Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Thayne
After posting this thread I've started to think more about the impact of even a small number of very old elves on a setting. If elves are ageless, even a small number of lucky elves who manage to survive thousands of years without dying of violence or accident means "living memory" in your setting is thousands of years.
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The same issue arises with gods, if you have gods of things that have been around for a long time.
In my long-running hombrew world dates were counted from the "Eldest of Days", a subsequent estimate of the date of a moment when everybody woke up with a language but no other memories. The setting of campaigns I ran ranged from 4600 After the Eldest of Days to about 5005 AED.
There were quite a few gods still around from the Eldest of Days, and a few claimed to remember what had gone before. But their stories didn't match up, and all the philosohers figured that they were liars.
There were no elves in that setting (nor dwarves, hobbits, orcs), but there was a group called the
léshy, who were exactly like Tolkien's elves except for not being like Tolkien's elves, if you get what I mean. By chance one had survived from the Eldest of Days: Alkinous the Deathless. The PC party in the first campaign tracked him down with great difficulty to ask what had happened to the Sword with No Name at some particular historical juncture. They found him nude on a beach on a remote island, fishing for his dinner with a hand-line, and his answer to their question was "I don't know; I wasn't there. If you want to live a long life you avoid historical junctures."
Alkinous turned out to be strongly oriented towards the future, and to disparage interest in the past. The PCs didn't quiz him about the Eldest of Days because they figured that the reason he made himself so hard to find was to escape prying tourists. He gave them a good dinner of fish, though, and charged very reasonably.
(Players never discovered this, but Alkinous combined moderately outstanding attributes with the highest possible skill level in every skill in the book including all the magical invocation skills, and complete knowledge of all the fields of knowledge including all the magical Fundamentals. He didn't have the Talent, but he was a Namer and a Spellsinger, besides being a Favourite of Selené, and he could perform un-Talented ritual magic. He put regular effort into performing divinations, and always tried to be where things weren't going to happen.)
It is a pain in the neck to have to devise the deep history of a whole world. I like to cut it off a reasonable way back, make it difficult and unrewarding to investigate the cut, and then never give players any reason to need to know about anything that happened more than a few hundred years ago.