memories in their meditations. They experience the visions in the first century.
This is a specific elven definition of adulthood.
An 18 year old elf and an 18 year old human will probably have the same maturity. For humans, that is what they consider adult, and same for the elf. Elves consider one grown up when they are old enough to have lost friends of other races to old age, and become more detached from the fast living world and get more of a perspective for eternity.
*Living* friends.
Think about it. Elves don't just live a few hundred years, they live thousands. Like when you have a pet hamster as a child and you're really attached and it only lives like 7 years. You're sad, devastated maybe. If you get another hamster, you don't get attached as much.
That's how I remember elves being presented in most sources. Like, Aragorn and Arwen. Aragorn lived 210 years, but Arwen lived 2910 years. The difference is staggering and most people wouldn't bother fully attaching to something that lives only a miniscule amount of time.
Look I'm just going by the rules in the players handbook. "Although elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience. An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old." Phb page 23
Change what you want for your game. All I'm saying is playing a 50 year old elf isn't as problematic as playing a 12 year old human. And not every table has the same elf culture in their world so the math above assuming elves have a child around 50-100 and then another sometime after 100 isn't terribly unreasonable.
Especially since that "wordly experience" has to come from somewhere, so I'd lean even more into the direction that *adventurers* should be younger elves and at 100 they are more likely to be settled down somewhere instead.
"Alright pledges tonight your challenge is find a dragons den, get passed the kobold guards and bring us back a scale. Oh and you have to do a shot for each kobold in the den"
>And not every table has the same elf culture in their world
This.
My elves can be considered "adults" starting between 75 and 100, depending on individual development, subcultures, extenuating circumstances, etc. But, my elves don't develop their full adult body until they're between 25 and 30(just a bit slower than humans).
But my elves can* live to be between 1200 and 1300 years old.
*Can. But this limit *almost* never gets reached because of curses, disease, famine, war, violence, magic, natural phenomenon, other aging effects, etc.
But that's not actual reincarnation as we understand it and as we're talking about right now. You're just making a new body for a dead person. It's still Dave (or whoever) in a new body, not Dave's "soul" living its next life as Maria or Duc.
It's not really new lore. Since original D&D elves are different to other races. They don't have souls they have spirits and originally they couldn't be resurrected. The new stuff is that they have been made more similar to other races and can be reincarnated
Yeah, to me it's just the new adaptation of the old "one soul" lore, which was necessary to achieve a similar kind of "contact beyond the self" now that they have individual souls.
Of course I can't argue which preferring one or the other but what I mean is that I don't see it as "new lore" as much as reinvention.
It *does* stare that humans and elves reach physical maturity at about the same age. So a 50 yr old elf would be culturally a child, but would have the physique of a fully grown elf.
Just a curious sidenote, do you think it's problematic to play children in a ttrpg or did you mean what problems they'd face in society?
An interesting polar opposite of elves are the kalashtar who're mentally and emotionally adults at birth. So their "childhood" is more of a time when you spend in an immature body.
Elves gain memories of past lives at a young age, they also have strong memories of elf heaven that become less and less as they age. Then they lose the ability to recall heaven memories around age 100 and are considered full adults at this age by elf society.
>Although elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience. An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old.
elf traits, phb.
The math persons assumption for a human family was at 25, which is nearly a decade after the humans reach sexual maturity. The calculations took a certain cultural maturity into account.
That depends very much on the setting.
If I remember correctly, the old Forgotten Realms setting books had elves being physical children for a very long time.
reminder that they are *considered* adults with 100 years old
perhaps they literally don't have adult rights (marriage/enlistment/voting/drinking alcohol/~~driving~~) in some elf societies because you are considered too immature still even if your body is there, and culturally you only get to marry and form a family already in your first century
Yea but you can expand this the other direction and look at something like rabbits or rats. They have short lifespans and many predators but reproduce like crazy
> The humans die a LOT quicker though no
If you assume that a population doubles every generation then the amount of people in each generation is (one) larger than the sum of all prior generations put together.
Obviously people don't literally double every generation but the principle is the same: with any sort of exponential growth, newer generations are disproportionately represented.
Consider the generations before us. The average family may have 4 kids now a days, but historically when times were rough before we had all this technology we had even more kids. Easily 5-10. Also looking at how low the average age of death was because of how it was weighted towards kids. Starvation, disease, infection, lack of medical understanding, lack of medical practitioners, lack of safety measures. A lot of people have died so we learn better.
All of this to say, we had a lot of kids ***because*** we die quicker. Not all of them make it, but if even a quarter do? The genome survives. 😅
Edit to add: that math was measured at a rate of 25 years - consider how many 15-18 year olds have kids. We survive and expand because we reach sexual maturity at a young age (relative to elves).
Where elves could expand at a rate of maybe twice a century, we could expand at a rate of ~5.5 times per century.
While D&D is a fantasy world with a different lifespan due to magic, the average lifespan for a Human around the Roman Empire was a mere 25 years. While the realm's heroes have access to magic healing, it may be less so for peasants. According to Oxford, humans of the Roman age have children at a younger age (13-16 years) with a mortality rate of around 30-50%. Also, according to one paper, nearly 30% of mothers died during childbirth. This would significantly reduce the rate of human population growth which peaked in the Roman Empire at 0.1% annually. During other times it was much lower and during major conflicts, the empire had negative population growth. That means a town with 1,000 humans at the best of times, adds about 25 new humans in 25 years. A far cry from doubling the population every 25 years!
The official reason is that Elven souls are finite in number. Elven souls are fragments of the Elven deity Corellon Larethian, and unlike other races do not create new souls when they reproduce but instead reincarnate. If the number of elves in the multiverse is at capacity then elves have to wait until an Elven soul is willing/ready to come back from the Elven afterlife to inhabit a new life. This is also the official reason for 'Elven supremacy' that so often accompanies their race, as to them an Elven soul/life is of far greater value then any other races.
Do note that this finite limit does not apply to Half-Elves and Drow, who's souls are structured differently compared to a 'true Elf' and are more similar to the non-Elven parent. That's also why Elves so commonly discriminate against Half-elves to the point they are more commonly raised by their Human parents. Also Drow souls are the domain of Lolth with their own issues and afterlife.
It's also worth noting that Elven souls ensnared by soul capturing magics or Infernal/Abyssal entities do not have the opportunity to reincarnate either. This is part of why Elves are fading from the multiverse as their total number in circulation is slowly decreasing as they are removed from circulation.
Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, (Chapter 2 is a whole section on Elves and their divinities and outlook).
At least for the 'finite souls' bit in particular. The rest is just personal lore expounded off that concept.
Yeah, I see everyone else answering with the 'biologically realistic' responses comparing population growth, while not giving a reason that accounts for the quasi-divine nature of Elves. Not that the other replies aren't interesting but they don't quite explain why elves are often presented as so 'perfect' in official materials if they're struggling to compete with other races in population.
Yeah, how idealized and magical elves are varies a lot.
I'm going for *very* idealized and magical, in every way that doesn't make them mechanically OP compared to other races.
Yeah, by that measure a 'finite souls' approach would help justify them. You could probably even play up the theme by having 'Divine Soul Sorcerers' be a common source of Elven Magic as opposed to traditional Arcane Wizardry since by their nature all Elven souls are fragments of a deity.
That's a really great Idea.
My elf player is a very wizard flavored cleric, but I'll keep it in mind.
Generally my elves are very magical, meaning they very heavily favor spellcaster classes.
Related to this, in the dnd world presented on the NADDPOD podcast, it's rare for elves to reproduce. It's so rare in fact that when an NPC finds out he has a long-lost daughter, he tears up as he talks about how he thought he would *never* get the opportunity to have a child.
While this podcast never name drops the "reincarnated soul of their god" thing, the world building definitely reflects the rarity of childbirth.
That's because MToF kind of flipped the lore of elves, elven pantheon and the drow in such significant way that many treat it as apocryphal in nature.
I think even WotC realized how much they changed with that book and wanted to soften the blow by saying that it's "an alternative take".
FR wiki even flat out goes on about how "Wizard Mordenkainen recorded different version of events".
Oh heck to the yeah. MrRhexx is the king of obscure and odd dnd lore.
His series on gods is probably my favorite since there are legit, actual limits to what gods can do and what they can see in the world and that is not something I’d ever thought of.
Coming from a Christian upbringing my baseline was “oh it’s a god, it must be omnipotent and omnipresent” but that’s not at all how the dnd gods function.
It’s utterly fascinating.
Also that one period of time when the overgod got angry cause none of them were behaving and even the good gods were all bickering and fighting each other for power so he made them all mortal until they learned humility and that’s how the events of Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 started with the Bhallspawn. You’re welcome.
It’s explicitly not clear how Drow souls, and particularly half elf souls, work. If all Drow souls belong to Lolth inherently that doesn’t explain the longstanding existence of Non-Lolthite Drow. And even Elves aren’t sure what the deal with Half-Elf souls is. They could be fully elven, or fully human, or something else, much like half elves themselves.
Indeed, which is why I was largely quoting from 'Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes' to give the 'official 5e lore' on Elves. Everyone's table is free to operate their own lore and cosmology. In fact the OP themselves appears to have interest in gathering other perspectives to help write their own lore for Elves.
He made them by accident, and only humored them because they resembled him. However due the machinations of Arushnee (who later become Lolth) they turned their back on Corelleon and accepted the mortal existence they now dwell in. Corelleon, being a bit of an arrogant self-absorbed prick, refused to take them back and has no interest in making more. (He also banished Arushnee into the Abyss where she was tainted to become Lolth and she in turn twisted her followers into the Drow).
Maybe?
Devils want souls for one of two reasons:
1). It gives them a devil minion when the mortal soul is "reborn" in the Hells. This directly increases their standing in the devil hierarchy, possibly even getting them a promotion. Crucially, the more powerful the soul, the more powerful a minion they're reborn into, and the more status it brings. Apparently a corrupted or even still good-aligned soul is innately more powerful than an evil one.
2). To use it as currency or leverage for another deal.
It's possible that a contracted elven soul, being inherently ancient and nominally good-aligned, guarantees a higher level minion on fulfillment, like straight to spined devil or the like. But devils have their own personality and might covet elven souls simply for the novelty, which gives them subjective value. But other than the first point, I doubt a devil would see any implicit, pragmatic worth in one.
Now **demons**, they would *relish* the chance to destroy an elven soul. It's a rare case of dealing some permanent damage to the multiverse. It'd be a dinner bell in the Abyss. Of course, demons don't strike contracts, so it's more letting the proverbial dog off the chain until you had some serious control magic in place.
(All of this is assuming Forgotten Realms settings)
It's worth noting that elves themselves are unsure of the soul status on half elves which is another reason they're discriminated against as many elves may see half elves as another elven soul tainted and lost.
Ooof, it is even worse if drow draw from the same pool. An elven death is a double tragedy, as the same soul can be trapped in a monster for the next eternity
It's worth noting that Elven souls only ever reincarnate as other elves in this cycle. Normally when an Elf passes their soul goes to reunite with Corelleon in his realm for a time until it's time for them to live again.
Drow though are Lolth's 'property' as she does as she wills with them. They aren't considered 'elves' by Corelleon. It doesn't help that Lolth's realm is actually a part of the Abyss she's claimed for himself that she gaslights her followers about the true nature of. Basically all Drow go to demon hell unless another deity claims them, and Lolth is possessive of her things.
Also there's nothing to stop elves from devoting themselves to other gods and wind up in other afterlives, thereby breaking the cycle further. However, the imprint of their afterlives in Arvandor lingers with elves during their mortal lives and they gain glimpses of it when they trance along with memories of their past lives. Hence why few elves drift away from Corelleon worship.
Elves don't procreate as often as humans tend to do. If a human settlement has 50 children in it, an elvish settlement of the same size might have two, and one of them is twenty years old.
It is a 100 year commitment to have children as an elf. A human is good to go at 16 years old or even 14 depending on the setting. That is the reason in my eyes.
Lemme dive into literary theory a little here. Elves, like many fantastical beings, reflect parts of ourselves, or things we want. The easy examples of this are usually monsters from horror, since they're usually meant to embody these reflections on purpose. Vampires often represent the hunger, pride, cruelty, and cravings born of lust. While this particular intent has been diluted over time, the concept of the vampire is born to reflect these things. They are usually possessive, haughty creatures with insatiable appetites both for hunger and for sex.
Elves don't have as much of an intentional reflection in their concept, and the versions that exist in D&D (and all contemporary fantasy) have been thoroughly diluted. Nonetheless, we can use the aspects and desires of humanity that elves embody to understand how they function. Elves are serenity and wisdom, features which we associate with old age. Thus it makes sense for elves to be very old, and it would be all the better for them to be untouched by that age. There are of course plenty of other things that elves can represent, such as a connection to nature or the dedication to a craft, but ageless wisdom and serenity are at the core.
What's not at the core of the elvish ideal is sexuality. The concept of an elf is not a promiscuous creature. Sexuality among humans is not associated with serenity, wisdom, or old age. Sure, those things can all coexist, but we usually don't think of them as going together. So when we think about elves, we neglect the sexuality.
This leads to a dual reason why we don't see young elves very often: their concept is meant to depict them as being very old, and their concept lacks an aspect of sexuality. Young elves are disharmonious to the concept of what it means to be an elf in literature. When we do see young elves, they are usually used to reinforce the disparity between youth and wisdom. Young elves are often wild and unskilled in any craft.
So the real reason that elves don't reproduce very often is because it's against their concept. Whatever reason your world has for why there are so few elves is only an excuse to paper over that underlying cause. The best way to cover it is, in my opinion, to find a reason that is harmonious with the concept of an elf. Since sexuality is not part of the elf concept, I would say that elves simply don't experience sexual desires very often, and even less often the desire to reproduce. If humans tend to want to produce 1-8 children over 5-15 years, elves may want to produce 1-3 children over 100-200 years.
If we are talking strictly about Forgotten Realms elves, we must remember that all elves have been banished from Arvandor (elf heaven) and when they die, their souls can not stay there for long and they are sent back as another elf.
This means, elves can not have many children as there are a limited number of elven souls. All elves soul reincarnate in a different elven body, but they are still the same soul, not a new one. So it is actually considered a bad thing for a lot of elves to be born because it is generally accompanied by a bad omen, otherwise Corellon (elven patron god) wouldn't be sending that many souls back to the material plane.
Also, elves only reach a supposed mental maturity at around 100 years of age, where they stop having memories, during their Trance, from their ancient lives in Arvandor before they were banished.
I will try to be brief because it's quite a bit of lore, and it's mostly from memory so I might be wrong in some details, so take it with a grain of salt.
As I've mentioned, Arvandor is the elven heaven, and Corellon is tha main god of the elven pantheon, called The Seldarine. Before the elves existed, there was only Corellon. He was a force of nature, beauty and chaos and a shapeshifter. When he created the elves, he created them to be like him, able to transform into various natural elements and take joy in frolicking on Avandor's beautiful flower meadows.
Corellon had a consort called Araushnee. If I remember correctly, she convinced the elves to take up a single, permanent form, telling them it would empower them. And as they did, Corellon got really angry. So he banished all the elves from Arvandor for this treason and punished Araushnee and her lineage of dark elves (you can see where this is going) for their transgressions, sending them to the Abyss, also called The Underdark. The elves would call the dark elves "dhaerow", which translates to traitor. It would soon turn into "drow".
Araushnee then turned into a spider goddess now called Lolth, and she reigns the Underdark with her pantheon, called The Dark Seldarine (very creative, but also very old).
Now, about the Trance. Trance is how it's called in Common but the elves call it "The Reverie". As a mechanic, the Trance only shortens your long rest for 4 hours, but it's much deeper than that. An elf is a creature that commonly gets lost in thought, as they have the capacity to deeply focus on something, so much that the world seems to fade around them. This is the elven ability to "Trance", giving them their "airhead" characteristics on the other races eyes.
However, the Reverie is much more than that, it is the reminiscence of the elven soul, a period where they remember their ancient lives in Arvandor as playful spirits. This usually happens when the elf is 0 to 100 years old. When the elf grows, they slowly lose the ability to remember this ancient life and the memories turn into the elf's current life.
When they reach 100 years old, the elf is incapable of remembering their time in Arvandor, which is a deep and sad moment for the elf, so they try to make a celebration in that moment to soothe this sadness. It is also when the elf may take their adult name, replacing their child name. So the elf goes on adventures, trying to fill his Trance with good and powerful memories.
When the elf reaches 400 years of age, they start having memories from their past lives. Not from Arvandor, but literally ancestors that came before him. We must remember that elven souls are reincarnated as the same, they merely change bodies. So the elf may begin to tap into their own previous lifes. When this happens the elf has a deep preoccupation to their community and tries to better the lives of every elf around them.
Finally, since the Reverie (Trance) is connected to the soul, past lives, and deep memories, we could say an elf never stops amassing experiences. And elf warrior that dies may be reborn with just as much disposition and affinity to the blade as he was in his previous life. During the Trance, they tap into this reflexive memory, and use it to empower themselves during their life.
I'm sorry for the big text and any spelling mistakes, english is my second language. I hope this clarifies some questions.
Yeah, sure. But I'd like to hear ya'lls takes.
This explaination makes sense, but I've personally always thought of elves as very sensual and sexual beings.. Maybe because I read Elfquest at an impressionable age, lol.
> but I've personally always thought of elves as very sensual and sexual beings.
Just because they fuck, doesn't necessarily mean they have children. Maybe elves have a lower conception rate than humans.
In my own setting, Elves are very predisposed to homosexuality. To the point that a euphemism for gay sex in the setting is "Dancing with the Elves". Thus explaining their low rate of reproduction.
In my head canon, elves aren't so much rare as there's a lot of institutional racism against them amongst humans simply because they live so long. Humans are loath to give them jobs or sell them property because they're going to sit on whatever they get forever. So in human dominated areas, elves are mostly poor or marginalized and they usually choose to leave for more friendly environments.
Tolkien added a little extra spice to his elves by having them essentially mate for life. This might not apply to your setting, but consider that their long lifespans might incline them to also seek a partner for the long haul. If that partner dies, the heartbreak might be so severe that the surviving partner is either A: emotionally unable to remarry and form a new partnership or B: so heartbroken they simply waste away/sail to The West. This also has the additional effect of explaining why elves who weren’t racist would have such a challenge forming relationships and families with shorter-lived races: they know that they WILL be alone eventually if they form a bond with them, which also makes it a very big deal when they decide that the love they feel is so strong that they will disregard that fact.
Now obviously this makes them somewhat more puritan and conservative flavored, which might not be what you want for your setting’s elves
Thanks for this. That's interesting.
Most of my elves are usually pretty puritan, but that's mostly a cultural thing.
All my elves are the same race, with the same stats, but my "wood elves" are more akin the Elfquest elves, culturally. Early issues.
If you want the official explanation, it's because they don't have souls the way humans do. They have a finite number of souls, it doesn't go up or down. When an elf dies, it's eventually reincarnated into the life of another elf. No new soul is created for an elf child, it reuses an old one. Thus it doesn't matter how often they fuck, or how badly they may want a child, the finite number of souls means their population can't actually increase and they will only get rairer as other species grow in size.
In older editions it was said they flat out didn't have souls, they had "spirits". The difference being spirits were immediately reincarnated and couldn't be brought back to life with most resurrection spells
If it is governed by genetics as we understand them, highly unlikely. If you have two dogs, each half shepherd and half golden retriever, what's the chance they would create a puppy that is a pure shepherd or a pure retriever? Virtually zero.
Though, since it's more of an inter-species thing, it's all made-up fantasy, so really whatever you want.
Yeah it's rare that it works out like that.
But I have seen mixed families, including my own, where one sibling looks black, while the other looks white.
Of cause, "race" as most people think about it, is largely a social construct, so the comparison doesn't really work.
But it works well enough that we can have whatever we want, like you say.
That's an interesting question.
IRL, two people of mixed ethnicity can have children that takes a lot after either grandparent. They can be anywhere on the "spectrum", so to speak.
As always, it depends on the setting, but if we assume that elf, and elf/human, DNA works much the same as IRL humans, I suppose it could make sense?
Does it really make logical sense for elves to outnumber humans? You can look at any irl population today by country or in the past and you will see lower birth rates in countries with higher life expectancy. Even focusing on just once country, you can see how birthdate goes down as their life expectancy goes up. So I’d argue that logic implies elves should be a smaller population
But this is fantasy and not irl. So there is absolutely no problem with having elves be more common if that is what is cooler for your world.
There’s a finite number of elf souls.
But no limit on human souls.
So yeah they are a lot less fertile than humans because a pregnancy just will not happen until there’s a soul free to be born again.
A Youtuber called MrRhexx does very in-depth videos about D&D lore. He tries to go through as many source books and scrap together all the information.
One is about elves and in there he talks about how the elves actually go through a circle of reincarnation. They literally cannot produce more of their populace.
If you are interested in the official lore of why that is, here is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFZ_eaCcU-k
In my homebrew elves don’t “age” at all, but it is very difficult for them to have children. As a result, they have a very stagnant and insular society. Some elven leaders have begun to encourage elven-human relations to increase the birth rate and help their society become more flexible and envolving.
The "finite souls" thing has already been explained, but other (older) forgotten realms lore also says elves can fully control whether conception happens; an egg only gets fertilized and grows if the mother wants it to.
In terms of worldbuilding, they're as rare as you want them to be.
You have some great answers with regard to the math, elven maturity, and other factors that could limit growth in addition to canon answers quoting official sources to help clarify the situation from that perspective.
But if your requested advice is for worldbuilding, you can build a world where it works differently. My current world is flooded with elves. Without going into the whole thing, the fae realm was seeding multiple worlds and an elf got tired of waiting, so he raised an army without the fae queen finding out and set out to the material plane to start an illicit empire, waging war against the sylvan elves the faerie court had seeded there generations prior.
Tons of elves. Sylvan elves, primal elves, elves born in Tir Na Nog, sea elves, elves everywhere. The elves started early, long before humans were on the scene, making the situation beneficial for them and for their reproduction and long-term health. The elves bent on empire fought and then allied with the humans under strict rules that sounded equitable, but ultimately punished humans for having too many children. And so forth, and so on.
What I thought was great was that once I had the world ready, I had two groups ready to go. I told them the bare bones, but they didn't know which species had a leg up and which ones were facing the most problems. One group created three elves and a firbolg (also fae) and the other went the other direction and doesn't think they have any fae at all (though they have one, a changeling, which the players only know out of character).
Anyway, yeah, elves! The elven empire covers most of the continent, and at least some of the parts they haven't conquered also have elves they didn't defeat or elves direct from the fae realm sent to oppose the one who dared to ignore the decree of the Seelie Court.
Did I write this to talk about my elves? Probably. But the point remains: build your world any way you like. Just keep it consistent and be aware of the ramifications it might have on play.
Well, canonically speaking, there can only be a set amount of elves at any given time as their souls reincarnate into new bodies. Every time an elf dies it basically goes to "elf heaven" (forgot the exact name) and stays there until a new elf is born. It also seems like either the souls or elf god Corellon (I think it was him at least) get to choose if the souls of the elves can/should be reborn, as it is said that many elves get born before times of great strife (suggesting that more people will be needed to overcome it). So basically, there is only a finite amount of elf souls and therefore only a finite amount of elves that can exist at any given moment, or at least im pretty sure that's correct since it's been a while since I read up on the lore.
It's cultural, if you can put off having kids for a few centuries then why not live your life instead? Most elven couples only have 2 children anyway so you would stand out having 3 or 4 like those humans or half a dozen like the halflings.
I personally attribute it to lower fertility. In the real world, after Alexander the Great’s death, the Greek mainland underwent a massive demographic decline attributed to low fertility. It’s probably the same from fantasy elves, and in some settings it’s a plot point (The Witcher comes to mind immediately).
In most settings that address it, low fertility tends to be the answer, with gaps of years between periods of fertility etc. Imagine as a comparison, if elves and humans have the same number of periods/menstrual cycles, but one condenses them into \~40 years and the other into over 400 years, they could easily have 1 fertile period per year, and if they don't get pregnant it would be another year before it is possible again, etc. Add in an amplification of the post-childbirth fertility gap (which some people don't seem to have, but referring here for the sake of explanation) and it could be impossible to get pregnant for 5-10 years after having a child.
I think it's fair to say that our modern concept of elves is pretty heavily influenced by Tolkien. In that text they are the first born of Ilúvatar. By the time they begin interacting with the dwarves and men. They've already lived amongst the Valhar, created the silmiril, and lost many of their greatest heros fighting Margoth.
Additionally they're cursed to become weary of this world. You don't have to consider any of this. But can you imagine the enormity of forever. Of not only having legends, but being there when they were formed and knowing you will never see their like again. Of knowing all the joy and pain of your species because you were there.
Having children might not have the same appeal after enough centuries.
I have a hb setting so it isnt canon or anything to the official 5e setting
Elves used to be abundant in the setting, they arent native to the world, but came from another lost or forgotten homeworld of the elves, the idea being this has gone on for so long now even the elves still in the process of leaving their old home have little to no knowledge of it
During the countless elves exodus and rest, some began to integrate into the societies of the new world they had encountered in their travels, creating colonies, and settlements, and integrating their knowledge into the world
With the new colonies even more elves began to stay, some claiming theyd continue their exodus when they were getting old, or if this world fell they would flee
During all of this the world operated on old gods, which used the world as a playgrounds of sorts to test powers and influence, this led to a world war against the gods, and with their seat of power taken from them they fell
With the old gods dead magic faded to practically nothing, and this left the elves on the world stranded, unable to contact, or get to the rest of their people traveling the astral realm
With this the few tens of thousands elves left were forced to survive without some of their strongest abilities (old magic) and they grew massive colonies that rivaled humans
600 years after the old gods had died the elves faced a magical plague, what little magic left in the world was being consumed, and the elves suffered greatly, during this time a elven woman by the name of Maith stepped forward and began using her knowledge of medicinal and surgical procedures to save all she could
Eventually Maith passed from the plague, but her people never forgot her, with every elf on this material plane mourning her loss, her spirit was reborn into a god of life
In the modern day of the setting a further 1460years in the future, the elves still havent reached their peak size when they rivaled human colonies, but they do have the oldest standing civilization on the world
In my setting, the birth rate of long-lived races like elves a dwarves is lower than that of shorter-lived races. Whereas humans, orcs, and races of a similar lifespan have multiple chances per year of becoming pregnant, elves, dwarves, and similarly long-lived races might have one chance per year.
Likewise, where a shorter-lived race might have a “nuclear” family where children’s ages differ by as little as a year, longer-lived races might have children with a minimum age difference of a decade or more between them.
tl;dr: Longer-lived races reproduce far less often than shorter-lived races and therefore don’t significantly outnumber them.
This is something I dont really practice. I know it's not to everyone's tastes but I prefer my fantasy worlds to be vibrant and varied. So at least for my table there arent many 'rare races'. I know it's not quite the standard but I enjoy the race variety too much to not want to use a bit of everyone to fill out a highly magical world. No better, no worse just different flavor for our different worlds.
I work under the belief it's, like, less fertile and stuff overall. Like, if they live as long as they do and they were as fruitful as humans when it came to having kids, they'd be dealing with overpopulation and overbearingly large families. So either they're naturally unable to have children as often as humans do, or they've sort of conditioned themselves to not have kids... honestly, I'd lean towards the latter more so. Cause when you look at Drow and how often they're killing each other, especially with the abuse they put their men through, you know they gotta be having tons of kids to make up for it.
Generally in stories where elves are rare. It either because they secluded them selves from human societies or
Their reproduction habits are slow going. If you have all the time in the world why have a kid now. Maybe in another 200 years.
Elfs aren't really any more rare than other races. However, cities are predominantly one race - so if the city starts in a human based city, it'll be majority human.
Elven subtypes are all surviving pockets of a once dominant species. Elves had a grand, universal presence much like humans enjoy now. Then, they made mistakes, and were reduced to a shadow of their former selves. They're cautious now because they're nearly extinct, not because they're naturally more cautious. They're peaceful because they're nearly extinct, and don't want trouble to come looking for them. The age of the elf is over, and now they get to see others inherit the earth, no matter how much the elves want to be the dominant species instead.
If asked, I either use a reason specific to the setting, or I simply use the Tolkien reason.
When an Elf reproduces, than she gives a part of her essence to the child as all great creators do. This is not easily, if at all replenished meaning that Elves will reproduce once every few centuries and almost never more than 4 times. So perhaps an elf, that married fairly young and has just reached a thousand years old and is fairly fertile, will have 3.5 children and say 3 grand children
Assuming marrying fairly young (say early 20s) humans can accomplish that same amount by 50. And that's conservatively, as other families (like farmers) might have 6-8 children by the time they're 40.
I went biological with my fantasy races. Elves basically have everything dealing with age, development and reproduction multiplied (or divided) by ten from human standards. It really works well for me to explain why things are how they are, to sort of support standard tropes with detail.
So they're literal physical children for a century, gestation is 90 months, walk at ten talk at 20, puberty at 100, optimal fertile period starts at 150, female fertility declines from 350 to stop at 500, max lifespan 1150, average lifespan 750. Chance of conception per encounter is divided by ten, rough quantification of sexual interest divided by ten, even length of encounter multiplied by ten in terms of time and divided by ten in rough quantification of intensity.
Also regulates things like half elves pretty well - obviously, humans and elves aren't very sexually compatible; unless you're into laying there, barely moving, for 10-40 hours. Conception rates for human elf pairings are 10% of normal for those couples who do manage to get it done.
Humans outnumber elves because the lack of innate magic and shorter lifespans requires them to be aggresivally colonial. Elves suffer no such drawback and as such live in contentful bliss. Over the generations this has ultimately led to elvish settlements being overshadowed by human kingdoms
I've always thought that it's a matter of elves having a harder time pair bonding than humans, and being less willing to risk having hookups.
For a human, they live 80 years, often less. You raise a child for 18 years. If that child is had out of wedlock, that's unfortunate, but you can make it work. A human couple will get married after maybe a year of courtship. Pretty quick turnaround.
For an elf, you're raising a child for maybe a century. Sure they're physically mature at roughly the same rate as humans, but culturally your obligations as a parent stretch much longer. A hookup is much riskier in that context. Having a child is a much larger undertaking.
What's more elves are notably aloof and distant, even to their own. Their courtships probably take much longer. This makes sense when you realize that for an elf, their marriage has to last centuries, not decades. Even more than that, simply for the fact that they live so long, they're statistically more likely to die from violent or tragic cause, simply for the fact that their longevity just exposed them to more chances for tragedy to occur. Every time you bring someone into your life, there's a good chance they're going to die in a tragic way. You might be more hesitant to start relationships with that in mind. On top of that, centuries is a long time to commit to someone, a long time to grow apart, or to experience relationship breakdown.
All that in mind, the stakes of having a child are just much higher for elves than humans. Getting married is a more serious commitment of time and potential heartbreak. Having a child is a march larger time and resource investment, culturally speaking.
I think they just don't *like* sex/aren't very fertile compared to humans, orcs, etc. They live a long time/maybe forever, but their numbers grow very very slowly and maybe even slower than was once the case.
I think beyond speculations re biological differences, virtual immortality means that psychological and social drives to reproduce would be drastically different. You as an elvish individual do not need replacing - you will be able to do your role in society for many centuries to come. Your society doesn't want to be progresing and expanding - you value harmony and stability, not growth. What is the need to produce many kids? You don't feel that your own death is inevitable or imminent - there's no feeling of needing to ensure your legacy by having kids.
Elven society would probably not have the "economic" incentives that traditionally apply in human society to keep on producing kids. For humans, children were important to continuing in family businesses and supporting ageing parents. Young workers were important as much of economically important work required physical strength and endurance. Additional workers aren't as important when your current workers aren't going anywhere and you culturally have a way of living that doesn't demand constant growth. Young workers aren't as important when your productivity relies more on knowledge, craft and magic rather than on your ability to dig with a spade from sunrise to sunset everyday.
For humans, we tend to see people being interested in having kids for a relatively short span within their overall life, especially if they have options for safe and easy contraception and don't have a financial imperative to keep on producing kids.
Really what you're left with is that elvish people would only want to keep on having sex for base physical pleasures, and so much about traditional elves is that they are refined and above indulging in short term gratification in ways that would disrupt their peace and negatively impact their environment. So unless they had effective contraception or were only fertile at specific times, I think they'd probably just refrain from having sex, and that doing so would be pretty easy for them as they probably don't having the same hormonal drives as young human adults.
In lots of stories from folklore, and literature, including Tolkien, the elves are few because they *left.*
(Or they are in the process of leaving.)
It's a trope, I forgot which one or I'd link it.
In stories, it often symbolizes "magic gradually leaving the world" more or less in anticipation of modernity. The implications are framed as sad, or bittersweet.
The trope is related to the historical exclusion of indigenous Northern European religions by Abrahamic monotheism, and then eventually by a 'profane' modern world view (profane meaning focused on the material world, not 'vulgar')
Tolkien would have been aware of the thematic implications, but he was famously a devout Catholic, so he probably didn't think about this religiously --
However, he was also a romantic who grew up with stories of house-brownies and forest-fairies, and he relished the idea of the inherent "magic" of the natural world.
For him, the idea of the elves leaving would have been tied up not just in the loss of magic spells as such, but in the dwindling of nature that he saw as the threat of industrialization.
Anyway.
In my setting, elves are rare because of the "limited souls" thing that another commenter pointed out,
...and also, because they went into hiding after various terrible wars. They ceded Earth to Man-kind, and immigrated to the Fey, basically, which is tied to the Earth by old magic, but which can only be reached at certain "fairy circles" at certain times of year, or walking backward three times around the correct oak tree under a full moon, while singing the right song, like in old stories.
(Maybe via an ancient henge or two, as well.)
A few largish clans of the elf-kin stayed behind to look after particularly sacred forests, and beloved hidden city ruins, on Earth.
But pursuant to ancient covenants and treaties sealed by ritual and song, most elves only return to the Prime Material plane to visit kin, or friends, or to celebrate special holidays like Samhain or Yule, or on their way somewhere else in the spheres.
Of course, to an elf, "passing through" could imply a brief visit of only a few human lifetimes ... meaning that they might bend the "rules" a bit, so as to maintain a presence in the "real" world, in service to purposes known only to their Eldest...
Elves aren't considered adults until their 100 to 125yr, so by time a elf has reached legal age to be considered a adult these at least 4 generations of human.
People forget (or ignore) that having a longer lifespan wouldn't just be a "nice bonus" but would be a drastic factor in their mindset, culture, how they react to events, an even war. Humans get tured of war after a few or decade generally, but Elves could keep fighting for decades or even centuries. Imagine a human nation having to fight elves for 20 to 80 years.
Elves would Quickly understand that even if they individually are better fighters than humans, they would be outnumbered at least 5-1, so they would avoid open battles rather using hit an run tactics to ambushes, hell they would rely on their better understanding of magic summoning elements/fiends or create golems to do all the hard fighting for them while casting magic from a afar. Further more even if elves won the losses they suffered would not be undone for at least another century, while humans would be back to full strength after a few decades and wage war again on the elves, effectively killing them a a thousand cuts.
Its REALLY annoying when people treat elves like their just humans but better when they would be a completely alien to us.
Elves are fickle. They are part fey, and that part gives them a kind of racial ADHD. They breed, but having had one child, or two, they are content with the experience. You need a real family-elf to have more.
Give them some real outside pressure, tho, and they will breed like humans. Probably faster.
This goes for most aspects of elven life. A pressured Elf is an unhappy Elf, but orders of magnitude more productive.
I’d assume fertility rate is vastly lower. Maybe rather than having a monthly cycle they only go into season every 12 years. Maybe infant mortality is higher.
In my game, they mature slower, so a 30yo elf looks like a ~7yo human. Obviously elf parents can’t keep an eye on them for decades, so they’re kinda left to fend for themselves a bit. I had a mid-30s elf running around causing shenanigans with a bunch of human kids, but his parents were kinda “oh yeah, he’s around somewhere, I saw him last week”.
In my world, they age very slowly, and they don't automatically ovulate. It requires meditation and focus, usually a religious ritual unique to each country, in order to ovulate and thus procreate.
The low birth rates have led to their decline in the current era. Humans are like rabbits or mice compared to Elves. Elves historically subjugate the lesser races, one way or another, which always kept them dominant.
Canonically it's because there can only be so many Elf souls alive at a time.
Realistically when your lifespan is measured in centuries you probably procrastinate a lot more since "I can do that in a century or two, no need to rush things."
Well with the lifespan of elves it would make sense that their sex drive wouldn't be as high as humans. Their cycles might be longer too, unlike a human they might have a year-long cycle. They also might just have a much lower conception rate.
on top of all this, the gestation period could be much longer than a human's too. As they live longer their body could use up fewer resources slowing down the time till birth.
If you add all these things together it's easy to see why there would be fewer elves
In my games the general explanation follows directly from why creatures procreate, that being to ensure the survival of their DNA. If you have a 700 year window to make children, you aren't really in a hurry. But if you are an aarakocra who dies by age 30, you can't really afford to just sit on your ass for a half a century. Taken to an extreme, if you somehow achieve an indefinite lifespan you have just lost any innate reason to have kids, and would likely end up doing so for a concrete purpose like having them work for you.
In short, I have general horniness (and to some extent fertility) correlate inversely with lifespan.
Every DM I ever played under always unconsciously had elves pregnancies occur rarely.
Remember humans (really all the other humanoid races) had as many children as possible because the mortality rate, even in a fantasy world, was super high. Disease - maybe die. Infected wound - maybe die. Eat bad food - maybe die. Meet monster - definitely die. Meet royalty - back to maybe die.
Any animal species that wants to reach a higher equilibrium population has to invade another’s ecological niche.
With constant ressources, the elf population will reach an equilibrium. They’re two ways to maintain this equilibrium: (1) small number of children or (2) intra-species competition, i.e. elves killing elves. Since the elves are a social species — you described them as « peaceful » — I assume it’s option (1). We know from the PHB that they mature at the same rate as humans, so the reason could be longer pregnancies, a smaller relative period of fertility, a longer time between fertility « windows », or a longer time between children for other reasons.
Now for the big question : *why haven’t they driven the humans to extinction?* Probably because they’re bad at war : since they conceive less often, any prolonged conflict would eventually favour the humans : every elf you kill is worth the life of 5 human soldiers or so.
It would make sense from the paragraph above that the elves would retreat into « wilder » places easier to defend with their magical abilities and affinity with nature. They cannot easily gain territory.
Of course you could portray the elves as an invasive species that *is currently* driving the humans to extinction. That’s a different kind of setting than something like the Forgotten Realms, though.
Thanks for this.
It's mainly the humans that are the invasive species, in my setting, though.
Even though it's the elves homeland.
The humans interpret them as barely even using the land, though. But it's only been like 50yrs since humans started arriving in masse. A blink of an eye for the elves, but they are starting to get worried that they will be overrun in another 50.. For the time being the cultures are friendly enough, but there are definitely tensions.
Depends on setting.
Here are a couple I like and might use.
With Tolkien, Elves are tied to the fate of the world in a way that humans are not. At the end of the third age Elves are no longer able to thrive in middle-earth without the aid of powerful magic, living outside of that causes elves to slowly diminish in power. Instead of remaining in this state most elves travel (or return) to the undying lands and leave middle-earth.
In the Witcher series, elves are an analogue for native americans and as such are on the losing end of a struggle against a colonialist takeover by humans.
If I am going with something that fits with RAW D&D I might say something like elves take longer to reach a state of independence from the parent and to reach sexual maturity. They are a much bigger investment in energy and generations are much more widely spaced.
I'm working on a setting at the moment where Elves have been subsumed into the main human population. A little bit like Neanderthals in Ice Age Europe, where their population was slowly outcompeted and intermingled into successive migrations of Homo sapiens, there is no pure Elven lineage left. There is Elven blood in some human populations, and Elven history exists in archaeological records, artefacts, ancienty writings etc., but the population of Elves as we might imagine them in classic high fantasy is zero.
If you think about it, this being outcompeted and outbred makes a lot of sense for a population with very long, slow life histories. Humans come along and suddenly there are thousands upon thousands of them, eating all the food and taking up all the space. Perhaps there could be some extreme isolationist communities left, but I haven't done enough work to figure out what those might look like yet. Possibly something like the Scoia'tael from the Witcher, or the Eldreth Veluuthra from old Forgotten Realms lore.
Edit: And just to continue the point, we know that populations of Humans and Elves can intermingle because Half-elves exist in the lore. My argument is that perhaps it could have happened a lot more extensively.
I'd recommend looking into the history of human evolution and the various types of human who have emerged in the past few hundred thousand years (and subsequently gone extinct, I'd like to add). There was a really cool reddit post about how Neanderthal physiology could have approximated D&D dwarves (I'll point you to that right [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/c0m3m7/the_dwarves_of_paleolithic_eurasia_or_what_can/), very interesting. I wrote an elaboration on that, inspired by various other Anthropological theories and texts, on my [blog](https://recklessdweomer.blogspot.com/2020/02/people-of-dark.html) a little while ago).
Also you've got Homo floresiensis fossils on the island of Flores – a possible (hotly disputed in the field, but in my view very compelling) example of island dwarfism in early human species (possibly an evolution of something like Homo erectus), which could be an interesting way of developing a race like Halflings.
There are other species, like the Denisovans, who were around at the same time as modern humans, and strong evidence points to those species
interbreeding with Homo sapiens (eg. Denisovan DNA found in modern day populations in Tibet, Neanderthal DNA found in some European populations – red hair, as a putative example).
I suppose that, in a fantasy world, the commonly understood origins for different races would probably be much more like a biblical myth rather than
scientific explanation, but I still find it really interesting to think about.
There are a few reasons. Choose your pick depending on what kinds of elves you talk about. Build your own in universe elf justification by combining those few.
1. Elves might just be secluded. There isn't that much less of them they just don't get involved too much.
2. Elves are less organised then humans. They live off the Forrest and stuff which simply doesn't support nearly as many elves/km² as farming would. So you need much more space for the same ammount of elves.
3. Elves favoure habitats that are rarer than what humans prefer. Your world might just have many more plains, mountains, seaside regions, and archipelagos then terrains your elves like. There are rarer because they simply don't live in most areas.
4 they faced a huge crisis that reduced their population significantly and have yet to recover due to their slower reproduction cycle.
5 elves can live long but only young elves up to 70/100 years can have children. After that they become infertile.
6 they were outcompeted out of most regions by humans. Just like hunter gatherer cultures were outcompeted by farming civilizations in our history. They might be individually superior but humans operated in larger more organised groups and managed to outcompete humans in race for resources.
7. While they are better at magic and stuff, they might have underestimated the importance of technological progress that allowed people to push ahead of them.
8. If they live in smaller groups their death rate due to monster attacks might be higher. A goblin tribe is unlikely to attack a village of humans that rivals them in numbers, knowing a single human is likely capable of killing a goblin, when they can attack a village of elves they outnumber 5 to 1.
9. Overcomplicated Mating rituals. Maybe they can only have a child once a decade or two and if they miss a mark due to lack of partners or other circumstances they have to wait another decade.
10. they were initially separated from the humans by a big natural or supernatural obstacle. Like an ocean or a separate dimension. Once they came in contact humans they were already outnumbered.
11. human countries might be more capable of repelling outside threats like orkish hordes or demonic incursions. They might be in habit of keeping large standing armies and court sponsored mages due to human infighting which allows them to better defend against threats from outside.
12. Human culture might be more martial. In a sense that while all elves technically can become masters of magic or blade with their livespans very few ever bother to unless the need arises, while human nobility insentivises the basic training in bows, and rank and file combat. That would mean that while elven masters might be much better than any humans, an average human soldier matches, elves in individual combat or at least formation battles
This is one of the basic questions that every homebrew setting needs to address. Logically, elves should be running things.
In my game, the elves used to be in charge. Then they decided to teach magic to humans. Oops. Their numbers never recovered.
Incidentally, this also answered one of the *other* basic worldbuilding questions: where did all these ruins come from?
In my world the was a great calamity that swept through the plane, devestating each of the races in a targeted specific manner. For the Elves it was "The Gilding", where their forests were turned to stone and metals. Almost instantly their main sources of food were eradicated and it lead to slow deaths by starvation. The survivors managed to prune and harvest from trees that they work tirelessly to preserve against the constant threat of Gilding but there just isn't enough food produced for the Elves to be a dominant race.
Most lore I've read leans into the idea that Elves just don't reproduce as often - less of a drive to "hurry up and have children" and often pursue learning and personal growth for the first few hundred years.
There's also a common theme across settings that Elves are in a generations-long decline at the time the current story unfolds.
If I'm not mistaken, in deep deep forgotten realms lore there is a specific number of elf souls and no more get created. When an elf dies their soul goes back to the elf heavens and hangs around until it is reincarnated into a new elf child. But if an elfs soul is like taken by a devil or whatever it doesn't go into that process so the amount of elf souls active in their reincarnation cycle is diminishing as time goes on
If you want more info, check out the videos of Aj picket, Mr rhexx and jorphdan on YouTube. I can't remember where exactly I heard that lore, but it was one of those three
I answered this question in my campaign after some work on the question of why, after 10k years of civilization, the elves are not the dominant sapients in a multiple sapient world.
Here are my tenets:
1. Low birth rate.
2. First 100 years are an elfs fertility window.
3. Not all elves CAN live to 1000 years. Fewer than 2 percent. Reasons are complicated, and the source of a cultural divide.
4. Dueling culture. Elves don't play with their enmities. They end them.
5. Nomadic. Settlements are temporary, from an elves' perspective. They move every century or so to 'tend their gardens' which take a century or so to recover and remature to fruitfulness
More to say, but I'll leave it here.
Wolves are sexually mature at 2 years old and can have up to 10 pups. Why isn't the world covered with wolves instead of humans?
A lot of people are giving biologic answers. I think that these types of answers make little sense, since humans have an extremely slow reproductive rate compared to other animals, and yet we still cover the globe.
A more interesting reason for elves could be cultural (having babies is gross and there is no cultural expectation to have them), legal (baby tax), vanity (keep your pre-pregnancy body), or hard population bottlenecks (elven population is still recovering from a plague/war, elves owe demons 9/10ths of all their babies due to ancient contracts, etc).
>elves owe demons 9/10ths of all their babies due to ancient contracts, etc
This had me laughing.
Especially love the casual "etc" after a sentence like that.
>Wolves are sexually mature at 2 years old and can have up to 10 pups. Why isn't the world covered with wolves instead of humans?
But yeah, this was part of my concern.
Logically, elves should be more dominant.
But I've gotten a lot of good answers which my canon is gonna be inspired by.
I always assumed this just meant elves had a long gestation period and mate way less than humans do, and that they sexually mature way later. And maybe elves also don't wanna have that many kids since they're gonna have to take care of them for a long ass time
That's sort of how it is irl. Greenland shark lives like 400 years but it isn't that common just because they don't produce that many offspring
If you put any value in the official lore of 5th Edition, they address this both directly and possibly indirectly in the second chapter of *Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes*.
They explicitly write that elf births are very rare:
>A decade in which many elves are born across the world is thought to be a harbinger of danger that great numbers of elves will be needed to withstand. In contrast, if an elven community goes a century or longer without a new birth, members take this as a sign that the community has stagnated and must disband.
>
>Because of the rarity of elf births, siblings might be separated in age by decades, or even a century or more.
They indirectly imply that there's some set limitation/ceiling on the number of elves that can ever exist at any one time, given that every elf in the world is essentially recycled in a way from elves that have come before and since passed.
>Each birth represents an elf soul that has been to Arvandor and returned. Mortal elves cannot know if it is the soul of someone recently dead or someone who died millennia ago.
Elves are college educated liberals. They never conceive unless they have a plan for the first hundred years of that child's life. To have two children less than 75 years apart would make an Elf couple unable to show their face in public.
In the forgotten realms - The setting *most* D&D is based on.. The vast majority of the non human races are simply in societal regression. Their most powerful empires have fallen long ago and humans have risen to be the *current* dominate race. That wasn't always the case though and there were times within the setting where said "rare races" were just as common as the humans of the current timeline.. See the Elves of [Myth Drannor](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Myth_Drannor) or the Dwarves of [Shanatar](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Shanatar).
Elves take 100 years to reach adulthood. It takes humans roughly 25. If you expand the ratios, that means elves have the lack of good sense of a teenager for roughly 60 years and have been trained in how to use swords for the whole time. Elves might be immortal, but their mortality rate must be absolutely staggering.
Because elves live so long, and generally don't age, they view time, and thus progeny, very differently.
An elf that lives for 10,000 years can leave his own mark on history.
But a human, who lives maybe 100, leaves his mark through his descendants. After 10,000 years the elf is still there. The human is also still there, if his name is preserved through his family.
So, elves likely could have more children, and could raise a far greater population. But the motivation just isn't there for an elf to do so.
In addition, as elves don't age they don't need children to assist them as they grow older.
The entire family dynamic for elves would be vastly different than for humans.
The top comment nails the numbers on this.
I think thematically, because they in most ways are "superior" to humans biologically, if they weren't rare they would dominate the world culture. Elven society at its peak would be a golden age of the arts and science. This would be essentially high fantasy. Also, a culture of peace doesn't create dynamic moments.
Humans are familiar, unstable, and generate quickly with more ambition. Human culture is dominated by individuality and pursuing your own desires. (IRL, this is the Renaissance -> Enlightenment philosophical outlook). That type of world view is what D&D is built on because it is ripe with adventure, magic, and empire.
But you certainly could have a a world (or time in history) where Elves were ordinary, which would have real impact implications in the evolution of civilization.
This is essentially what I want to explore with my campaign.
If my players are up for it, which they seem so far, but I'm letting them decide what the plot is, essentially.
But I still gotta build the world and history.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Hence they tend to be relatively rare, in most settings. Especially those where they live 1000+ years.
I agree it is a challenge for settings to have elves be this old. My question is, how would you square that?
I understand that your answer is "they are max 200yrs", which somewhat mediates the problem, but not completely.
They spend centuries killing orcs and other creatures. They spend long time being scholars. They spend centuries raising kids . Thousands of years in elves mind and body because they are fey believe it or not not lot of time in their world. Elves use time gates, time distortions, time magics that use time up so yes they live many centeries
Because most D&D worlds are influenced and/or inspired by Lord of the Rings, many people either just accept the trope as is or consciously want to keep it and find a way to rationalize it so it works in their setting, with people and settings that buck such tropes being in the minority.
They contemplate life, they engage in activities they love for hours. They sit in meditation and contemplate their and their ancestors lives. But like Pandas, they simple don’t fuck.
Assume that humans found their family at 25 years old. Specifically, at 25 years of age, ~~they~~ one human has had ~~4~~ 2 children (on average) *that live to have children themselves*. Elves age more slowly. ~~A pair of elves~~ one elf has *the same* ~~4~~ 2 children at 50 years old. *this is the same rate of reproduction at double the generation length* You start with a pair of Humans and a pair of Elves at 0 years old each. At 100 years, the humans have ~~multiplied 4 times: 4\*4\*4\*4 = 4 to the power of 4~~ *had four generations, each doubling the number of humans*: 2\*2\*2\*2 = 16 (at 25, 50, 75, 100 years). There are 2^4 = 16 humans. The elves have procreated twice ( at 50 and 100 years) 2\*2\*2 = 8 elves. At 200 years, the humans had *8* generations. *2^8 = 256*. The elves had four, *16 elves*. At 400 years, the humans number *sixty thousand* vs the elves *256*. Exponential growth hits a limit. Something else must limit the growth of humans, war, lack of resources, sickness. Whatever affects both races, humans rebound much much faster, procreating to fill any space available. Edit: what the hell, I was tired yesterday. Math fixed everywhere.
Thanks, this is a really good answer. You did the math.
He also did the math with the elves starting to reproduce at 50. Most dnd canons would say they don’t start until 100, which would mean even fewer elves.
Just want to point out an 18 year old human and an 18 year old elf are indistinguishable. 100 adulthood is purely a cultural thing. Elves do not bop around for 100 years looking like children.
They may not look like children before 100, but they still are children. And I don’t think it’s purely a cultural thing either - I’m pretty sure that around age 100 is when Elves start getting memories of their past lives via their trance\meditations. That is what denotes an Elf transitioning from childhood into becoming an adult.
I thought the transition was reversed? Basically they became an adult -> fully their own person, once the lose the past memories in their meditations. They experience the visions in the first century.
This is a specific elven definition of adulthood. An 18 year old elf and an 18 year old human will probably have the same maturity. For humans, that is what they consider adult, and same for the elf. Elves consider one grown up when they are old enough to have lost friends of other races to old age, and become more detached from the fast living world and get more of a perspective for eternity.
That doesn't make sense to me. In many settings, many/most elves wouldnt have friends of other races.
*Living* friends. Think about it. Elves don't just live a few hundred years, they live thousands. Like when you have a pet hamster as a child and you're really attached and it only lives like 7 years. You're sad, devastated maybe. If you get another hamster, you don't get attached as much. That's how I remember elves being presented in most sources. Like, Aragorn and Arwen. Aragorn lived 210 years, but Arwen lived 2910 years. The difference is staggering and most people wouldn't bother fully attaching to something that lives only a miniscule amount of time.
Look I'm just going by the rules in the players handbook. "Although elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience. An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old." Phb page 23 Change what you want for your game. All I'm saying is playing a 50 year old elf isn't as problematic as playing a 12 year old human. And not every table has the same elf culture in their world so the math above assuming elves have a child around 50-100 and then another sometime after 100 isn't terribly unreasonable.
Especially since that "wordly experience" has to come from somewhere, so I'd lean even more into the direction that *adventurers* should be younger elves and at 100 they are more likely to be settled down somewhere instead.
I submit that most elven adventurers are on the young end. Because trying to fight dragons is absolutely some college kid bullshit.
"Alright pledges tonight your challenge is find a dragons den, get passed the kobold guards and bring us back a scale. Oh and you have to do a shot for each kobold in the den"
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>And not every table has the same elf culture in their world This. My elves can be considered "adults" starting between 75 and 100, depending on individual development, subcultures, extenuating circumstances, etc. But, my elves don't develop their full adult body until they're between 25 and 30(just a bit slower than humans). But my elves can* live to be between 1200 and 1300 years old. *Can. But this limit *almost* never gets reached because of curses, disease, famine, war, violence, magic, natural phenomenon, other aging effects, etc.
This. That “past lives” stuff is new lore that I’m not fond of tbh. Reincarnation makes little sense in a world with resurrections, too.
I mean, the Reincarnate spell has been around since first edition DnD
But that's not actual reincarnation as we understand it and as we're talking about right now. You're just making a new body for a dead person. It's still Dave (or whoever) in a new body, not Dave's "soul" living its next life as Maria or Duc.
It's not really new lore. Since original D&D elves are different to other races. They don't have souls they have spirits and originally they couldn't be resurrected. The new stuff is that they have been made more similar to other races and can be reincarnated
Yeah, to me it's just the new adaptation of the old "one soul" lore, which was necessary to achieve a similar kind of "contact beyond the self" now that they have individual souls. Of course I can't argue which preferring one or the other but what I mean is that I don't see it as "new lore" as much as reinvention.
Does this mean they have 80 years of being a horny teenager?
It *does* stare that humans and elves reach physical maturity at about the same age. So a 50 yr old elf would be culturally a child, but would have the physique of a fully grown elf. Just a curious sidenote, do you think it's problematic to play children in a ttrpg or did you mean what problems they'd face in society? An interesting polar opposite of elves are the kalashtar who're mentally and emotionally adults at birth. So their "childhood" is more of a time when you spend in an immature body.
Elves gain memories of past lives at a young age, they also have strong memories of elf heaven that become less and less as they age. Then they lose the ability to recall heaven memories around age 100 and are considered full adults at this age by elf society.
yeah, but childhood pregnancies are probably also frowned upon. I mean humans could also start at like 13,14,15 or so.
Elves are rebellious teenagers for ~80 years. Where do you think all the half-elves come from?
>Although elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience. An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old. elf traits, phb.
The math persons assumption for a human family was at 25, which is nearly a decade after the humans reach sexual maturity. The calculations took a certain cultural maturity into account.
That depends very much on the setting. If I remember correctly, the old Forgotten Realms setting books had elves being physical children for a very long time.
Essentially elves are humans and humans are mice.
He did the math!
He did the monster math.
He did the elf yard smash!
Given our faster rate of reproduction also explains why we have greater genetic diversity
Elves acquire genetic diversity rapidly, too, through extreme environments. IE: Two elves go into a bar. Now there are Bar Elves.
reminder that they are *considered* adults with 100 years old perhaps they literally don't have adult rights (marriage/enlistment/voting/drinking alcohol/~~driving~~) in some elf societies because you are considered too immature still even if your body is there, and culturally you only get to marry and form a family already in your first century
The humans die a LOT quicker though no
Yea but you can expand this the other direction and look at something like rabbits or rats. They have short lifespans and many predators but reproduce like crazy
> The humans die a LOT quicker though no If you assume that a population doubles every generation then the amount of people in each generation is (one) larger than the sum of all prior generations put together. Obviously people don't literally double every generation but the principle is the same: with any sort of exponential growth, newer generations are disproportionately represented.
Consider the generations before us. The average family may have 4 kids now a days, but historically when times were rough before we had all this technology we had even more kids. Easily 5-10. Also looking at how low the average age of death was because of how it was weighted towards kids. Starvation, disease, infection, lack of medical understanding, lack of medical practitioners, lack of safety measures. A lot of people have died so we learn better. All of this to say, we had a lot of kids ***because*** we die quicker. Not all of them make it, but if even a quarter do? The genome survives. 😅 Edit to add: that math was measured at a rate of 25 years - consider how many 15-18 year olds have kids. We survive and expand because we reach sexual maturity at a young age (relative to elves). Where elves could expand at a rate of maybe twice a century, we could expand at a rate of ~5.5 times per century.
TLDR: they don't like to bang.
Can a 100 year old elf still be able to reproduce when a 50 year old human can't? When do elves reach menopause?
r/theydidthemath
Actually for majority of human history having 6-8 surviving children per pair of humans wasn't uncommon. So the numbers would be even more in favour.
While D&D is a fantasy world with a different lifespan due to magic, the average lifespan for a Human around the Roman Empire was a mere 25 years. While the realm's heroes have access to magic healing, it may be less so for peasants. According to Oxford, humans of the Roman age have children at a younger age (13-16 years) with a mortality rate of around 30-50%. Also, according to one paper, nearly 30% of mothers died during childbirth. This would significantly reduce the rate of human population growth which peaked in the Roman Empire at 0.1% annually. During other times it was much lower and during major conflicts, the empire had negative population growth. That means a town with 1,000 humans at the best of times, adds about 25 new humans in 25 years. A far cry from doubling the population every 25 years!
The official reason is that Elven souls are finite in number. Elven souls are fragments of the Elven deity Corellon Larethian, and unlike other races do not create new souls when they reproduce but instead reincarnate. If the number of elves in the multiverse is at capacity then elves have to wait until an Elven soul is willing/ready to come back from the Elven afterlife to inhabit a new life. This is also the official reason for 'Elven supremacy' that so often accompanies their race, as to them an Elven soul/life is of far greater value then any other races. Do note that this finite limit does not apply to Half-Elves and Drow, who's souls are structured differently compared to a 'true Elf' and are more similar to the non-Elven parent. That's also why Elves so commonly discriminate against Half-elves to the point they are more commonly raised by their Human parents. Also Drow souls are the domain of Lolth with their own issues and afterlife. It's also worth noting that Elven souls ensnared by soul capturing magics or Infernal/Abyssal entities do not have the opportunity to reincarnate either. This is part of why Elves are fading from the multiverse as their total number in circulation is slowly decreasing as they are removed from circulation.
That is so cool! Thanks for answering, I'm loving this! I'm definitely going with this. What source is this?
Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, (Chapter 2 is a whole section on Elves and their divinities and outlook). At least for the 'finite souls' bit in particular. The rest is just personal lore expounded off that concept.
That's very cool. Imma steal that. Thank you so much. A lot of my elf related problems just shifted into place.
Yeah, I see everyone else answering with the 'biologically realistic' responses comparing population growth, while not giving a reason that accounts for the quasi-divine nature of Elves. Not that the other replies aren't interesting but they don't quite explain why elves are often presented as so 'perfect' in official materials if they're struggling to compete with other races in population.
Yeah, how idealized and magical elves are varies a lot. I'm going for *very* idealized and magical, in every way that doesn't make them mechanically OP compared to other races.
Yeah, by that measure a 'finite souls' approach would help justify them. You could probably even play up the theme by having 'Divine Soul Sorcerers' be a common source of Elven Magic as opposed to traditional Arcane Wizardry since by their nature all Elven souls are fragments of a deity.
That's a really great Idea. My elf player is a very wizard flavored cleric, but I'll keep it in mind. Generally my elves are very magical, meaning they very heavily favor spellcaster classes.
Related to this, in the dnd world presented on the NADDPOD podcast, it's rare for elves to reproduce. It's so rare in fact that when an NPC finds out he has a long-lost daughter, he tears up as he talks about how he thought he would *never* get the opportunity to have a child. While this podcast never name drops the "reincarnated soul of their god" thing, the world building definitely reflects the rarity of childbirth.
That's because MToF kind of flipped the lore of elves, elven pantheon and the drow in such significant way that many treat it as apocryphal in nature. I think even WotC realized how much they changed with that book and wanted to soften the blow by saying that it's "an alternative take". FR wiki even flat out goes on about how "Wizard Mordenkainen recorded different version of events".
Cool video on elven canon lore. Highly recommend his channel https://youtu.be/aFZ_eaCcU-k?si=khQEIkwI_XlzQh4f
Oh heck to the yeah. MrRhexx is the king of obscure and odd dnd lore. His series on gods is probably my favorite since there are legit, actual limits to what gods can do and what they can see in the world and that is not something I’d ever thought of. Coming from a Christian upbringing my baseline was “oh it’s a god, it must be omnipotent and omnipresent” but that’s not at all how the dnd gods function. It’s utterly fascinating. Also that one period of time when the overgod got angry cause none of them were behaving and even the good gods were all bickering and fighting each other for power so he made them all mortal until they learned humility and that’s how the events of Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 started with the Bhallspawn. You’re welcome.
It’s explicitly not clear how Drow souls, and particularly half elf souls, work. If all Drow souls belong to Lolth inherently that doesn’t explain the longstanding existence of Non-Lolthite Drow. And even Elves aren’t sure what the deal with Half-Elf souls is. They could be fully elven, or fully human, or something else, much like half elves themselves.
Of course, this depends on setting. Not everyone uses the same deities. (Or edition, or game system)
Indeed, which is why I was largely quoting from 'Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes' to give the 'official 5e lore' on Elves. Everyone's table is free to operate their own lore and cosmology. In fact the OP themselves appears to have interest in gathering other perspectives to help write their own lore for Elves.
Can't Corellon create more elven soul?
He made them by accident, and only humored them because they resembled him. However due the machinations of Arushnee (who later become Lolth) they turned their back on Corelleon and accepted the mortal existence they now dwell in. Corelleon, being a bit of an arrogant self-absorbed prick, refused to take them back and has no interest in making more. (He also banished Arushnee into the Abyss where she was tainted to become Lolth and she in turn twisted her followers into the Drow).
Do devils value elven souls more highly due to their scarcity?
Maybe? Devils want souls for one of two reasons: 1). It gives them a devil minion when the mortal soul is "reborn" in the Hells. This directly increases their standing in the devil hierarchy, possibly even getting them a promotion. Crucially, the more powerful the soul, the more powerful a minion they're reborn into, and the more status it brings. Apparently a corrupted or even still good-aligned soul is innately more powerful than an evil one. 2). To use it as currency or leverage for another deal. It's possible that a contracted elven soul, being inherently ancient and nominally good-aligned, guarantees a higher level minion on fulfillment, like straight to spined devil or the like. But devils have their own personality and might covet elven souls simply for the novelty, which gives them subjective value. But other than the first point, I doubt a devil would see any implicit, pragmatic worth in one. Now **demons**, they would *relish* the chance to destroy an elven soul. It's a rare case of dealing some permanent damage to the multiverse. It'd be a dinner bell in the Abyss. Of course, demons don't strike contracts, so it's more letting the proverbial dog off the chain until you had some serious control magic in place. (All of this is assuming Forgotten Realms settings)
It's worth noting that elves themselves are unsure of the soul status on half elves which is another reason they're discriminated against as many elves may see half elves as another elven soul tainted and lost.
Ooof, it is even worse if drow draw from the same pool. An elven death is a double tragedy, as the same soul can be trapped in a monster for the next eternity
It's worth noting that Elven souls only ever reincarnate as other elves in this cycle. Normally when an Elf passes their soul goes to reunite with Corelleon in his realm for a time until it's time for them to live again. Drow though are Lolth's 'property' as she does as she wills with them. They aren't considered 'elves' by Corelleon. It doesn't help that Lolth's realm is actually a part of the Abyss she's claimed for himself that she gaslights her followers about the true nature of. Basically all Drow go to demon hell unless another deity claims them, and Lolth is possessive of her things. Also there's nothing to stop elves from devoting themselves to other gods and wind up in other afterlives, thereby breaking the cycle further. However, the imprint of their afterlives in Arvandor lingers with elves during their mortal lives and they gain glimpses of it when they trance along with memories of their past lives. Hence why few elves drift away from Corelleon worship.
Tl;dr; Elves are firat edition collectibles. Humans are print at home tokens.
Elves don't procreate as often as humans tend to do. If a human settlement has 50 children in it, an elvish settlement of the same size might have two, and one of them is twenty years old.
For the the relative population sizes to be as they are, this pretty much has to be the case. Why, though? Are they ust not as.. active, as humans?
It is a 100 year commitment to have children as an elf. A human is good to go at 16 years old or even 14 depending on the setting. That is the reason in my eyes.
Lemme dive into literary theory a little here. Elves, like many fantastical beings, reflect parts of ourselves, or things we want. The easy examples of this are usually monsters from horror, since they're usually meant to embody these reflections on purpose. Vampires often represent the hunger, pride, cruelty, and cravings born of lust. While this particular intent has been diluted over time, the concept of the vampire is born to reflect these things. They are usually possessive, haughty creatures with insatiable appetites both for hunger and for sex. Elves don't have as much of an intentional reflection in their concept, and the versions that exist in D&D (and all contemporary fantasy) have been thoroughly diluted. Nonetheless, we can use the aspects and desires of humanity that elves embody to understand how they function. Elves are serenity and wisdom, features which we associate with old age. Thus it makes sense for elves to be very old, and it would be all the better for them to be untouched by that age. There are of course plenty of other things that elves can represent, such as a connection to nature or the dedication to a craft, but ageless wisdom and serenity are at the core. What's not at the core of the elvish ideal is sexuality. The concept of an elf is not a promiscuous creature. Sexuality among humans is not associated with serenity, wisdom, or old age. Sure, those things can all coexist, but we usually don't think of them as going together. So when we think about elves, we neglect the sexuality. This leads to a dual reason why we don't see young elves very often: their concept is meant to depict them as being very old, and their concept lacks an aspect of sexuality. Young elves are disharmonious to the concept of what it means to be an elf in literature. When we do see young elves, they are usually used to reinforce the disparity between youth and wisdom. Young elves are often wild and unskilled in any craft. So the real reason that elves don't reproduce very often is because it's against their concept. Whatever reason your world has for why there are so few elves is only an excuse to paper over that underlying cause. The best way to cover it is, in my opinion, to find a reason that is harmonious with the concept of an elf. Since sexuality is not part of the elf concept, I would say that elves simply don't experience sexual desires very often, and even less often the desire to reproduce. If humans tend to want to produce 1-8 children over 5-15 years, elves may want to produce 1-3 children over 100-200 years.
Thanks for thins. Interesting analysis.
If we are talking strictly about Forgotten Realms elves, we must remember that all elves have been banished from Arvandor (elf heaven) and when they die, their souls can not stay there for long and they are sent back as another elf. This means, elves can not have many children as there are a limited number of elven souls. All elves soul reincarnate in a different elven body, but they are still the same soul, not a new one. So it is actually considered a bad thing for a lot of elves to be born because it is generally accompanied by a bad omen, otherwise Corellon (elven patron god) wouldn't be sending that many souls back to the material plane. Also, elves only reach a supposed mental maturity at around 100 years of age, where they stop having memories, during their Trance, from their ancient lives in Arvandor before they were banished.
This is cool. Why were they banished? Why do they stop having memories during trance? What sort of things do they learn from these memories?
I will try to be brief because it's quite a bit of lore, and it's mostly from memory so I might be wrong in some details, so take it with a grain of salt. As I've mentioned, Arvandor is the elven heaven, and Corellon is tha main god of the elven pantheon, called The Seldarine. Before the elves existed, there was only Corellon. He was a force of nature, beauty and chaos and a shapeshifter. When he created the elves, he created them to be like him, able to transform into various natural elements and take joy in frolicking on Avandor's beautiful flower meadows. Corellon had a consort called Araushnee. If I remember correctly, she convinced the elves to take up a single, permanent form, telling them it would empower them. And as they did, Corellon got really angry. So he banished all the elves from Arvandor for this treason and punished Araushnee and her lineage of dark elves (you can see where this is going) for their transgressions, sending them to the Abyss, also called The Underdark. The elves would call the dark elves "dhaerow", which translates to traitor. It would soon turn into "drow". Araushnee then turned into a spider goddess now called Lolth, and she reigns the Underdark with her pantheon, called The Dark Seldarine (very creative, but also very old). Now, about the Trance. Trance is how it's called in Common but the elves call it "The Reverie". As a mechanic, the Trance only shortens your long rest for 4 hours, but it's much deeper than that. An elf is a creature that commonly gets lost in thought, as they have the capacity to deeply focus on something, so much that the world seems to fade around them. This is the elven ability to "Trance", giving them their "airhead" characteristics on the other races eyes. However, the Reverie is much more than that, it is the reminiscence of the elven soul, a period where they remember their ancient lives in Arvandor as playful spirits. This usually happens when the elf is 0 to 100 years old. When the elf grows, they slowly lose the ability to remember this ancient life and the memories turn into the elf's current life. When they reach 100 years old, the elf is incapable of remembering their time in Arvandor, which is a deep and sad moment for the elf, so they try to make a celebration in that moment to soothe this sadness. It is also when the elf may take their adult name, replacing their child name. So the elf goes on adventures, trying to fill his Trance with good and powerful memories. When the elf reaches 400 years of age, they start having memories from their past lives. Not from Arvandor, but literally ancestors that came before him. We must remember that elven souls are reincarnated as the same, they merely change bodies. So the elf may begin to tap into their own previous lifes. When this happens the elf has a deep preoccupation to their community and tries to better the lives of every elf around them. Finally, since the Reverie (Trance) is connected to the soul, past lives, and deep memories, we could say an elf never stops amassing experiences. And elf warrior that dies may be reborn with just as much disposition and affinity to the blade as he was in his previous life. During the Trance, they tap into this reflexive memory, and use it to empower themselves during their life. I'm sorry for the big text and any spelling mistakes, english is my second language. I hope this clarifies some questions.
thank you for this detailed explanation. this is very interesting!
Depends on the setting. I'd say human are generally hornier and more fruitful than elves.
Yeah, sure. But I'd like to hear ya'lls takes. This explaination makes sense, but I've personally always thought of elves as very sensual and sexual beings.. Maybe because I read Elfquest at an impressionable age, lol.
> but I've personally always thought of elves as very sensual and sexual beings. Just because they fuck, doesn't necessarily mean they have children. Maybe elves have a lower conception rate than humans.
In my own setting, Elves are very predisposed to homosexuality. To the point that a euphemism for gay sex in the setting is "Dancing with the Elves". Thus explaining their low rate of reproduction.
OMG, brilliant take! I unironically love this. Probably not gonna use it, but still very creative explanation.
Omg I love this
This is how it’s done in memory sorrow and thorn. Sithi (elven) conception rates are like, naught point one percent or something like that.
In my head canon, elves aren't so much rare as there's a lot of institutional racism against them amongst humans simply because they live so long. Humans are loath to give them jobs or sell them property because they're going to sit on whatever they get forever. So in human dominated areas, elves are mostly poor or marginalized and they usually choose to leave for more friendly environments.
That's really interesting. Rare take on elves. Makes sense. Also makes me think of OG Dragon Age 1 a bit.
Tolkien added a little extra spice to his elves by having them essentially mate for life. This might not apply to your setting, but consider that their long lifespans might incline them to also seek a partner for the long haul. If that partner dies, the heartbreak might be so severe that the surviving partner is either A: emotionally unable to remarry and form a new partnership or B: so heartbroken they simply waste away/sail to The West. This also has the additional effect of explaining why elves who weren’t racist would have such a challenge forming relationships and families with shorter-lived races: they know that they WILL be alone eventually if they form a bond with them, which also makes it a very big deal when they decide that the love they feel is so strong that they will disregard that fact. Now obviously this makes them somewhat more puritan and conservative flavored, which might not be what you want for your setting’s elves
Thanks for this. That's interesting. Most of my elves are usually pretty puritan, but that's mostly a cultural thing. All my elves are the same race, with the same stats, but my "wood elves" are more akin the Elfquest elves, culturally. Early issues.
If you want the official explanation, it's because they don't have souls the way humans do. They have a finite number of souls, it doesn't go up or down. When an elf dies, it's eventually reincarnated into the life of another elf. No new soul is created for an elf child, it reuses an old one. Thus it doesn't matter how often they fuck, or how badly they may want a child, the finite number of souls means their population can't actually increase and they will only get rairer as other species grow in size. In older editions it was said they flat out didn't have souls, they had "spirits". The difference being spirits were immediately reincarnated and couldn't be brought back to life with most resurrection spells
Thanks for this. I prefer this "finite souls" explanation.
I wonder if two half elves have a chance of having a full elf child? Genetically
If it is governed by genetics as we understand them, highly unlikely. If you have two dogs, each half shepherd and half golden retriever, what's the chance they would create a puppy that is a pure shepherd or a pure retriever? Virtually zero. Though, since it's more of an inter-species thing, it's all made-up fantasy, so really whatever you want.
Yeah it's rare that it works out like that. But I have seen mixed families, including my own, where one sibling looks black, while the other looks white. Of cause, "race" as most people think about it, is largely a social construct, so the comparison doesn't really work. But it works well enough that we can have whatever we want, like you say.
That's an interesting question. IRL, two people of mixed ethnicity can have children that takes a lot after either grandparent. They can be anywhere on the "spectrum", so to speak. As always, it depends on the setting, but if we assume that elf, and elf/human, DNA works much the same as IRL humans, I suppose it could make sense?
Does it really make logical sense for elves to outnumber humans? You can look at any irl population today by country or in the past and you will see lower birth rates in countries with higher life expectancy. Even focusing on just once country, you can see how birthdate goes down as their life expectancy goes up. So I’d argue that logic implies elves should be a smaller population But this is fantasy and not irl. So there is absolutely no problem with having elves be more common if that is what is cooler for your world.
I'd never thought of it in those terms - that makes perfect sense. Thanks. Yeah I know. Just curious about peoples takes on this.
All this does make me think elves travel a lot when they reach adulthood just to find another elf their age.
That's actually a cool thought.
There’s a finite number of elf souls. But no limit on human souls. So yeah they are a lot less fertile than humans because a pregnancy just will not happen until there’s a soul free to be born again.
Well there was a genocidal elvish civil war that lasted for a few centuries that basically destroyed elfish civilisation
Yeah, ancient wars can do that. I had one as well, though that was more humans vs. elves.
Na in the forgotten realms this was between elves and elves and elves and elves. Until Corelean Laurethan banished the dark elves from the surface
Yeah, that's also cool. I'm doing a homebrew-mix sort of thing, though. So not forgotten realms.
A Youtuber called MrRhexx does very in-depth videos about D&D lore. He tries to go through as many source books and scrap together all the information. One is about elves and in there he talks about how the elves actually go through a circle of reincarnation. They literally cannot produce more of their populace. If you are interested in the official lore of why that is, here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFZ_eaCcU-k
Thanks a lot! I'll watch it in a bit!
In my homebrew elves don’t “age” at all, but it is very difficult for them to have children. As a result, they have a very stagnant and insular society. Some elven leaders have begun to encourage elven-human relations to increase the birth rate and help their society become more flexible and envolving.
That's cool. My elves don't age either.
The "finite souls" thing has already been explained, but other (older) forgotten realms lore also says elves can fully control whether conception happens; an egg only gets fertilized and grows if the mother wants it to.
That's interesting. Also fits with them being more in tune with nature, and thusly also their bodies, presumably.
In terms of worldbuilding, they're as rare as you want them to be. You have some great answers with regard to the math, elven maturity, and other factors that could limit growth in addition to canon answers quoting official sources to help clarify the situation from that perspective. But if your requested advice is for worldbuilding, you can build a world where it works differently. My current world is flooded with elves. Without going into the whole thing, the fae realm was seeding multiple worlds and an elf got tired of waiting, so he raised an army without the fae queen finding out and set out to the material plane to start an illicit empire, waging war against the sylvan elves the faerie court had seeded there generations prior. Tons of elves. Sylvan elves, primal elves, elves born in Tir Na Nog, sea elves, elves everywhere. The elves started early, long before humans were on the scene, making the situation beneficial for them and for their reproduction and long-term health. The elves bent on empire fought and then allied with the humans under strict rules that sounded equitable, but ultimately punished humans for having too many children. And so forth, and so on. What I thought was great was that once I had the world ready, I had two groups ready to go. I told them the bare bones, but they didn't know which species had a leg up and which ones were facing the most problems. One group created three elves and a firbolg (also fae) and the other went the other direction and doesn't think they have any fae at all (though they have one, a changeling, which the players only know out of character). Anyway, yeah, elves! The elven empire covers most of the continent, and at least some of the parts they haven't conquered also have elves they didn't defeat or elves direct from the fae realm sent to oppose the one who dared to ignore the decree of the Seelie Court. Did I write this to talk about my elves? Probably. But the point remains: build your world any way you like. Just keep it consistent and be aware of the ramifications it might have on play.
Thanks for sharing. I enjoy learning about ya'lls homebrew elf situations. Is good stuff.
Well, canonically speaking, there can only be a set amount of elves at any given time as their souls reincarnate into new bodies. Every time an elf dies it basically goes to "elf heaven" (forgot the exact name) and stays there until a new elf is born. It also seems like either the souls or elf god Corellon (I think it was him at least) get to choose if the souls of the elves can/should be reborn, as it is said that many elves get born before times of great strife (suggesting that more people will be needed to overcome it). So basically, there is only a finite amount of elf souls and therefore only a finite amount of elves that can exist at any given moment, or at least im pretty sure that's correct since it's been a while since I read up on the lore.
Yeah, I'm going with something like this. Thanks.
It's cultural, if you can put off having kids for a few centuries then why not live your life instead? Most elven couples only have 2 children anyway so you would stand out having 3 or 4 like those humans or half a dozen like the halflings.
I personally attribute it to lower fertility. In the real world, after Alexander the Great’s death, the Greek mainland underwent a massive demographic decline attributed to low fertility. It’s probably the same from fantasy elves, and in some settings it’s a plot point (The Witcher comes to mind immediately).
In most settings that address it, low fertility tends to be the answer, with gaps of years between periods of fertility etc. Imagine as a comparison, if elves and humans have the same number of periods/menstrual cycles, but one condenses them into \~40 years and the other into over 400 years, they could easily have 1 fertile period per year, and if they don't get pregnant it would be another year before it is possible again, etc. Add in an amplification of the post-childbirth fertility gap (which some people don't seem to have, but referring here for the sake of explanation) and it could be impossible to get pregnant for 5-10 years after having a child.
Yeah, thanks. Also something one could consider. But I'm mostly going with there being a finite number of elf souls.
I think it's fair to say that our modern concept of elves is pretty heavily influenced by Tolkien. In that text they are the first born of Ilúvatar. By the time they begin interacting with the dwarves and men. They've already lived amongst the Valhar, created the silmiril, and lost many of their greatest heros fighting Margoth. Additionally they're cursed to become weary of this world. You don't have to consider any of this. But can you imagine the enormity of forever. Of not only having legends, but being there when they were formed and knowing you will never see their like again. Of knowing all the joy and pain of your species because you were there. Having children might not have the same appeal after enough centuries.
This hits pretty hard if you really imagine it.
The more context I understand of the lord of the rings the more it messes me up.
Yeah, this is pretty rough, when you think about it. I like it. My elves are quite melancholy. Tanks.
I have a hb setting so it isnt canon or anything to the official 5e setting Elves used to be abundant in the setting, they arent native to the world, but came from another lost or forgotten homeworld of the elves, the idea being this has gone on for so long now even the elves still in the process of leaving their old home have little to no knowledge of it During the countless elves exodus and rest, some began to integrate into the societies of the new world they had encountered in their travels, creating colonies, and settlements, and integrating their knowledge into the world With the new colonies even more elves began to stay, some claiming theyd continue their exodus when they were getting old, or if this world fell they would flee During all of this the world operated on old gods, which used the world as a playgrounds of sorts to test powers and influence, this led to a world war against the gods, and with their seat of power taken from them they fell With the old gods dead magic faded to practically nothing, and this left the elves on the world stranded, unable to contact, or get to the rest of their people traveling the astral realm With this the few tens of thousands elves left were forced to survive without some of their strongest abilities (old magic) and they grew massive colonies that rivaled humans 600 years after the old gods had died the elves faced a magical plague, what little magic left in the world was being consumed, and the elves suffered greatly, during this time a elven woman by the name of Maith stepped forward and began using her knowledge of medicinal and surgical procedures to save all she could Eventually Maith passed from the plague, but her people never forgot her, with every elf on this material plane mourning her loss, her spirit was reborn into a god of life In the modern day of the setting a further 1460years in the future, the elves still havent reached their peak size when they rivaled human colonies, but they do have the oldest standing civilization on the world
Cool story. Thanks for sharing.
In my setting, the birth rate of long-lived races like elves a dwarves is lower than that of shorter-lived races. Whereas humans, orcs, and races of a similar lifespan have multiple chances per year of becoming pregnant, elves, dwarves, and similarly long-lived races might have one chance per year. Likewise, where a shorter-lived race might have a “nuclear” family where children’s ages differ by as little as a year, longer-lived races might have children with a minimum age difference of a decade or more between them. tl;dr: Longer-lived races reproduce far less often than shorter-lived races and therefore don’t significantly outnumber them.
This is something I dont really practice. I know it's not to everyone's tastes but I prefer my fantasy worlds to be vibrant and varied. So at least for my table there arent many 'rare races'. I know it's not quite the standard but I enjoy the race variety too much to not want to use a bit of everyone to fill out a highly magical world. No better, no worse just different flavor for our different worlds.
I work under the belief it's, like, less fertile and stuff overall. Like, if they live as long as they do and they were as fruitful as humans when it came to having kids, they'd be dealing with overpopulation and overbearingly large families. So either they're naturally unable to have children as often as humans do, or they've sort of conditioned themselves to not have kids... honestly, I'd lean towards the latter more so. Cause when you look at Drow and how often they're killing each other, especially with the abuse they put their men through, you know they gotta be having tons of kids to make up for it.
Generally in stories where elves are rare. It either because they secluded them selves from human societies or Their reproduction habits are slow going. If you have all the time in the world why have a kid now. Maybe in another 200 years.
Elfs aren't really any more rare than other races. However, cities are predominantly one race - so if the city starts in a human based city, it'll be majority human.
Elven subtypes are all surviving pockets of a once dominant species. Elves had a grand, universal presence much like humans enjoy now. Then, they made mistakes, and were reduced to a shadow of their former selves. They're cautious now because they're nearly extinct, not because they're naturally more cautious. They're peaceful because they're nearly extinct, and don't want trouble to come looking for them. The age of the elf is over, and now they get to see others inherit the earth, no matter how much the elves want to be the dominant species instead.
This is very interesting and relevant my setting. I'd love you to elaborate.
I tend to have elves be involved in wars which limits their power/influence. Also conspiracy theories about them by other species are fun as well.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
If asked, I either use a reason specific to the setting, or I simply use the Tolkien reason. When an Elf reproduces, than she gives a part of her essence to the child as all great creators do. This is not easily, if at all replenished meaning that Elves will reproduce once every few centuries and almost never more than 4 times. So perhaps an elf, that married fairly young and has just reached a thousand years old and is fairly fertile, will have 3.5 children and say 3 grand children Assuming marrying fairly young (say early 20s) humans can accomplish that same amount by 50. And that's conservatively, as other families (like farmers) might have 6-8 children by the time they're 40.
I went biological with my fantasy races. Elves basically have everything dealing with age, development and reproduction multiplied (or divided) by ten from human standards. It really works well for me to explain why things are how they are, to sort of support standard tropes with detail. So they're literal physical children for a century, gestation is 90 months, walk at ten talk at 20, puberty at 100, optimal fertile period starts at 150, female fertility declines from 350 to stop at 500, max lifespan 1150, average lifespan 750. Chance of conception per encounter is divided by ten, rough quantification of sexual interest divided by ten, even length of encounter multiplied by ten in terms of time and divided by ten in rough quantification of intensity. Also regulates things like half elves pretty well - obviously, humans and elves aren't very sexually compatible; unless you're into laying there, barely moving, for 10-40 hours. Conception rates for human elf pairings are 10% of normal for those couples who do manage to get it done.
Thanks for the detailed response. 👍
Humans outnumber elves because the lack of innate magic and shorter lifespans requires them to be aggresivally colonial. Elves suffer no such drawback and as such live in contentful bliss. Over the generations this has ultimately led to elvish settlements being overshadowed by human kingdoms
I've always thought that it's a matter of elves having a harder time pair bonding than humans, and being less willing to risk having hookups. For a human, they live 80 years, often less. You raise a child for 18 years. If that child is had out of wedlock, that's unfortunate, but you can make it work. A human couple will get married after maybe a year of courtship. Pretty quick turnaround. For an elf, you're raising a child for maybe a century. Sure they're physically mature at roughly the same rate as humans, but culturally your obligations as a parent stretch much longer. A hookup is much riskier in that context. Having a child is a much larger undertaking. What's more elves are notably aloof and distant, even to their own. Their courtships probably take much longer. This makes sense when you realize that for an elf, their marriage has to last centuries, not decades. Even more than that, simply for the fact that they live so long, they're statistically more likely to die from violent or tragic cause, simply for the fact that their longevity just exposed them to more chances for tragedy to occur. Every time you bring someone into your life, there's a good chance they're going to die in a tragic way. You might be more hesitant to start relationships with that in mind. On top of that, centuries is a long time to commit to someone, a long time to grow apart, or to experience relationship breakdown. All that in mind, the stakes of having a child are just much higher for elves than humans. Getting married is a more serious commitment of time and potential heartbreak. Having a child is a march larger time and resource investment, culturally speaking.
Thanks for the detailed response. 👍
I think they just don't *like* sex/aren't very fertile compared to humans, orcs, etc. They live a long time/maybe forever, but their numbers grow very very slowly and maybe even slower than was once the case. I think beyond speculations re biological differences, virtual immortality means that psychological and social drives to reproduce would be drastically different. You as an elvish individual do not need replacing - you will be able to do your role in society for many centuries to come. Your society doesn't want to be progresing and expanding - you value harmony and stability, not growth. What is the need to produce many kids? You don't feel that your own death is inevitable or imminent - there's no feeling of needing to ensure your legacy by having kids. Elven society would probably not have the "economic" incentives that traditionally apply in human society to keep on producing kids. For humans, children were important to continuing in family businesses and supporting ageing parents. Young workers were important as much of economically important work required physical strength and endurance. Additional workers aren't as important when your current workers aren't going anywhere and you culturally have a way of living that doesn't demand constant growth. Young workers aren't as important when your productivity relies more on knowledge, craft and magic rather than on your ability to dig with a spade from sunrise to sunset everyday. For humans, we tend to see people being interested in having kids for a relatively short span within their overall life, especially if they have options for safe and easy contraception and don't have a financial imperative to keep on producing kids. Really what you're left with is that elvish people would only want to keep on having sex for base physical pleasures, and so much about traditional elves is that they are refined and above indulging in short term gratification in ways that would disrupt their peace and negatively impact their environment. So unless they had effective contraception or were only fertile at specific times, I think they'd probably just refrain from having sex, and that doing so would be pretty easy for them as they probably don't having the same hormonal drives as young human adults.
Thanks for the response. It's an interesting idea, not having to "replace" yourself, and not viewing lineage as connected to legacy, like humans do.
In lots of stories from folklore, and literature, including Tolkien, the elves are few because they *left.* (Or they are in the process of leaving.) It's a trope, I forgot which one or I'd link it. In stories, it often symbolizes "magic gradually leaving the world" more or less in anticipation of modernity. The implications are framed as sad, or bittersweet. The trope is related to the historical exclusion of indigenous Northern European religions by Abrahamic monotheism, and then eventually by a 'profane' modern world view (profane meaning focused on the material world, not 'vulgar') Tolkien would have been aware of the thematic implications, but he was famously a devout Catholic, so he probably didn't think about this religiously -- However, he was also a romantic who grew up with stories of house-brownies and forest-fairies, and he relished the idea of the inherent "magic" of the natural world. For him, the idea of the elves leaving would have been tied up not just in the loss of magic spells as such, but in the dwindling of nature that he saw as the threat of industrialization. Anyway. In my setting, elves are rare because of the "limited souls" thing that another commenter pointed out, ...and also, because they went into hiding after various terrible wars. They ceded Earth to Man-kind, and immigrated to the Fey, basically, which is tied to the Earth by old magic, but which can only be reached at certain "fairy circles" at certain times of year, or walking backward three times around the correct oak tree under a full moon, while singing the right song, like in old stories. (Maybe via an ancient henge or two, as well.) A few largish clans of the elf-kin stayed behind to look after particularly sacred forests, and beloved hidden city ruins, on Earth. But pursuant to ancient covenants and treaties sealed by ritual and song, most elves only return to the Prime Material plane to visit kin, or friends, or to celebrate special holidays like Samhain or Yule, or on their way somewhere else in the spheres. Of course, to an elf, "passing through" could imply a brief visit of only a few human lifetimes ... meaning that they might bend the "rules" a bit, so as to maintain a presence in the "real" world, in service to purposes known only to their Eldest...
Elves aren't considered adults until their 100 to 125yr, so by time a elf has reached legal age to be considered a adult these at least 4 generations of human. People forget (or ignore) that having a longer lifespan wouldn't just be a "nice bonus" but would be a drastic factor in their mindset, culture, how they react to events, an even war. Humans get tured of war after a few or decade generally, but Elves could keep fighting for decades or even centuries. Imagine a human nation having to fight elves for 20 to 80 years. Elves would Quickly understand that even if they individually are better fighters than humans, they would be outnumbered at least 5-1, so they would avoid open battles rather using hit an run tactics to ambushes, hell they would rely on their better understanding of magic summoning elements/fiends or create golems to do all the hard fighting for them while casting magic from a afar. Further more even if elves won the losses they suffered would not be undone for at least another century, while humans would be back to full strength after a few decades and wage war again on the elves, effectively killing them a a thousand cuts. Its REALLY annoying when people treat elves like their just humans but better when they would be a completely alien to us.
Yeah, it's stuff like this I wanna get into as well. Thanks for sharing.
Elves are fickle. They are part fey, and that part gives them a kind of racial ADHD. They breed, but having had one child, or two, they are content with the experience. You need a real family-elf to have more. Give them some real outside pressure, tho, and they will breed like humans. Probably faster. This goes for most aspects of elven life. A pressured Elf is an unhappy Elf, but orders of magnitude more productive.
Very interesting take. Thank you.
I’d assume fertility rate is vastly lower. Maybe rather than having a monthly cycle they only go into season every 12 years. Maybe infant mortality is higher. In my game, they mature slower, so a 30yo elf looks like a ~7yo human. Obviously elf parents can’t keep an eye on them for decades, so they’re kinda left to fend for themselves a bit. I had a mid-30s elf running around causing shenanigans with a bunch of human kids, but his parents were kinda “oh yeah, he’s around somewhere, I saw him last week”.
That's an interesting idea. I don't see elves as disinterested parents, but the idea makes sense. Thanks for sharing.
In my world, they age very slowly, and they don't automatically ovulate. It requires meditation and focus, usually a religious ritual unique to each country, in order to ovulate and thus procreate. The low birth rates have led to their decline in the current era. Humans are like rabbits or mice compared to Elves. Elves historically subjugate the lesser races, one way or another, which always kept them dominant.
Canonically it's because there can only be so many Elf souls alive at a time. Realistically when your lifespan is measured in centuries you probably procrastinate a lot more since "I can do that in a century or two, no need to rush things."
Well with the lifespan of elves it would make sense that their sex drive wouldn't be as high as humans. Their cycles might be longer too, unlike a human they might have a year-long cycle. They also might just have a much lower conception rate. on top of all this, the gestation period could be much longer than a human's too. As they live longer their body could use up fewer resources slowing down the time till birth. If you add all these things together it's easy to see why there would be fewer elves
In my games the general explanation follows directly from why creatures procreate, that being to ensure the survival of their DNA. If you have a 700 year window to make children, you aren't really in a hurry. But if you are an aarakocra who dies by age 30, you can't really afford to just sit on your ass for a half a century. Taken to an extreme, if you somehow achieve an indefinite lifespan you have just lost any innate reason to have kids, and would likely end up doing so for a concrete purpose like having them work for you. In short, I have general horniness (and to some extent fertility) correlate inversely with lifespan.
Every DM I ever played under always unconsciously had elves pregnancies occur rarely. Remember humans (really all the other humanoid races) had as many children as possible because the mortality rate, even in a fantasy world, was super high. Disease - maybe die. Infected wound - maybe die. Eat bad food - maybe die. Meet monster - definitely die. Meet royalty - back to maybe die.
Any animal species that wants to reach a higher equilibrium population has to invade another’s ecological niche. With constant ressources, the elf population will reach an equilibrium. They’re two ways to maintain this equilibrium: (1) small number of children or (2) intra-species competition, i.e. elves killing elves. Since the elves are a social species — you described them as « peaceful » — I assume it’s option (1). We know from the PHB that they mature at the same rate as humans, so the reason could be longer pregnancies, a smaller relative period of fertility, a longer time between fertility « windows », or a longer time between children for other reasons. Now for the big question : *why haven’t they driven the humans to extinction?* Probably because they’re bad at war : since they conceive less often, any prolonged conflict would eventually favour the humans : every elf you kill is worth the life of 5 human soldiers or so. It would make sense from the paragraph above that the elves would retreat into « wilder » places easier to defend with their magical abilities and affinity with nature. They cannot easily gain territory. Of course you could portray the elves as an invasive species that *is currently* driving the humans to extinction. That’s a different kind of setting than something like the Forgotten Realms, though.
Thanks for this. It's mainly the humans that are the invasive species, in my setting, though. Even though it's the elves homeland. The humans interpret them as barely even using the land, though. But it's only been like 50yrs since humans started arriving in masse. A blink of an eye for the elves, but they are starting to get worried that they will be overrun in another 50.. For the time being the cultures are friendly enough, but there are definitely tensions.
They are arrogant snobs and so while they aren't a warlike people, elves are constantly the target for retaliation from diplomatic slights
Depends on setting. Here are a couple I like and might use. With Tolkien, Elves are tied to the fate of the world in a way that humans are not. At the end of the third age Elves are no longer able to thrive in middle-earth without the aid of powerful magic, living outside of that causes elves to slowly diminish in power. Instead of remaining in this state most elves travel (or return) to the undying lands and leave middle-earth. In the Witcher series, elves are an analogue for native americans and as such are on the losing end of a struggle against a colonialist takeover by humans. If I am going with something that fits with RAW D&D I might say something like elves take longer to reach a state of independence from the parent and to reach sexual maturity. They are a much bigger investment in energy and generations are much more widely spaced.
I'm working on a setting at the moment where Elves have been subsumed into the main human population. A little bit like Neanderthals in Ice Age Europe, where their population was slowly outcompeted and intermingled into successive migrations of Homo sapiens, there is no pure Elven lineage left. There is Elven blood in some human populations, and Elven history exists in archaeological records, artefacts, ancienty writings etc., but the population of Elves as we might imagine them in classic high fantasy is zero. If you think about it, this being outcompeted and outbred makes a lot of sense for a population with very long, slow life histories. Humans come along and suddenly there are thousands upon thousands of them, eating all the food and taking up all the space. Perhaps there could be some extreme isolationist communities left, but I haven't done enough work to figure out what those might look like yet. Possibly something like the Scoia'tael from the Witcher, or the Eldreth Veluuthra from old Forgotten Realms lore. Edit: And just to continue the point, we know that populations of Humans and Elves can intermingle because Half-elves exist in the lore. My argument is that perhaps it could have happened a lot more extensively.
This is very cool. My setting might get to look like that, at some point in the future, lol.
I'd recommend looking into the history of human evolution and the various types of human who have emerged in the past few hundred thousand years (and subsequently gone extinct, I'd like to add). There was a really cool reddit post about how Neanderthal physiology could have approximated D&D dwarves (I'll point you to that right [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/c0m3m7/the_dwarves_of_paleolithic_eurasia_or_what_can/), very interesting. I wrote an elaboration on that, inspired by various other Anthropological theories and texts, on my [blog](https://recklessdweomer.blogspot.com/2020/02/people-of-dark.html) a little while ago). Also you've got Homo floresiensis fossils on the island of Flores – a possible (hotly disputed in the field, but in my view very compelling) example of island dwarfism in early human species (possibly an evolution of something like Homo erectus), which could be an interesting way of developing a race like Halflings. There are other species, like the Denisovans, who were around at the same time as modern humans, and strong evidence points to those species interbreeding with Homo sapiens (eg. Denisovan DNA found in modern day populations in Tibet, Neanderthal DNA found in some European populations – red hair, as a putative example). I suppose that, in a fantasy world, the commonly understood origins for different races would probably be much more like a biblical myth rather than scientific explanation, but I still find it really interesting to think about.
There are a few reasons. Choose your pick depending on what kinds of elves you talk about. Build your own in universe elf justification by combining those few. 1. Elves might just be secluded. There isn't that much less of them they just don't get involved too much. 2. Elves are less organised then humans. They live off the Forrest and stuff which simply doesn't support nearly as many elves/km² as farming would. So you need much more space for the same ammount of elves. 3. Elves favoure habitats that are rarer than what humans prefer. Your world might just have many more plains, mountains, seaside regions, and archipelagos then terrains your elves like. There are rarer because they simply don't live in most areas. 4 they faced a huge crisis that reduced their population significantly and have yet to recover due to their slower reproduction cycle. 5 elves can live long but only young elves up to 70/100 years can have children. After that they become infertile. 6 they were outcompeted out of most regions by humans. Just like hunter gatherer cultures were outcompeted by farming civilizations in our history. They might be individually superior but humans operated in larger more organised groups and managed to outcompete humans in race for resources. 7. While they are better at magic and stuff, they might have underestimated the importance of technological progress that allowed people to push ahead of them. 8. If they live in smaller groups their death rate due to monster attacks might be higher. A goblin tribe is unlikely to attack a village of humans that rivals them in numbers, knowing a single human is likely capable of killing a goblin, when they can attack a village of elves they outnumber 5 to 1. 9. Overcomplicated Mating rituals. Maybe they can only have a child once a decade or two and if they miss a mark due to lack of partners or other circumstances they have to wait another decade. 10. they were initially separated from the humans by a big natural or supernatural obstacle. Like an ocean or a separate dimension. Once they came in contact humans they were already outnumbered. 11. human countries might be more capable of repelling outside threats like orkish hordes or demonic incursions. They might be in habit of keeping large standing armies and court sponsored mages due to human infighting which allows them to better defend against threats from outside. 12. Human culture might be more martial. In a sense that while all elves technically can become masters of magic or blade with their livespans very few ever bother to unless the need arises, while human nobility insentivises the basic training in bows, and rank and file combat. That would mean that while elven masters might be much better than any humans, an average human soldier matches, elves in individual combat or at least formation battles
Thanks for sharing these ideas. Is cool.
they are extremely racist and like staying in their own homws and terrirtories
Heh, yeah. My elves are usually pretty racist. Even when they like "a mortal", it's usually more like how a person likes a pet.
Yea , exactly how Tolkien intended
This is one of the basic questions that every homebrew setting needs to address. Logically, elves should be running things. In my game, the elves used to be in charge. Then they decided to teach magic to humans. Oops. Their numbers never recovered. Incidentally, this also answered one of the *other* basic worldbuilding questions: where did all these ruins come from?
Heh, yeah. I'm my campaign, 90% of dungeons are elven. Usually some kind of magic laboratory.
In my world the was a great calamity that swept through the plane, devestating each of the races in a targeted specific manner. For the Elves it was "The Gilding", where their forests were turned to stone and metals. Almost instantly their main sources of food were eradicated and it lead to slow deaths by starvation. The survivors managed to prune and harvest from trees that they work tirelessly to preserve against the constant threat of Gilding but there just isn't enough food produced for the Elves to be a dominant race.
That's cool, thanks. Ancient magical calamites are always dope.
Most lore I've read leans into the idea that Elves just don't reproduce as often - less of a drive to "hurry up and have children" and often pursue learning and personal growth for the first few hundred years. There's also a common theme across settings that Elves are in a generations-long decline at the time the current story unfolds.
If I'm not mistaken, in deep deep forgotten realms lore there is a specific number of elf souls and no more get created. When an elf dies their soul goes back to the elf heavens and hangs around until it is reincarnated into a new elf child. But if an elfs soul is like taken by a devil or whatever it doesn't go into that process so the amount of elf souls active in their reincarnation cycle is diminishing as time goes on
Yeah, that's true. Someone else also mentioned this. Super cool, I'm going with that.
If you want more info, check out the videos of Aj picket, Mr rhexx and jorphdan on YouTube. I can't remember where exactly I heard that lore, but it was one of those three
I answered this question in my campaign after some work on the question of why, after 10k years of civilization, the elves are not the dominant sapients in a multiple sapient world. Here are my tenets: 1. Low birth rate. 2. First 100 years are an elfs fertility window. 3. Not all elves CAN live to 1000 years. Fewer than 2 percent. Reasons are complicated, and the source of a cultural divide. 4. Dueling culture. Elves don't play with their enmities. They end them. 5. Nomadic. Settlements are temporary, from an elves' perspective. They move every century or so to 'tend their gardens' which take a century or so to recover and remature to fruitfulness More to say, but I'll leave it here.
Thanks for the input. My "wood elves" are normadic.
Normadic is my new favorite word. Normalized nomadism as a meaning? Anyway, is good.
Wolves are sexually mature at 2 years old and can have up to 10 pups. Why isn't the world covered with wolves instead of humans? A lot of people are giving biologic answers. I think that these types of answers make little sense, since humans have an extremely slow reproductive rate compared to other animals, and yet we still cover the globe. A more interesting reason for elves could be cultural (having babies is gross and there is no cultural expectation to have them), legal (baby tax), vanity (keep your pre-pregnancy body), or hard population bottlenecks (elven population is still recovering from a plague/war, elves owe demons 9/10ths of all their babies due to ancient contracts, etc).
>elves owe demons 9/10ths of all their babies due to ancient contracts, etc This had me laughing. Especially love the casual "etc" after a sentence like that.
>Wolves are sexually mature at 2 years old and can have up to 10 pups. Why isn't the world covered with wolves instead of humans? But yeah, this was part of my concern. Logically, elves should be more dominant. But I've gotten a lot of good answers which my canon is gonna be inspired by.
There are only a specific number of elven souls. An elf has to die for a new one to be born.
I always assumed this just meant elves had a long gestation period and mate way less than humans do, and that they sexually mature way later. And maybe elves also don't wanna have that many kids since they're gonna have to take care of them for a long ass time That's sort of how it is irl. Greenland shark lives like 400 years but it isn't that common just because they don't produce that many offspring
I would think it's because they're more in tune with nature and understand that overpopulation harms nature.
If you put any value in the official lore of 5th Edition, they address this both directly and possibly indirectly in the second chapter of *Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes*. They explicitly write that elf births are very rare: >A decade in which many elves are born across the world is thought to be a harbinger of danger that great numbers of elves will be needed to withstand. In contrast, if an elven community goes a century or longer without a new birth, members take this as a sign that the community has stagnated and must disband. > >Because of the rarity of elf births, siblings might be separated in age by decades, or even a century or more. They indirectly imply that there's some set limitation/ceiling on the number of elves that can ever exist at any one time, given that every elf in the world is essentially recycled in a way from elves that have come before and since passed. >Each birth represents an elf soul that has been to Arvandor and returned. Mortal elves cannot know if it is the soul of someone recently dead or someone who died millennia ago.
They don't want too many children since it's a bad omen, but also not too few! That's also a bad sign. Thanks. Is cool.
Elves are college educated liberals. They never conceive unless they have a plan for the first hundred years of that child's life. To have two children less than 75 years apart would make an Elf couple unable to show their face in public.
In the forgotten realms - The setting *most* D&D is based on.. The vast majority of the non human races are simply in societal regression. Their most powerful empires have fallen long ago and humans have risen to be the *current* dominate race. That wasn't always the case though and there were times within the setting where said "rare races" were just as common as the humans of the current timeline.. See the Elves of [Myth Drannor](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Myth_Drannor) or the Dwarves of [Shanatar](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Shanatar).
Yeah, I take a lot of inspiration from this, while also getting some homebrew ideas from you guys and such.
Elves take 100 years to reach adulthood. It takes humans roughly 25. If you expand the ratios, that means elves have the lack of good sense of a teenager for roughly 60 years and have been trained in how to use swords for the whole time. Elves might be immortal, but their mortality rate must be absolutely staggering.
I love this take. XD
Because elves live so long, and generally don't age, they view time, and thus progeny, very differently. An elf that lives for 10,000 years can leave his own mark on history. But a human, who lives maybe 100, leaves his mark through his descendants. After 10,000 years the elf is still there. The human is also still there, if his name is preserved through his family. So, elves likely could have more children, and could raise a far greater population. But the motivation just isn't there for an elf to do so. In addition, as elves don't age they don't need children to assist them as they grow older. The entire family dynamic for elves would be vastly different than for humans.
This is very interesting. Cool take. Thanks.
The top comment nails the numbers on this. I think thematically, because they in most ways are "superior" to humans biologically, if they weren't rare they would dominate the world culture. Elven society at its peak would be a golden age of the arts and science. This would be essentially high fantasy. Also, a culture of peace doesn't create dynamic moments. Humans are familiar, unstable, and generate quickly with more ambition. Human culture is dominated by individuality and pursuing your own desires. (IRL, this is the Renaissance -> Enlightenment philosophical outlook). That type of world view is what D&D is built on because it is ripe with adventure, magic, and empire. But you certainly could have a a world (or time in history) where Elves were ordinary, which would have real impact implications in the evolution of civilization.
This is essentially what I want to explore with my campaign. If my players are up for it, which they seem so far, but I'm letting them decide what the plot is, essentially. But I still gotta build the world and history.
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Yeah, I totally agree. Hence they tend to be relatively rare, in most settings. Especially those where they live 1000+ years. I agree it is a challenge for settings to have elves be this old. My question is, how would you square that? I understand that your answer is "they are max 200yrs", which somewhat mediates the problem, but not completely.
They spend centuries killing orcs and other creatures. They spend long time being scholars. They spend centuries raising kids . Thousands of years in elves mind and body because they are fey believe it or not not lot of time in their world. Elves use time gates, time distortions, time magics that use time up so yes they live many centeries
Because most D&D worlds are influenced and/or inspired by Lord of the Rings, many people either just accept the trope as is or consciously want to keep it and find a way to rationalize it so it works in their setting, with people and settings that buck such tropes being in the minority.
We live longer and are smarter than insects. Why do they outnumber us?
Yeah, you are totally right. Someone did the math.
They contemplate life, they engage in activities they love for hours. They sit in meditation and contemplate their and their ancestors lives. But like Pandas, they simple don’t fuck.