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.