Friday, July 29, 2011

are your elves insufficiently creepy? here's one horrible fix

This may be my worst idea ever, but I think it will totally work if you want your elves to be less sweetness and light and more scary not-quite-people from the shadows beyond the heartfires of civilization.  I can sum up the idea in 3 words:

Fairyland is Carcosa.

Change the place names to better lull players into a false sense of security if you'd like.  And maybe spruce up the various races of men.  White Men become high elves, Green Men are goblins, Blue Men are Andorians or xvarts if you don't like Star Trek races in your D&D, Bone Men are Newhon Ghouls (i.e. no change really), maybe Red Men look could like Coop devils (wait til you're not at work to google that one if you don't know what I'm talking about).  Black Men become drow if you want, though I favor the more purplish depictions.  I'm still working on the three unearthly colored races (Dolm, Jale, Ulfire).  I'm thinking they look weird when visiting Earth, as if light interacts with their skin all wrong.  Maybe one of the races shimmer or sparkles with rainbow hues, another has a mirror sheen and the third is invisible (Jale Men = Invisible Stalkers, who are reclassified as fairies).

Imagine the average Carcosa wilderness hex as a green and pleasant land like you see in a TV commercial promoting tourism in Ireland.  It's a gorgeous place, it just also happens to have crashed alien saucers, mutated dinosaurs and abominable elvish sorcerers.

19 comments:

  1. OSR Blog Mass-Mind... in my latest OD&D game Elves PCs are explicitally from Fairyland. (when they come to Earth they decide whether to be a FM or MU for that visit.)

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  2. My elves are inspired by The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks. Well worth a read. Hooray for grisly totem masts!

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  3. Since everybody's getting all "in my campaign": In my campaign, elves are immortal/amoral hillbilly clan-feuding bastards that like to charm people into fighting their battles for them.

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  4. I played in a game once where at night, you have to be afraid of vampires. In the daytime, you have to be afraid of elves. For the same reason.

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  5. In my game, I based the elves of the red men of Barsoom... they live in a totally alien desert city, surrounded by bizarre, alien monsters, and if you do make it there, one of them will probably challenge you to a duel for some strange breach of etiquette you can't even understand and kill you. And they are red.

    And don't even think about touching the hot red princess...

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  6. Anonymous5:33 PM

    If high elves are one of the eight races, that means that elves were bred by the equivalent of the snake men for their rituals.

    I find more creepy the idea that elves are the "true" snake men and bred other fairy races to use them to summon Cthulhu. Or Gaia.

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  7. Jon H8:47 PM

    If you haven't, try reading Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men for a taste of creepy elves, their creepy Queen, and a creepy Fairyland.

    From Wikipedia: "One race captured by the Queen and pressed into her service are the dromes; huge, vaguely humanoid beings with grey, doughy flesh, toothless mouths and tiny eyes. They can project dreams and make them real, using them to ensnare their prey until it starves to death."

    Also, Faery as depicted in Jonathan Strange And Mr. Norrell is pretty creepy.

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  8. How about elves who live in square trees and spend their days trying to assimilate everyone into their weird-ass hive mind?

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  9. Anonymous2:37 AM

    What's wrong with the real deal, Tolkien elves?

    - Settembrini

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  10. Anonymous6:42 AM

    Check out Andre Norton's 1973 novel Here Abide Monsters for UFOs-versus-Faeries (with time-slipped humans from parallel Earth caught in the crossfire).

    In my campaign, however... C J Cherryh's The Chronicles of Morgaine is a big influence.

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  11. This may be my worst idea ever

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  12. Cool beans. I like it. That would be an easy sell to Joe the Gamer for a Carcosa campaign....

    For my new game, I was thinking something along the lines of:
    Elves = Scandinavian Black Metal Kids
    Gnomes = Smurfs
    Hobbits = Time Bandits
    Dwarves = ????
    also Wookies.

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  13. Anonymous11:31 AM

    And Gargamel could be collecting elves, smurfs and brownies and rape them to summon Cthulhu.

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  14. The Sheeda from Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers are more or less elves, and they're nice and creepy.

    SPOILERS BELOW!

    They're us, centuries into the future when we've screwed everything up, and so they come back in time to invade the world before it got all messed up. Of course, their advanced technology just looks like magic to our primitive-by-association eyes.

    So it's Moorcock meets Kirby, and it's great.

    SPOILERS END.

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  15. What about changelings? maybe Faerie magic has a sterilizing effect, slowly turning men and women into elves, but leaving them infertile. In the early days lost, abandoned, and orphaned children were plentiful, but these days cradle robbing has become the norm, and were you to dig up the graves of many dead babies, you'd find nothing but a once enchanted piece of wood or rock.

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  16. I'll second Jonathan Strange: it's slow and rambly but the elf is a scary character, while still being perfectly old-fashioned and Dunsanian.

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  17. Elves connected with snakes? Just think of all the old snake spells. And no wonder they retain their youth through long lives...they probably moult. Maybe St Pat drove the snakes and the elves out of Ireland!

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  18. Oh jesus god someone has gone and mentioned The Wasp Factory.

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  19. Anonymous7:07 AM

    Earthdawn blood elves.... thorns prick their skins, the pain protects them from the Horrors but have driven them mad....

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