Author: Dylan Green

Elves (Blood and Tradition)

for World of Dungeons

Elves are beautiful. Perfect really. Tall, delicately featured, wise, immortal. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that we can can hardly stand them. No one wants to be compared to that. Elves exist at the unhappy crux of being too heart-achingly beautiful to be desired and just different enough wrong. Sadly, they will never be quite at home with anyone but other elves.

This is one thing that is common among all elves. They are separate. Aloof. Perhaps even a little alien. Their immortality makes them distant from the brief lives of mortals that flicker around them. This gives elves an air of quiet sorrow. They react to the world around them with a cool detachment, knowing at all times that, this too shall pass.

And then this will fall away and, they will smile, or laugh, or make some dry joke and for a moment, they will be gloriously happy. And we will be happy just to have been here to witness it. And then we will both remember that this moment cannot last, for either of us.

Rights of Blood and Tradition

Break from the group and sing, alone, under the stars.

Speak fondly of a time millenias dead with one of your own.

Craft something of delicate and fragile beauty. Share it with no one.

In a rare moment of openness, try to explain to your allies how things were long ago.

Stop and contemplate an object of beauty, fallen into ruin.

Heritage Moves

Shape wood with a song

Summon a small friendly nature spirit

Recall a secret from ages past

Perform an act of inhuman grace

Blind, dazzle, or confuse with glamour

GM Moves

Someone is offended by their hauteur

Cold iron brings pain and poison

Nature cries out for aid or shares it’s pain

Your beauty marks you as alien, strange, or dangerous

You are enrapt by a display of beauty

For Your Game

Where did elves in your world come from? Why are they so damn pretty? Were they the result of some experiment with immortality? Perhaps they are failed gods or fallen angels. A sort of too perfect first draft of mortals by the gods, before they got the concept of “mortal” down. Or maybe they’re a refinement. A new breed of life in balance with nature and not misshapen or doomed to die like the rest of us. Did they always exist this way? Did they have some shining glorious kingdom that fell into ruin? Perhaps they are trying to rebuild it. Perhaps they destroyed it themselves, knowing it could not last. Perhaps not. Perhaps they have always been a wandering people. Rare and elusive. Meeting only rarely and living lives of solitude outside the busy lives of the mortal races.

Working on another project I found this amidst my notes:

Witcher’s Brew

When you take time (a few hours) to concoct a strange elixir name a monster and pick 1 effect:

• Consuming the elixir forces you into a coma from which you won’t wake for several hours.

• The elixir wracks your body with pain as it works on your system. Take 1D8 damage.

• The elixir’s effects will last for less than an hour, rather than a few hours. 

Then roll + CON. On a 10+ hold 3. On a 7-9 hold 2. On a 6- hold 1, but the GM chooses an additional effect from the above options. While the elixir is in your system you may spend your hold to to negate the effects of the chosen monster’s abilities on yourself. You can resist a vampire’s mind control, match a werewolf’s agility, stop a gorgon from turning you to stone, etc.