Bizarre Life Cycle

Last Week: What Do Really Long Lifespans Mean For a Setting? 

One of my favorite solutions to this problem comes from the Sorcerer's Skull blog. This is a great way to solve two problems with one answer. It both explains why elves have such long lifespans, and also why the various types of elves are so different from each other.

The solution to the latter problem is underrated. A lot of the attempts to “fix” drow, orcs, and other ancestries in modern D&D basically add up to patches and hotfixes on the lore, aimed at nudging them into some kind of approximate moral equilibrium with the other ancestries. This is an imprecise solution, and rarely pleases anyone. I would like to see more creators think big in the style of the Sorcerer’s Skull idea, elegantly solving these issues by making them part of an alien (but understandable) life cycle.

Another excellent example is this False Machine post on elves. This is part of a series of posts that take the conventional modern fantasy races and tries to recontextualize them and make them alien without abandoning their conventional characteristics. False Machine's elves (or Aeth) are recognizably within genre conventions, but ramp up the strangeness. The longer lifespan doesn’t seem so strange when the alienness of elves is front and center.

Both of these approaches require some buy-in from players more familiar with the bog-standard elves of the Forgotten Realms and similar settings. But it's a small price to pay for integrating elves in a more organic way within a game’s setting.

A Different Kind of Old Age

This is an extension of the idea from the Sorcerer's Skull post. Science fiction and fantasy stories that consider the impact of immortality (or extreme life extension) devote a lot of energy to examining what it would mean to live forever. These characters are not simply interesting because they are long-lived; they are interesting in ways specifically informed by being long-lived. This could be as simple as blocking out the lowest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one by one. A very long-lived creature simply ceases to care about such things. Or it could be subtler.

Elves live much like humans for the first century or two. In their third and fourth centuries, many enjoy an extended period as wise sages and leaders; similar to Elrond and many other familiar elves from existing fiction. Many humans assume that these elves are the very oldest elves, but they’re really just middle-aged, by elven standards.

By the time these elves reach their fifth century, their interaction with the world simply begins to constrict. This happens very gradually and slowly; it's not sudden or abrupt. They are just as wise and experienced as ever. But the scope of people, places, and events they apply their lived experience to begins to narrow. Perhaps they grow indifferent to the world beyond elven lands. Or they become obsessively focused on a single pursuit. They almost certainly withdraw from society in some form or another. Carrying on a conversation with them becomes difficult. People outside their focus are immaterial and unreal to them, like ghosts. 

This is not, by elven cultural standards, inherently a positive or negative thing. In one instance, a truly ancient elf might be an unparalleled master of a craft. In another case, a tragic case of monomania, centuries spent perfecting an essentially meaningless task or habit.

If you are thinking this kind of presentation could present parallels to real-world humans, well, you’re not wrong. How much you want to grapple with those parallels in your fantasy wizard game is up to you; just carefully think through with your players what you want out of the game (as thoughtful writers have done time and time again) and how close or far you want it to live from those real-world questions.