From: Nick Brooke (100270.337@CompuServe.COM)
Date: Sat 12 Feb 1994 - 00:53:46 EET
Uncle Ken was asking about brown elves.
I had a theory once. Excuse me while I rabbit on a bit...
It happened while I was at University, and was about to run a RQ-Glorantha game with a bunch of non-Gloranthans. Worse than that: Tolkien fans. OK, I was partly to blame (having helped them found the OU Tolkien Soc), but I was really worried about how the girls would react to meeting Aldryami. So I got to thinking about elves' personalities, and came up with this:
In modern Fantasy fiction, there are several diverse portrayals of "elves". There are naff "flower-fairy" types, all frivolous and comical (Jack Vance and Neil Gaiman handle these well). There are the honourable, chivalrous, Silmarillion warrior types (with shining eyes, noble purpose, etc.). There are the wise, old, smugly complacent ones (most in LotR fit this category). And there are the doomed, Celtic-twilight, fringe-of-the-world types ("last survivors of a dying race" etc.).
Why not take these for *seasonally variable* Aldryami personalities?
A mature brown elf is frivolous and whimsical in Sea Season (when the pollinating fertility "dances" happen). This is a time for practical jokes and merriment. It is hard for the elves to concentrate on anything seriously for long, and dangerous for outsiders to meet them. They hide and trick.
The elves develop a fixed purpose and intent in Fire Season, and work hard to achieve it. This could be something warlike (elf armies march in this season), or a more passive project (reforestation, or cleaning up spoiled woodland, etc.). Collective effort and dedication to the task are the keys.
Win or lose, come Earth Season the brown elves are calmer and more sedate: their labours have (as it were) borne fruit, and they can rest on their laurels. This is a good time to deal with them: they are often peaceable, and strangers are safe from the random pranks of Sea Season.
Then as Dark Season arrives, their enemies grow stronger and their siblings drop into the Long Sleep of Winter, until the last brown elves left awake naturally slip into that desperate survivor mentality, hiding in the bleak wintry forest and hoarding whatever can help them against their foes.
Trick here is: that's how it works for "mature" elves. A player character elf is by definition immature: he/she is not yet at one with the cycles of the forest and its season. So players can pick any of the "stereotypical" elf personalities briefly described above and run with that alone. Mature elves will shift bizarrely between seasons, effectively passing from youth to old age every year (as a human would perceive it). They won't "look down on" immature elves, any more than we look down on childrens' personalities. The people of the forest take on a different character to match each season of the woodlands.
Well, it worked for me: their Esrolite party met Arstolan brown elves in Springtime and were deeply pissed off by their mindless frivolity. I had hours of fun giggling and behaving strangely at them, while they tried to talk sense and gather information from a wholly non-cooperative audience. Especially as some of the characters were told as part of their background that they had met the elves before (in the Autumn), and I'd told them how wise and generous etc. they always appeared...
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