[Meta: this is normally something I would post on my tumblr, but instead am putting on LW as an experiment.]
Sometimes, in games like Dungeons and Dragons, there will be multiple races of sapient beings, with humans as a sort of baseline. Elves are often extremely long-lived, but most handlings of this I find pretty unsatisfying. Here’s a new take, that I don’t think I’ve seen before (except the Ell in Worth the Candle have some mild similarities):
Humans go through puberty at about 15 and become adults around 20, lose fertility (at least among women) at about 40, and then become frail at about 60. Elves still ‘become adults’ around 20, in that a 21-year old elf adventurer is as plausible as a 21-year old human adventurer, but they go through puberty at about 40 (and lose fertility at about 60-70), and then become frail at about 120.
This has a few effects:
The peak skill of elven civilization is much higher than the peak skill of human civilization (as a 60-year old master carpenter has had only ~5 decades of skill growth, whereas a 120-year old master carpenter has had ~11). There’s also much more of an ‘apprenticeship’ phase in elven civilization (compare modern academic society’s “you aren’t fully in the labor force until ~25” to a few centuries ago, when it would have happened at 15), aided by them spending longer in the “only interested in acquiring skills” part of ‘childhood’ before getting to the ‘interested in sexual market dynamics’ part of childhood.
Young elves and old elves are distinct in some of the ways human children and adults are distinct, but not others; the 40-year old elf who hasn’t started puberty yet has had time to learn 3 different professions and build a stable independence, whereas the 12-year old human who hasn’t started puberty yet is just starting to operate as an independent entity. And so sometimes when they go through puberty, they’re mature and stable enough to ‘just shrug it off’ in a way that’s rare for humans. (I mean, they’d still start growing a beard / etc., but they might stick to carpentry instead of this romance bullshit.)
This gives elven society something of a huge individualist streak, in that people focused a lot on themselves / the natural world / whatever for decades before getting the kick in the pants that convinced them other elves were fascinating too, and so they bring that additional context to whatever relationships they do build.
For the typical human, most elves they come into contact with are wandering young elves, who are actually deeply undifferentiated (sometimes in settings / games you get jokes about how male elves are basically women, but here male elves and female elves are basically undistinguished from each other; sure, they have primary sex characteristics, but in this setting a 30-year old female elf still hasn’t grown breasts), and asexual in the way that children are. (And, if they do get into a deep friendship with a human for whom it has a romantic dimension, there’s the awkward realization that they might eventually reciprocate the feelings—after a substantial fraction of the human’s life has gone by!)
The time period that elves spend as parents of young children is about the same as the amount of time that humans spend, but feels much shorter, and still elves normally only see their grandchildren and maybe briefly their great-grandchildren.
This gives you three plausible archetypes for elven adventurers:
The 20-year old professional adventurer who’s just starting their career (and has whatever motivation).
The 45-year old drifter who is still level 1 (because of laziness / lack of focus) who is going through puberty and needs to get rich quick in order to have any chance at finding a partner, and so has turned to adventuring out of desperation.
The established 60-year old who has several useless professions under their belt (say, a baker and an accountant and a fisherman) who is now taking up adventuring as career #4 or whatever.
[Meta: this is normally something I would post on my tumblr, but instead am putting on LW as an experiment.] Sometimes, in games like Dungeons and Dragons, there will be multiple races of sapient beings, with humans as a sort of baseline. Elves are often extremely long-lived, but most handlings of this I find pretty unsatisfying. Here’s a new take, that I don’t think I’ve seen before (except the Ell in Worth the Candle have some mild similarities): Humans go through puberty at about 15 and become adults around 20, lose fertility (at least among women) at about 40, and then become frail at about 60. Elves still ‘become adults’ around 20, in that a 21-year old elf adventurer is as plausible as a 21-year old human adventurer, but they go through puberty at about 40 (and lose fertility at about 60-70), and then become frail at about 120.
This has a few effects:
The peak skill of elven civilization is much higher than the peak skill of human civilization (as a 60-year old master carpenter has had only ~5 decades of skill growth, whereas a 120-year old master carpenter has had ~11). There’s also much more of an ‘apprenticeship’ phase in elven civilization (compare modern academic society’s “you aren’t fully in the labor force until ~25” to a few centuries ago, when it would have happened at 15), aided by them spending longer in the “only interested in acquiring skills” part of ‘childhood’ before getting to the ‘interested in sexual market dynamics’ part of childhood.
Young elves and old elves are distinct in some of the ways human children and adults are distinct, but not others; the 40-year old elf who hasn’t started puberty yet has had time to learn 3 different professions and build a stable independence, whereas the 12-year old human who hasn’t started puberty yet is just starting to operate as an independent entity. And so sometimes when they go through puberty, they’re mature and stable enough to ‘just shrug it off’ in a way that’s rare for humans. (I mean, they’d still start growing a beard / etc., but they might stick to carpentry instead of this romance bullshit.)
This gives elven society something of a huge individualist streak, in that people focused a lot on themselves / the natural world / whatever for decades before getting the kick in the pants that convinced them other elves were fascinating too, and so they bring that additional context to whatever relationships they do build.
For the typical human, most elves they come into contact with are wandering young elves, who are actually deeply undifferentiated (sometimes in settings / games you get jokes about how male elves are basically women, but here male elves and female elves are basically undistinguished from each other; sure, they have primary sex characteristics, but in this setting a 30-year old female elf still hasn’t grown breasts), and asexual in the way that children are. (And, if they do get into a deep friendship with a human for whom it has a romantic dimension, there’s the awkward realization that they might eventually reciprocate the feelings—after a substantial fraction of the human’s life has gone by!)
The time period that elves spend as parents of young children is about the same as the amount of time that humans spend, but feels much shorter, and still elves normally only see their grandchildren and maybe briefly their great-grandchildren.
This gives you three plausible archetypes for elven adventurers:
The 20-year old professional adventurer who’s just starting their career (and has whatever motivation).
The 45-year old drifter who is still level 1 (because of laziness / lack of focus) who is going through puberty and needs to get rich quick in order to have any chance at finding a partner, and so has turned to adventuring out of desperation.
The established 60-year old who has several useless professions under their belt (say, a baker and an accountant and a fisherman) who is now taking up adventuring as career #4 or whatever.