First, lets get this out of the way: it’s all made up and the points don’t matter, so who gives a heck.
But that aside, given that:
Elves can live “well over 700 years” (PHB 5e 2014)
Human-elf progeny are possible so they do get down like that
Why aren’t there billions of elves? That’s a question being asked over on monsters and manuals.
If you live for a very long time, or indeed forever, you can make an awful lot of babies. Not only would it mean overpopulation. It would also cause severe social problems […]
But maybe this is too just much of a human biased thought. It’s possible that they just don’t like kids. No need to. Many of us have an inbuilt instinct to care for children – our own or others – because we know that’s the only way the species will carry on. That’s not really the case for elves though. They just need to keep existing rather than existing vicariously from children.
I bet that instinct only kicks in for elves in the last decades of their life. I’m imagining it like a Vulcan pon farr thing. Maybe there’s a new bad guy idea in there: really old elf who couldn’t get laid in time so has turned into a BBEG. Or a journey where the adventurers have to find him a partner before he explodes, so to speak.
Something like that.
I also quite liked a suggestion from the blog posts comments:
Elves are chiefly homosexual, and the number who are interested in the opposite sex is very small, or they only do it out of obligation solely for procreation.
The oceans have always been eyed up greedily by humankind. Transport by boat was crucial for emergence of empires and economies over the few hundred years, and remains so today. Shipping routes aren’t the only thing to be jostling for; what’s in (and under!) the oceans are crucial too, from oil to food.
Our jobs are much easier nowadays with fossil fuel powered, enormous ships, not to mention highly accurate maps and nautical equipment.
Maps aren’t new though. They are more prolific, but there are many maps we have of older civilizations. These maps, especially before 1300AD, show other issues with traveling through the inky green: dozens of sea monsters.
I’m reading Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (Chet van Duzer) and couldn’t help but do a bit of world building here. The images in this blog post are scans of part of this book. (With hundreds more in the book!)
The creatures range from sea-pigs, to merfolk, to leviathans that could be mistaken for islands. In fact a common supposition was that “every land creature has an aquatic equal”. These creatures appear all over the world, corroborated on multiple maps. They were discussed in Green literature, known as “ketos”. Marco Polo in 1254 writes of spells needed by the pearl farmers which they incant to keep away the sea monsters.
A “pig-dog”. I can’t imagine this guy was a menace. A familiar, maybe?
Then, quite suddenly, these warnings of sea monster being to disappear from new maps. Rare and rarer still throughout the 1500s, until today where maps are very dry. The oceans are empty of most nuisances, other than weather (which we’ve never really been able to tame). Not a winged sea dragon or a ichthyocentaur to be found.
What happened to them?
There is a place where these creatures can still be found, and witnessed quite safely by every person on Earth. Look up. What made the ketos disappear from our oceans and reappear as constellations?
Order of the Seraphic Seas
The Order existed for a few hundred years and then was dissolved once their job was completed. Their singular aim, given to them by the church and funded by vested merchants, was to tame the seas.
They did this, quietly and with great honor, by hunting the seas for “ungodly” creatures and extincting them by force. These paladins were efficient and thorough. As the might of man stood against the ketos, there was no doubt about the end of this road. The ketos would be wiped out.
An ichthyocentaur. Apparently that’s what this is.
The smarter, more sentient of these creatures, made a deal with something for protection. Like Noah and his arc, the creatures who accepted the offer of help were swept away from their waters to safety.
They shelter in the cosmos now, their eyes glinting down at night, watching. Awaiting a return? Trapped in a pact they can’t escape?
Whatever they were doing, they were exterminated from the seas and so the job was done for the Order.
The Starchasers
But stars don’t always stay in the sky. “Tiny, harmless meteors,” we’re told. “Safely crashed into the ocean, causing no harm,” they say.
Some escape the hell they were confined to, in the maddening space between silence and dark. In their escape, they make a beeline for the place they once called home.
It’s possible before the Order that these creatures were aggressive only in protecting their home. Now though, centuries of abyssal torture has driven them mad and their fury is all they have left. Not only that, but the vile darkness has left its mark on them. Twisting them. Granting them unearthly strength.
With the Order gone, it falls to a much more ramshackle group to deal with the mess. (This is where the players come in!) The Starchasers hunt down these creatures – on land or at sea – to finish off the Sepharific duties of the Order.
I think this is a fine premise for a monster of the week style game, and you’ve got hundreds of ideas for bad guys from actual maps. And, of course, cryptids.
“I don’t know you how do it” is a pretty common refrain when hearing about someone running a marathon, writing computer code, or making art.
“Yes, you do!” I often want to scream. The runner spends hours training, the coder hours learning, and the artist hours practicing. There are very few skills humans are born with. We have to learn them. Suggesting otherwise is to disregard the effort someone has put into something.
Imagination is exactly the same. “I’m not creative enough to write a story.” Neither was Gaiman, until he put a bit of effort in. No one is born with thoroughly unique ideas and no one sits around waiting for a muse.
Imagination is an active process that works of the fuel you’ve been collecting for years: books, music, TV. Almost every piece of popular culture is built on top of a predecessor’s work. Munched own by one author to be mulled over and reshaped by the next.
The writing advice of “always be reading” isn’t to improve your vocabulary (that does help, but you may want to turn to crosswords for that!), it’s to fill you up with ideas you can take and work with.
Not wholesale stealing – I believe the industry frowns upon that. But you largely have free reign with the ingredients of stories; if stealing from one place is bad, stealing a tiny bit from lots of places is industry standard!
“It’s Sherlock Holmes, but if Sherlock was a house elf, and he’s trying to track down some keys, like from Locke and Key, but instead of keys they’re dog collars from Infernal Soldiers.”
All ideas stolen from books I’ve read recently, but altogether make a unique premise. Is that imaginative? There’s nothing inspired about it in there – it’s a collection of stolen ideas. But their combination will connect ideas no one has every had before. The twine that connects those threads will make a whole world out of nothing, and the story you tell will come sort of naturally out of that. You’ll have to explain the Infernal Soldiers for one thing, and the relationship between your-version-of-the-house-elves and the rest of society. You’ll have to figure out why the main character is interested in their left over collars – if nothing jumps out at you pick the obvious and see where it takes you. “Well, because he lost them.”
A fantastic and seemingly endless (and public domain!) well spring of ideas to fill up on are folklore stories.
I’m reading an indie published book, Myth & Lore: Cryptids of the UK, which is full of ancient and Weird creatures. These creatures are so mysterious that there’s often large white pieces of canvas around them which need to be filled in with stories. Rarely, for instance, are the motivations of the Loch Ness considered. Lets accept that there is a huge dino swimming around the Scottish lakes, but then the question is why was this singular creature placed there?
Take the macguffin from the last book you read or film you recently saw. Chuck that at the bottom of the loch and suddenly Nessy is there to protect that! That’s a story (or at the very least a side quest)!
That’s what imagination often is. The fun of combining ideas, jumbling them about to see how they play together, and then hopefully their summation ends up inspired.
Pseudo Nests are actually a fungus that survives mostly on the … processed leavings of hornet-women as they’re going to and from their actual nest. Mostly harmless to non-hornet creatures, these imitation nests become more proficient at luring their meals towards them as they grow from small patches of fungus to swallowing up whole forests if allowed.
Spores of this fungus can be found, quite harmlessly, inside many hornet-women’s digestive tracts, largely dormant. These spores are swept up in the normal processes of the hornet and are expelled, often quite near to an actual nest. They begin to reproduce only when in contact with trees or soil which it makes its habitat and yet still survives off of hornet droppings throughout its life cycle.
Once passed their immature stage of “hoping” for food delivery, the nest takes a more active roll in finding food: the developed fungus looks and smells nearly identical to a hornet nest made of traditional material. Akin to catnap or nicotine, the hornets stop by regularly simply to breath it in (and there by picking up more fungus inside of themselves).
For the largest colonies – a key identification for gardeners is the speed of growth and if it reaches unnatural size – the colony has been known to take the addicted, starved bodies of the hornets and reassemble them in the ape of a queen hornet.
With a “queen” present, whole swarms settle and ultimately perish to the fungus. This seems to be the natural limiting factor to the size of Pseudo Nests: they ultimately become too efficient at capturing their prey and can wipe out entire swarms that pass.
There are some situations where characters would behave smarter than their players. That’s why we have passive checks and other checks to see if the character thinks (or even remembers) something the player doesn’t.
One of those situations is remember to leave the house with their winter coat when in the middle of the darkest months. It’d be cruel for a DM to suggest that since the player didn’t specifically say, “I’m going to dress up warm,” that the character would be wandering around in a t-shirt and shorts.
Similarly, when you are on floor four of a mine, where the job was to collect a few diamonds, only to realise that no one noted down a pickaxe, the group should be given the benefit of the doubt. Obviously the character would have considered this and picked one up.
Full disclosure: I’ve not actually read Blades in the Dark, and only know it from the Adventure Zone, but it has a nice system for this kind of thing. Before setting off on an adventure, the players decide what loadout they’d like to take. I believe these are along the lines of light and heavy.
The items in those loadouts aren’t decided immediately, but are decided in the adventure as they’re needed. If you’re going in light you can get away with a small handgun or an iron file or some such. Small things. Too many small things will eventually add up to a heavy load, so at some point you can no longer add more things.
A heavy load means you can start pulling out great axes and whatnot. The downside here is that (even before you’ve decided on what items there are) people around you will know you’re packing. Suspicions are going to be raised pretty quickly.
These loadouts might cost an upfront payment, but making the group pay for the items at the end might be more fun, adding a push-your-luck mechanic. Shall we splash out on a Scroll of Detect Lies now? What if it reveals nothing? What if the dungeon is a bust and the PCs end up going into debt? Drama! Tension! Oooh!
The DM can of course have final ruling on what a loadout contains. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for the PC to be carrying a glass making kit. It’s important to remember rule one of being a good DM though: at the end of the day, your job is to make the players feel like their characters are heroes. If that means they pull the perfect macguffin out their ass and it makes for a cool scene, then why on earth not.
