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Add in the old New World setting, circa 2010-2014

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Andrew Kesterson
2026-05-18 12:26:59 -04:00
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The elves of the Elven Protectorate are quite different
from those you might find in other fantasy settings such as the
Forgotten Realms. Millenia of slavery has decimated both their
numbers and their bloodlines, and their behaviours are quite
different from the standard fantasy elf. Their history is long
and complex, but I will try to explain it all here.
It could be said that the history of The New World
is the history of the Elves, and more specifically, the history
of the tragic Drow Elf race. Indeed, the most important events
in the New World's timeline occur centered around the various
elven races. But this is only a small part of the story of the
history of the world; much more remains to be told of the
other races as well. No world rises or falls on the merits -
or flaws - of one race alone.
1. The Golden Era and the Civil War
-----------------------------------
Before the time of the Alliance and their Slave Camps,
the Elves were a master race. Perfect in physical appearance,
long in life, masters of the bow, the sword and the wand, they
could not be matched by any others in the world. They ruled
their kingdoms fairly and gracefully in their tree cities in the
most ancient forests of the world, using the trees and plants
themselves as a sort of historical record, tracing their noble
bloodlines back through tens of thousands of years. But the
elves, despite all their perfection, had a dark secret - the
secret that their drive to perfection had caused them to eliminate
and exterminate some of their own kind, driving them deep underground,
rather than accepting them as part of their kin.
The Drow elves were not always dark skinned and pale eyed
as they are now. At one time, the Drow were High Elves, just like
the others. But the Drow were darker, more sinister than their
brethren. They were clannish, and craved arcane power more than
almost anything. Their quest for arcane knowledge and power would
put them at odds with their other brothers more than once. But
despite this, they never attempted to usurp the throne of the
Elven Kings, and they never waged battle with their kin. But the
relations were always strained and uneasy.
The High Elves were, at the heart of it all, extremely
vain. Their vanity was so great that, at one point, a meeting
was called by the Elven King in secret; fearing the power of the
arcanist elves, and fearing that they might one day become greater
than the others, he issued an extermination order. The ensuing
chaos saw a civil war between elves the likes of which had never
been seen, and would not be seen again for thousands of years.
Brother slaughtered brother, fathers fell at the hands of their
dutiful sons, and mothers set against daughters and sister against
sister. The females were made an especially gruesome example;
their reproductive organs were sent to the four corners of the
Elven Empire, along with their heads, to warn all elves what would
happen to themselves and their families, should they decide to
begin producing such people again.
Not all of the arcanist elves were slaughtered in this
procession. Many had the foresight to prepare underground labyrinths
into which they could flee to safety; and so they did, by the
hundreds. An exiled people, they were labeled "Drow", which in
the Elven tongue, means "Demon". The Drow accepted the monicker,
and, eventually, would live up to its name.
Some of the Elves did not agree with the civil war and refused
to participate, insisting that the problem was not the Drowish
quest for power, but that the race as a whole was so vain and
insecure as to allow such a thing to happen. Some, despite all the
reasons for and against the war, were so disgusted that they fled
the Elven homelands and lived as humans, unable to bear the pain
of their race any longer. And this is where the various elven
varieties come from; the great rift in the elven community began
with the extermination of the Drow.
2. Pre-Slavery
----------
The Drow never forgot the treatment they received at the
hands of their own kin. And they vowed vengeance on those above.
Hidden deep in their underdark caverns, the drow waited for thousands
of years, building their strength, reproducing, and mastering their
darkest arcane arts. They formed a religion based around their arcane
ways, and gathered unto themselves a dark Goddess. Remembering the
treatment of their wonderful, lovely arcanist women, their society
became feminist, with the females on top of the food chain and
the males on the bottom. They began to create bizarre rituals and
mating habits formed out of their now-twisted minds formed in the
war with their brothers, combined with their new guiding spider
Goddess. And so the Drow grew in power, and grew away from their
now distant brethren on the surface. Their skin darkened, and their
hair and pupils turned white. They began to hate the sun. And
everything - EVERYTHING - that lived under its light. They
hated it, but they remembered it. And they hated everyone for
driving them away from it.
Meanwhile, on the surface, the High Elves were doing their
best to pretend that the Drow had never happened - a stain that had
been cleaned quite thoroughly from the Elves' perfect histories.
Some elven families felt it was a tragedy more than a triumph,
and others refused to speak of it at all. But over a few generations,
the Drow were made into a myth, a fairy tale told to children to
frighten them at night so they would obey their parents. The
High Elven families continued to prosper, while watching over the
fledgling Human race that had just recently become civilized; they
saw great promise in them, and began assisting the humans. They
taught them armor and weaponcraft, farming, the ways of the woodlands.
The elves did not understand the humans' bizarre religious affliction,
but nonetheless, the race seemed to be a great promise of good to the
world. What nobody wanted to admit was that everyone in the Elven
nation was dreadfully ashamed of what they had done to their
Drowish kin, and were helping lead the humans out of the Dark Ages
as a sort of silent penance for it, hoping that it would somehow
balance the cosmic scale that they had so nearly destroyed. But
nobody dare admit such a thing aloud; it would have done irreparable
damage to their reputation.
But the Drow saw their fostering of the human race. They saw
the Dwarves and the Gnomes participating in this fiasco as well.
The outrage was uncontainable; the other races of the world would
aid THIS FLEDGLING RACE of INFERIOR and IMMATURE demihumans, but
none of them could have been bothered to LIFT A FINGER to help
prevent what had happened to the Drow only a thousand years prior?!
The simmering anger of the Drowish people could almost be felt in
a heat underneath the ground. This, they would not stand for.
3. Rise of the Alliance
-----------------------
While the Elves were up on the surface nursing their
helpless fledgling Human race, the Drow were making ready for
war. They had mastered their own abilities and perfected their
cruelty to an art; they had bred an elite warrior class and
had produced arcanists that would be sufficient to bring down
the world of the sun lovers above. But this was not enough
for the Drow. Over the thousands of years, they had grown
disgusted with the Elven fostering of humanity; so they decided
to return the favor. The Drow would foster races of their own,
and make them ready to colonize the world of the Elves
once the Drow were finished turning it to cinders. They would
breed races with the cruelty and the hatred for the sun lovers,
such that perhaps the elves could see their folly once they were
all in chains.
The Drow did one better; with the help of their magics
and their burning hate, they were able to bring many races
out of the stone age. With the help of the Drowish Wizards,
Orc Shamans turned their loose-knit families of bone gnawing
neanderthals into bloodthirsty warriors, who were finally
able to understand the words of their Orcish God and understand
what had been done to them when the world was divided amongst
men. They martialed the Goblin, Hobgoblin and Kobold races.
They turned entire races into bloodthirsty warriors grateful
to only one group - the Daughters of the Queen, the Drowish
ruling class.
Those races that were too old or too smart to be
controlled in such a manner were brought into the fold with
promises of wealth and power on the surface once the demihumans
had been exterminated.
When their croft was full, the Drow exploded onto
the surface in a great wave of pain, suffering, and destruction.
Nobody was ready for it.
4. Slavery
----------
The races of the world fell quickly to the onslaught
of the Great Alliance. Nobody had ever considered that,
in such peaceful times, such a great threat was amassing
right underneath their feet. The few battles fought were
more massacres than battles, and all good men fell under the
boot of the Alliance and its dark Gods.
The High Elves suffered the greatest in the times
of chains and slavery. The Drow took great pleasure in the
torture and humiliation of the High Elves. Crucifixion was
a favorite amongst the Drowish tormentors. The High Elves
were turned into little more than cattle, and managed as
such. Females and males were separated into different
cages in the slave camps, and were bred like cows when
it was time to produce new elves for the camps. Any time
that a baby was born that was not authorized from a
specific sire and mare, the entire camp would be chained to
the ground and forced to watch as the baby was submitted
to various and horrible tortures; all while Drowish
clerics ensured its cries and howls for its parents were
heard long and loud. The torture would go on for days
before the lifeless carcass of the child was given back
to the parents - who, along with the rest of the camp,
had been chained without food or water for days,
watching the ordeal - who were given strict orders to
"care for their new bundle of joy as any new parent would;
any attempts at burying your child will result in swift
punishment". And so the parents would be forced to deal with
the carcass until, thank heavens, some loose dog or something
would make off with it.
The tortures the Elves endured were unspeakable and
continuous. A volume could be written on such matters all by
itself. But perhaps one of the worst was the Drowish practice
of "bloodline clarification", whereby the High Elves had
their genetic properties changed over a series of thousands
of years. The elves had many of their best features bred
out of them. They lost their ability to cast magic entirely.
Their elven grace was replaced by clumsy human features, as
human DNA was introduced into the High Elven bloodlines.
Their starlight vision was bred out of them. Only a few
of the High Elves managed to maintain their original traits,
and they were kept locked in anti-magic cages where their
torture was continuous, unending, and unspeakable, until
their eventual and inevitable deaths.
5. Rebellion
------------
The Elves had endured thousands of years of slavery
- 3,000 by most reckoning - and generations of humiliation,
torture, theft, rape and murder, at the hands of the Drowish
brethren that they drove away by their own hands. The cries
of the Elves in the camps went high and loud to the heavens;
the shame of the High Elves was unbearable and they prayed
for release one day, for extermination the other. But the
Drowish torture was unending.
The Elves eventually began to understand that if
history was to be righted, it would have to begin with an
escape from the slave camps. They would have to go somewhere
that they could start anew. But they had to get out of this
hell in order to do it. But with their trademark Elven
grace mostly bred out of them, and having lost the ability
to perform feats of magic and their abilities to see in the
dark, their traditional martial tactics now proved useless.
A bow, when an elf managed to get his hands on one, now proved
little more than a clunky plank of wood in the hands of a pauper.
The Elves began to research different methods for
combatting their captors. Not able to rely on their unnatural
Elven grace anymore, they had to train their bodies as they
had trained their Human proteges; rigorous physical and
mental training allowed them to regain some of their abilities
to move quickly, and react sharply. Through hundreds of years
of secret meetings, they developed a martial art whose core
techniques were cleverly disguised as a variety of sorrowful
dance routines. They trained themselves to use their eyes again,
and not so much their elven senses. But their skill was
never what it once was. But when the time came for rebellion,
they were ready. And they fought with the same visceral
dedication and iron will that had made them fierce warriors
to begin with; of all the things the Drow had done to them,
they had never been able to break their Elven spirits.
6. Now
------
The High Elves will never forget what happened to them
in the slave camps of the Great Alliance. The experiences
were so horrible that, often, a toddler's first words will
be descriptions of a nightmare involving alliance horrors
that they have never even seen. The history of their punishment
is now in their genetic code; a scar they will carry with them
until the end of their days.
But the High Elves that now inhabit the Elven Protectorate
are determined to make a better world this time, and to not make the
same horrible, tragic mistakes that their ancestors made. The
Elven Protectorate's motto, below its coat of arms, on all official
communications, reads simply : "Never Again." And this refers to
far more than their time in slavery; the High Elves of today
realize that the decision to drive the Drow from the surface was
a fatal one that led directly to their enslavement. However, the
elves are wise enough to know that things may not have been
different if they had been done differently, and that there
is no point in lamenting the past; the fact is that the Drow
are the sworn enemies of all Elves, and that will be the fact of it
until the end of time.
The Elves, at first, settled in the Western Kingdom with the
Humans. However after the Council of Nine went into the Dragonspine
Mountains, the elves found themselves unable to properly face the
race they had helped foster, blaming themselves for the Humans'
role in the enslavement. They also feared for themselves, as their
numbers were strikingly small - at the time of the escape from the
Alliance, only 500 or 1000 elves made it across the Western Mountains
and into the Kingdom proper. So they decided to sequester themselves
away in the Civil Wood, making the protection of this ancient forest,
and the Dragonspine Mountains to which it connects, their solemn
responsibility.
The Elves in the Protectorate are a mix. The genetic
experimentation that went on in the Alliance slave camps has left
a great many of them in a state of barbarism; the Kagonesti and Sylvan
tribes wandering the Civil Wood are the result of such experimentation.
However, these people are the only ones who have not had the magic bred
entirely out of their blood; it is not uncommon to see the
Sylvan or Kagonesti tribes produce Shamans, Clerics, and occasionally
a Sorceror. The High Elven families, however, have not produced a
spellcaster in almost 750 years, since before they left the slave camps.
For every elf born, there is only a 5% chance that the magic-blocking
genes will be recessive, and that he will be able to do any sort
of spellcasting. The chance improves by 2.5% for every spellcasting elven
parent; if one of the parents is a spellcasting gnome or human, the chance
improves by 5% instead of 2.5%.
But even when the Elves do overcome the genetic problems they
acquired in the Slave camps, they are more susceptible to disease and
deformation; the experimentation done to them by the Drow results
in a base 25% chance for a deformity, and a base 30% chance to be born
with a life-threatening disease that will likely kill the infant before
his first birthday.
The Drow, for their part, are surprisingly quiet. They are currently
licking their wounds deep in their underdark cities, wondering where
exactly they went wrong to allow this slave kingdom to rebel and form
itself - and what they continue to do wrong that keeps them out of reach.
Unlike the high elves, however, the years of slavery, and the rebellion,
have not changed the Drow. They are as cold, calculating, brutal, and
vengeful as ever. And they are watching. And waiting.